ASPO: “Many questions hanging over the oil industry”

“For nearly 20 years the world’s oil companies have extracted oil in deep water. Since production on land has been declining at the same times as the need for crude oil is increasing the companies have been forced to develop technology for deep water drilling. But the technology for extraction has been developed significantly faster than that for the associated safety measures”, says Kjell Aleklett, Professor of Physics at Uppsala University and president of ASPO, an organization that warns of oil shortages predicted by the theory of peak oil (the end of increasing oil production).

“The oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico showed that the technology did not exist to guarantee safety or to stop the leak. Now, however, it seems that BP has succeeded to develop the technology for stopping the leak”, says Kjell Aleklett.

“He is not worried about BP’s new test wells off the coast of Libya since the company has drilled thousands of holes earlier without any incidents. However, he wants to see a plan for if a catastrophe happens.”

The worry was just that which was discussed a little earlier in the article, namely that many nations with oil are too weak to impose conditions on the oil industry, something that others have also discussed. BP now plans to drill in the Mediterranean and the question is how worried we should be. From the article,

“BP signed a contract with Libya in 2007 to drill five wells deeper than the one that exploded in April in the Gulf of Mexico. According to BP the company has carefully studied the risk factors before the drilling that is expected to take six months or more.

““If anything goes wrong it could be as bad in the Mediterranean as in the Gulf of Mexico”, says Jonas Fejes of the Swedish Environment Institute. However, he also says that the oil catastrophe on BP’s drilling platform Deepwater Horizon has caused the oil company to review its routines and, hopefully, this will result in better safety measures.”

ASPO