American manufacturers will pay a price for BP’s big oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and the costs have nothing to do with the gigantic cleanup bills the refiner will ultimately pay.
The costs: Companies will likely have to deal with greenhouse gas (GHG) emission controls and energy efficiency mandates.
Reason: BP’s oil spill could easily kill any chance that Congress will approve a climate change bill that would severely restrict EPA’s ability to impose global warming restrictions.
Prior to the spill, President Obama had joined the, “Drill, Baby, Drill” chorus. He had endorsed offshore drilling in pending Senate climate change legislation in exchange for a GHG emission cap-and-trade program.
But the BP spill forced Obama to back off his “drill now” harmony until lengthy and complicated investigations reveal why the oil rig exploded, killed 11 workers and created the massive oil spill that now threatens to inundate fisheries and coastal areas in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. This could get even worse. Unless the oil spill is plugged and contained quickly, there are fears the slick will round the southern tip of Florida and work its way up the East Coast.
There’s no way all this investigating will be completed before this fall’s elections, so that puts the kibosh on prospects for a climate change/energy bill.
One thing’s for certain, there will be tighter safety and environmental regulations for future offshore exploration projects.
BP’s penchant for accidents came to light after a 2005 explosion at its Texas City refinery killed 15 workers. As reported in Safety News Alert, the Chemical Safety Board concluded that BP’s targeted budget cuts of 25 percent in 1999 and another 25 percent in 2005 left much of the refinery’s infrastructure and process equipment in disrepair and vulnerable to a catastrophe. Also, operator training and staffing were downsized, the board said.
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Tags: BP, climate change, EPA, greenhouse gas regulation, oil spill
May 19th, 2010 at 5:44 pm
The accident that killed 11 workers is certainly a tragedy and the root cause of the accident must be determined with corrective actions put in place for all off-shore rigs. The oil released from the damaged line must be fixed, but I have a hard time understanding if this is the level of ecologic disaster it is being promoted to be. If someone will verify my math (please do), they will determine (I believe) that 210,000 gallons of oil pouring from the pipeline into the Gulf far enough from the shore to allow the ocean to perform natural remediation (as it does everytime a seismic shift releases this “naturally produced contaminent” is relatively insignificant. It does not come close to the concentration of oil and proximity to shore that the Exon Valdez released in Prudhoe Bay and microbes in the ocean are phenomenal clensers of the saltwater environment. To put it in perspective, let’s assume there is no natural remediation and 210,000 gallons pours unabated for not 3, but 4 months into the Gulf (not the entire ocean) until the relief well is drilled. This amounts to a total percentage contaminating mass in the Gulf (580,000 square miles x 1 mile deep) of roughly 3.95 x 10-11 % (I believe concerns were raised in Alaska for levels 1000 times greater across the bay). I personally could not comprehend a number that small so I reduced the Gulf of Mexico down to the size of a 30 gallon aquarium for an analogy. An equivalent contaminent would then be the size of a cube that is 1/1000th the width of a human hair (on each side) in that 30 gallon fish tank. Now granted the leak could be larger or smaller, but at the scale we are observing, I do morn the small consequential loss of ocean life at that scale in the very direct flow path (I am a scuba diver), but someone smarter than me needs to take the analysis from here to assess how this becomes one of the worst ecological “man-made” disasters our planet has faced. Boy, the liberals were really watching those Florida beach tar balls until they were determined to not be associated with the BP leak site (where did those come from ?). Let’s not decide we are going to use this as another opportunity to redistribute wealth in the U.S. by taxing all the oil companies, hence our citizens at the pump, into another mediocre country on this planet. Again, I’m not a geologist, chemist, or environmentalist, so please verify my assumptions and analogy.
June 17th, 2010 at 1:15 pm
Personally i wonder if the Gulf will ever recover from this nightmare…It’s a nightmare of a situation for sure but it’s kinda funny how the BP exec’s continually stick their feet in their mouths