Four oil firms operating in the Gulf of Mexico — Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell — have collaborated to create a rapid response network for oil spills. This brainchild of the U.S. petroleum industry comes in the wake of late April’s BP spill — the effects of which are manifest on the outlying beaches, swamps and marshes of the coastal states and in the Gulf of Mexico.The containment system will deploy a deepwater cleanup team to respond within days of an oil spill emergency without the lags in response time that plagued Deepwater Horizon. The founding sponsors have designated a new non-profit organization, the Marine Well Containment Company, to run the containment project.The four companies have each footed $250 million and pooled their money for the emergency system. A collective $1 billion initial investment will pay for building subsea and modular equipment for the oil containment assembly.The alliance was forged after Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar imposed a moratorium on deepwater drilling until Nov. 30. The mutually-assured stagnation of Gulf drilling for these four oil companies may have sparked their commitment to devise an emergency plan for massive well blowouts. Rex W. Tillerson, the chairman of ExxonMobil, mentioned in an interview that another catastrophe requiring use of the emergency system would be unlikely, but a “risk-management gap” had to be plugged to restore public confidence and coerce the government to repeal its deepwater drilling ban.The new backup plan geared toward damage control is a defensive countermeasure to the drilling moratorium, but there is still some glimmer from an environmentalist beacon among the oil companies.I was working for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association in June when I saw Apache, Exxon Mobil and Shell employees deploying from coastal marinas to work on their companies’ oil pipelines.At Falgout’s Canal Landing in Theriot, La., ConocoPhillips workers caught my attention because the men were unloading heavy bushels of marsh grass to plant as part of the company’s efforts at coastal restoration. The marsh grass planting belied my suppositions that champions of industry dominated oil commerce; I was surprised to see an oil company gentrifying and vitalizing the Gulf Coast.
ConocoPhillips produced more than 2 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in 2006, second only to ExxonMobil in the United States. The company’s emphasis on natural gas helps cut the emission of greenhouse gases, and ConocoPhillips is intensely focused on the climate change debate, according to a Feb. 16 news release.BP has also taken the reins in disbursing $5 million in grant funds to LSU. Our University’s School of the Coast and Environment was a prime candidate for the grant — and one of the first to express consternation about spraying dispersants in deep sea environments. EPA official Lisa Jackson beseeched the school’s advice on underwater dispersant use early on in the crisis.”Very unusual and interesting creatures inhabit the deep sea — and the effects of dispersants on these creatures are yet unknown,” Dean Christopher D’Elia said.BP visited LSU and broached the dispersants research to the School of the Coast and Environment back in May, less than a month after the blowout and BP spill. “At that time it had not gotten inland,”  D’Elia said, referring to the mixture of oil and dispersants. “I told BP that our greatest expertise was on coastal and wetland science.”Two offshore industries constitute the bulk of coastal Louisiana’s economy: seafood and oil. The companies that empathize with the state’s environmental plight and fortify our waning coastland while they extract our oil and natural gas are the ones worth keeping in Louisiana.–
Contact Trevor Fanning at [email protected]