Comment by scurvy
5 years ago
That might have been true 20-30 years ago. Today, all of the easy oil has been tapped. They're going out farther, deeper, and under much high pressures than before. Oh, and they're less regulated.
> You don't drill a $100 million deepwater well without all the bells and whistles. <
You will if you can make a couple $B off it. It's a risk. The deep gulf has mudslides that take out rigs. It happened to Taylor Energy in 2004. All the tech in the world couldn't prevent that spill.
https://www.nola.com/news/article_a55f87c0-8253-11ea-9f24-23...
What does that have do the ability to shut in a well? A shut in isn't stopping something that's leaking or stopping a blowout. It's the ability to deliberately and temporarily stop production.
A loss of containment is very very very bad and a huge problem, but it's not related to a shut in.
I'm well aware of shallow hazards (e.g. mass wasting aka mudslides). I've mapped them in many areas. I'm well aware of the ongoing Taylor spill. I've actually worked with monitoring it using satellite imagery from the regulatory side. I've also worked with it from the oil industry side...
None of that is even remotely relevant here, though... I'm still very unclear how anything you mentioned relates to anything I said...
That having been said, if you think _anything_ around the oil industry isn't done with safety and environmental concerns first and foremost, you've _clearly_ never been anywhere around the industry. I'm dead serious.
What they do is really, really, really damned dangerous and it's fair to debate whether that risk is worth it at a societal level.
However, don't for a goddamn second think that these folks don't care or are sloppy. _Every_ meeting all the way to the top starts with a discussion about safety and possible environmental impacts. I really, really mean that... Every damn one. It's vastly more important than very literally anything else. The first decision is _always_ HSE, never money.
Yeah, things can go wrong in very bad ways. It's not because people don't care or are trying to make a buck at the expense of the environment. It's because they're working in a really difficult environment. Yes, deepwater horizon was preventable. Yes it was due to a poor well design. BP fucked up. That doesn't mean that the oil industry is some evil mustache twirling villain.
You want cheap vegetables, flights across the continent, and plastics? Right now, we have to have oil for that. It ain't ideal, but it's not because people are out there trying to make money off of environmental disasters.
If the disasters happen repeatedly despite safety and environmental concerns being the top priority, then clearly they are not.
Money comes first, safety second.
Obviously there will be a lot of effort spent on safety, because otherwise there would be even more accidents, and the whole company might be forced to shut down.
As it is, they have just found an equilibrium of safety and greed.
Businesses exist to make money. There is a constant demand for oil in the market; the world as we know it needs some level of oil to continue to function. If you can't ban the extraction oil, and you believe in the continued existence of private business, then profit and safety have to co-exist as priorities.
All industrial operations are inherently exercises in risk management. I think it's smug to phrase that as an "equilibrium of safety and greed" but frankly, yes, in order for things with risk to happen, you have to accept a level of risk, which will never ever be 0.
I work in another industry (not oil & gas) where safety is a consideration in every action we take, and it's not just lip-service. It's a down-to-our-bones mentality that we won't do anything unsafe, or allow anything unsafe to happen. Accidents still happen, and it's not because if avarice.
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