SHASHANK BENGALI, McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON -- A decade ago, U.S. government regulators warned that a major deepwater oil spill could start with a fire on a drilling rig, prove hard to stop and cause extensive damage to fish eggs and wetlands because there were few good ways to capture oil underwater.
The disaster scenario -- contained in a May 2000 offshore drilling plan for the Shell oil company that McClatchy Newspapers has obtained -- is now a grim reality in the Gulf of Mexico. Less predictably, perhaps, the author of the document was the Interior Department's Minerals Management Service, the regulatory agency that has come under withering criticism in the wake of the BP spill for being too cozy with industries it was supposed to be regulating.
The 2000 warning indicates that some federal regulators were well aware of the potential hazards of deepwater oil production in its early years, experts and former MMS officials told McClatchy.
Yet over the past decade, the risks faded into the background as America thirsted for new oil sources, the energy industry mastered new drilling technologies, and the number of deepwater wells in the Gulf swelled into the thousands. Then-President George W. Bush ushered in the new era with an executive order on May 18, 2001, that pushed his administration to speed up the search for oil.
"I think it was certainly overwhelmed by the excitement of all the oil and gas that was starting to show up in the seismic studies and the technical excitement of how to drill these reservoirs," said Rick Steiner, a veteran environmental scientist who reviewed the document for McClatchy. "I think that had a way of subduing the real concern about the risk of these things."
The Shell plan, which Greenwire, an environmental news service, first reported last week, described a worst-case scenario for a deepwater blowout that in several instances reads like a preview of what has happened since the Deepwater Horizon rig began spewing crude into the Gulf seven weeks ago.
While noting that a major blowout was very unlikely, the Shell plan said: "Regaining well control in deep water may be a problem since it could require the operator to cap and control well flow at the seabed in greater water depths . . . and could require simultaneous firefighting efforts at the surface."
The BP disaster started when the drilling platform exploded, sending a towering wall of flames into the sky and killing 11 workers before it sank.
The 2000 Shell plan also cautioned that an oil gusher wouldn't behave the same way in deepwater as one would in shallow water, where most drilling to that point had been done. "Spills in deep water may be larger due to the high production rates associated with deepwater wells and the length of time it could take to stop the source of pollution," it said.
Among its other warnings for a drill site less than 140 miles southwest of the Deepwater Horizon:
*The chemical dispersants required to clean up a major spill would expose adult birds to a combination of oil and dispersant that could "reduce chick survival."
*Fish eggs and larvae within a potentially large area of the northern Gulf would be killed.
*In certain weather and oceanographic conditions, a large blowout could have "severe adverse impacts" for wetland areas.
*Not all the spilled oil would rise to the surface, and "there are few practical spill response options for dealing with submerged oil." It predicted that gas surging from a blowout could form hydrates and remain deep underwater, a likely cause of some toxic subsea oil "plumes" that scientists have identified in the BP spill.
"That's pretty prophetic," Steiner said.