BP: If the cap fits…
What might otherwise be regarded as an incredible feat of engineering has been achieved a mile under the ocean in the Gulf of Mexico.
As of this moment, it LOOKS as if BP has finally managed to lower and secure a completely sealed cap on to the three month old gush of oil.
The more we learn about ‘deep sea, off shore’ drilling, the more miraculous the entire saga becomes.
Miraculous that man, without line of sight and with the vicissitudes of currents and ocean swirls, can so direct remote robotic actions that a seventy ton cap can be dropped upon so active a volcano of oil, secured and sealed to a flexible outflow to conduct the gush in a controlled flush to boats anchored on the surface.
Yet it is today’s ‘miraculous’ engineering capacity that got BP into trouble in the first place – a conviction that they had a fail-safe mechanism to explore and retrieve oil from depths never plumbed before.
As America struggles to break its previously unquenchable dependence upon countries with questionable regimes in the Middle East, let’s make no mistake, BP represented to the archangel of hope.
‘Drill baby drill!’, was Sarah Palin’s cry which I heard for myself at the last Republican Convention.
Barack Obama’s unease about coastal drilling bowed in the face of the post Iraq War need to slash those Arab oil imports.
But what we never knew was that all this drilling depended upon one ‘fail-safe’ piece of technology which had ‘never previously failed’.
Had we known then that we were one valve, one washer, one O ring from disaster would we have drilled baby?
When Channel 4 News was reporting from Brazil at the end of last year, we devoted much attention to the new and potentially life changing finds of oil off Rio.
They are two thousand feet DEEPER than the reserves off Louisiana.
At what point will the world conclude that seven thousand feet, five thousand feet, any thousand feet below the sea’s surface is too deep?
That in effect those stocks are non-stocks and that the need to find an alternative right now, is with us?
Presumably only when demand outstrips supply, will our drugged dependence on oil ever be broken, by science coming up with a more sustainable alternative.
The question now is whether that moment could be artificially fixed by a globally agreed moratorium that draws the line on deep sea drilling.