On Sept. 15, 2004, Hurricane Ivan, traveling through the Gulf of Mexico, toppled a Taylor Energy Company oil platform into the water. As columnist Fred Grimm notes in a piece in the South Florida Sun Sentinel, the results of the collapse included “nine ... holes belching oil and gas” that were “deemed too dangerous to plug.”Taylor Energy has spent the last 14 years telling everyone that just a little bit of oil has been spilling into the Gulf since then. It wasn’t until 2015 that reports filtered out via an investigation by the Associated Press that exposed the extent of the growing environmental disaster.
An Associated Press investigation has revealed evidence that the spill is far worse than what Taylor -- or the government -- have publicly reported during their secretive, and costly, effort to halt the leak. Presented with AP's findings, that the sheen recently averaged about 91 gallons of oil per day across eight square miles, the Coast Guard provided a new leak estimate that is about 20 times greater than one recently touted by the company.
By 2008, the well was still leaking, and Taylor made a deal with the government to establish a $666 million trust to be used to stop the spill. This coincided with Taylor selling off its small oil-drilling interests to a joint venture of South Korean companies. The cleaning and work that this trust funded didn’t stop the leaking, but the government and Taylor continued to keep things very quiet. New analysis using outside data has brought the size of this disaster back into focus.
Using satellite images and pollution reports, the watchdog group SkyTruth estimates between 300,000 and 1.4 million gallons of oil has spilled from the site since 2004, with an annual average daily leak rate between 37 and 900 gallons.
If these numbers were true, it would still only be a small percentage of what was spilled into the Gulf from the Deepwater Horizon platform a few years later. It would still put it in the top ten of oil spills in the Gulf over the last 50 years, as of 2015. But that isn’t the full story. The Department of Justice released a report last month that has the amount of oil spilled into the Gulf from the Taylor platform well into Deepwater Horizon territory. The reason the report was released by the DOJ is that Taylor Energy is trying to get a few hundred million dollars back from taxpayers.
After putting aside hundreds of millions of dollars for environmental recovery, Taylor Energy has sued the United States to get $423 million back.
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Taylor Energy wants to dissolve its $423 million trust that guaranteed payment for the costs of plugging the leaking wells, and other environmental remediation. The company — now defunct and sold — has already spent a whopping $435 million on containing the leaks — including hauling the heavy platform to the surface.
The analysis of Oscar Garcia-Pineda, the DOJ’s hired consultant, has now put the number of barrels-a-day spewing forth into the Gulf at 300-700, considerably higher than Taylor Energy’s 1-55 barrels-a-day “estimates.” That means that, over 14 years, the Taylor platform has ended up adding almost as much oil to the water as the Deepwater Horizon disaster did. Plus, there hasn’t been any successful plugging of the leaking holes.
Taylor Energy declined to comment. The company has argued that there’s no evidence to prove any of the wells are leaking. Last month, the Justice Department submitted an independent analysis showing that the spill was much larger than the one-to-55 barrels per day that the U.S. Coast Guard National Response Center (NRC) claimed, using data supplied by the oil company.
Garcia-Pineda explains that using Taylor Energy’s data amounts to a nothing-burger for analysis.
“There is abundant evidence that supports the fact that these reports from NRC are incorrect,” Garcia-Pineda wrote. Later he said: “My conclusion is that NRC reports are not reliable.”
The Trump administration is rolling back safety protections, including the ones put into place after the Deepwater Horizon disaster, in order to push forward on quickly beginning offshore drilling in the Atlantic. There is no ethical business model that supports this. However, the fossil fuel industry hopes going forward that they can begin the drilling as soon as possible, because when they do, they will change the entire local economy of the area. Once that happens, it will be very difficult to get people, with new oil jobs and money, to change course.
