The view from Crude Beach

Based on current news reports, it seems that deep-sea oil exploration technology is lopsided.

For me, summer always seems to be associate with a movie. For instance, A Summer Place , with Sandra Dee and Troy Donahue, will always brings back memories of the summer of 1959, which I spent with other teenagers at the beach in Connecticut, and Steven Spielberg’s Jaws also reminds me of days on the beach — but not in the water — in 1975. Unfortunately, I think I’ll always associate the summer of 2010 with a video of gallons of oil spewing from a twisted, truncated pipe deep in the Gulf of Mexico.

I was watching that video just a few days ago on the New York Times Web site (www.nytimes.com/interactive/ 2010/06/08/us/20100608-oil-spill-live-video-feed-bp.html
), ROV cameras from the Skandi Neptune offshore construction vessel showed gas and oil constantly boiling out of the drill casing, while cameras on the Boa Deep C’s Oceaneering ROVs watched as its robot arms tried to loop cables through steel eyes of equipment that had to be moved. The operation seemed clumsy, until you remembered it was being done a mile underwater.

All in all, the technology being used seems pretty amazing; the tele-presence does make you feel as if you are actually on the ocean floor, and the machines are managing to do some amazing things. It just seems as if the technology available to cope with the problem is not enough and a bit too late.

Based on current news reports, it seems that deep-sea oil exploration technology is lopsided. The technology being used to discover and extract oil is well funded and highly advanced. The technology that isn’t being unwritten and pushed ahead is that for coping with potential problems and events that have led to today’s ecological disaster.

It’s not hard to understand why that’s the case. Any executive can go to the company’s board and say, “I’m going to spend $X million to increase our productivity, and thus improve our bottom line by $XX million.” But if he or she were to say, “I’m going to spend $X million on equipment we may not need, and it won’t improve our profits unless a disaster occurs,” that person is likely to soon be sailing through the skies on a golden parachute.

While the ultimate way to prevent such spills from happening is to stop being heavily dependent on oil, that isn’t likely to happen in the near future. And alternative energy may present problems we have yet to realize. If we are going to field advanced technology, we’re going to have to spend more time thinking about its risks and preparing to cope with them.

The only practical way to balance the application of technology to deep-sea oil exploration is to mandate that companies that are granted drilling licenses show that they are able to rapidly respond to a crisis in a way that prevents it from becoming an environmental disaster. Then all we’ll have to worry about when we go to the beach in the summer is attacks by Great Whites.

Richard Comerford