« A Friend For Dinner: Cannibalistic Creatures | Main | Gas-Guzzling Garden Gadgetry »

March 18, 2006

The Slippery Slope: Oil Spills More Frequent Than Thought

My friend mentioned to me today that there was a small oil spill near Elliot Bay in Seattle today. Is it just me, or have there been a lot of oil spills this month?

I was under the false impression that oil spills only happen every once in a while. After all, the 11 million gallons of oil the Exxon Valdez spilled into the Gulf of Alaska was years and years ago, right? Did you know that ship is still in service? It was re-christened Sea River Mediterranean and still operates in the Atlantic. The ship is prohibited by law from ever returning to Prince William Sound in Alaska.

Oil spills happen all the time, I was rather surprised to find. Just check Google news. What's the name of that movie? Any Given Sunday... Well, it's just a regular old Friday. Let's see what's happening oil-spillage-wise.

A quick Google search on oil spill turns up the Seattle spill, along with several other very recent oil spills happening around the world. Thirty seconds of searching around finds:

• Estonia, Gulf of Finland - 100+ tonnes (at least 700 barrels by my math)
• Chelsea River, Boston Harbor - 12,000 gallons +
• Seattle's Elliot Bay - ~15 gallons
• Bashkortostan pipeline, Russia - Unknown
• Southeastern Norway - 200 barrels
• Elbe River, Czech Republic - 500 litres (132gal, a little over three barrels)

Meanwhile, a tiny hole in an Alaskan pipeline went unchecked for days, resulting in what could be the worst spill in Alaska's North Slope ever - possibly more than 267,000 gallons of crude, with almost 800,000 gallons unaccounted for given some estimates.

On Thursday, March 2, a BP oil operator discovered signs of an oil spill at a caribou migration site on the snow-covered tundra of Alaska’s North Slope. Three days later, response workers finally uncovered the source of the spill – a breach in an oil transit pipeline

...

Clean-up crews have already vacuumed up more than 50,000 gallons of crude oil and melted snow off the delicate tundra, but at least one report from an industry expert has indicated that up to 798,000 gallons could be unaccounted for, possibly making this the largest crude oil spill in the history of the North Slope, and second in Alaska only to the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill. Oil is still dripping from the breached pipeline and the full extent of the damage and affected acreage are unknown.

...

This weekend’s accident is just one in a long history of substantial spills seen on Alaska’s fragile North Slope since development began there. In fact, despite industry hype about the safety of development and new technology, the Prudhoe Bay oil fields and Trans-Alaska Pipeline have caused an average of 504 spills annually on the North Slope since 1996, according to the Alaska’s own Department of Environmental Conservation.

More at: Sierra Club: Drilling Causes Major Crude Oil Spill Near Arctic National Wildlife Refuge

Did you catch that? 504 spills annually??? At just this one operation! One has to wonder how large most of these spills are. Also, the fact that the spill was found by a man who smelled it, as opposed to the pipe-line regulatory processes is a bit disturbing as well. In fact, recent news has shown that BP likely knew about the corrosion problem.

So I went around to try to see what kinds of oil spills stats I could find.One I found rather interesting was the Coast Guard's National Response Center. The National Response System is the U.S. government's mechanism for emergency response to discharges of oil and chemicals into the navigable waters or environment of the United States and its territories (says their website). They provide some interesting statistics on the number of reported spills as well as details on individual spills.

According to Smithsonian's Ocean Planet exhibit from 1995 (so the stats are over ten years old), about 706 million gallons of oil end up in our oceans every year, mostly from non-accidental sources.

Posted by sorsha at March 18, 2006 1:21 AM