Are we any smarter following Gulf oil spill? Editor’s Note

Have we learned anything from British Petroleum’s debacle in the Gulf?

Frankly, I think we’ve learned just how much we don’t know.

And because of that, we should cease drilling in U.S. waters until there’s better science to be had.

From the moment the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform blew up May 20 and the well began to gush, it became evident BP and the rest of the industry were in uncharted waters, if you’ll forgive the metaphor.

No fix on a damaged oil well had ever been attempted at such depths, we were told repeatedly, by BP and the science community. At times, this mantra had the feel of a safety valve, a bulwark against the repeated failures of BP’s attempts to shut the well down.

If closing this well was so difficult, with so many unknowns, why was BP drilling there at all? This was now a drilling project that had let an environmental genie out of a bottle. And the genie was winning.

There’s an term used in the mountain-climbing community, and it applies here. It’s about having a “bombproof” anchor – something that will keep that climber roped in and safe, should handholds fail and all hell breaks loose on the mountain.

It’s a standard all reasonably responsible climbers follow: if you can’t find something that’s bombproof, and able to ensure your safety, you turn around and go home.

That’s a philosophy from some of humanity’s biggest risk takers. Even they understand the need to ensure a basic safeguard.

In the wake of the Gulf spill, our oil industry seems to have demonstrated it outranks even climbers, in terms of risk-taking.

Does anyone remember the happy state of affairs for the oil industry a decade ago, when the cost for a barrel of oil began its surge through the roof? The dividends that these companies brought to their shareholders as a result?

This was the same cash-rich industry that once turned its nose up at Kevin Costner’s company, Ocean Therapy Solutions, and the oil-separation technology the company was developing, in the case of a major spill.

“What struck Kevin was that we had this same separation technology for years – how is it that we can to the moon in the ’60s, but we can’t advance our separation technology?” Costner’s business partner John Houghtaling told the New York Times.

Seems in those days, even though the industry had just about run out of things to buy, the cleanup technology for its own livelihood was still lagging years behind.

This paragraph from another New York Times article simply makes my blood boil:

Beyond regulatory obstacles, a major reason for the dearth of new technologies has been a lack of money for research. Programs that were flush with cash in the 1990s after the Exxon Valdez spill and the subsequent creation of the Oil Pollution Act have had their appropriations dry up over the past decade. And research money from oil companies has declined in the same period.

The coming months, and the ongoing federal investigation, will tell us much about the state of affairs in our oil industry, and our permitting process allowing them to drill.

Let’s not forget that these waters, and their rich reserves of fuel, are not the possession of the oil industry. They are owned by us.

And it’s up to us to ensure that these users – who are only guests here – have the ability to fix what they break, if the seemingly impossible happens and all hell breaks loose.

If they don’t, then they should operate like a responsible climber, turning around and going home.