Disaster prevention in treacherous environments

in too deep

People across the world consume about 85 million barrels of oil each day, and we have used up the easy-to-reach sources of oil, observe Stanley Reed and Alison Fitzgerald in ‘In Too Deep: BP and the drilling race that took it down’ (www.wiley.com). “As a consequence, the industry is moving into more and more treacherous environments. It is in all of our interests to make sure that the industry adopts the safest possible practices, but we should not delude ourselves into thinking that risk can ever be completely eliminated,” the authors add.

They note that, as an aftermath of the massive oil accident that BP recently experienced, drilling is likely to become more expensive. For instance, the book cites estimates speaking of delays and costs in the Gulf of Mexico going up by 20 per cent. Yet, as the author adds, the governments of oil producing countries, which depend on the international oil industry for revenues, are unlikely to shoo the golden geese away, warnings and threats notwithstanding.

New safety rules

Thankfully, disaster prevention is getting its due attention, on par with profit, through a series of new safety rules. The book mentions, as example, the proposal to build a standby containment system for deepwater blowouts that would allow the oil companies to cap blown-out wells and capture most of the oil before it spreads into the Gulf of Mexico.

“Operated by a nonprofit company, the Marine Well Containment Company, the new system would receive an initial investment of $1 billion, and it would be designed to do all the things that BP and the industry so miserably failed to do after the Macondo blowout. The apparatus would look much like what BP used to eventually capture a portion of the oil and channel it to the surface…”

Instructive read.

**

BookPeek.blogspot.com