The oil industry has a weird new excuse to convince people that we should expand oil drilling outside the Gulf of Mexico, the Washington Post’s Paulina Firozi reported Monday.
According to industry, Florence is a reminder that we should put more oil rigs in the path of the next hurricane to strike the southeast.
You see, the concentration of rigs in the Gulf of Mexico means that when a hurricane rolls through, rigs need to evacuate and could cause subsequent problems with the nation’s oil supply. To keep the oil flowing, industry logic goes, companies should be allowed to drill across the southeastern United States, as well as other parts of the Gulf of Mexico, and off the California and Alaskan coasts. That way, no matter where a hurricane hits, they will still be able to sell their product.
Of course, putting rigs up throughout the Gulf and across the eastern seaboard would also mean that no matter where on the coast a storm hits, it would hit oil rigs.
And it’s not like rigs are storm-proof. In a court document filed last Friday, the federal government said oil rigs damaged by 2004’s Hurricane Ivan are still leaking some 10,000 to 30,000 gallons a day. A watchdog group estimates that between 2004 and 2017, the spill from Ivan has leaked between 855,000 and 4 million gallons of oil into the water.
The company responsible, Taylor Energy, claims that only three or four gallons a day are leaking. It’s suing to get back money from the government that they had to set aside for clean up, so their claim that it’s all better has a massive 423 million dollars at stake. Not that such a figure would be an incentive for the company to do whatever it could to make it appear sufficiently addressed as soon as possible...
Now, the Trump administration could conceivably point to Florence as a reason to support its plan to bail out coal and nuclear power plants under the guise of reliable energy. We need these sorts of power plants to keep power on when a storm like Florence hits, right? Nope!
As Dino Grandini at the Washington Post wrote yesterday, Florence has “blown a hole” in the administration’s argument that nuclear power is reliable in an emergency: two of Duke’s NC reactors had to shut down because of the storm. Even if they had stayed online, it’s the transmission lines that tend to cause most outages, not a shortage of fuel. (Duke’s renewables performed fine, by the way. And if distributed renewables are installed so that a rooftop panel can either plug into the grid or directly power your home, that’d make them even more reliable…)
As for coal, Florence also caused problems for Duke’s coal operations. While the Trump administration doesn’t even pretend to care about pollution, others might be concerned that a breached coal ash pit released hundreds of dump trucks’ worth of toxic waste.
Nuclear’s not as reliable as some claim, then, and obviously fossil fuels are dirty. But at least when you ignore the millions of dollars of cleanup costs, they’re far cheaper than renewables, right? Not for long!
Bloomberg reported Monday that battery improvements mean that utility-scale solar and storage in the southwest is now cheaper than gas plants. A new facility slated for completion in 2021 will use solar and batteries to provide electricity around the clock for $36 per megawatt-hour, much cheaper than the $47 per megawatt-hour a new gas plant would cost.
Cheaper, cleaner, climate-friendly… no wonder renewables are so popular with everyone, except those who also ascribe to them another c-word: competition.
Top Climate and Clean Energy Stories: