The Philippine Online Chronicles

There is an ongoing oil spill of catastrophic proportions off the Southern coast of the United Sates. This was due to the sudden explosion of the oil rig Deepwater Horizon situated just 40 miles away from the tip of the Louisiana coastline. The rig was to take oil from a very deep oil well situated 1 500 meters below the water surface. The explosion is expected to have killed a dozen workers who have yet to be found since the April 20, 2010 explosion. The explosion was so big and fast that it was said that it only gave the workers less than five minutes to escape from the inferno.

The cost

The company running the oil rig is BP. The oil rig Deepwater Horizon was commissioned by Hyundai Heavy Industries based in South Korea. The explosion was believed to have been caused by a bubble of methane gas from the oil well escaping through the hole made by the drilling. According to most estimates, the expected flow rate from the open well ranges from 5 000 to 100 000 barrels per day. It is a huge cost in all possible levels regardless of what figure you believe.

On the first level, the sheer loss of the oil is big blow to the company and its share holders. BP is a big company but a disaster like this won’t come without a dear price tag. Billions of dollars were spent in prospecting, hiring and the procurement of a lot of heavy machinery in hopes of turning the oil well into a handsome profit. But with this sort of outcome, it’s quite unlikely that BP and Halliburton will be rolling in cash.

Offshore drilling has always been quite a controversial topic in the American arena. In fact, a few months before the disaster, President Barack Obama carefully toed the line on the idea that he will allow offshore drilling off the Atlantic seaboard and the eastern side of the Gulf of Mexico near the Florida Peninsula. The American public has long been guarded on the idea of offshore drilling due to the various experiences of the US regarding the devastation caused by oil spills. In 1989, the oil tanker Exxon Valdez spilled an estimated 250 000 barrels of oil near the Alaskan island of Prince William Sound causing untold destruction of the fragile wildlife and ecosystems on the island.

The Gulf of Mexico is also interconnected to the Caribbean Sea - a major body of water that surrounds many island nations in the area. Understandably, these countries would depend on the sea for their livelihood – whether through fishing or tourism in terms of their beaches or coral reefs. Having oil slick in the area would definitely be a big blow to the economy of nations like The Bahamas, Dominican Republic and even the territory of Puerto Rico.

The Southern part of the US is known for its affinity to seafood. This has been immortalized in the Academy Award winning film Forrest Gump where the protagonist (named Forrest Gump played by Tom Hanks) ends up in the shrimp business after his tour of duty in the army. Forty percent of the nation’s seafood comes from the Gulf Coast region so if the oil spill does have some serious effects on the marine life in the area, it would be absolutely be felt not only in the South but also all throughout the country.

Even if the haul remains steady in the area, it still doesn’t mean that the people would have the same response to seafood as before. Most people can start doubting whether or not seafood sourced from the Gulf of Mexico is a good food product knowing that it could have easily been contaminated with the oil leaking from the open well. The damage caused by the spill doesn’t go away as easily. For instance, the fishermen who do their trade where the Exxon Valdez oil spill happened still find it hard to turn a profit it even twenty one years after the actual disaster. That same oil spill blackened over 1 500 miles of the Alaskan coastline and the clean up and rehabilitation of the area continues to this day and the people in the area continue to struggle with the consequences of Exxon’s failures.

The Aftermath

BP has been continuously been criticized for their lack of quick response to the challenges of the oil spill. There has been an effort to contain the oil slick on the water surface but it has been found out that there are plumes of oil in under the water’s surface that are invisible to the naked eye when viewed from above. The company has also tried to put a mechanism that would catch the remaining oil escaping from the well but this won’t really save the oil from getting wasted. It is expected that tens of millions of barrels would end up getting wasted as a result of the disaster.

The oil slick has been spotted along the coast of the marshlands of Louisiana. The marshland that lines the coast of the state of Louisiana is a very fragile environment that supports a lot of animals and plants that inhabit the precarious boundary between the freshwater lakes and rivers of the state as well as the salt water interface with the Gulf of Mexico. There is a strong water current near the coast of Louisiana that could send the slick towards the coastline of the Florida panhandle as well as the set of islands known as the Florida Keys.

The marshlands are known to be the nurseries of various sea life like oysters, clams, shrimps and crabs and having these areas contaminated by oil slick or so called tar balls can wipe out an entire generation of the species. This can also a major decline in the numbers of these animals or even force these species to migrate in relatively cleaner parts of the Gulf of Mexico. Either way, this will make catching these animals harder and their prices would certainly go up in the markets.

Four major cities line the American coast of the Gulf of Mexico. Houston is certainly one of the most sensitive areas of interest given its proximity to the oil slick. It is only preceded by New York, Los Angeles and Chicago in terms of population and is the largest city in the Gulf Coast. The Louisiana city of New Orleans is also a major center in the region. It was heavily devastated by Hurricane Katrina just five years ago. Other major cities in the area include Mobile in Alabama and Tampa in the southern tip of Florida.

The thirst for energy

With the demand for oil skyrocketing, countries have tried different ideas to make sure that their nation doesn’t lose out in the great rewards that await those who try to seek oil. There have been many different approaches to the thirst for oil. Canada has resorted to taking coal out of so-called oil sands in the province of Alberta. The process is not exactly efficient but it is still a good source for oil after all the sand has been processed and changed into a form that could be used by most conventional engines.

It is easy to say that countries should take a stand towards a more renewable approach to energy by making sure that newer technologies are less harmful to the environment. While it does sound a lot more ideal to veer away from coal, it is very infeasible. Despite the advent of renewable forms of energy, much of the world still depends on coal for electricity. According to figures from 2006, much of the world still depends of coal, natural gas and oil to fuel the power plants that generate oil.

If the global pie would be split to sixteen equal slices, only one slice would be for hydroelectric power plants and a slice would also belong to nuclear power plants. Both sources of energy are considered to be harmful by a lot of activists. While the hydroelectric way is largely clean compared to the other forms that require the burning of fossil fuels, the construction of dams and the raising of reservoirs can be quite taxing in the local ecology and the lives of people living in the area.

Even Avatar director James Cameron got into the action when he decided to go to Brazil and speak against the construction of a dam that would have displaced thousands of indigenous people and endangered the existence of many plant species and migratory fish.

Nuclear power is very reliable since the physics of it is already well documented but at the end of the day, the material used for the reactions in the power plants could also be used to create weapons of mass destruction. There is great opposition in the world for Iran to develop its own nuclear program – even for energy producing purposes – so encouraging other countries to go this direction in solving the energy crisis would be more than hypocritical in the developed nations’ part. The stories of nuclear accidents most notably the one that happened in Chernobyl in 1986 in present day Ukraine continue to make the nuclear option very unpopular in a lot of sectors. Green Peace International released a study that over a hundred thousand cases of cancer has been recorded in the area since the disaster – a figure much higher than most other areas in the world.

Going back to the pie diagram, only one-fifth of a slice would account for wind energy, solar energy and tidal energy. The revolution for clean energy wouldn’t happen overnight but the base has to be built so that the rest of the grid can move on to the newer generation of energy sources.

If the thirst of oil continues at the same level that is going right now, it would be too farfetched if humans would go to great lengths just to procure oil. Russia is now clearly making a play at the undivided territories of the North Pole. The area is also considered to be very rich in oil and once the more accessible parts of the world have already been drained of oil reserves, it’s very likely that many different countries would try to get their hands on the last drops of fuel even if it means going to the least explored edges of the planet.