Make sure drilling is safe

Tuesday, May 4, 2010 | 2:01 a.m.

Sophisticated technology has allowed rigs to drill miles under the ocean searching for crude oil to meet the nation’s insatiable demand. The result has been that oil companies have gone out deeper and farther in their pursuits.

The explosion and sinking of the Deepwater Horizon, a rig leased to BP, is an example of the risk. The rig was about 41 miles off the Louisiana shore, floating 5,000 feet above the sea floor, when the explosion occurred, killing 11 people. Since then, millions of gallons of oil have seeped into the water, threatening the fisheries, wildlife and coast along a large swath of the Gulf of Mexico.

Federal officials say they don’t know when the leak will be stopped. Despite the technology and the redundant systems that are supposed to be in place, attempts to turn off the blowout preventer at wellhead, a massive piece of equipment designed to stop explosions, have failed.

The result is a growing environmental disaster that could have a major effect on the country.

The oil industry’s critics and some members of Congress say the incident shows how the industry has held too much influence over regulation. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that two other oil-producing nations — Norway and Brazil — require a safety device called an acoustic switch for oil platforms, which the industry has successfully fought in the United States. The $500,000 switch, a mere fraction of the cost of an oil well, is used as a last resort when other methods of shutting off a well don’t work. The acoustic switch allows a boat to signal the seabed valve to shut down. Norway has been requiring the switches since the early 1990s in the North Sea and has found them to be quite effective.

The Journal reported that the oil industry fought acoustic switches when the federal government started considering them in 2000. In 2003, the government declined to mandate the switches, calling them unreliable and noting that oil companies were using backup systems such as the unmanned submarines that BP has been using to try to stop the leak — without success.

It is unclear if an acoustic switch would have stopped the flow of oil from the BP well, but it would have provided another way to protect the environment and prevent the waste of a limited resource.

Although this is a dramatic failure, problems with deep-sea wells are not uncommon. Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., who heads a Senate subcommittee that oversees oceans, fisheries and the Coast Guard, pointed to a federal study that reported 117 failures of blowout preventers on the ocean floor over a two-year period during the late 1990s.

Unfortunately, as was evident during the Bush administration, the oil industry has had large sway over regulation. Because of the nation’s energy needs, oil drilling will be necessary for years to come. But the nation should be making sure that it is being done as safely as possible to prevent another catastrophe.