BP oil spill: is Obama's fury justified?
Updated on 04 June 2010
As Obama fumes at BP, Simon Boxall of the National Oceanography Centre tells Channel 4 News that bashing BP is not the answer - to a spill that is not the worst ever, in fact, it ranks 50th.
The Deepwater Horizon incident has prompted disparate claims, from being the world's worst environmental disaster to the US's worst oil spill.
BP has been accused of fumbling around with threats from the US of freezing its assets. But how true or fair are these statements?
The Deepwater disaster in the Gulf of Mexico is bad news, not least of which because eleven people were killed in the accident.
A major spill from the deep water oil industry was not an if, but a when, and it will not be the last - regardless of the number of safety measures introduced.
The amount of oil spilt so far is in dispute, but taking an average the spill does now equal the volume of the Exxon Valdez in Alaska (1989).
In terms of volume this puts it about 50th in the league tables of major oil spills – hardly the world’s worst.
In addition, the environmental damage of Exxon's spill far exceeds that seen to date along the US Gulf Coast.
A tanker spill tends to occur close to shore and in shallow water, and the oil is introduced over a period of hours to the environment, causing a smothering of life along the shore line.
More from Channel 4 News on the BP oil spill:
- Gulf spill: BP fits cap on leaking oil pipe
- BP oil spill under criminal investigation
- Oil disaster: we are in this for months to come
- BP to plug oil leak as biologist sounds warning
- BP Gulf spill environmental costs 'enormous'
- Deepwater: lessons to learn from the BP spill
The Deepwater Horizon spill is 40 miles offshore in a depth of 1 mile and is a steady stream rather than a gush.
The environmental impact has been small, with politicians and media searching out tar balls on beaches and any dead animals, most of which have proven to be unrelated to the current incident.
The main damage so far has been to the outlying island chain off the coast where an already stressed mangrove ecology will likely and tragically be pushed over the edge by this last straw.
Fishing has been stopped in the Gulf region but experience in other incidents has shown that the fishing grounds will open within a few months of the oil being capped off.
The oil itself will decay naturally and rapidly in the warm sunlit waters of the region.
Can BP recover from the oil spill damage?
As BP begins to capture oil from the leak in the Gulf of Mexico Job Rabkin writes from Washington and says the company's actions, and its chief executives' gaffes, are causing anger in the US.
Across the country, there are angry demonstrations, boycotts and increasingly shrill demands that the US government should issue a Declaration of Independence - and just shut down BP all together.
One former Clinton cabinet minister, Robert Reich, has demanded the US government take over BP temporarily, until the leak is plugged and the spill is cleared up.
Even America's late night comedians have been sticking the knife in.
"BP seems to have done this on their own, they don’t pay attention, they essentially make their own rules, they pay off everybody," Jay Leno said recently on the Tonight Show.
Such is the rage that Americans woke up this morning to Tony Hayward on their TVs, declaring in a very British sort of way: "I'm sorry".
But this time it was a paid commercial: a sign that BP feels the need to spend millions to control its message. The company has had to hire a new head of media relations to calm the storm. Anne Womack Kolton, who's now in charge, is a former aide to Vice President Dick Cheney and a former spokeswoman for the US Energy Department.
As a representative of UK PLC - and one of Britain's proudest companies - this crisis has not been BP's finest hour. Any hopes Americans had that that the plucky Brit Tony Hayward would fight the oil on the beaches have sunk in a pool of thick black sludge.
Read the article in full here.
Has BP been slow and incompetent?
BP has admitted that it needs more tools in their tool box for the future, if deep sea oil extraction is to continue.
But working a mile down in the ocean is unlike any other environment.
We have better maps of the surface of Venus than our own sea bed and engineering at these depths is more difficult than working in space.
The pressures are colossal - over one ton per square inch, and this is a shallow deep sea well!
Divers cannot operate at these depths and we are limited to using ROV's (Remotely Operated Vessels). This type of engineering is like servicing your car with boxing gloves on and a small torch.
Add to that an unstable platform at the surface and it is a wonder how they managed to get to the oil in the first place – the secret there relies on most of the fine scale work taking place on dry land and then lowered to the sea floor.
The long term solution are the relief wells started early on in the incident, and these will work, but not until August.
In the meantime the ongoing attempts to stem the flow are proving a challenge.
Obama himself admits that BP has the most experience and the best engineers to solve this problem, sending in the military would quite literally put them out of their depth.
When the US ship the Torrey Canyon floundered off the Cornish coast in 1967 it was the first major spill from a super tanker.
Four times the volume of the present spill was dumped, a mile from the shore.
Engineers and scientists had no idea how to deal with it then and many more mistakes were made, but equally many lessons learned.
We can only plan so far for such a disaster, the reality often throws up unexpected curved balls.
BP is as much the victim as the guilty party. They have said from the outset that they will pay all costs for stopping the leak, for clean up, and compensation for those affected – and are one of the few companies worldwide who could afford to.
The jury is still out as to where actual blame lies.
With Transocean the rig owner and operator, with the company who designed and built the BOP that failed - both US companies incidentally?
The list is extensive.
It is also worth remembering that the oil in the Gulf was for the US domestic market and that substantial taxes from oil licences go into the US purse.
Let us not bash BP too much just yet, and let them get on with the difficult and challenging task in hand.Dr.
Dr Simon Boxall, National Oceanography Centre, University of Southampton
