Guest writer Gulf will recover

LITTLE ROCK — I’m an oilman, and I am also an environmentalist. And yes, you can be both.

I’ve been an oil and gas exploration geologist for over 40 years, I have worked on offshore rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, and three times during my career I was on wells that blew out.

And by the way, the BP well is not a spill, it’s a blowout. The most amateurish thing you can say about the BP well is that it’s a spill.

I’m also a former three-term president of the Arkansas Wildlife Federation and I spent six years on the board of the Department of Environmental Quality, where I was the designated environmental representative. Let me give you a really fair and balanced view of the BP blowout.

First, who’s to blame? BP points a finger at Halliburton, citing a bad cement job, and Halliburton pointsa finger at BP, saying the company took some cost cutting shortcuts that put the operation in danger. Then there’s the rig crew. Did they do something that caused the blowout?

Of course. we may never know who was at fault. The rig crew on the floor, when the blowout occurred, was killed and everything we know about it is secondhand information.

However, if you cut through all the rhetoric and go to the ultimate reason the blowout occurred, I think you can come up with the culprit. As Pogo Possum once said in the comic strip, we have met the enemy and he is us.

We’re the ones who, by our addiction to oil and gas, put that rig out in the Gulf in 5,000 feet of water. Here’s why.

The BP well was drilling in 5,000 feet of water to a depth of 18,000 feet to tap a huge oil field. By industry standards, a field that size is called a giant field, something over 100 million barrels of oil. Sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? Well, it is, but it’s just a little more than the world’s one-day requirements. That’s the crux of the problem.

Because of the worldwide demand, the price of oil has skyrocketed over the past decade, and it stands to increase even more in the next decade. That increase sent BP into the deep water of the Gulf, and it is sending rigs into almost every corner of the earth to feed our insatiable appetite for cheap energy.

Ever since oil exploration began, controlling wild wells, or blowouts, has been a problem. There are companies that specialize in capping wildwells, and every well drilled in the world today has a blowout preventer. Apparently, the blowout preventer on the BP well malfunctioned, and instead of having a shut-in well, there is a wild well kicking out a phenomenal amount of oil into the Gulf.

The key to controlling any blowout is directly related to the pressure in the oil reservoir. At more than 18,000 feet, the bottom-hole pressure is something over 10,000 pounds per square inch. That’s why the top-kill procedure-trying to overpower the well with heavy mud and cement-didn’t work. The well won the battle. Now we’re down to trying to divert as much as possible into tankers.

The ultimate solution is in the works. Two relief wells are being drilled. It’s an exact job, but I’m confident the expertise is there to complete the job-in another 30 or 40 days.

The BP blowout has been compared to the Exxon Valdez spill, but that’s not a fair comparison. The Exxon Valdez spill had a greater impact because it was confined to Prince Edward Sound. The BP blowout is in a huge body of water, the Gulf of Mexico, and it will be disbursed over a much wider area.

The real solution to pollution is dilution, and the BP blowout has that going for it. But if you’re in Florida and looking at white-sand beaches expecting to see a tide of oil hitting your beaches, that’s no comfort. However, we do need to consider one thing. Oil is a part of nature, and the Gulf of Mexico has hundreds of natural oil seeps that flow into it every day. Granted, these seeps are only a few hundred barrels, but the ecosystem absorbs this amount of oil easily.

Based on the damage done to Prince Edward Sound, I believe 90 percent of the damage to the environment will be gone within a year of the capping of the BP well. Of course, there will be a residue that will be there for years, but the Gulf as a fishery will recover faster than expected and all the screams that it will be a 100 years in recovering are just plain overreacting.

The bottom line: It’s not the end of the world. The well will be capped. BP will pay for the damages. And the Gulf fishery will not be irreparably damaged.

Richard H. Mason is president of Gibralter Entergy Co. of El Dorado.