It’s time we stop drilling in the Gulf
Ten years after the Deepwater Horizon blowout that killed 11 people and sprayed 210 million gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico, there is an easy way to ensure a similar accident never happens again.
No, there is no rule the industry could follow to make drilling foolproof. There is a simpler way: Permanently end new deep-water drilling. The Coronavirus Recession and the global oil glut prove we can do it.
The CEOs of Big Oil companies and Texas business leaders talk a lot these days about reducing our dependence on fossil fuels and fighting climate change. If we shaved global demand by just 2 percent, we could eliminate the need to ever drill another well in the Gulf.
The oil industry has changed a lot since the Macondo well blew out. Back then, U.S. onshore wells produced only 4 million barrels a day. Prices were flitting around $100 a barrel. We worried about where we would find more oil.
Hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling now produce more than 12 million barrels a day from U.S. onshore wells. U.S. offshore oil production is nearly 2 million barrels a day, just short of its all-time high, according to the Energy Information Administration.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the world consumed about 100 million barrels a day. But the world has the capacity to produce more than 105 million. To balance things out, Russia and OPEC agreed to hold back 2 million barrels a day to prop up prices.
COVID-19 has cut oil demand by 20 million barrels a day, and the world is struggling to reduce production before storage tanks overflow. No one knows when oil demand will fully return, but there is an excellent chance it will take years before we reach 100 million barrels of demand again.
Even then, the world has too much oil. Venezuela’s political turmoil has cut production by 2 million barrels a day. Libya’s civil war has taken out 1 million.
experiment.
The consequences: The oil and chemicals killed off plants and vegetation while the freshwater killed oysters and forced fish to migrate. As the vegetation died, the land eroded, leading to more frequent flooding.
Neighbors packed up to leave. It had finally become too difficult to rebuild.
BP said in a statement that it has helped the Gulf recover and remains proud of its progress. A spokesman defended the use of dispersants, which he said was “coordinated with, and approved by, the federal government including the (Environmental Protection Agency) and U.S. Coast Guard.”
Those who relied on the Gulf for their livelihoods took steep losses in the decade that followed the spill. The ones that remained say they are barely hanging on.
“Outside of oil field and oysters, there isn’t a whole lot else,” said Toby Voisin, owner of Wilson’s Oysters, a wholesale oyster processing company in Houma, on the other side of Barataria Bay, farther inland. “Everything depends on those two.”
Voisin, who comes from a long line of oyster harvesters, said it’s difficult to point his finger at one specific cause of oyster population declines. But what he knows for sure is that his oysters are struggling to spawn 10 years after the oil spill.
“It’s a scary outlook,” he said. The river diversions that occurred in the aftermath of the spill were a factor, Voisin and other oyster harvesters say. The estuaries, accustomed to saltwater due to dams that prevent the Mississippi from flooding river towns, were inundated with freshwater, killing hundreds of thousands of acres of oyster beds and forcing fish that rely on high salinity water, such as shrimp and speckled trout, to abandon the area.
A decade later, the oyster harvest is down 50 percent, according to data from the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries. Reports issued by the agency attribute declines to the aftermath of the spill as well as recent flooding.
Docks that used to bustle with more than two dozen boats to fish oyster beds now stand empty. Just a handful of fishermen go out every day. They come back with smaller catches. It’s why Voisin, an eighth-generation oysterman, isn’t advising any of his three children to become the ninth.
“The oyster industry is on the ropes big time,” he said.
Tourists forget; water doesn’t
On the west side of Barataria Bay, about 30 miles down a toll bridge that crosses more water than land, Grand Isle has long beckoned fishermen with promises of bounty and beauty.
Since the oil washed up on their beaches 10 years ago, commercial and recreational fishermen take boats farther and farther offshore to find fewer fish. Business has never fully recovered for Dean Blanchard, who owns one of the largest commercial shrimping businesses in the United States.
In 2009, Blanchard’s business hauled 11 million pounds of shrimp and fish. In 2019, his catch is down by nearly half, to 6.6 million pounds. Revenues are down 30 percent from a decade ago.
Blanchard is well-known for his hyperbolic political testimonies on behalf of the commercial fishing industry. In the aftermath of Deepwater Horizon, Blanchard, whose business accounts for about 10 percent of the shrimp caught in the United States, was a key character in the region’s postDeepwater Horizon narrative, appearing before Congress and on TV, and ultimately obtaining a significant, undisclosed settlement from BP six years after the spill.
Blanchard and many other people in the region say they feel lied to: The offshore oil industry promised to operate safely before the spill. The government promised to clean up after the spill. Residents say oil still washes on shore as tar balls.
