Some thoughts, feel free to refute them with proof, reasonable arguments, nunchucks, etc.

The current drilling moratorium is a joke, alright? Not in theory, but in practice.

1) It takes six months for “the commission to determine how to prevent this from ever happening again?” Arbitrary duration and a poorly-stated goal. The way to prevent this from happening again is known. But it’s going to take a lot more than six months, given the pace at which the federal government moves, to enforce and measure real behavior change that should come from within a given company, set up a verifiable and analyzable flow of data between the company and the MMS, remove the conflicts of interest between energy companies and the MMS and revamp the regulatory agency in any lasting fashion.

2) Not all oil companies are the same. Other players will already have increased safety measures in a hurry. Even if they have not, what is going to happen in six months to change standard operating procedure? What are we doing to address the smaller leakers? If the goal here is “to prevent this from happening again,” can we get a guarantee that this oil spill or even a smaller version of it will never happen again IN SIX MONTHS TIME?

3) I guarantee you that someone has done a tremendous amount of market research on behalf of the government that by the six-month mark, the public will have softened its stance on drilling enough for things to go back to business as usual. It’s a nice round we’ve-all-done-enough-penance number.

Yes, you heard me right earlier. The way to prevent this from happening again is known. There are folks opposed to and for offshore drilling who say that we can never prevent a recurrence and therefore we should stop drilling or continue to drill, respectively. But, this was no mere accident. An accident happens when you follow all the rules of the road and external, heretofore-unknown circumstances conspire against you. In this case, the driver didn’t have the seatbelt on, the tires were under-inflated, the brakes were non-operational but no one had bothered to check them and the car was driven anyway even after passengers expressed concern and asked for the handover of keys. (Hey, if folks in the industry are going to liken this ongoing disaster to a car accident or plane crash, you can bet I will run miles with the metaphor.) So, this much is absolutely preventable.

What about the rest? As commenter Blair, who incidentally is a rocket scientist, said in a comment to a previous post, “It costs to do fault tree analysis and establish contingency plans, but the cost of NOT planning is getting too high. I worry that governments are reactive in nature and will never get ahead of the situation. Government CAN require industry to have plans in place before they proceed with potentially risky activity.” You cannot prevent lightning from striking the collection ship thus halting oil recovery for a while. That is a legitimate accident. But to not anticipate and not plan for any critical component of the operation failing due to human oversight or act of god, even and especially in the recovery phase, shows that neither BP nor the government has learned philosophically much from the initial disaster and it’s going to take a lot more than six months and a drilling moratorium to fix systemic breakdown.

Fire away.

Update: Oil gushing at spill site after vent damaged; cap removed after robotic sub hits vent

We need a moratorium on whomever is running this outfit. NOW.

"It could be worse. Could be raining oiled pelicans."

This AM: Judge blocks Gulf offshore drilling moratorium; White House will appeal

I wondered, “There are judges in Louisiana and Texas who don’t have to recuse themselves from oil spill cases because of conflicts of interest?”

This PM: Judge who overturned drilling moratorium reported owning stock in drilling companies

I have to highlight Jeffrey’s reaction to this for posterity: “Seems like only one administration ago when the unitary executive was supposedly free to be a decider without having the shareholders meddlesome courts overrule the decidings.”

It ain’t New America if it doesn’t resemble Old India at least once a day.

Oil and gas. I can’t seem to get away from the stuff. My mother once joked that it is in my blood. I was born in a land made obscenely rich by massive oil finds, started out wanting to be a doctor or architect but ended up seduced by rocks and working in the oil industry for a decade and now own property and live right on top of one of the most prolific American gas shales.

Last night, when I turned on HBO’s GASLAND, a documentary about the hydraulic fracturing of shales for oil and gas removal and its human and environmental impacts, imagine my surprise when it started with the Devonian Marcellus shale that sits about half a mile below this Ohio town and runs all the way east into Pennsylvania and southern New York and south into West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, Tennessee and northern Alabama.

***

First, a short primer on hydraulic fracturing: Conventional drilling is tapping into porous rock, sandstone for instance, and pumping out oil and gas. Hydraulic fracturing involves breaking non-porous rock, in this case shales, with a high-pressure mixture of water, sand and proprietary chemical mixes, which releases oil or gas into the well. The controversy here comes from two things: 1) Hydraulically fracturing rock impacts adjacent aquifer horizons by exposing them to oil, gas and chemicals through the fractures and 2) the Energy Policy Act of 2005 included the exemption of hydraulic fracturing from the Safe Drinking Water Act (recommended by a special task force on energy policy convened by Vice President Dick Cheney, FYI). It seems that fracking of the Marcellus shale east of here has had documented negative effects on the health of humans, water sources and wildlife.

GASLAND takes director Jason Fox and his production crew from his home in Pennsylvania to various places in America where fracking is on the rise to tap these unconventional sources of energy, i.e. not regular crude oil or coal but oil and gas shales, as the quality of life of the people of these regions decreases. I am as wary of non-scientists “doing science” as it gets and am not partial to the Michael-Moore-And-Me “folksy” style of exposé, but Fox is on to something here.

***

It is the beginning of the third month of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. GASLAND‘s parallels with this disaster alone are startling.

– Area residents and fauna take ill as hydraulic fracturing intensifies and companies blame it on anything but the chemicals required for said fracturing. Even when no one got sick and water coming out of pipes wasn’t flammable until then.

– The well blowouts and pipe leaks. They are everywhere.

– Halliburton is everywhere.

– State regulatory agencies are mismanaged and underfunded bodies that seem to operate on behalf of energy companies and not the people they represent. “There is no one here to help you. Find a lawyer.”

– Legal and public relations arms of the energy companies expertly stonewall the media.

– Legislative hearings are dog-and-pony shows in which energy company executives state that they follow the law and that they have published the chemical composition of their raw materials but are unwilling to hand those documents over to lawmakers.

– One legislator uses the hearing to stump for his next campaign and apologizes to the energy companies for this hassle while thanking them for the jobs they have created in the region.

– Louisiana is always terminally screwed. Never mind its own production, refining and pipeline activity, which pollutes the coastline and has created Cancer Alley between Baton Rouge and Plaquemines Parish, the state receives one-third of the nation’s oil and gas drilling waste via the Mississippi and other streams in its drainage basin.

– Interior Secretary Ken Salazar is as useless now as he was then. As Colorado senator, he voted for the 2005 Energy Policy Act with the hydraulic fracturing provision intact (then Senator Obama of Illinois, Senators Landrieu and Vitter of Louisiana, Senator Kohl of Wisconsin and both senators of Ohio and Pennsylvania respectively also voting Yea, surprise surprise).

***

The pros of offshore drilling, hydraulic fracturing and other conventional energy-extraction methods: Jobs, revenue and independence from foreign energy sources.

The cons: Water and land pollution; human and animal illness, chromosomal abnormalities and death; long-term environmental destruction.

Jobs and revenue are great, but we have to get past looking at energy in these terms. As D says, “When horses were replaced by automobiles, the guys clearing horseshit from roads and stables complained about lost jobs.” Times change and our resources are limited. A barrel unused is a barrel in reserve.

If we don’t take this opportunity to check our energy consumption and use oil, gas and coal but only to evolve into our next, more sustainable set of energy sources, we are going to be left with neither and will have polluted our soil and drinking water in the process. Given our growing rate of consumption, we will also have to return to importing fuel after having depleted ours.

Fast, easy and cheap. We get to pick two.