By KATE GALBRAITH
Published: May 16, 2010
The catastrophic Deepwater Horizon oil spill began off the coast of Louisiana — hundreds of miles from Mexico and far from any other country.
But many oil spills, almost by definition, become international events. Oil slicks can easily be carried to distant shores by the sea currents. A huge Australian oil spill last year in the Timor Sea caused angst in Indonesia and East Timor.
There has even been concern that the crude gushing into the Gulf of Mexico could make its way to the Atlantic Ocean, tugged along by powerful currents.
In the event of a spill that affects multiple countries, a number of global conventions devised through the International Maritime Organization govern prevention and clean-up efforts. There are also regional agreements — the United States, for example, maintains agreements with Canada, Mexico, Panama, Russia and the British Virgin Islands, according to the State Department.
But experts say there are large gaps in what the international agreements cover.
“There is a tremendous body of international law addressing oil pollution, dealing with matters including construction and seaworthiness of ships, safety of navigation, pollution response, and liability,” said Tim Stephens, a senior lecturer on the law faculty at the University of Sydney and the co-author of a forthcoming textbook on the law of the sea.
However, the international maritime conventions apply “primarily or exclusively” to accidents involving tankers — the devastating 1999 Erika spill off the coast of Brittany, France, was from a tanker, for example, he said in an e-mail message.
They do not apply to accidents involving oil platforms, like the Deepwater Horizon spill.
“It is definitely an omission,” Mr. Stephens said, adding that only “tentative” steps have been taken so far to make the maritime agency’s rules applicable to platform spills.
The regulatory discrepancy has a simple explanation: tankers move across international boundaries all the time, whereas platforms remain fixed in place. But as oil companies push their exploration farther offshore with the help of new technology, spills like Deepwater pose an increasing risk — and could galvanize new action.
A key area for exploration and production-related spills is liability.
“There is no global convention governing this issue,” said Sergei Vinogradov, a senior lecturer at the Center for Energy, Petroleum and Mineral Law and Policy at the University of Dundee, in Scotland.
By contrast, liability from tanker spills is covered by two 1992 conventions, one dealing with civil liability and the other with an oil-pollution compensation fund, he said in an e-mail message.
A different area in which more international coordination on spills is needed is the Arctic. That region is widely regarded as the next frontier for petroleum production. It holds perhaps 13 percent of the world’s undiscovered oil, according to a 2008 assessment by the U.S. Geological Survey, but it is also among the most fragile environments on Earth.
An international oil-spill conference next year in Portland, Oregon, is supposed to focus on Arctic issues, said Robin Rorick of the American Petroleum Institute, which is one of the conference sponsors, along with several U.S. agencies.
In the aftermath of the Deepwater spill, the conference agenda is certain to change, but Mr. Rorick said that the Arctic would remain a point of emphasis. The issue is growing more pressing as companies prepare to drill there — Shell Oil plans to drill several exploratory wells off northern Alaska this summer.
Even outside of formal agreements, international advice and assistance is often a key feature of oil-spill response. In the Deepwater case, a number of countries — including Norway, Britain, France and Germany — have offered equipment and assistance to the United States in dealing with the spill.
And the administration of President Barack Obama plans important changes to the Minerals Management Service, the U.S. agency that regulates the offshore oil industry, somewhat along the lines of restructuring that previously took place in Australia, Britain and Norway.
The U.S. agency enforces safety and environmental requirements for oil rigs. It also collects money from oil and gas leases on U.S. government land as well as mineral-extraction royalties. This is a conflict of interest, and the Obama administration plans to split the agency, which is part of the Department of the Interior, into two parts in order to address the problem.
As Tom Zeller Jr. reported last week in the New York Times (of which the International Herald Tribune is the global edition), Australia created a special offshore safety agency in 2005, called the National Petroleum Safety Authority, to minimize conflicts of interest. Norway created its Petroleum Safety Authority in 2004, for similar reasons.
Britain also walled off the functions of safety and revenue-collection following a deadly 1988 explosion of the Piper Alfa rig in the North Sea. It moved safety oversight from the Department of Energy to the Health and Safety Executive.
The United States will also undoubtedly look to other countries as it tries to understand how to strengthen safety requirements to prevent another oil spill.
One technology that could have been useful in the Deepwater case is an acoustic valve to shut off the well by remote control in an emergency. Such devices are required by Brazil and Norway, but not by the United States, where the oil industry successfully resisted a proposal years ago to require its use, according to Oystein Noreng, who heads the petroleum studies unit at the Norwegian School of Management.
“In Norway, for more than 40 years, we have had a fairly harmonious coexistence between a large offshore oil industry and some of the world’s largest fishing industries,” Mr. Noreng said in an e-mail message. “Nobody can say that a disaster like the one in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico could not happen in Norway, but we have invested in the additional line of defense, thanks to political wisdom.”
