Gps affirmative

Spills in SQO

Magnitude of offshore drilling leads to future spills – its just a question of the cleanup

Myles Spicer 05/07/10 “Gulf oil drilling has high risk, too little reward” MinnPost.com also known as MinnPost is a non-profit news website in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with a focus on Minnesota news

The real dangers and damages To begin with, there are currently 115 oil rigs operating in the Gulf of Mexico — and each provides an opportunity and exposure for another mishap and major crisis. Many are doing exactly the kind of extreme deep-water drilling the BP platform was doing — and extending technology into areas not entirely understood or well managed by the oil industry (as is the BP situation shows). More important, there are about 500 offshore rigs operating worldwide, and they have been far from safe. Offshore operators continue to spill thousands of barrels of oil, fuel and chemicals into federal waters each year, government records show. "This is not a zero-risk proposition," said John Rogers Smith, an associate professor of petroleum engineering at Louisiana State University, who monitors such statistics. Offshore operators have had 40 spills greater than 1,000 barrels since 1964, including 13 in the past 10 years, according to data from the U.S. Minerals Management Service, which oversees exploration and production in federal waters. Moreover, spills from the rigs and actual drilling, are only part of the story. Drilling offshore has other potential dangers:

High risk of oil spills

Steven Mufson, April 19, 2012 “Two years after BP oil spill, offshore drilling still poses risk” Steven Mufson is a staff writer covering energy and other financial news. He has worked at the Washington Post since 1989 and has been its chief economic policy writer, Beijing correspondent, diplomatic correspondent and deputy editor of the weekly Outlook section. Earlier, he spent six years working for The Wall Street Journal in New York, London and Johannesburg and wrote a book about the 1980s uprisings in South Africa’s black townships.

Two years after a blowout on BP’s Macondo well killed 11 men and triggered the largest oil spill in U.S. history, oil companies are again plying the waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Forty-one deep-water rigs are in the gulf. The vast majority of them are drilling new holes or working over old ones, while the other behemoths are idle as they await work or repairs. A brand new rig — the South Korean-built Pacific Santa Ana, capable of drilling to a depth of 7.5 miles — is on its way to a Chevron well. But three recent incidents in other parts of the world show just how risky and sensitive offshore drilling remains. In the North Sea, French oil giant Total is still battling to regain control of a natural gas well that has been leaking for nearly four weeks. Meanwhile, Brazil has confiscated the passports of 11 Chevron employees and five employees of drilling contractor Transocean as they await trial on criminal charges related to an offshore oil spill there. And in December, about 40,000 barrels of crude oil leaked out of a five-year-old loading line between a floating storage vessel and an oil tanker in a Royal Dutch Shell field off the coast of Nigeria. Many experts say that even with tougher regulations here in the United States, such incidents are inevitable. “I’m not saying we shouldn’t do it [offshore drilling], but we ought to go at it with our eyes open,” said Roger Rufe, a retired Coast Guard vice admiral. “We can’t do it with a human-designed system and not expect that there will be occasional problems with it.” Shell is one company particularly anxious to avoid the slightest whiff of trouble. It is on the verge of getting the final two permits needed to drill this summer in the Chukchi Sea, off Alaska’s Arctic Coast, a plan that has aroused opposition from a broad array of environmental groups. So on April 10 when federal regulators told Shell that they had spotted a 1-by-10-mile oil sheen in the eight miles of water between two Shell production platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, executives acted quickly. They promptly mobilized an oil cleanup vessel and sent two remotely operated underwater vehicles to scour the sea floor. It turned out that the oil — only six barrels — came from a natural seep common in the gulf. “Post-Macondo, there’s no such thing as a small spill,” said an executive from another big oil company, who asked for anonymity because he was not authorized to comment. With the anniversary of the BP spill, many experts are reassessing U.S. progress since the accident. And environmentalists are assessing damages. A National Wildlife Federation report said, for example, that the shrimp catch increased last year but that since the spill 523 dolphins have been stranded onshore, four times the historic average; 95 percent of them were dead. A team of scientists led by Peter Roopnarine of the California Academy of Sciences said oysters collected post-spill contain higher concentrations of heavy metals in their shells, gills and muscle tissue than those collected before the spill.

Push for oil risks catastrophic spills

The PEW Environmental group, 2010. Oceans North U.S. http://oceansnorth.org/oil-spill-risks

The search for oil is pushing into ever more remote corners of the world – including the U.S. Arctic Ocean. Diminishing sea ice is increasing access to Arctic waters, potentially enabling industrial activities such as shipping and oil and gas development. But industrial development in U.S. Arctic waters brings a new set of challenges and a larger set of risks than in other oceans. In the Arctic, people and machinery will be working in some of the most remote and harshest conditions on the planet. The track record of the oil and gas industry shows that despite safeguards, equipment fails, mistakes are made and accidents happen. British Petroleum’s Deepwater Horizon blowout in the Gulf of Mexico provides a vivid illustration of the risks of offshore oil and gas activity. The rig exploded on April 20, 2010, killing 11 workers. Two days later, the rig sank, causing a disastrous spill that eventually spewed 205,000,000 barrels of oil into the Gulf before BP was able to plug the well three months later. If anything goes wrong in the Arctic, oil will spill into a highly sensitive marine environment. The combination of oil and ice could be disastrous to the ecosystem and nearly impossible to clean up.