Just too slick…

Oil policy expert Dr Kent Moors highlighted the growing problem at the end of July: “We have seen three examples of it in the past two weeks. First, on July 16th, a pipeline ruptured in the Chinese seaport of Dalian. Then reports surfaced on July 26th that more than 150,000 barrels of crude oil were spilling from an underground pipeline connecting the US and Canada – and finally on July 27th, a tug boat hit an abandoned wellhead in the waters off the Mississippi River”.

Indeed, while the world focused on «Deepwater Horizon», another much smaller spill was going on just a few miles away at drilling rig «Ocean Saratoga». But authorities kept this one very much under their hats. It was only discovered, by chance, by the «Skytruth» team, which monitors environmental problems via satellite.

“The question is, what would we see if we were systematically looking at the offshore industry as a whole?” said Skytruth’s John Amos. “Is this an aberration, or are things like this going on all the time?”

The answer, almost certainly, is yes. Leaking pipelines are nothing new. Along the extensive Russian oil pipeline, for instance, there are apparently as many as 5.000 leaks on any given day.

Indeed, thousands of insecurely capped wells from the Soviet era dot the coast of Kazakhstan – where the sea level is rising. As a result, crude has flowed back into the Caspian Sea, destroyed sturgeon breeding grounds and decimated the caviar industry – not to mention the local fishing economy.

But it’s not all doom and gloom. The one advantage of BP’s devastating spill is that however much they try, oil companies’ ability to wriggle out of maintenance responsibilities will now be drastically reduced.

In the aftermath of the worst ecological disaster in American history, new regulations are coming into force to make oil companies pay far greater attention to leakages and “facility integrity”.

And in an industry that will do just about anything in the interests of profit, this is the latest area where “profit potential” comes in… According to oil experts, there around 500 billion dollars worth of work to be done safeguarding the world’s pipelines – and the urgency is growing at “about a billion dollars every week”.

Now just how slick is that, eh?