Suit: Feds ignore risk of huge spills to endangered species
NEW ORLEANS — Environmental groups have asked a federal court to throw out the Trump administration’s assessment of oil and gas activity’s likely effects on endangered species in the Gulf of Mexico, saying it dismisses the chance of another disastrous blowout like the 2010 BP spill.
The National Marine Fisheries Service’s 700page analysis greatly underestimates both the likely number and size of oil spills, according to the suit filed this week by Earthjustice for the Sierra Club, the Center for Biological Diversity, Friends of the Earth, and Turtle Island Restoration Network.
Even though the study was prompted by the 2010 spill, it “essentially pretends the Deepwater Horizon spill never happened — that there was nothing to learn from that disaster,” Earthjustice attorney Chris Eaton said in an interview Tuesday.
The federal agency said it left the possibility of an extremely large spill like BP’s out of its calculations of likely effects because a Bureau of Offshore Energy
Management analysis found little chance of another during the next 50 years.
The previous analysis, in 2007, also estimated that “such a large spill was extremely unlikely,” the lawsuit noted. That analysis had estimated that “the largest spill possible would be at most 15,000 barrels,” or 630,000 gallons.
The 2010 spill, which started with a blowout that killed 11 people, was hundreds of times bigger than that. Estimates of the amount of oil spewed into the Gulf for 87 days varied from from nearly 176 million gallons to less than 103 million gallons. A federal judge calculated damages based on 134 million gallons in the Gulf.
The chance of such a spill is even higher now, the lawsuit said, because “Gulf drilling is moving into deeper waters, which increases the possibility of a catastrophic well blowout and extremely large oil spill.”
The study also failed to consider the increased frequency, due to climate change, of hurricanes that can severely damage oil and gas facilities, nor did it take into account recent research about the danger of underwater landslides that can cause extremely large oil spills, the lawsuit said.
In addition, it said, the analysis left out the BP spill’s effects on the corals and other animals and their habitats, using population estimates and other information from before the spill.
The groups asked a federal court in Maryland to make the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s fisheries service write a new report, called a biological opinion.
The fisheries service does not comment on pending litigation, spokeswoman Allison Garrett said.
The federal agencies that regulate offshore oil operations are required by the Endangered Species Act to insure that their actions aren’t likely to jeopardize endangered or threatened species or damage their critical habitat. Offshore oil regulators asked the National Marine Fisheries Service for a new analysis on June 30, 2010, while BP’s well was still gushing.
Ten years later, the result is “just another handout to Big Oil,” Marcie Keever, legal director at Friends of the Earth, said in a release.