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

2. The Macondo Mess

2 The Macondo Mess Officially speaking, BP’s drilling was taking place in a location that the U.S. Department of the Interior calls “MC 252”—government -speak for “Mississippi Canyon block 252.” In practice , though, most drilling operations are remembered through their code names, which simplify the protection of confidentiality during early stages of exploration, then provide easierto -remember names later on. Some of the names come from people (Holly, Heather), others from drinks or fish (Cognac, Marlin), and still others from cartoon characters (Rocky, Bullwinkle ). The name of the ill-fated BP project, though, first became known through one of the most important literary works of the twentieth century. It is the fictional town at the center of Gabriel García Márquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude—Macondo. One wonders if BP really thought about the implications of that name. The Macondo of the book started as “a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs.” So far, so good: BP’s Macondo well started in an area of clear water, and although it was looking for prehistoric leftovers in the form of oil, not eggs, that could be seen as a petroleum geologist’s version of 10 Chapter 2 literary license. If there is any one sentence in Marquez’s book that summarizes the fate of Macondo, though, it would be this one, which comes many chapters later: “It was as if God had decided to put to the test every capacity for surprise and was keeping the inhabitants of Macondo in a permanent alternation between excitement and disappointment, doubt and revelation , to such an extreme that no one knew for certain where the limits of reality lay.” In that phrase, García Marquez might well have been discussing the people of the Gulf coast. For at least the first three months after the blowout, the humans along the Gulf of Mexico were in the grip of “excitement and disappointment,” unable to know “where the limits of reality lay.” For decades into the future, as well, there will continue to be debates over where the limits of reality may be. Still, some of the basic outlines were starting to become clear even as the oil was still erupting into the Gulf of Mexico. On the day when the Deepwater Horizon commemorated the fortieth anniversary of Earth Day by going down in flames, Coast Guard personnel on the scene reported no evidence of spilling oil. In a way, they shouldn’t have expected to see much of a problem. Oil companies had been drilling in the Gulf for more than half a century by then, and the last time there had been a significant spill from drilling in U.S. waters—as opposed to the transporting of oil, as in the case of the Exxon Valdez— had been the 1969 blowout off the shores of Santa Barbara, which had been part of the inspiration that led Senator Gaylord Nelson to call for that first Earth Day. Even when truly major hurricanes had ripped through the thousands of offshore oil facilities in the Gulf of Mexico, moreover —Ferdinand in 1979, Andrew in 1992, Ivan the Terrible in 2004, Katrina and Rita in 2005—the underwater shut-off valves known as blow-out preventers had usually done their The Macondo Mess 11 jobs. After Andrew, when the two of us went out into the Gulf on a research vessel with a group of other scientists, we saw one jack-up rig that had been blown more than a hundred miles away from its original location, but there were no reports of oil leaks even from a force that powerful.1 In the case of the Deepwater Horizon, unfortunately, oil did soon begin to appear. Initially, there was some hope that this oil might just have come from the mile or so of pipe that connected the rig to the ocean floor. Over the next few days, unfortunately , it became clear that officials were seeing far more than just one pipe’s worth of crude oil. By April 30, the headlines in the Mobile Press-Register called attention to a leaked report, “Government fears Deepwater Horizon well could become Unchecked Gusher.” Soon thereafter, the fears were confirmed by growing quantities of oil itself...