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Last September, BP (BP) tapped into a vast new oilfield called Tiber, estimated to hold at least 3 billion barrels of crude, or six months' worth of U.S. consumption. Discovered through seismic imaging and data crunched on a supercomputer, the field is nearly six miles beneath the Gulf of Mexico's floor, in a spot where the water is almost a mile deep. To access it, the British oil company and its drilling contractor, Transocean, sank the deepest oil well ever known. The $365 million rig that accomplished this feat was called the Deepwater Horizon, a floating thicket of machinery the size of two football fields, which held a crew of 130 and cost more than half a million dollars a day to rent from Transocean. As a drilling rig, the Deepwater Horizon didn't hang around to pump Tiber's crude. The self-propelled behemoth motored to the site of its next exploration, a perfect expression of humankind's ability to find buried treasure deep beneath the ocean floor and bring it safely to the surface.
Today the wreckage of the Deepwater Horizon lies upside down at the bottom of the Gulf under a mile of seawater in a place called Mississippi Canyon Block 252. Eleven of its crew are missing and presumed dead. Oil from the last well it drilled—not Tiber, but a much shallower, less complex job called Macondo—is spewing out of control from the seafloor, with perhaps 3 million gallons released at last estimate. A swath of the Gulf about the size of Delaware is covered by an iridescent, rusty orange sheen.
If the spill comes ashore, as scientists say it is almost certain to do, it could cause damage rivaling the 1989 wreck of the Exxon Valdez in Alaska's Prince William Sound, despoiling the breeding grounds of countless species in the fragile coastal buffer zone that provides hurricane protection. Already, the oil is threatening some of the most productive and profitable shrimping and fishing grounds in the world, part of a Gulf industry that provides a quarter of the seafood in the U.S. If efforts to seal the well go awry, they could cause far larger volumes of oil to spill. In some scenarios, the Gulf of Mexico loop current could even carry the oil around Florida and up the East Coast. The unfolding environmental disaster might yet become the worst in U.S. history.
The Deepwater Horizon exploded on Apr. 20 at a moment when U.S. energy policy was pivoting decisively in favor of undersea drilling. After two years of fierce partisan debate triggered by the $4-a-gallon gasoline prices of 2008, President Barack Obama and other Democratic leaders dropped their opposition to expanded offshore drilling. On Mar. 31, Obama proposed opening up large areas of East Coast, eastern Gulf, and Alaskan waters beginning in 2012—part of a grand bargain that Administration officials hoped would propel comprehensive energy and climate legislation designed to lead the country beyond petroleum, as BP's slogan famously declared. All of that is now in doubt.
For the oil industry, the Gulf of Mexico had been one of the few bright spots in a dim picture of flattening global production. After several years of decline, the amount of oil pumped in the Gulf has been rising as rigs move into deeper waters. The U.S. Energy Dept. predicted this year that by 2035, offshore oil production from the lower 48 states would grow more than 80 percent to account for about 38 percent of U.S. output, up from 30 percent now.
Until now, Gulf oil production has been not just expanding but reasonably clean, with serious spills so rare that industry and regulator alike behaved as if they were scarcely possible. Catastrophic accidents, it seemed, had been relegated to history by such high-tech gear as "blowout preventers" designed to shut off wells when pressures get out of control. These valves and shears were the last line of defense, a supposedly impenetrable Maginot Line that made other fail-safes unnecessary. The federal Minerals Management Service, which regulates offshore oil and gas production and collects reports on spills as small as a single barrel, was so confident of the system that it exempted BP from filing an environmental impact statement for the Macondo operation. MMS commissioned studies on creative ways to cope with massive well blowouts and never implemented them. It promulgated rules and allowed the oil industry to obey them on a voluntary basis. "It turns out, by the way, that oil rigs today generally don't cause spills," Obama said on Apr. 2. "They are technologically very advanced."
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