The Interior Department approved last week the first production facility in federally administered offshore Alaska. Hilcorp Energy plans to build a gravel island six miles off the Alaskan north coast in the Beaufort Sea. The site is twenty miles east of Prudhoe Bay near the Arctic Wildlife Refuge. A reservoir of oil there is expected to contain as much as 150 million barrels of oil. The project is expected to produce 70,000 barrels a day at peak production.
So-called Project Liberty is part of the Trump regime's misguided effort to drill its way to energy independence. The scientific consensus is that producing and consuming more fossil fuel will only exacerbate the serious consequences of global warming. The Interior Department's decision to open up 90% of the outer-continental shelf to oil exploration and development ignores the environmental costs associated with the oil and gas industry.
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| Louisiana's offshore industrial zone |
Of course that is nothing new. A production platform that sank in the Gulf is leaking 300-700 barrels
a day for fourteen years. The spill is rapidly becoming the worst spill in US history, eclipsing the disaster caused by the
Deepwater Horizon drilling rig. Taylor Energy, the owner of the platform attempted, somewhat successfully, to keep the on-going spill secret. Itl was hidden for six years before environmental groups monitoring the BP disaster stumbled upon the slick caused the sunken platform.
[map] The company is attempting to walk away from the spill; it sued the Interior Department for return of $450 million in a trust created to pay for wreckage recovery and site remediation. The company says there is no evidence that the wells are leaking. Independent analysis submitted by the Justice Department in the suit says otherwise. Rather than 55 barrels a day reported by the Coast Guard using company data, the wells are leaking at ten times that rate. The abandoned wells are covered under 100 feet of mud deposited by an undersea avalanche that knocked the platform downslope 170 meters after Hurricane Ivan hurled 70 foot waves and 145 mph winds at the installation.
The fact is that many of the smaller, independent companies operating in the Gulf cannot afford a major spill incident. The company made an unpublicized deal with the federal government to establish a $666 million trust fund for containment. To give Taylor Energy credit, its spent a fortune plugging some of the 28 wells, salvaging the platform's deck, and building a barrier to contain rising crude. But its efforts were ultimately unsuccessful.
Six years later satellite imagery confirmed oil slicks in the area were not coming from the destroyed Deepwater Horizon platform. In 2015 AP reported that the spill had been shrouded in secrecy, and its extent about 20 times worse than the company ever reported pursuant to its legal obligation. There are 2000 platforms off the coast of Louisiana alone. Another 2000 are situated off the coasts of Texas and Mississippi. 50,000 miles of pipe carry product to shore. So its understandable that there are 20 blowouts a year, and fires erupt offshore every three days. It is all part of the dirty business as usual in the Gulf of Mexico. Coming soon to a coastline near you.
