Hey! You got oil in my Gulf!

Since one of my first posts was pertaining to the coal-mining disaster in West Virginia, I find it fitting to say a little something about the recent oil leak that BP and the US Government are working on stopping in the Gulf of Mexico.

This is a horrible environmental disaster, and while it is not likely that humans will die as a direct consequence of the spill, it is extremely likely that people in the area, and possibly along the whole East Coast will feel the consequences of this disaster.  I wish I were more experienced in the exact way that a deep-water oil rig works, but from my basic understanding, a leak has developed in the pipeline that brings oil from under the sea floor, and to the top of the rig, where it is transported to refineries, etc.  This leak has been directly channeling oil from underground and into the sea for the past few days, and because of its depth (about a mile down), it has been very difficult to fix.

So, now the problem is two-fold:  fixing the leak before it gets worse and simultaneously cleaning up the oil that has already escaped.  Here are a couple interesting news stories related to the topic, if you feel like knowing a little more:

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6430AR20100504
http://www.grist.org/article/2010-05-03-how-risky-is-the-dispersant-strategy-for-addressing-the-gulf-spi

Okay, so this is a big deal, but what does it mean for the oil industry in America, or even abroad?  I think nothing.  They will have to be careful to guard against this kind of failure in a deep-water rig again, but it's unlikely that our government will be able to (or even want to) cut back our domestic oil supplies.  Personally, I don't think we should stop drilling anywhere just because of this accident, but it may make it a little scarier for some people who don't want off-shore drilling a few hundred feet from their back-yards.

Of course, oil drilling has brought us an amazing age of new technologies and transportation, so for that, it is assuredly an advancement, but it's never that simple.  No engineer can design a perfect machine that will never fail, never break down, and never have an unforeseen problem.  James Carville had a good point the other day on CNN.  He said that no matter what kind of fuel we are using - coal, oil, nuclear, hydroelectric - we have a chance of disaster, and the more we use that kind of fuel, the greater our chances are for something to go wrong.  There is no known perfectly safe, perfectly clean, perfectly unobtrusive way to produce energy on this earth.  We can only keep improving our processes and looking for new advancements, but I feel confident that we will.