Rendered ocean

One question that occurs to anyone who has been watching and reading about oil gusher is how many capped or abandoned wells are down there now and how well-maintained are they?

More than 27,000 abandoned oil and gas wells lurk in the hard rock beneath the Gulf of Mexico, an environmental minefield that has been ignored for decades. No one -- not industry, not government -- is checking to see if they are leaking, an Associated Press investigation shows. The oldest of these wells were abandoned in the late 1940s, raising the prospect that many deteriorating sealing jobs are already failing.

When President Obama issued his much-criticized and deceptively incomplete moratorium on Gulf oil production, one strong argument in favor of the idea was that the entire system of governance under which this industry operates needed to be inspected and redesigned. Before we ask millions of people to continue assuming the massive risks of a seabed perforated with poison ducts, we need to ensure that an infrastructure exists to mitigate those risks and respond in a timely fashion when things get nasty.

Clearly nothing like that exists now. The industry does not police itself. The State of Louisiana sure as shit doesn't do it. And for multiple decades now, neither does the Federal Government.

Regulations for temporarily abandoned wells require oil companies to present plans to reuse or permanently plug such wells within a year, but the AP found that the rule is routinely circumvented, and that more than 1,000 wells have lingered in that unfinished condition for more than a decade. About three-quarters of temporarily abandoned wells have been left in that status for more than a year, and many since the 1950s and 1960s -- eveb though sealing procedures for temporary abandonment are not as stringent as those for permanent closures.

This morning on WWL radio, Clancy Dubos, as is his wont, argued the accepted local conventional wisdom regarding a news topic. Clancy and many others focus on BP's remarkably horrible safety record and conclude that a drilling moratorium under these circumstances is tantamount to punishing the innocent. But I don't find that convincing. There are serious systemic problems with the way we ignore rather than confront the hazards of industry. And those problems need to be addressed in a systemic fashion.

On the other hand, I'm inclined to agree with critics who argue that the moratorium Obama has imposed doesn't actually do any of this. About a month ago, Ricky P outlined a good start point for what a constructive drilling moratorium and reform process might look like. So far there's been very little action from the Obama Administration on most of those points.