6 lessons from the BP oil spill

For years to come, the United States and the oil industry will be absorbing the lessons of the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Regulators will toughen inspections. Oil companies will adopt more rigorous safeguards. New cleanup technologies will emerge from university and corporate laboratories. And spill drills could become a regular part of coastal communities’ emergency planning.

What the BP oil spill does not signal, however, is a change in direction. Even as brown goo gushes from the Gulf floor 5,000 feet below the surface, and cleanup crews struggle to halt the slick from befouling beaches and shorebirds, companies are already developing the technologies to drill twice as deep off South America, Africa, and in the Gulf itself.

Oil plays too big a role in the world economy to turn off the spigot — or to stop exploring for new sources of crude to replace declining oil fields already in production.

The larger lesson of the BP oil spill — the environmental and economic risks of over-reliance on fossil fuel — is lost on no one. The Obama administration and Congress may push through some measure that begins to tax the burning of oil and other fossil fuels.

But economic and technological hurdles — as well as political ones — stand in the way of a significant change in the US’s energy diet. Electric cars, biofuels, or some other technology will one day consign the internal-combustion engine to history’s dustbin. For the moment, though, it looks far easier to create a more foolproof blowout preventer or safer drilling technique than to find a cheap, simple, and ubiquitous alternative to oil.

So what are the lessons of the Great Spill of 2010 ?

1) Improve the offshore police

Wanted : People who understand the physics of recovering oil from the bottom of the ocean floor. Need to be intimately familiar with the mechanics of deep drilling — in other words, know that a RAM BOP has nothing to do with text messaging. Must be tough-minded and dispassionate. Must be willing to refuse any "gifts" from the oil industry, like free hunting and fishing trips. No golf outings with industry executives, either.

This may soon be a job description coming to a classified ad near you. One outcome of the spill is the need for a retooled system to regulate energy exploration and production. Among the most pressing needs : more offshore sheriffs — people trained to inspect drilling rigs. Mary Kendall, the acting inspector general in the Department of Interior, told Congress recently that the Minerals Management Service (MMS) had about 60 inspectors to oversee the 4,000 or so offshore oil production and exploration facilities in the Gulf of Mexico. More and better-trained staff is likely to be a top priority.

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2) Design a better drill rig

As oil discoveries in deeper waters beckon, giant new rigs will plunge drill bits two miles below the sea surface and five more miles into the earth — the equivalent of 29 Empire State Buildings. But such ultradeep drilling means ultrahigh pressures. At any time a bit could hit a pocket of pressurized gas that bursts to the surface and explodes. Capping a blowout 10,000 feet down would make the Deepwater Horizon problem look like a do-it-yourself caulk job.

The industry is currently working on new "sixth-generation" deep-sea rigs that experts say will be the safest ever developed — but still not foolproof in handling one of the most challenging engineering feats faced by man. The cost of the new rigs : about $500 million.

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3) Manage the cleanup like Churchill

In the 1990s, experts from Columbia University and Boeing Corporation tried to prod the oil industry into planning for disasters as a critical part of the so-called lean management movement. No luck.

"The industry thought it was added cost, and because incentives were heavily biased towards cost cutting, they turned it down," says Roger Anderson, a senior scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.Y.

One result : BP has in essence been trying to invent ways to stop the blowout in the Gulf on the fly. This may be the most basic lesson from the disaster about how to manage oil spills in the future. As simple as it sounds, oil companies need to acknowledge that catastrophic events are going to happen, even if infrequently, and build responses into their corporate DNA, no matter what the cost.

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4) Find something better than a boom

The ideas for new tools to clean up oil spills range from the mundane (better chemical dispersants to break up the crude so it will degrade naturally) to the exotic (ravenous microbes to eat the oil off beaches).

Then there are the two Florida contractors who have been pitching a home-grown technique, using locally cut hay and straw to soak up the oil like a chamois. They can be seen demonstrating their simple solution on YouTube, pouring oil into large bowls of water, floating hay on top, stirring it around to simulate wave action, and — voilà ! — a solution almost as clean as tap water.

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5) Tap the power of the people

The moment Gulfport, Miss., resident Megan Jordan feared has arrived. The viscous onslaught of crude is no longer an abstract horror belonging to Louisiana, Alabama, and Florida. The first globules of oil have slipped through the Mississippi Sound and washed ashore in nearby Ocean Springs. For Ms. Jordan and her neighbors, this isn’t just any beach — it’s the keeper of memories, the provenance of dreams. The destruction is hard to bear.

Their passion, properly channeled, could become a crucial element in future oil spill defense. Experts say that by tapping into local knowledge — and love — communities could formulate emergency plans to bolster what residents have criticized as a slow, inadequate government and corporate response.

It’s a lesson California learned in 2007, when a container ship crashed into the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, releasing 58,000 gallons of fuel into the bay. Volunteers, desperate to help, rushed to the water’s edge, creating chaos. "They had people running down to the beach, picking up oil with their hands and in T-shirts and towels," says Kurt Hansen, project manager for oil spill research at the US Coast Guard Research and Development Center in New London, Conn.

But in a potentially toxic environment, federal laws prohibit — and often thwart — even the best of intentions. In order to participate in cleanup efforts, federal rules require at least a 40-hour hazardous waste course. Mr. Hansen says response times could be significantly lowered if communities could draw upon a ready pool of trained volunteers.

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6) Recalibrate our energy policy

It has become one of the iconic images of 2010 : oil gushing from the floor of the Gulf, almost one mile below the surface, where it mushrooms up from BP’s failed drilling rig like clouds of café au lait. The undersea feed from robotic cameras has popped up on national news telecasts and cable shows, during televised congressional hearings and presidential speeches — a potent reminder that for all the talk and technology, man’s search for oil is risky and beginning to push the limits of human engineering.

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