Americans should be thanking BP

It is easy to understand American hostility to BP, but it is fundamentally misplaced. Never mind that Transocean and Halliburton were also involved and it seems there is plenty of blame to go round. Never mind that more oil is spilled every year in the Niger Delta, where Shell and Exxon are the big operators, and which supplies 40 per cent of US oil imports, without a peep of American protest. Never mind that despite the hyperventilation the slick is still relatively small by historical and international comparison. The plain fact is BP is not uniquely culpable, just unlucky.

Oilmen tell me the US Gulf of Mexico has always been loosely regulated compared to world leaders Norway and, since Piper Alpha, the British North Sea. But now we discover the safety regime is not just slack but also profoundly corrupt. First-hand testimony reveals drug- taking government inspectors from the Minerals Management Service routinely accepted gifts from operators, and allowed them to fill out their own safety reports in pencil to be inked over by officials later. It would make a Banana Republic blush, and means it is unlikely any operator was working to higher operational and safety standards than BP. In other words, it was an accident waiting to happen and it could have happened to anyone.

That doesn’t make it all right, of course, but it does mean the scale of the disaster is not due to any particular incompetence of BP’s – though where is their much-vaunted technology
now? – but to the enormous depths at which the industry is forced to operate.

The fact that BP was drilling for Macondo – a tiny field under a mile of water containing less than 12 hours’ global consumption – tells us all we need to know about the state of oil depletion. Deepwater production – anything under more than 500 metres of sea water, far too deep for divers to work should anything go wrong – has quadrupled from less than 2 million barrels per day (mb/d) in 2000 to 8 mb/d today, precisely because onshore and shallow offshore supplies are running down. The industry only drills at such extreme depths because there are very few alternatives – the Canadian tar sands and Iraq are equally unpalatable – and it is a clear sign of impending peak oil.

Independent UK