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COMMENTARY
May 15, 2010
Oil plugging
It couldn't have happened to a nicer oil company. For many years, British Petroleum has been the industry leader in environmental posturing. Their ads extolling their own risible efforts to advance solar, wind, and every other kind of "renewable" energy technology, had us almost convinced they were a bunch of hippies. The imagery seemed to suggest that every time you went to a BP pump, you were filling up your car with sunshine.Turns out they still drill for oil. And they do it offshore, in places like the Gulf of Mexico. Why? Because that's where the oil is, a mile down under the water in the case of Deepwater Horizon. Big oil companies are not all the same. There are cultural differences even between the capitalist ones; and vast cultural differences once the field is extended to the many nationalized oil companies, competing in the international market to national sets of rules. They have much different priorities from companies merely trying to please their shareholders. This came out clearly in Iraq, when bids were received to exploit the country's huge oil reserves in the post-Saddam era. Nothing could be farther from the truth than the demented leftist cry of, "No blood for oil!" -- the accusation that became a media commonplace when Iraq was invaded. U.S. companies were shut out of that contest, along with all other consortia dominated by the privately-owned. Iraq's revenue demands made it entirely unprofitable for them to be players. Instead, the contracts were won almost entirely by state-owned companies from all over the world, which were relatively indifferent to costs, and much more concerned with guaranteeing their respective national oil supplies, to keep themselves in business. We've come a long way from the world of the "Seven Sisters," who were the targets of leftist rhetoric when I was growing up. The "old boys club" today is dominated by state bureaucrats, including regulating authorities with the power to make different rules for different players, and to change the rules as the game proceeds. Example: Democrat congressmen have been thinking aloud about changing the oil-spill liabilities retroactively, in order to soak more money out of BP than they can under existing laws. (Do I have to explain that the rule of law ends when laws can be changed retroactively, case by case?) It's the flip side of an intensely politicized business environment in which straight talk is generally punished, and sleazy posturing is generally rewarded. The news yesterday was that Steven Chu -- the brilliant physicist who is Obama's energy secretary -- has hand-picked a team of famous lateral-thinking scientists to fly down to Houston and come up with solutions smarter than anything BP has tried. (A review of BP's efforts so far would make good slapstick comedy.) Good luck to these gentlemen: for the incident itself provides a wonderful opportunity for human inventiveness and technological advance, as all environmental disasters do. That's what's so great about them. This one is incidentally not very large. Even if the oil is leaking at several times the 5,000 barrels a day that the media keep repeating from an obviously flawed U.S. government estimate, it represents such a tiny trickle into the immensity of the Gulf of Mexico as to be almost worth ignoring. Nature could easily better that, and even man has achieved far more impressive oil spills. True, many photogenic birds and dolphins have got in the way of the slick, but compare that to what the average hurricane takes out. By the numbers: this is less than the millionth part of a cubic mile, in a bath of cubic miles by the million. Okay, it all floats to the top, but that is the silver lining. The sun shines on the happy microbiota that just adore hydrocarbons, and multiply quicker than (insert politically incorrect ethnic reference here) at the prospect of a free lunch. They in turn create dining opportunities all the way up the food chain. Nature loves an oil spill, and the only bad news is when it's over. From a human point of view, however -- given the current price of oil -- this is a terrible waste. But I notice one of BP's amateur-looking devices for cleaning it up shows real tactical promise. That is, to suck as much surface oil as they can into a rented oil tanker. The harvest may be badly salted, but can still go straight to the refinery at Texas City. Indeed, if we could get over our neuroses, this seems like a much cheaper and safer way to harvest undersea oil reserves. Just blow a hole in the ocean floor, and lap up the oil when it rises to the surface. You could hem it in with strings of floating Javex bottles, and leave those hydrocarbon-gobbling bacteria to do their organic gardening on the slicks that get away. I haven't done an environmental impact study on this, however. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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