“I would’ve never took that settlement if I had known the truth,” Blanchard said. “We ought to be able to go back and sue BP again. Who ever thought this would’ve lasted 10 years?”
The tourism industry suffered from perceptions that the area was polluted after the spill, but the tourists eventually came back. Real estate values and restaurant traffic rebounded as the memory of pelicans covered in oil gradually faded.
Carolyn Angelette, who runs a real estate firm on the island, moved to Grand Isle with her husband in 1993. Angelette, whose company markets second homes, hesitates to call herself a local (there’s a 30-year minimum, at least, she jokes) but speaks authoritatively about the oil spill.
Before the spill, oceanfront property on the island cost around $3,000 per linear foot. Today, it runs between $2,400 and $2,800, she said.
“What hurt us the most,” she said, “was the 2010 oil spill. It knocked us down, and we are still recovering.”
It was worse than the Great Recession, she said.
‘Living good back then’
Offshore oil workers didn’t escape the economic impact of the spill, either. Rocky Moore, a crane operator who works in the industry in Houma, about 60 miles southwest of New Orleans, said the spill didn’t dissuade him from working offshore — he continued to do so for nearly another 10 years — but the money was never the same.
Before the spill, when Moore worked offshore for Cal Dive International, a Houston pipeline company, his six-figure salary was well beyond what he ever dreamed of when he first headed offshore at 19.
“I was living good back then,” he said. A motor home, motorcycles, a boat — he had “all the toys.”
But troubles began for his company when the Obama administration temporarily halted offshore drilling following Deepwater Horizon, and they ended in 2015 when an oil bust drove Cal Dive International into bankruptcy.
Moore found another job offshore, but for just more than half of what he made before the Deepwater Horizon disaster. He sold his recreational vehicles to keep his house.
Two years ago, he took his first job on land. “The money isn’t the same, but it’s paying the bills,” he said.
Attitudes toward the energy industry changed after Deepwater Horizon, not so much that the community rejected oil and gas, but that fewer young people became interested in working offshore and fewer families encouraged them to do so.
Dee Price, a recreational fishing guide in Grand Isle, said his 25year-old son works in the oil industry as a commercial welder. When his son was younger, he idolized working offshore — good money and exciting, hard work. But after Deepwater Horizon, he changed his mind and took a land job, Price said.
His son’s decision, he explained, “was a safety issue.”
A future funded by BP
Deepwater Horizon continues to have major implications not only culturally and economically, but also politically.
As Louisiana’s wetlands disappear at an alarming rate — the state has lost about 2,000 square miles of wetlands since 1932, according to the Geological Survey — the state government for years has debated the best way to address the problem, which will be funded by a $7.2 billion BP settlement dedicated to coastal restoration.
On both sides of the Barataria Bay, what to do with the BP money is a topic of constant conversation. Spending the money requires federal approval, and much of the work, which would include dredging the bay and restoring eroded land, hasn’t started. A master plan is still in the works.
The most controversial project among shrimpers and oyster harvesters is a proposed $2 billion plan to divert freshwater and sediment from the Mississippi River into Barataria Bay. Environmentalists largely support the diversions as a sustainable way to rebuild land from the sediment long into the future.
Diverting the river to estuaries, proponents argue, would simply return the river to what it did naturally more than 100 years ago, before the Army Corps of Engineers corralled it with dams, increasing the salinity of marshes and creating an artificial environment in which oysters thrived.
“The Mississippi River can’t freshen the whole Gulf,” said David Muth, a director at Restore the Mississippi River Delta, a coalition of environmental groups advocating for the river diversions. “There’s always going to be appropriate habitat.”
The commercial and recreational fishing industry opposes the river diversion because it would, as it did 10 years ago, drive fish and oysters away.
Mitch Jurisich, a third-generation oyster harvester in Empire, a town on the east side of Barataria Bay, argues that flooding marshes with freshwater would mean giving up the legacy of his family, which emigrated from Croatia and started in the oyster industry 100 years ago.
Jurisich, one of the largest oyster suppliers in Louisiana and a member of the Louisiana Oyster Task Force, which advocates for the industry, received a settlement from BP of around $30 million for the damage to his 15,000 acres of oyster grounds.
“People think BP made us rich,” he said. “My family was rich in the oyster industry. It doesn’t replace what my normal oyster practices can produce.”
His son, Nathan, 29, wants to continue the family business into a fourth generation. Steering a boat into the bay’s open water, the younger Jurisich pointed to patch of water, where his family owns an oyster lease. His grandparent’s house once stood there before coastal erosion and the encroaching bay claimed it.
“You can’t be negative and be in this business,” Nathan Jurisich said after harvesting a few oysters. “Otherwise, with oysters dying and everything else, it’ll take a toll on you.”