New Technologies Needed

The failure of BP’s attempt at a “top kill” solution to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill highlights a problem that the industry will face moving forward in deepwater drilling. It is understood that some companies use better prevention approaches than others and that prevention strategies keep improving with time, but what about technologies for handling a blowout once it happens? The deepwater Horizon offshore drilling disaster has highlighted a hole in the industry’s prowess. There is apparently no proven technology to handle a blowout in short order. If there was one, someone would be offering it to BP or to the U.S. Department of Interior.

The argument that blowouts hardly ever happen seems a hollow statement in light of the extensive damage once one occurs. The American public might be shocked to know that a similar blowout, known as the Montara spill, took place in the Australian section of the Timor Sea on August 21, 2009 and spewed 17,000 to 85,000 gallons of oil a day until November 3, 2009 when the fifth attempt at drilling a relief well was finally successful.

In the aftermath of the Australian catastrophe, where the well operator was a subsidiary of the Thai national oil company, there was no debate about how to develop worst case scenario technologies. Now with a second major blowout event so close together in timing, research and development activities in this area seems all the more imperative.

For all the talk of commissions, investigations, blame and politics, the reality is that there is a giant science brain trust sitting inside the American oil industry. The question is: Whose responsibility is it to develop blow out response technology? Industry? Government? Universities? Or perhaps most sensibly, all three. And how do we implement that? Free market? In light of the BP oil spill, we might want to consider that the free market didn’t actually deliver it and how we would remedy that.

Amy Myers Jaffe