Welcome To Peak Oil - The Deeper You Drill, The More You Might Spill

Posted by Big Gav in bp, horizon, peak oil, pollution

TreeHugger has a post on deepwater drilling and peak oil - Welcome To Peak Oil - The Deeper You Drill, The More You Might Spill.

A British-owned company has failed publicly and massively in sovereign US waters, having outsourced an ill prepared charge into dangerous underwater territory. Hence the reference to Lord Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade" - Light Crude Brigade...get it?

While it is hard to imagine how exactly they got process safety so wrong - drilling a mile below sea level without frequently testing and certifying that the system would actually shut the flow off when needed? - we should not miss the larger point, that this failed charge signifies the arrival of Peak Oil.

Everyone was expecting a steep and sustained run-up in oil price would mark the onset of Peak Oil. Not happening because of the economic downturn. Instead we get a Gulf-wide gusher. See below for ideas on how government regulation should be deployed under the Peak Oil reality.

You'd think that the engineers in charge of Horizon rig would have been constantly focused on how important process safety was to sustaining corporate productivity. Millions of barrels leaked, times around $65 per barrel, represents a huge profit loss even without the cleanup cost added in. (So much for the power of free markets to encourage companies to 'do the right thing.')

1 comments

SP says 1:14 AM

I'm guessing this won't discourage the Light Brigands.
There will still be a brigade of engineers who, like those on Star Trek, will argue that all they have to do is invert the polarity of the dilithium chamber and hey presto...
IE in a technological age, technical solutions reign supreme.