Dangerous drilling invites disaster

While the explosion of BP/Transocean's Deepwater Horizon drilling rig was a horrific event, it was neither surprising nor unexpected.

BP is one of the most powerful corporations operating in the United States.

Its 2009 revenues of US$327 billion are enough to rank BP as the third-largest corporation in the country. It spends aggressively to influence US policy and regulatory oversight.

In 2009, the company spent nearly US$16 million on lobbying the federal Government, ranking it among the 20 highest spenders that year, and shattering its own previous record of US$10.4 million set in 2008.

In 2008, it also spent more than US$530,000 on federal elections, placing it among the oil industry's top 10 political spenders.

This money has bought BP great access and, many would argue, leniency.

"I personally believe that BP, with its corporate culture of greed over profits, murdered my parents," Eva Rowe testified before Congress in 2007.

The Congress was investigating the worst workplace accident in the US in more than 15 years, an explosion at BP's Texas City Refinery in March 2005 that killed 15 workers, including Rowe's parents, and injured 180.

The US Chemical Safety Board, an independent federal agency, investigated the blast and released a devastating indictment of BP.

"The Texas City disaster was caused by organisational and safety deficiencies at all levels of the BP corporation," the 2007 report found.

"The combination of cost-cutting, production pressures and failure to invest caused a progressive deterioration of safety at the refinery."

While experiencing its highest profits in its corporate history, BP implemented budget cuts of 25 per cent in 1999 and 2005 at each of its five US refineries. The safety board found a pervasive "complacency towards serious safety risks" at all of them.

When the next great explosion at a US oil workplace occurred, it was of little surprise to learn that it was, again, BP at fault. It also came as little surprise the location was the deep offshore waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

BP and the entire oil industry have lobbied aggressively to open new US waters to offshore drilling and expand the access they already had.

For decades, the vast majority of drilling from the US Gulf took place on simple scaffolds in nine to 60m of water.

In the past 10 years, the number of rigs drilling in depths of greater than 300m (deep wells) has risen dramatically, as have ultra-deep wells, those greater than 1500m.

The trend is problematic for many reasons, including that drilling deeper than 150m releases methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide in contributing to global warming.

Many shallower fields have dried up, and the industry has become ever more flush with cash and more desperate for oil.

As a result, the companies - led by BP, the largest producer of oil in the US Gulf - are breaking all records, pushing ever deeper - and well past the point of technological know-how and safety.

In September 2009, BP drilled the deepest well ever at its Tiber field in the US Gulf at a depth of more than 10,600m (farther down than Mt Everest is up). When it exploded, BP's Deepwater Horizon Drilling rig was drilling at just over 5500m deep.

* Antonia Juhasz, author of The Tyranny of Oil: The World's Most Powerful Industry - and What We Must Do To Stop It, is director of the Chevron Programme at Global Exchange, a San Francisco-based human rights organisation (www.globalexchange.org/chevron).

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