Question

A historically devastating environmental event occurred in 2010. System failures in a British Petroleum (BP) oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico led to the release of significant amounts of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. The explosion of the Deepwater Horizon platform seems to be caused by faulty engineering. The spill was one of the worst environmental disasters in North American history. Eleven people were killed and it took almost three months to stop the oil flow.

Discuss how each of the human-centered and nature-centered ethical theories would interpret the moral issues involved in this case, and apply your own environmental ethic to the case.

Answer 1

Impacts of the Macondo oil spill

The “Macondo oil spill,” as it came to be called, had a devastating impact on the environment. Oil was scattered over more than 1,300 miles of shoreline from Texas to Florida. Owing to deep water ocean currents, the oil flowed hundreds of miles away from the blowout. A large volume of oil sank to the ocean floor. In the attempt to clean up the spill, incalculable damage was done to fish and wildlife and to vital marshes and estuaries. In addition, though they were seldom discussed at the time, cleanup efforts often made first responders ill from the chemicals and other substances used in attempts to contain and clean up the damage.

A sea turtle covered in oil from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill swims off Grand Terre Island, Louisiana June 8, 2010.

As bad as the Macondo oil spill was in its direct impacts on the environment, its lasting effect has been even more pronounced on the energy and environmental policy. The fact that it took BP nearly three months to cap the well—despite the fact that the Deepwater Horizon oil spill occurred near the heart of the oil and gas service industry along the Gulf coast—raised serious concern about what would happen if a blowout occurred in an even more remote region, such as Alaska’s northwest shelf where no help would be readily attainable and where oil could seep under ice, making it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to recover. Consequently, whereas previously the Interior Department, Environmental Protection Agency, and other federal oversight authorities had one standard for all offshore operations, after Macondo there was a growing chorus for “Alaska-specific” regulations, which in the end, combined with the disappointing results of Shell’s first well and the collapse in oil prices, led to a reassessment about whether drilling in ice covered regions of the Arctic poses too great of a financial and technical risk.

Lessons learned and misconceptions

As we note the 6th anniversary of the Macondo tragedy, let us not take away the wrong lesson by misinterpreting the past. It was not offshore drilling per se that led to the accident, but rather the fact that too cozy a relationship between regulators from the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Minerals Management Service (MMS) and owners and operators of the Deepwater Horizon rig led to woefully inadequate regulatory oversight. There was also poor coordination and inadequate lines of responsibility among BP, Transocean, and Haliburton employees. Additionally, there was no contingency planning by the companies or the U.S. Coast Guard on what to do in the event of an emergency—a grave shortcoming when you are drilling at depths with little past experience. Finally, from the evidence presented in court and in regulatory proceedings, it is clear that there was gross negligence on the part of BP and its partners who placed short-term profits against technically sound drilling practices, with untold damage in the public trust of the entire petroleum industry, an industry on which the world’s future lies.

Workers clean up oil balls from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill as the surf brings more onto a beach in Waveland, Mississippi July 7, 2010. Reuters/Lee Celano

Though this particular incident certainly represents the dangers of offshore drilling without requisite oversight, it has also placed an unjust stigma on many leaders in the industry who have exemplified sound environmental consciousness in their drilling practices. As global leaders work to expand energy access to the millions of people worldwide who still lack basic electricity, the oil and gas industry should and must be an important partner.
Pondering the Worst Case

The prospects of failures far more severe are chilling. Yet, Lehigh University Professor John Kenly Smith, a chemical engineer who specializes in the history of technology, believes that forcing stakeholders to ponder the absolute worst is the only way to grapple with what’s really at stake. "If you are going to work in an environment where it’s physically impossible to go down there and get your hands on the technology, you really have to think of the unthinkable and nobody wants to do that," says Smith. " I’ll bet every day on that platform there were engineers thinking, ‘If we have a blowout on this thing what will we do?’"

What have we learned in the months since the worst that could happen, in fact, did? Perhaps not much that’s new, says Smith, who believes some of the safety failures that led to the disaster stem from what’s all predictably human and imperfect in all of us. What’s also clear is that engineers who design and maintain complex systems are in a tough spot. Here, Smith cites a few lessons of the spill:

1. Numbers can be deceiving. "There’s tremendous pressure in the corporate and scientific worlds to convert uncertainty to risk," says Smith. Take an uncertainty, assign it a probability number then run it through a model to obtain data on how likely a failure might be. The problem, though, says Smith, who during his career in industry investigated a number of serious job-related accidents, is that "999 times, people get away with doing unsafe things, and it’s only the 1,000th time that something horrible happens."

2. Safety has to be hardwired into a firm’s SOP. Smith cites the success of companies like DuPont—the subject of a book he coauthored, Science and Corporate Strategy: DuPont R&D, 1902-1980—with rewarding teams with the best safety records. "You have to really drill it into people and create counterincentives that make them stop and say ‘Will I cost everyone their prize if I get hurt?’" A hard-core safety-first stand also can relieve the tension between line functions that bring in the money and the staff people (i.e., engineers who raise the red flags). This is where ethics come in, says Smith: "The staff functions and engineers need to have the clout to make themselves heard."

3. Simplicity has its virtues (i.e., technical controls can create a false sense of security). The jury is still out on why the Deepwater Horizon blowout preventer failed. Even if results of the investigations lead to future fixes, blind faith in technology can be dangerous, Smith warns "When facing a problem there’s a tendency to add equipment like a blowout preventer, and think ‘Problem solved.’ In this case, it didn’t work." Additionally, he cautions, adding complexity to a system can inject more ways the pieces of the system can interact and produce unpredictable outcomes.

4. Think broadly. As the saying goes: "It’s not enough to guard against the failures that have already occurred. Those that haven’t happened yet are the ones to fear most." Organizations need to prepare for the unthinkable, and when that happens, go beyond devising ways to keep that particular failure from happening again. "Engineers are taught to be problem solvers rather than broad thinkers," says Smith. "When something goes wrong, the focus should be on what was the thinking that got us in this position?"

5. Know where you work. Engineers, says Smith, have always faced one central dilemma: "Are we independent professionals who provide objective assessments based on our training and ethics? Or are we employees who do what the boss says?" Clearly society needs the former, and because of that, he contends, it’s important to know an organization’s history before you join it: "As a young engineer buried down at the bottom of an org chart, you might not see much or really know what a place is about." But studying up on who’s running the company and the values it was founded upon can provide important clues about what to expect when it’s time to take a tough stand.