DEEPWATER DECEPTION:
The Gulf Disaster and the Oil Slick of the Corporate Mind
By A. Kronstadt

[PHOTO BY JOHN PENLEY]

[June 18, 2010] This SHADOW editorial is written on day 60 of the great Gulf Coast oil
disaster, which at this point is not even a contiguous oil slick anymore but hundreds
of thousands of patches of congealed oil that have already invaded marshes and
wetlands and cut off oxygen supplies to numerous fish and crustacean species.

On May 2, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration suspended commercial
fishing and shrimping for hundreds of miles on either side of the stricken Macondo oil
drilling site in the Missisippi Canyon of the Gulf of Mexico, from the Missisippi Delta to
Pensacola Bay.

The latest failing efforts to contain the leak, which began with a fatal explosion aboard
British Petroleum's Deepwater Horizon drilling rig on April 20, have gotten as far as
draining off 25,000 barrels of oil per day using a high-tech siphoning system. This leaves,
according to the estimate of Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, 35,000 to 60,000 barrels
of oil per day still gushing into the Gulf. At 42 gallons per barrel of oil, this amounts to
1,470,000 to 2,520,000 gallons of oil per day, adding to the 82 to 216 million gallons of oil
that have already poured into the Gulf from the damaged well head since the explosion
aboard the Deepwater Horizon.

Oil is Not Transparent:
BP More Interested in Damage Control than Controlling Damage
BP has still not owned up to the existence of multiple underwater plumes of oil, each
over 20 miles in extent spreading under the water, which have not made themselves
visible yet, but which, according to independent scientists studying the situation, are
equal in quantity to the devastating amount of oil already apparent on the surface. Some
of these scientists are suggesting that BP's use of dispersants, particular the rash attempt
to inject the detergent-like agent Correxit directly into the well head immediately after the
spill began, have caused the oil to re-form into these plumes which are not rising to the
surface the way oil normally does, but are insidiously dissolving into and poisoning the
waters of the Gulf. BP explained that it used Correxit--which is banned as highly toxic in
the United Kingdom, BP's home country, but permitted in the U.S.--because it was "available"
in the early days of the crisis. Correxit is manufactured by Nalco, a subsidiary of Exxon-
Mobil, and is stockpiled in vast quantities by oil companies. The EPA has ordered BP to
suspend the use of dispersants until the toxic effects of these substances has been further investigated.

BP is trying to divert attention from these vast underwater clouds of detergent-dispersed
oil by means of linguistic maneuvering; BP's Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles remarked,
"It may be down to how you define what a plume is here. The oil [below the surface] that
has been found is in very minute quantities."

The obvious surface oil meanwhile has spread
from Louisiana to Pensacola Beach, Florida. It
contains matter of an asphalt-like consistency
that makes the oil emulsify and thereby spread
out over greater distances, and which also makes
it more difficult to burn off the patches of toxic
mess which are broken up into small pieces over
the water. There is nothing preventing this material
from following the Loop Current up the entire East
Coast of the U.S., and from there into the deeper
reaches of the Atlantic. Damage to the sea bed
5000 feet under the water around the ruptured well
head has not been assessed, or at least not publicized by BP, and it remains to be seen
what damage the oil and BP's toxic dispersants will ultimate do to the marine photosynthetic plankton which are at least as important as land plants for creating oxygen and removing
carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Any appreciation of the scale of the disaster has had to be wrung out of BP, and their story
has changed repeatedly. At first, BP Chief Executive Officer Tony Hayward assured us
all that the environmental impact of the spill would be "very, very modest." When finally
forced to admit that BP's miscalculations would result in disruptions to the millions of
people on the Gulf Coast, he felt impelled to add "You know, I'd like my life back," just to
make us understand who he thinks the real victim is.

BP has truly rolled up its sleeves in the PR department in direct proportion to the way it
has dragged its feet in actually making headway against the oil spill. On May 30 they hired
Ann Womak-Kolton, one-time press secretary to former Vice President Dick Cheney, as their
head of U.S. media relations. Under Kolton, they have invested 50 million dollars in a
propaganda campaign that has so far included purchasing all of the Google search terms
that people have been typing in to obtain information about the Gulf disaster so that they
will lead to the BP Web site as the top search hit. Are they trying to control their own oil slick
or create an additional, informational oil slick to obscure public oversight of their shoddy
operation?

