Lecture 19 Summary and Notes

Some questions to ponder...

1. How does the Deepwater Horizon Disaster (DHD) compare to historic unscheduled and scheduled releases of oil into the environment?

2. What was special about the Deepwater Horizon before it exploded?

3. Why did the Deepwater Horizon fly a Marshallese flag?

4. What series of events contributed to the blowout and eventual unscheduled release? How is it possible that BP, Transocean, Haliburton, Cameron, Anadarko, MOEX (MOECO), and Weatherford were all (potentially) liable in the DWD?

5. What was the rate of discharge from the well during the release? How did the reported discharge change as a function of time? How did the actual discharge change as a function of time? Why was it so difficult to estimate the discharge of the spill? What are the potential incentives to underestimate the discharge and total volume of the spill?

6. What happened to all of the oil?

7. How much money does BP estimate the spill will cost? How has money been already spent? Where is BP getting (some of) the money that will go into operational response and compensatory funds?

8. What are some of the recent developments in offshore drilling in and around the USA (in Cuba, AK, and along the border between the EEZs of the USA and Mexico?)

Slides from today are up on Sakai. Tomorrow, we will begin our discussion of coal. Your reading assignment for Friday is Mountaintop Mining Consequences by Palmer et al. (2010) from Science Magazine. Also, our reading assignment for Monday will be Full cost accounting for the life cycle of coal by Epstein et al. (2011) in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. This is a longer article and so I wanted to get it to you with plenty of lead time.