Learning From the Deepwater Disaster

In the wake of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, Stanford professors discussed the country's grave dependency on oil and the future of drilling in the Gulf of Mexico in a lecture series this week at Stanford.

In Tuesday evening's concluding session, professors Mark Zoback and Meg Caldwell met at the William R. Hewlett Teaching Center to speak about how oil production can be better regulated to insure safety.

Professor Roland Horne gave the initial lecture, "The Deepwater Horizon Accident: What Happened and Why?" on Nov. 16. He described the technology of deepwater oil drilling, potentially unsafe practices, events that caused the disaster and what can be done to prevent future explosions and oil spills.

Pamela Matson, dean of the School of Earth Sciences, conceived the lecture series and introduced the speakers. She reminded the audience that on April 20, BP's Deepwater Horizon rig exploded, killing 11 workers, injuring 17 and spilling 4.9 billion barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

"The regulatory system failed to do its job," said Zoback, a geophysics professor. He pointed out that neither of the industry players, BP and Halliburton, nor the federal Minerals Management Service corrected problems that allowed the accident to happen.

Zoback demonstrated the dependence on oil from the Gulf for the foreseeable future. Worldwide energy consumption is expected to double over the next half century, because energy use per capita is proportional to per capita income, and economies like Brazil, China and India are becoming more prosperous.

The Gulf of Mexico now supplies 30 percent of U.S. oil production. Eighty percent of that comes from deepwater (more than five miles below sea level) oil fields. There are 2,000 deepwater wells operating in the Gulf with what Zoback called "an admirable safety record." The Deepwater Horizon was a singular exception, and Zoback said, "We never want this to happen again." 

Law professor Meg Caldwell, director of the Environmental and Natural Resources Law and Policy Program, spoke about the environmental effects of the BP oil spill. The spill was the second-largest in world history—second only to the damage to oil wells in Iraq deliberately caused by Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War. BP's spill was 19 times greater than that of the Exxon Valdez in 1989.

The environmental effects from the Exxon Valdez are still being dealt with, so we can expect many years of grappling with the Gulf's ecologically fragile characteristics, said Caldwell. The world faces a loss of endangered species like sperm whales, sea turtles and manatees.

"Bluefin tuna spawn in the area of the BP oil spill, and the disaster happened at the worst possible time for them," she said. "We don't know the fate of their larvae."

Economic effects for the area are grim. Caldwell cited the 29 percent drop in hotel revenue at resorts, significant losses of income in the seafood industry and loss of jobs during the moratorium on oil drilling.

Caldwell then turned to how we can do better. She said regulatory laws need to be strengthened. For example, the National Environmental Policy Act only requires federal agencies to examine the impacts of their actions. She wants the statute to be revised to require that the agencies undertake mitigation or change their plans when they observe a possible environmental risk.

Furthermore, the Minerals Management Service excluded drillers in the Gulf of Mexico from the need to submit detailed environmental impact reports. This is something Caldwell wants to change. She also wants the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act to be amended to include comprehensive ecosystem assessments and oil spill response planning.

Click on the following link to watch the YouTube presentation of, "The Deepwater Horizon accident: What Happened and Why?"