Image courtesy Central Florida News 

Today marks the anniversary of the 1979 Ixtoc oil spill in Mexico’s Bay of Campeche.  The catastrophic event ultimately released 3.3 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico over a period of 357 harrowing days until it was finally stemmed by the drilling of relief wells.

            The spill, which occurred in only 160 feet of water 50 miles offshore, was sparked by an exploratory drill bit hitting soft stata below the seabed.  This caused a loss of hydrostatic pressure—the pressure that allows liquids to flow in the right direction with appropriate pressure levels.  When workers attempted to remove the drill bit to shift location, they set off a chain reaction that allowed a catastrophic blowout that caused an explosion when oil and gas reached motors aboveboard.

            At Ixtoc, too, the shear rams—those supposedly all-powerful jaws located within the blowout preventer—failed.  They were of insufficient strength to cut through the reinforced pipe.

            The spill released "30,000 barrels of oil a day" into pristine Gulf waters, Professor Tyler Priest told NPR yesterday.  Priest is Professor and Director of Global Studies at the University of Houston, and is an expert on the oil and gas industry,

            The damage caused by the spill, the third largest in history according to Wikpedia (unless we surpass it now), was considerably less than what we can anticipate, according to Priest.  In the Ixtoc case much of the oil drifted offshore to deeper waters, fouling marine environments that remained out of sight and out of mind.  Significant damage was caused along more than 150 miles of coastal Texas, but nothing like what will be caused by the inevitable fouling of estuaries and marshes along the coast of Louisiana.

            In comparison to Ixtoc, “I think that the damage is going to be a lot worse,” Priest told NPR.

Like Open Heart Surgery at 5,000 Feet

            What stands out in comparing the Ixtoc disaster to Deepwater Horizon is the length of time it took to drill relief wells to ultimately cap and control the spill.  At Ixtoc, it took one year.  One.  Full.  Year.  And that was at a depth of 160 feet, not 5,000.

            What took them so long?  Ixtoc workers drilled two relief wells, same as the current strategy of BP as stipulated by the Obama administration.  In the case of Ixtoc, the first relief well did little good.  According to Reuters , Ixtoc “continued to leak oil more than three months after Pemex completed its first relief well.”  And in that case, Pemex, the driller, was able to shore up its efforts by pumping cement and water down the runaway well, something that cannot be done in the case of the BP spill.  Pemex used divers to attempt to fix the blowout preventer, another option unavailable to us. 

            The earliest timeline for capping the Deepwater Horizon spill with the aid of a relief well was said to be August.  This morning White House energy advisor Carol Browner told NPR, “90 days.”  That puts us into September.  But who is to say that estimate has any validity?  Experience counters persuasively that more is likely to go wrong, that one relief well may be insufficient, and moreover, that even with two relief wells in place it’s not a done deal by any means.  At Ixtoc, it took from March to May 1980 just to finish the job until the well was, as Priest put it, “officially capped.”

            At Ixtoc they were able to pump heavy mud into the two relief wells—an option not available to us.  Browner indicated that the relief well has to intersect some part of the original wellhead area, an operation that others have described as open heart surgery at 5,000 feet.

            Meanwhile, informed estimates of the total cost of damages are beginning to climb from the 4 to 6 billion dollar range to the 10 to 14  billion dollar range.  These estimates seem to increase daily.  The survival of BP, seen as a foregone conclusion two weeks ago, is now questioned by some analysts.  These cost estimates, while dependent on a variety of uncontrollable variables, all assume the spill will be stopped this summer.  That cannot be a foregone conclusion at this point.

At the Mercy of Weather and Currents

            Forty-four days into our worst environmental disaster in history the well may have already released 900,000 barrels of oil into sensitive Gulf waters if you accept the conservative 20,000 barrels a day estimate now being advanced by the Browner.  We are at the mercy of weather and ocean currents now.

            In fact, the future of the Obama administration and of the Democrats in general may be at the mercy of those weather and ocean currents.  If currents take the oil around the horn of Florida and up the east coast—if a hurricane rains down oil 50 miles inland—if all this and more occurs in the coming months, public disgust will peak just in time for the mid-term elections.

            As of this moment, Deepwater Horizon absolutely has the capacity to become Obama’a Katrina, even though the analogy is deeply flawed.  It comes down to three things:  the degree of devastation within the Gulf, the potential for damage beyond the Gulf, and the length of time it takes to get the spill under control.  The Obama administration can effectively control none of these variables, though its direct efforts may prove most effective containing coastline damage within the Gulf. 

            We are at and beyond the limits of the restorative technology available to us.  A BP senior technology executive admitted as much in 2005 when he said we had better master drilling at 5,000 feet before we go to 10,000 feet.  But the fact is, the technology seems to have changed remarkably little since 1979. 

            How bad was Ixtoc?  We’ll never know.  According to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, “thorough studies of the ecological damage in Mexico have either not been carried out or the results have not been released.”

            Pemex never paid for the damage it caused the economy of the U.S. and Mexico, nor did it pay for any environmental damage its spill caused.  Why?  It claimed sovereign immunity.  Perhaps BP’s best survival strategy would be to become nationalized by the U.S. government.   Is another bailout on the deepwater horizon?  If it takes six months to cap that well all bets are off. 

 * * *

UPDATE: June 5 --  A wire services article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune cites unnamed analysts now putting high end estimates of the financial costs of the spill at $20 billion.  High end estimates have tripled over the last two weeks.

UPDATE:  June 7 -- U.S. Coast Guard chief Thad Allen on CBS network's “Face the Nation,” Sunday, June 6:

“"This will only end when we intercept the well bore, pump mud down it to overcome the pressure of the oil coming up from the reservoir and put a cement plug in. That's what I would call bottom kill rather than top kill. The spill will not be contained until that happens," he told host Bob Schieffer.

"But even after that, there will be oil out there for months to come. This will be well into the fall. This is a siege across the entire Gulf," he said.”

And that’s if nothing else goes wrong.