Halliburton Again
Since we have already crossed paths with Dick Cheney in this saga, it is almost like waiting
for the other shoe to drop until we meet up with Cheney's sinister corporate alter ego, the Halliburton Corporation, which it turns out was responsible for the cement job around the
now exploded and gushing Macondo well head. This cement job was supposed to be the
first line of protection against surges of natural gas, which is one possible cause of the
Deepwater Horizon explosion and the probable source of the pressure forcing the oil out
of the bottom of the sea. In an internal Halliburton presentation from November 2009 on
the subject of how to cement things 5000 feet under the water (http://www.businessinsider.
com/ halliburton-deepwater-horizon-oil-spill-crisis-20 10-5#-1), that company's engineers
give the following assessment (bolding added by the SHADOW):

Challenges
> Shallow water flow may occur during or after cement job
> Under water blow out has happened
> Gas flow may occur after a cement job in deepwater environments that contain major
hydrate zones.
> Destabilization of hydrates after the cement job is confirmed by down hole cameras.
> The gas flow could slow down in hours to days if the de- stabilization is not severe.
> However, the consequences could be more severe in worse cases.

Deepwater Well Objectives
> Cement slurry should be placed in the entire annulus with no losses
> Temperature increase during slurry hydration should not destabilize hydrates
> There should be no influx of shallow water or gas into the annulus
> The cement slurry should develop strength in the shortest time after placement
> Conditions in deepwater wells are not conducive to achieving all of these objectives simultaneously

All of the above information points to the activities of two companies, BP and Halliburton,
who were proceeding with projects that they themselves did not believe that they could
pull off, and which would have enormous consequences for millions of people if anything
went wrong, but which they went ahead with anyway because of the potential mega-profits.
Judging from their track record in Iraq and elsewhere, that certainly sounds, in particular,
like Halliburton's modus operandi.

A Monstrous Predicament
There have been many scary stories dealing with terrors from the sea. From Moby Dick to
Godzilla, large evil masses arising from the ocean have thrilled and terrorized our
imaginations. However, these fictional beings represent nature getting back at mankind
in some way, and mankind has found these sea monsters to be sympathetic characters,
because we all know that we deserve to have nature come back in our faces after all of the
atrocities that we have committed against our own planet.

When it is no longer fiction, namely, when mankind has created a monster via its own
stupidity, via the groupthink and non-transparency of the modern corporation turned
loose and allowed to perform a fatal experiment on the earth itself, the monster story is
no longer entertaining. Our hemisphere is now threatened by a nonliving monster of crude petroleum, composed ironically of the remains of once teeming forests hundreds of
thousands of square miles in extent, predating the dinosaurs and part of the stuffings of the
inner earth which we all, with the accuracy of hindsight, now know should never have been disturbed. The nonliving monster does not have the mighty fluke of Melville's great white
whale, or the ability to breathe nuclear fire like Japan's national monster, but it has the ability
to suffocate, to spread its nonliving-ness to the rest of life by cutting off its oxygen, and by poisoning the chemical reactions of life and disrupting the food chain, right on up to us
human beings.

Oil's Chernobyl
One thing that the Gulf disaster has made clear is that offshore drilling for oil is as unsafe and unviable as nuclear energy. We must be aware that oil corporations also control vast uranium deposits that became much less valuable in the wake of the Three Mile Island incident and finally the Chernobyl disaster, which affected hundreds of thousands of square miles of Central Europe with
tens of thousands of fatalities both immediate and long term. The executives of these energy corporations are going to try to convince us that because nuclear energy and oil have now proven to be equally
dangerous, we should reconsider nuclear power. Like most other talking points that
corporate spokespeople are required to recite, this is an ass-backwards argument that
will guarantee future generations a diminished quality of life and possible extinction.

Corporate Greed Has Driven Us Into the Abyss
The greed for energy and the determination to stay the course of unchecked industrial
development, human sprawl making the automobile mandatory, and energy monopolies
that push poisonous energy sources while hobbling any efforts to create alternatives, drove
the U.S. into Afghanistan and Iraq and resulted in thousands of deaths on our side as well
as tens of thousands of deaths on the part of the people of those countries. But the
metaphorical abyss of war was not the only abyss into which energy madness was
driving the U.S. and the "civilized" world as a whole.

British Petroleum was being allowed to drill for oil a whole mile under the Gulf of  Mexico
in a place as unhospitable to human beings as deep outer space-without light, with a
pressure of thousands of pounds per square inch capable of instantly squeezing every
molecule of fluid out of the human body and replacing it with sea water-in other words,
the literal as opposed to the figurative abyss.

Instead of considering alternative energy sources or cutting back on the need for energy
through more efficient technologies, Corporate America is willing to expose its own workers
and the regular Americans, whom that snob and sociopath, BP Chairman Carl-Henric
Svanberg referred to as "small people," to any level of danger. If we are small in proportion
to men like Mr. Svanberg it is only because we tolerate a tiny handful of these people
making decisions behind closed doors that imperil the lives of the many millions of us.