The worst environmental disaster to hit North America is upon us. We are seeing the best and worst of America in its midst. The hope, undoubtedly, is to restore the ecology and families that have suffered at this mishap. We are all to blame. Clearly, the processes that lead to this great disaster needs to be rethought and the practices used need to be changed throughout the entire industry.
Could it have been averted? These are answers that we may or may not find out. Everyone is currently doing a large amount of finger pointing and trying to manage the fallout since the Deepwater Horizon exploded.
Opinions vary widely in the media throughout the world on who is to blame. There are extreme opinions suggesting that the rig explosion was caused by terrorism and America’s own administration in Washington D.C. It is easy to blame British Petroleum, but the bottom line is that this could have occurred to any major oil company drilling in any of the world’s oceans.
Can future oil drilling disasters be prevented through caution and moderation? Clearly, drilling technology has not changed as rapidly as the industry would have the public believe. The bits used to drill into the Earth’s surface have evolved little since the U.S. granted a patent for Sharp-Hughes Rock Bit in 1909. We may have incorporated some electronic technology and adopted the ability to drill in more challenging environments, but the process has been fundamentally unchanged since the Chinese were extracting oil over 2,400 years ago with bamboo poles.
The machinery employed has is considered more modernized by the oil industry and governments around the world, but the underlying variables will never change in extracting from the Earth. These can only be answered after the fact when extraction has occurred. It is for this reason that every safety precaution, regardless of cost, needs to be taken when extracting natural deposits from the earth. How to govern it?
The answer is national and international legislation. The reality is that oil dependency is here to stay. There is just no alternative fuel that is as dependable and as efficient as oil. Alternative fuels have come a long way, but they lack oil’s efficiency, abundance, and usability. The future of energy for the masses is in oil extraction. Alternative fuels have a future, too. They, however, cannot provide for the energy needs of our planet as of yet. Alternative fuels can be problematic, lacking in standardization and application, and time consuming.
The future of oil extraction is in the world’s oceans. It is estimated that there is enough oil in the world’s oceans to satisfy our current demand levels for over 250 years. How can we meet our world’s current demands and not sacrifice our environment? The Canadian Government may be approaching the stated advancements by oil technologists with the correct caution. The Canadian Government has required that relief wells be dug prior to production wells for the last 34 years.
The advantages to having a relief well dug prior to a production well cannot be seen in daily oil extraction or costs, but they are a necessary caution for extracting of natural deposits. This should be adopted by the entire industry as a standard throughout the world. The building of mandatory relief wells prior to production wells is considered by opponents to be unnecessary, costly, and not needed. But one only need to cite the current disaster in the Gulf of Mexico for the reality to become apparent about how current practices need to be altered, especially as oil companies and our demand for crude oil pushes oceanic drill rigs into deeper depths.
Following Canada’s legislative requirement of having mandatory relief wells dug prior to production wells, we will be able to confront ecological disasters caused by unforeseen variables in oil extraction, still meet our demand for oil, thwart potential terrorist activities, and satisfy profits of capitalists simultaneously. If we do not change our practices now, they will be repeated. Oil extraction technology is not as modern as we or the industry may think. At its most basic level, oil extraction has not changed for over 2,000 years. This is analogous to the paved road adopted by contemporary societies from Rome. The Roman Road has seen very little change in the last 2,500 years.
The fact that the Roman Road is still in use, with the exception of the addition of asphalt in 1824, should be an indication that we are not as advanced as we think and that simple technologies remain because they work. Should we improve upon relief wells? Can we approve upon relief wells?
The answer is no. They just make sense at their most basic level. If you are putting a hole into the earth, it is necessary to be able to have multiple options to close the hole in a face of a catastrophe because in reality we should not be putting holes in the Earth in the first place. Have we become so arrogant, as a species, to think that we can drill into the ocean floor to extract The Earth’s natural deposits without having multiple levels of basic safety precautions in place?
