Nothing insightful here, just a sigh of disgust at how an industry that’s already doomed is damning itself in yet another way:
An oil spill that has been quietly leaking millions of barrels into the Gulf of Mexico has gone unplugged for so long that it now verges on becoming one of the worst offshore disasters in U.S. history.
Between 300 and 700 barrels of oil per day have been spewing from a site 12 miles off the Louisiana coast since 2004, when an oil-production platform owned by Taylor Energy sank in a mudslide triggered by Hurricane Ivan. Many of the wells have not been capped, and federal officials estimate that the spill could continue through this century. With no fix in sight, the Taylor offshore spill is threatening to overtake BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster as the largest ever. [WaPo]
Obfuscation, bad estimates, and on top of that it’s a really shitty situation to clean up.
Taylor Energy spent a fortune to pluck the deck of the platform from the ocean and plug about a third of the wells. It built a kind of shield to keep the crude from rising.
But no matter what it did, the oil kept leaking.
And yet the Eastern Seaboard is now under threat for oil development, despite the fact that hurricanes, the downfall of the Taylor Energy platform, hit the Eastern Seaboard twice as often (although, to be honest, I’m not clear on the exact metric in use here – per mile of coastline?).
It’s the sort of thing where you want to say, We need to stop fucking around and move to renewables ‘cuz this’ll never happen with renewables.
And then someone would embarrass me with their own tale of renewables gone bad, and I’d feel awful.
There, done venting.
