Drilling technology may surprise tree huggers
Mitch Covington, an environmentalist and longtime Tallahassee resident who works in the oil industry, submitted the following Op-Ed to the Tallahassee Democrat on June 29, 2009. Bugware, Covington’s consulting firm travels to the rigs offshore from Louisiana and is an Affiliate of CEA-Florida. View by clicking here.
Few things are more important to humans than living in a clean environment. The great outdoors is a source of recreation and inspiration, and it belongs to all of us. It’s our responsibility to keep it clean, and those who litter and pollute the earth should be liable for their crime and punished accordingly.
I’ve canoed down the Wakulla River quite often and have never taken the canoe out of the water without a bag full of other folks’ beer and soda cans, bottles, and other assorted trash. I do this when I visit my favorite natural spots, too. By some standards, I’d be considered a “tree hugger.”
My love for the outdoors eventually landed me in an undergraduate geology program. Geologists often get to spend a lot of time doing field work, so this was a good fit for me. I was also interested in marine biology, so through graduate school at Florida State I became a micropaleontologist. Micropaleontology is the study of the skeletal remains of single-celled algae that have flourished in the oceans for the past few hundred million years. These fossils are extremely useful for age-dating the sediments in which they’re found.
Oil is found mostly in the sedimentary layers around the world, including the Gulf of Mexico. Consequently, oil companies find paleontologists very useful in the hunt for hydrocarbon, and this led me to eventually start a small consulting firm here in Tallahassee to provide service to the major oil companies. My company employs 10 to 12 Floridians, and we spend many hundreds of days each year on oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico.
Today’s oil rigs are not the rigs often portrayed in the media, but are billion-dollar floating cities employing state-of-the-art technology and costing up to $1 million a day to operate. Most often, the new rigs are actually ships with derricks mounted on them. The drill ships can be nearly three football fields in length and are home to roughly 200 people at a time. They can drill in water deeper than 10,000 feet and can drill a well 35,000 feet from the rig floor to the bottom of the hole.
The shipboard team stays in contact with the shore-based office with frequent video conferences. All crew members attend multiple and mandatory daily meetings, the topics of which include current drilling operations, of course, but also prominent discussions about personal safety and environmental protection. Today’s oil exploration companies take the environmental issue extremely seriously. There will not be a cigarette butt thrown into the water. In my 10 years of working on oil rigs, I have never heard of an oil spill. In fact, while there have been more than 30,000 wells drilled in the Gulf of Mexico, how many spills of any significance have you ever heard of that originated from a drilling rig? The rigs are kept clean and are subject to surprise inspections by federal agencies.
The possibility of a “blowout” is minimized, if not eliminated, by a huge contraption that sits on the bottom called the “Blowout Preventer,” or BOP. The BOP is controlled from the surface, and if a pressure buildup is detected, it can close off the hole with the push of a button. The BOP is regularly and frequently tested to ensure its functionality. If there is an approaching hurricane, the ship can simply shut off the well at the BOP, displace the drilling fluid, detach from the well and sail out of the way of the storm.
So without a doubt, we can drill safely and cleanly. Is it impossible for a catastrophic accident to happen? No, but the chances are infinitesimally small, and considering the benefits of drilling, it’s worth the barely existent risk. If we consider the environmental impact of a beachfront high-rise condo, offshore drilling pales in comparison.
In these tough economic times, the potential for tens of thousands of jobs that would accompany offshore drilling should not be ignored. In addition, the other states in the Gulf of Mexico enjoy the royalties that come from offshore drilling in the waters that they have the resource rights to.
Should we completely rely on oil for our energy needs? Of course not. We absolutely should be moving full steam ahead on alternative sources. But petroleum products will be needed not only for energy and fuel for our vehicles and homes for decades to come, but also for thousands of products made of plastic and other synthetics.
It’s understandable that tourists may not want to sit on a beach and look at a drilling rig. For those few occasions when a prospect actually would barely be within eyeshot of the shore, and the few situations when a discovery is actually made (finding oil is still a toss at the dart board), the extraction and retrieval can be done from the bottom of the ocean. No structures need to be seen from shore.
We’re all entitled to our own opinion about this issue, but let’s just be honest about the reasons not to drill. The mantra of “automatic environmental devastation” is just simply wrong.
The shipboard team stays in contact with the shore-based office with frequent video conferences. All crew members attend multiple and mandatory daily meetings, the topics of which include current drilling operations, of course, but also prominent discussions about personal safety and environmental protection. Today’s oil exploration companies take the environmental issue extremely seriously. There will not be a cigarette butt thrown into the water. In my 10 years of working on oil rigs, I have never heard of an oil spill. In fact, while there have been more than 30,000 wells drilled in the Gulf of Mexico, how many spills of any significance have you ever heard of that originated from a drilling rig? The rigs are kept clean and are subject to surprise inspections by federal agencies.
The possibility of a “blowout” is minimized, if not eliminated, by a huge contraption that sits on the bottom called the “Blowout Preventer,” or BOP. The BOP is controlled from the surface, and if a pressure buildup is detected, it can close off the hole with the push of a button. The BOP is regularly and frequently tested to ensure its functionality. If there is an approaching hurricane, the ship can simply shut off the well at the BOP, displace the drilling fluid, detach from the well and sail out of the way of the storm.
So without a doubt, we can drill safely and cleanly. Is it impossible for a catastrophic accident to happen? No, but the chances are infinitesimally small, and considering the benefits of drilling, it’s worth the barely existent risk. If we consider the environmental impact of a beachfront high-rise condo, offshore drilling pales in comparison.
In these tough economic times, the potential for tens of thousands of jobs that would accompany offshore drilling should not be ignored. In addition, the other states in the Gulf of Mexico enjoy the royalties that come from offshore drilling in the waters that they have the resource rights to.
Should we completely rely on oil for our energy needs? Of course not. We absolutely should be moving full steam ahead on alternative sources. But petroleum products will be needed not only for energy and fuel for our vehicles and homes for decades to come, but also for thousands of products made of plastic and other synthetics.
It’s understandable that tourists may not want to sit on a beach and look at a drilling rig. For those few occasions when a prospect actually would barely be within eyeshot of the shore, and the few situations when a discovery is actually made (finding oil is still a toss at the dart board), the extraction and retrieval can be done from the bottom of the ocean. No structures need to be seen from shore.
We’re all entitled to our own opinion about this issue, but let’s just be honest about the reasons not to drill. The mantra of “automatic environmental devastation” is just simply wrong.
