Arshad M. Khan

The oil gusher in the Gulf has been capped though the well still has to be

plugged.  The cost to BP so far is about $32 billion — about a third of its value.  

Tony Hayward the CEO is swapping jobs with Bob Dudley the American who has

been handling the spill.  Mr. Hayward will be off to dispose substantial BP assets

(in the form of reserves) to help pay for the disaster and its aftermath … the

lawsuits.  BP was the third largest oil company before the spill; it is now likely to

become a minor player.  The Gulf itself is a monumental environmental disaster.  

How could all this happen?

A year ago, reports Carla Carlisle, a columnist for a British weekly, she was

sitting in Mr. B’s Bistro in New Orleans enjoying barbecued Gulf shrimp with

grits and drooling over their flavor when someone put a damper on her

pleasure.  He was a coastal ecologist monitoring a large dead section of the

Gulf.  As he expressed it, the main culprit was fertilizer and chicken manure

carried down the Mississippi into the Gulf.  He was trying to restore the

wetlands but no matter what he did, he said he was certain his efforts would be

to no avail because of the oil companies’ arrogance, greed and ignorance.  

According to him, the drilling operations being conducted then were a disaster

waiting to happen.  He could not have been more prescient.

Robert Bea is a UC Berkeley engineer who specializes in system failure.  His

experience encompasses levee breaks after Katrina, space shuttle explosions,

and above all drilling disasters including the North Sea Piper Alpha platform

which blew up killing 167 people in 1988.  Tongue in cheek, he says A plus B

equals C is his equation for disaster.  ‘A’ represents nature in all its vagaries:  

earthquakes, volcanoes, hurricanes, tsunamis, all that our living earth can

conjure; ‘B’ represents the human component:  knowledge, skills, competence

(or lack thereof), and our flaws, greed, arrogance, hubris, ignorance and yes,

laziness — a tendency to let things slide.  A plus B in an unfortunate mix leads to

C, a disaster.  In the Gulf spill A is blameless.  So it’s the human factor that failed

and carries the total burden.

According to Bea, the government in its supervisory role is the parent, and the

industry being supervised is the child.  In the Gulf, our system was so out of

whack and the supervising agency (Materials Management Service) so

dysfunctional that the child was telling the parent what to do.  After the Piper

Alpha disaster, Britain discovered lax regulation was part cause and since then

has completely restructured.  The Kielland accident in the Norwegian section of

the North Sea when the supports cracked, and the rig capsized killing 123 men,

occurred eight years earlier.  The Norwegian response was similar.  Still, the

question remains, will we be able to undertake necessary regulatory reform?

The quantity of oil spilled was first low-balled at 1000 barrels per day (bpd) in

what appears to have been a collusion between government agencies and BP.  

Raised to 5000 bpd, it was soon abundantly clear that even this figure was too

low.  When a collector funnel was successfully installed, BP began raising 16,000

bpd in what was a small quantity of the leak.  Estimates now range from 25,000 to

100,000 bpd.  If we use 50,000 bpd as most likely, it still amounts to over 200

million gallons spewed into the Gulf, dwarfing the quarter million in Alaska from

the 1989 grounding of the Exxon Valdez.

The big issue now is, what is going to happen to this oil?  In a 2000 experiment

conducted off the coast of Norway somewhere between one two-thirds percent

and 28 percent of a controlled release of oil reached the surface — the wide

range of the estimate is an indicator of the difficulty of such an experiment.  The

remainder of the oil dispersed in microfine droplets with neutral buoyancy

somewhere below the surface.  Since oil dispersants are
being used in the Gulf, the percentage in suspension should be much higher.  

Various teams of researchers are reporting plumes up to three miles wide with

the worst impact a quarter mile below the surface.  Oil tainted strata have been

observed up to 45 miles from the wellhead.  While big fish might steer clear of

these, plankton and tiny plants that float with the currents, as well as tiny fish

and larvae, cannot.  Unfortunately these form the base of the food chain.

The only good news is the history of past spills in the Gulf.  Though nowhere

close to the magnitude of the present one, they indicate the presence of oil-

degrading bacteria.  But such natural processes are slow, and we will have to

wait many years for the Gulf to heal itself … provided of course we learn from

the British-Norwegian experience, put our regulatory house in order, and

prevent future spills.