Back in September 2004, Hurricane Ivan tore through the Gulf of Mexico. As a result of this weather phenomenon, a Taylor Energy Company offshore oil rig platform collapsed into the water, and oil began spewing into the gulf. Taylor Energy told everyone that no more than a couple of gallons of oil was leaking into the Gulf of Mexico and they were working on it. It took three years before Taylor Energy was forced to admit that its broken oil rig was leaking at least 90 gallons per day. It wasn’t until 2008 that Taylor Energy Company and the government made a deal that created a $666 million trust meant to stop the spill from continuing to leak into the Gulf. The deal coincided with Taylor selling off its oil interests to a South Korean company. While the money was meant to help stop the leak, it did not.
The company and the government kept the size of the spill very quiet until around 2015, when the Associated Press did an investigation that estimated that the Taylor Energy oil rig was leaking at least 91 gallons of oil per day, and had been for more than a decade. This was about twice as much as Taylor Company’s public estimates of 1-41 gallons per day of leakage. In 2018 a report by environmental watchdogs SkyTruth, using satellite data and pollution reports, put the amount of oil flooding the gulf from the Taylor rig somewhere between 37-900 gallons a day. That’s a big difference that began bringing the size of the Taylor Company oil rig into focus, placing it into the top 10 worst oil spills in the last few decades, up there with the Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2010.
In 2018, Taylor Energy attempted to get back $423 million from the government by dissolving the trust they had made the original deal on. This led to the Department of Justice investigating and releasing a report that revealed the Taylor Energy oil rig was still leaking somewhere between 300-900 gallons of oil a day into the waters.
On Monday, a new report was released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Florida State University, in which they estimated that the Taylor Energy Company oil rig had been leaking around 4,500 gallons of oil per day. This, the report explains, was more conservative than other recent estimates: “Using sonar technology and a newly developed method of analyzing oil and gas bubbles rising through the water, scientists determined that the plumes are the result of oil and gas released from multiple wells.”
Events like Taylor Energy and Deepwater Horizon continue to happen and will continue to happen in the foreseeable future. There is not truly safe way to dig thousands of feet down with pipes and pull things out of the ground, without danger, and the Trump administration wants to rollback the oil drilling regulations put in place after the Deepwater Horizon disaster.
Instead of holding polluters accountable, conservatives are hellbent on creating more polluters. There must be consequences for not paying the costs of that danger. The entire concept of “high risk, high reward” is that while you might get rich doing a dangerous thing, you might also lose a lot of money and life—that’s what the “risk” in that phrase is supposed to symbolize. The fact that there are millions of living things, humans included, that aren’t interested in you being allowed to get rich at the cost of our planet’s life doesn’t even have to figure into the equation for someone to realize that rigging this deck is a lose-lose situation for everyone.