BP is back 15 years after Deepwater Horizon disaster with plans to drill even deeper

How many chances should you give a bad actor? A screw-up? A company that fouled the ocean and the coast and killed lots of wildlife? I ask this because BP, the British oil giant responsible for the worst spill in U.S. history, is asking for a do-over.

This marks the company’s first major attempt at a comeback since the 2010 spill that went on for months and left four states — one of them Florida — coping with floating toxic blobs.

This time, instead of the darkly ironic “Deepwater Horizon” name, BP has dubbed its project “Kaskida.” To me that name sounds less like an oil field and more like a clunky car model: “I recently bought a new Chevy Kaskida, but it’s already been recalled.”

The Houston Business Journal says BP’s new oil field is about 250 miles off New Orleans and, when completed, should produce 80,000 barrels of oil per day. Ideally the oil will go into barrels only, not into the water.

If I seem overly skeptical of BP, you have to understand: I covered that massive 2010 spill and saw all of its nastiness up close.

I saw beautiful white Panhandle beaches that I’d played on as a child that were tainted with BP’s stinky glop.

I saw workers in hazardous materials suits patrolling the coastlines of eight Florida counties, cleaning up the mess that showed up there almost every day for months on end.

I even spent a day with a Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission crew who ventured out in a 50-foot boat to try to spot — and stop — the floating tar mats that had made it as far as our state. One of the crew members told me that they were looking for “rainbow sheen, metallic sheen, or Charlie Sheen.”

So you’ll have to forgive me for not swooning as BP trumpets the wonderful future that will open once this new well is tapped. “Developing Kaskida will unlock the potential of … the Gulf of Mexico for BP, building on our decades of experience in the region,” one vice president boasted last year.

BP’s abysmal track record has a lot of environmental groups nervous about the idea of the company drilling a new well — this time going even deeper than Deepwater Horizon.

“Kaskida is a reckless gamble with the Gulf’s future,” Martha Collins, executive director of the environmental group Healthy Gulf, told me this week. “The history is right there in your face, and everybody is refusing to see it and learn from it.”

This is not some remote risk they’re worrying about. Our extremely pro-fossil fuel federal government is expected to rubber stamp the BP permit by Friday of this week.

If you’re wondering when the public gets to comment on this, I’m sorry to say you missed it. Several folks I talked to told me they believe that the comment period was kept quiet to avoid alarming the public. Nevertheless, five members of Congress and tens of thousands of people wrote in to oppose the permit.

“Wait a minute,” you may be thinking, “surely BP learned its lesson from that horrible 2010 disaster. After all, it cost the company billions of dollars in penalties.”

Alas, as Alicia Silverstone put it so succinctly in “Clueless,” “As IF!”

An Earth Day disaster

For those who don’t remember, weren’t born yet, or are suffering from a brain-eating worm, here’s how the last BP oil spill happened.

BP started Deepwater Horizon drilling in 2009. The project earned that name because it was deeper than Barry White crooning a love song. The Deepwater Horizon drilling occurred in about 5,000 feet of water and then went down more than 18,000 feet in the rock below.

But the depth of the well became a major factor in the disaster to follow.

On April 20, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded, killing 11 people and injuring 16 more, then quickly sank to the floor of the Gulf.

Two days later — on Earth Day, of all things! — the damaged rig began spewing oil. No one could easily get down to the sea floor to stop it, either. It wound up coating coastlines in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida. The spill badly damaged tourism, commercial fishing, and other industries that depend on clean beaches and uncontaminated water.

Unable to easily send humans to so deep a place, the company dispatched robot subs to try to shut down the flow — the first time such an operation had been mounted at this depth. Unfortunately, the robots turned out to be just as inept as the humans controlling them.

The spectacle of the unstoppable gushing oil held the nation spellbound for months. BP’s engineers struggled with a variety of gadgets and inventions that also failed to stop the spew of black gold. More than 130 million gallons would gush into the Gulf from the broken well.

Desperate, the company sprayed 1.8 million gallons of a chemical dispersant called Corexit on the oil to prevent it from reaching shore. This was an unprecedented amount of dispersant, some of it sprayed directly at the wellhead.

Unfortunately, Corexit didn’t correct anything. It created a mixture that spread even more widely and was even more toxic.

The company also tried burning the mats of oil floating on the surface, which created air pollution to go with the water pollution. The burning left a residue of toxic chemicals that drifted down to the bottom as something resembling dirty snow, which was particularly bad for coral reefs.

After 87 days, BP engineers finally figured out how to shut off the well. By the end, some 2.5 million pounds of BP oil slathered Florida’s coastline. And the damage – to wildlife as well as humans – has continued for years afterward.

Here’s a fun fact about Kaskida: BP found that deposit of oil in 2006 using the same drilling rig that it used for Deepwater Horizon. OK, maybe that fact isn’t so fun after all.

To get to the Kaskida oil field will require drilling down even deeper than the Deepwater Horizon well — 5,900 feet to the gulf bottom, then another 32,500 feet in the rock.

“The safety of our people and the environment will remain our highest priority throughout this project and in all our operations,” a BP spokesman told me this week.

Still, I have an uneasy feeling that, with this latest BP project, we’re all about to channel Steely Dan and go back, Jack, and do it again.

Sea lions, seals and otters, oh my!

Following the Deepwater Horizon disaster, BP’s oil spill response plan drew widespread attention — and widespread mockery.

“BP mentions sea lions, seals, sea otters, [and] walruses in its Oil Spill Response Plan for the Gulf of Mexico region,” Grist reported in May 2010. “The geniuses who wrote the plan either don’t know jack about wildlife, or they cribbed text out of a plan for the Arctic region.”

There was plenty more to ridicule. The plan referred to a Japanese home shopping site as a resource for rapid deployment of spill response resources. And it contained no information about tracking sub-surface oil plumes from deepwater blowouts. Oops!

The only thing worse than seeing BP’s error-filled spill plan is knowing that the federal agency that permitted the drilling didn’t catch those problems either.

The depth of Deepwater Horizon signaled a need for greater caution, and critics say Kaskida should send the same signal. Going very, very deep makes the odds of a huge mistake much more likely.

“The deeper you go into the ocean to drill, the greater the risk of a spill,” said Jackson Chiappinelli of Earthjustice, another environmental group that’s opposed to the new BP project.

Given what happened with Deepwater Horizon, you might think BP would do a better job on its oil spill response plan for Kaskida. I have to say, there’s no mention of sea lions or Japanese home shopping sites this time. But there’s not much else, either.

“Their plan fails to adequately analyze the risk of an oil spill and the extent of harm that it could cause,” said Kristen Monsell of the Center for Biological Diversity, yet another environmental group that’s opposing the permit.

Its only plan for dealing with a spill from this deeper well is basically “spray lots more Corexit on it.” But as we learned from Deepwater Horizon, Corexit is “an incredibly dangerous dispersant,” Monsell said.

Long-term studies after Deepwater Horizon found that the cleanup workers who came into contact with the Corexit-oil mixture had more health problems than those who did not.

In the decade-plus since the spill, Dale Sandler of the National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences  has been leading a study of the effects on 33,000 of the people who worked to clean up BP’s oil. (And so far, RFK Jr. hasn’t shut the study down.)

From spending just six to nine months doing clean-up work, Sandler told me, people developed increased risks of heart attacks, diabetes, rashes, and other skin conditions that have continued to this day.

The dispersant made the chemicals from the oil more accessible to affect the clean-up crews, Sandler told me. And she pointed out that most of the clean-up crews were made up of poor and unemployed people who couldn’t afford top-notch care, so they already had health problems.

“The oil spill was not good for you,” Sandler said, “but those other things were not good for you either.”

Sliming the shrimp

Almost as soon as word spread about BP’s spill, scientists from the University of South Florida’s College of Marine Sciences began planning where to dispatch their research ship. They wanted to see the effect the oil had on the wildlife of the Gulf.

Their first gulfwide survey found that there were more sick fish in the area of the oil spill than anywhere else. There were red snapper and sheepshead with lesions, fin rot, and parasite infections.

They and other scientists kept monitoring the damage done — the dolphins stranded, the oysters spoiled, the shrimp slimed. An estimated one-fifth of the entire population of the rare Rice’s whale was wiped out.

By 2020, USF scientists had sampled more than 2,500 fish representing 91 species from 359 locations across the Gulf and found evidence of oil exposure in all of them.

“Quite a number of species still haven’t recovered,” Steve Murawski, a fisheries biologist with the University of South Florida’s College of Marine Science, told me at the time. “And there are (still) two major pools of Deepwater Horizon oil in the environment – one in the estuaries, and one in the deep sea.”

Only 3,000 dead sea birds turned up after the spill, but scientists believe the true number of avian casualties from Deepwater Horizon to be closer to 800,000. That’s a staggering number of birds lost — enough for a modern-day sequel to Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring.”

Now picture the oil from a spill at Kaskida, coming from much deeper, under much greater pressure, and with a full load of Corexit making it more likely to spread far and wide.

Not needed

If the decision on this new BP permit were up to me, this Panhandle native would tell them, “Negatory, good buddy.”

After all, it’s not like we need more oil right now. The U.S. became the world’s top producer of crude oil in 2018 and it’s topped the list every year since then.

In a nice irony, that fossil fuel surge mostly occurred while the president was Joe Biden, a big fan of weaning the U.S. off fossil fuels. He pushed Congress to pass bills to promote even more solar (good news for the Sunshine State, where our utilities are building lots of solar farms) and wind power.

But now the president is the guy who told oil execs he’d repeal every environmental rule if they would give him $1 billion for his campaign. He’s already begun paying them back with big tax breaks and incentives galore.

He’s also been installing a fox in every federal henhouse. The decision on BP’s permit is up to the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. The bureau’s acting boss is Matt Giacona, a former lobbyist for offshore oil drilling companies.

Something tells me that when it comes to requests from the members of the oil industry, the word “no” is not in his vocabulary.

I do wish this was something our Florida state government would jump up and fight. But right now, the governor seems totally preoccupied with protecting us from the dangers of rainbow crosswalks.

Maybe the only way to keep BOEM from giving BP a green light is to convince that guy in the White House that the company has expressed a deep commitment to supporting diversity, equity, and inclusion. He seems to really hate that.

Besides, they’re British! Why should they get to exploit the Gulf that he’s now named for America?

Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Michael Moline for questions: info@floridaphoenix.com.