Zesty Lemon

Unless you’ve been living in a pit for the last four months, you couldn’t really have avoided the global media coverage surrounding the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig and the subsequent spillage in the Gulf of Mexico. Apart from bequeathing a level of lubrication rarely seen; in at least the feathered inhabitants of the Deep South, it hasn’t done wonders for Anglo-American diplomatic relations either.

Tragically the initial explosion resulted in the loss of 11 hard working souls on the rig itself, a fact that I wouldn’t dream of mocking or indulging in meaningless analysis. However, being America, after condolences to the families, the next thing on the agenda was to find someone to blame.

At this point, officials had declared that the well wasn’t leaking oil but as soon as some hot blooded southerners realised that oil rig was being operated by BP, tension started to mount up against Britain. I’d like to clarify that I’m not a particularly patriotic person at all – in fact, although my ancestry is so English that I’m probably descended from a piece of fruit cake and a cricket bat, I’m the first to point out foibles with this country as is probably obvious from this blog!

The reality is that the rig was built in Korea, registered to a company in the Marshall Islands and operated in America, by Americans and for American use. I’m not attempting to absolve BP of any blame, on the contrary, their involvement in ‘leasing’ the rig was very significant. However, it’s important to remember that BP’s operations are much bigger outside of Britain and contrary to popular American belief, BP no longer stands for ‘British Petroleum’ and hasn’t at any point this millennium.

I wouldn’t say I was ‘privileged’, but I got a birds-eye view of the impending environmental disaster on a flight from London to Nassau in June and seeing the network coverage from US television stations really sparked my curiosity. Firstly I was impressed that they employed news anchors who’s anatomy had a higher concentration of plastic that the desk at which they were sat, but also at the fact that southern nationals expected Barack Obama to don a wet-suit and plug the leak himself. With the best will in the world, he isn’t Chuck Noris and even his ego couldn’t plug a well that size.

After chatting with a friend that works in the oil and gas industry, I was reliably informed that had the same sort of accident happened in the North Sea, then an additional safety device that falls under our legislation would have been activated in order to prevent oil from escaping into the ocean. The almost pre-historic solution proposed in the Mexican Gulf however, was an operation called Topkill which essentially involved spending a lot of financial resources dredging mud into the hole and hoping for the best. So in perhaps the finest and most literal example of pouring money into a hole in the ground, the mission began in earnest, only to be branded as an unmitigated failure within three days.

I won’t bore you with the details, but in the last few days the leak has been successfully plugged and the search for a scapegoat was started. The obvious candidate in the firing line was BP’s chef executive; Tony Hayward. I actually have quite a lot of respect for this man as he made himself the public face of this ‘crisis’ when he could have easily shirted responsibility and delegated the task to some PR graduate with a winning smile and an extraordinary talent in ‘spin’.

Who is actually to blame is a completely different question. I would go out on a limb and say that high oil consuming nations and their respective citizens are to blame with their/our unhealthy attachment to refined oil. I’m not a campaigner for the ‘recycle your sandles’ brigade at all, but this one event has probably done more to alert America to their fragile dependency on oil than all the environmental publicity before it combined.

Tags: Barack Obama, bp, british, deep south, deepwater, disaster, environmental, gulf, horizon, mexico, petroleum, Tony Hayward, topkill