Gulf slick will stall offshore drilling
Nice perspective from The Washington Post's energy reporter, Steven Mufson. The 1969 Union Oil blowout off Santa Barbara cast gooey muck up on the beaches and helped propel the ban on offshore drilling and the environmental movement generally. In today's story, Mufson reports that the Gulf spill could surpass the Santa Barbara disaster in volume of oil leaked by next week.
The spill baby spill will certainly impede renewed efforts to drill baby drill offshore. Obama recently said he wants to reverse the ban on offshore drilling. But he didn't really mean it; it was a political feint to the right. This will set back efforts even more.
Mufson:
At its current rate, the spill could surpass by next week the size of the 1969 Santa Barbara spill that helped lead to the far-reaching moratorium on oil and gas drilling off the Pacific and Atlantic coasts, a ban that Obama recently said he wants to modify. It would take about 260 days for this incident to exceed the size of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill off Alaska, but it took several weeks for a similar oil well blowout to be brought under control off the coast of Australia last year.
Comments
Now the US will finally mandate the use of remote turn-offs for drilling platforms. The oil drilling companies will claim great costs and raise prices for crude. The oil refining companies will gleefully buy the higher priced crude and attach their markup to the higher cost and make MORE billions.
Posted by: mapuser | April 29, 2010 4:25 PM
Oil is the energy of the past.
We need to push harder to harness cleaner, safer, more abundant and cheaper forms of energy.
With the addition of oil thirsty China and India it won't be long before the world comes to blows over the shrinking pools of oil.
And if China starts exploring for oil....forget any environmental concerns. They'll do just about anything, including polluting the oceans, to get at their share.
Posted by: Norris Hall | April 30, 2010 2:18 AM