In the early days of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, I was puzzled by an observation that received little attention at the time. When a few tar balls were found on the Florida coast, an official said that these were probably not from the Deepwater well and would have to be tested to determine origin. At the time I thought, “How odd; if not from Deepwater, where else would tar balls be coming from?” Today I found a possible answer in THIS ARTICLE.
There are now more than 27,000 abandoned oil and gas wells JUST IN THE GULF! This has been on going since the 1940s with little if any regulation and virtually no oversight or monitoring of the well heads. One can only imagine what might be happening to concrete that has been exposed to sea water and ocean floor disturbances.
If a well is only temporarily abandoned, the requirements for sealing them are less stringent. The company with drilling rights is supposed to either reopen the well or close it off permanently within a year but this rarely happens. I suspect that many wells are “temporarily” closed simply to save money with no intentions of reopening them.
Capped wells on land and under water can repressurize and those capped on land frequently leak. Not much is known about how many wells are now leaking in the Gulf because no one is monitoring them.
The US Mineral Management Service, now the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, which is supposed to oversee the operation and condition of these wells has done little more over the decades than shuffle paper.
“In the end, the Coast Guard's Marine Safety Laboratory handles little more than 200 cases of oil pollution each year. And manager Wayne Gronlund says it's often impossible to tell leaking wells from natural seeps, where untold thousands of barrels of oil and untold millions of cubic feet of gas escape annually through cracks that permeate the sea floor.”
The Deepwater Horizon leak is just the tip of the iceberg. The Gulf could easily become our Chernobyl.
(Octopus addition: Rachel Maddow recalls
earlier oil spills... now conveniently forgotten):
The Gulf could easily become our Chernobyl WITHOUT the other 26,999 wells.
ReplyDeleteI was talking about oil in teh gulf today and lamented the lack of oversight and regulation.
ReplyDelete"WE HAVE TOO MUCH GOVERNMENT REGULATION" was the thunderous reply. Now this guy isn't dumb, has at least one PhD, but despite the hollywood origins, the phrase "stupid is as stupid does" seems to be appropriate.
Yes, the whole world is screwed.
I agree with jadedJ. This ONE oil spill IS our Chernobyl, and the prospect of 27,000 more is mere overkill.
ReplyDeleteAbout the shortcomings of the human species ... you all know how I feel, so don't get me started (running out of ink, I am).
I wrote about this today too. And it's not just abandoned oil wells. It's leaky coal ash ponds. It's uranium mining operations. It's the whole damn thing. Lazy operators, lax regulators, who cares, it's a big counyry, no one will notice. Until they do.
ReplyDeleteToxic soup.
We can't get off the petro tit fast enough.
Octo - nice find on that Rachel Maddow piece which just reinforces the obvious - we are on the brink of a disaster that could easily dwarf all other oil spill disasters put together.
ReplyDeleteAnd I think you all might be right - this could end up being our Chernobyl.
And if it does what would we ever compare the burst of numerous wells to?
It's like any excavation of natural reasources this country has ever done.
ReplyDeleteAs long as there is profit in it, the after effects are not important.
It's not just the scaring of the land, it's consequences years and decades later.
You would think we could have learned from our History, "Don't mess with Mother Nature."
America is literally falling apart at the seams and we have no one to blame but our greedy selves.
ReplyDelete