A Conversation with Frances Beinecke

Environmental Leader Discusses the Findings of President Obama’s Deepwater Horizon Commission

by Carl Frankel, March 28, 2011

Technological marvels have a way of becoming suddenly nightmarish. Take nuclear power plants, for instance. Extraordinary testimonials to engineering prowess, they also carry extraordinary risks, as the recent catastrophe in Japan attests.

Things are no different in the oil and gas industry. For years, the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico was hailed as a technological wonder. Owned and operated by Transocean, the world’s largest offshore drilling company, it had been used in September 2009 to drill the deepest offshore well in history at a vertical depth of over 35,000 feet, in over 4,000 feet of water.

And then, in one fell blast, it was anything but wonderful. On April 20, 2010, the rig exploded as it was being used to drill a well for the multinational British Petroleum (BP), killing 11 crewmen, creating a fireball that was visible 35 miles away, and leaving oil spewing into the Gulf at a rate of over 50,000 barrels a day.

How do you seal a gushing oil well that’s beneath almost a mile of water? The answer came quickly: not easily. By the time the Deepwater Horizon well had been sealed three months later, five million barrels of oil had seeped into the Gulf of Mexico, giving BP and its subcontractors the dubious honor of having co-created the largest offshore oil spill in United States history.

On May 22 of last year, President Obama established the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling, with the explicit mandate to “examine the relevant facts and circumstances concerning the root causes of the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster and [to] develop options for guarding against, and mitigating the impact of, oil spills associated with offshore drilling.”