Oil industry lacks financial motive to improve blowout prevention technology

Evidence

The most striking parallel between Ixtoc and Deepwater is this: it took Pemex, the oil company responsible, 297 days of futile experimentation and clueless passivity before the Ixtoc spill ran its course, by which stage the company had managed to drill two relief wells. During those months of serial incompetence, 140 million gallons of crude spewed into the Gulf, destroying (among other things) a venerable fishing culture which, along with keystone species of marine life, has never fully recovered. Deepwater drilling today is much deeper than it was in the 1970s. But the crucial unlearned lesson remains: in pushing back the technological frontiers of oil extraction, the industry thirty years ago had, and still has, little motivation for making comparable advances in blowout prevention and cleanup technology. The standard operating procedure remains: it’s cheaper for us to improvise when stuff happens—wetlands, deltas, marine life, tourist, and fishing industries be damned. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 827

Categorization

• XREF: Extends ch 10’s internalize-profits-externalize-risks claim into a precise cost-incentive mechanism.
• SHARE: A person tracking petro-capitalism failure modes would appreciate the 297-days/140-million-gallons parallel between Ixtoc and Macondo.