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A more dispassionate account of the spill’s legacy would emphasize several contrasting but not contradictory realities. Independent investigations and court rulings have blamed the intertwined negligence of BP and its contractors, Transocean and Halliburton, for the debacle, which killed 11 workers on the Deepwater Horizon rig. A federal judge found that the spill released 3.19 million barrels of crude. The corporate actors—chiefly BP, the majority owner of Macondo—deserved condemnation and got it. Yet as bad as the environmental and economic damage was, the recovery has been remarkable, in large part because of luck.
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Which brings us back to the East Grand Terre oil mat. The 30-meter-wide mass was something of an outlier. BP’s shoreline cleanup, supervised by the U.S. Coast Guard, concluded a year ago. Since then, cleanups have resulted in the collection of 6,000 pounds of weathered oil residue mixed with sand. All told, BP has spent more than $28 billion on cleanup and damage claims. By mid-2011, according to government surveys, only a tiny fraction of the sullied coast, some 13 miles, suffered from “heavy oiling,” meaning areas with 50 percent contamination or worse. By last year, fewer than 4 miles were so categorized.
Since the spill was capped, less than 2 percent of almost 18,000 water samples and a similar proportion of more than 8,000 sediment samples have exceeded U.S. Environmental Protection Agency toxicity benchmarks. Many of the bad readings were taken in the vicinity of the Macondo wellhead, 40 miles offshore and 5,000 feet below the ocean surface, which helps explain why the harm to the coast wasn’t worse.
Wildlife populations have bounced back. Dolphins, an exception, have perished in abnormally high numbers in recent years, but scientists date the beginning of the elevated mortality trend to February 2010, two months before the oil spill. Many commercial fisheries reopened by 2011. Oyster stocks have dwindled, but studies have attributed the problem to Louisiana’s diversion of fresh water into the Gulf after the spill and to Mississippi River flooding in 2011; both reduced salinity, a death sentence for oysters.
Every year, the equivalent of 560,000 to 1.4 million barrels of oil—perhaps a quarter of the amount that BP spilled—seeps naturally from the floor of the Gulf, estimates the National Research Council. Hydrocarbon-gobbling bacteria that thrive in the region thus were positioned to biodegrade oil from the spill. Once BP’s oil reached the surface, warm-water temperatures and ample sunlight accelerated evaporation and photooxidation. The oil from Macondo happened to be a light crude, which degrades and evaporates more quickly than heavier oil, like what escaped during the 1989 Exxon Valdez accident in Alaska. No one can say for sure how much BP oil residue remains in deep water—there are surely more undiscovered tar balls and oil mats than the one that washed up on East Grand Terre—but over time, it will be increasingly difficult to distinguish BP’s contribution from Mother Nature’s.
BP still has bills to pay. In a pending civil trial under the Clean Water Act, the federal government is seeking an additional $13.7 billion, most of which, by law, would have to be spent on regional restoration projects. A separate federal administrative process, called a Natural Resource Damage Assessment, will generate another multibillion-dollar restoration tab for the company. Since 2010, BP has sold about $38 billion in assets, and the company’s total liability could exceed the $43 billion it has set aside.
Read more at The BP Oil Spill Cleanup Isn’t a Disaster
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