Blowout in the Gulf: The BP Oil Spill Disaster and the Future of Energy in America

9. Cleaning Up

9 Cleaning Up Déjà Vu All Over Again Some forty years ago, after the Santa Barbara oil spill, a friend of ours wrote about the striking disjuncture between the technology available for oil drilling—already sophisticated and expensive at that time—versus the distinctly low-tech options that were available for cleaning up the spill. The drilling and production were being carried out with some of the most precise equipment ever invented, while the so-called clean-up was being done with straw, rakes, shovels and garbage cans. During most of the time when we were writing this book, efforts were still underway to stop and “clean up” the blowout from the BP disaster, and watching the ineffectiveness of the socalled “clean-up” techniques made his points even more striking , forty years later. Various efforts were made to stop or control the spewing oil, but from the start, industry experts predicted that the only true hope for finally stopping the ongoing tragedy would come from drilling a new,“relief” well. Making use of today’s extraction technology, that relief well was designed from the start to be drilled through a mile of water, then through another two and a half miles of sediment and rock—all then to hit a target 154 Chapter 9 that is only inches in diameter. In percentage terms, this kind of drilling technology is actually more precise—and in our view, more sophisticated—than doing brain surgery on a single cell, blindfolded. The available clean-up technology today, by contrast, is little more advanced than the straw bales and shovels of forty years ago.1 Two decades after the Santa Barbara spill, but three weeks after the Exxon Valdez spill, one of the authors of this book stood with other members of a National Research Council committee, watching an almost surreal “clean-up” activity that was being conducted by Exxon on the beach of one of the smaller islands in Prince William Sound.A couple of dozen men in brightly colored jump suits were scurrying about the beach at low tide. Four points about their activities are important to understand. First, the “beaches” in Prince William Sound consist mainly of gravel and flat, gray stones, most of which are about the size of a child’s hand. Second, this activity was necessarily confined to low tide, because the tidal range in Prince William Sound is about ten feet, and at high tide the beach would be covered by water. Third, while Prince William Sound is more protected than the Gulf of Alaska, to which it connects, it can still be a challenging body of water, with waves that are not to be taken lightly. This means that as the tides rose and fell, the beaches would not only be submerged, but be subjected to wave action that could be quite intense. Fourth and finally, because on this particular day there was a gentle but steady wind, these men needed to work on the lee side of the island to avoid the waves. The actors and their props were positioned as follows. Two garish orange floating booms were stretched in a V, from a section of the beach to the sides of a skimmer boat. The boat had a submerged, ramp-like front with a conveyer belt arrangement Cleaning Up 155 that was designed to lift floating oil and deposit it in a storage area. Within that V, a pump was sending seawater up on the beach—the same beach that would soon be submerged by the same sea water—and allowed to run down to the water’s surface . This produced a very light sheen—not visible oil or globs of tar, but a microscopically thin sheen—which the skimmer was attempting to lift off the water. Tellingly, there was no storage barge, or facility, to hold the contents from the skimmer after it was full. Other members of this strange drama were actually wiping down rocks above the tidal line with paper towels . The futility of the whole operation prompted one member of the committee to comment that what we were watching was an entirely political activity, not an environmental one. Twenty-one years later, the same author stood on the beach at Grand Isle, Louisiana, about a month after the BP Deepwater Horizon blowout, watching as a couple dozen men—this time in white jump suits—scraped at the beach...