“5 million barrels of oil doesn’t disappear”
To mark the one-year anniversary of the worst oil spill in history, I'm posting heavily today in remembrance of the explosion in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 workers and releasing nearly 200 million gallons of oil, tens of millions of gallons of natural gas and 1.8 million gallons of chemicals. And it's an issue that won't go away, especially since BP has requested permission to resume offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.
Democracy Now has an excellent interview with Antonia Juhasz, author of the new book, Black Tide: The Devastating Impact of the Gulf Oil Spill. She is the director of the Energy Program at Global Exchange and her book Black Tide: The Devastating Impact of the Gulf Oil Spill has just been published.
After the jump is an excerpt.
ANTONIA JUHASZ: The reports have actually been damning, especially the presidential commission on the Deepwater Horizon. Actually, every investigation that has gone into this disaster has said, one, five million barrels of oil were spilled. That oil does not disappear. One of the amazing people I covered in my book was Dr. Samantha Joye. She has, from the beginning, been going deep into the water, studying oil on the bottom. She’s one—part of the team that discovered the oil plumes. She is deeply aware that five million barrels were released, and the oil still remains in the Gulf.
But what each of the commissions have found is that this is a systemic problem within the oil industry, that the oil industry itself was moving beyond its own capacity to do its operations, but even more so, that federal regulators have no clue what they’re doing. They do not know how to regulate this industry, and the industry has pushed beyond its own capacity. And every report that has come out has said that. It’s been universal, that this is a serious, ongoing, devastating disaster in the Gulf Coast, but that the industry is to blame—BP, Transocean, Halliburton, Cameron most immediately in this disaster—but all of the oil companies were involved. Remember, Chevron, Exxon, Shell, they all sat down at a table after the explosion and said, "Wow! How do we cap a deepwater blowout? Oh, boy, it turns out we actually don’t know how to do that, even though we have 148 deepwater wells around the world. Boy, we said that we could handle a 300,000-gallon-a-day—or barrel-a-day oil spill. Boy, it turns out we couldn’t even handle 80,000 barrels a day." None of them know what they’re doing. And the federal regulators don’t know, either. And every report has been—has concluded those outcomes.
AMY GOODMAN: BP has requested permission to resume offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, less than a year after the oil rig exploded, killing 11 workers. They want to resume in 10 existing wells in the Gulf by July, the request to U.S. regulators coming just a week after the Department of Justice confirmed the company is facing potential manslaughter charges and other civil and criminal penalties in connection with the explosion and the deaths of the workers.
ANTONIA JUHASZ: They absolutely should face criminal charges, I believe. If every report has demonstrated just utter failure—managerial failure, operational failure, cost cutting—on the fact—on the part of BP. But it’s not just BP. Transocean, which is the owner and operator of the rig—and the vast majority of the employees on the rig worked for Transocean—is the largest owner and operator of all offshore rigs in the country. Their failures need to make us worried about all operations. But yes, BP is the largest producer of oil and natural gas in the United States. They have massive holdings all across the country, all across the Gulf. One of the things that the oil industry tried to do as a result of the disaster was isolate BP and make this look like a BP problem: it’s just this rogue British company. Well, BP definitely has very problematic operations, and I do not believe that they should be given the right to continue to produce those wells. We need to think very seriously about their operations.
