The Bush administration agency charged with assessing the impact of new deepwater drilling on endangered species in the Gulf of Mexico based its 2007 conclusion that expanded drilling was "not likely" to "destroy or adversely modify designated critical habitat" on a worst-case scenario that a single spill would dump no more than 630,000 gallons of oil into the Gulf.
That worst-case scenario proved to be wildly optimistic -- more than 100 million gallons have already gushed into the Gulf thus far in BP's Deepwater Horizon disaster.
The National Marine Fisheries Service prepared the report for the Minerals Management Service in June 2007 as part of the Bush administration's push to expand deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. The report assessed the biological impact of plans by MMS to sell 11 new lease areas for offshore oil and gas exploration, one of which included the site of the ill-fated BP well.
According to the report, "Oil-spill data derived from historical trends estimate that a total volume of 237,972-1,116,150 gal of oil will be introduced into federal offshore waters over 40 years as a result of the proposed lease sales in the CPA."
The report's worst-case scenario -- that just over 1.1 million gallons of oil would spill into the Gulf of Mexico -- was off by multiple orders of magnitude, representing less than 1 percent of the total amount that the BP disaster alone has released.
Keep in mind that this worst-case projection included the combined total of all spills over the next 40 years from each of the new lease areas proposed by MMS in the Central Planning Area (CPA) of the Gulf of Mexico. Six of the 11 new lease areas were in the CPA.
Based on this radical underestimate of the risk posed by offshore drilling, the report concluded:
The biological opinion concludes that the five-year leasing program and its associated actions are not likely to jeopardize the continued existence of threatened or endangered species under the jurisdiction of NMFS or destroy or adversely modify designated critical habitat.
In addition to dismissing biological impacts in its June 2007 review, The New York Times reports a regional office of NMFS in September 2007 told MMS that that deepwater drilling posed little risk to endangered species and their habitat.
The full NMFS report is available here. The spill data projections are on page 76.
Update -- Here's a good analogy suggested to me by Barb for using "historical trends" to estimate the amount of oil that would be released from these sites: imagine if assessments of new car safety were based on the velocity of the original Model Ts. You might get an accurate portrait of what would happen if cars maxed out at whatever the Model T's top speed was, but you'd have no idea what would happen in the real world.
continued at Daily Kos....
