By Richard A. Joyce

Redstone Review

PUEBLO – Back in the late 1980s, give or take a couple of years, I took my daughter, Shannon, to Galveston, Texas, to spend some time with my former in-laws, with whom I had good relationships despite my recent divorce.

Shannon lived with her mom during the school year and with me during the summers. It was July, and we stayed in a large beach house about 200 yards from the ocean’s edge on Galveston Island. It was an expensive rental, but there were enough of us to make a week-long stay possible.

I’ll never forget the experience. Enjoying the ocean and beach by day, watching the stars above the beach at night, especially the constellation Scorpio, which I had never seen before, and falling asleep on the third floor of that house with the air conditioner turned off and all the windows open to the cool sea breeze all left lasting impressions of beauty on my mind and spirit.

Not so for the tar balls. In fact, because tar balls were rather ubiquitous in the sands of Galveston Island, we all carried bottles of baby oil with which to remove the nasty stains tar balls left on the bottoms of our feet before venturing back inside our rented house each day, for if those stains had transferred to the carpet of said house, we would lose our damage deposit, which was considerable.

Naturally, as a person from Colorado unfamiliar with life on the Gulf, I inquired as to the source of those nasty tar balls. My in-laws, who resided in Houston, told me it was the result of the natural leakage of oil from the bottom of the ocean floor. The oil, they said, leaked into the ocean, and broke up into tar balls, which were deposited in the beach sands by the tidal action of the ocean.

Now, I don’t know if oil naturally percolates up through the bedrock and into the ocean, but I do know, because of an Associated Press report this July, that there may be another reason those tar balls were such a nuisance on my vacation all those years ago: abandoned oil wells.

More precisely, leaking abandoned oil wells. It seems the practice in the oil industry is to constantly explore for new deposits of oil and natural gas, then drill a well to reach them, then plug the well so as to return to it and open it up when that oil is needed (and presumably when it is highly profitable to bring it up).

That’s called temporary abandonment, according to the AP report. The well being drilled by the Deepwater Horizon was such a well, and the explosion that destroyed that oil platform and has led to the most massive oil pollution in our history occurred during the final phase of temporarily capping that well so that its oil could be recovered another day.

In addition, of course, when a well has been depleted to the point at which it is not profitable to extract what oil and gas may be left in it, the well is shut down permanently. In the case of temporary abandonment, the oil companies are supposed to return to those wells within a year and do something with them. But many do not, the AP report said.

And in the case of permanently capped wells, some have been capped for 70 years. The oil companies assure us that those permanent caps will last forever, but they also assured us that the disaster unfolding in the Gulf would never happen because of the technology in place.

The AP report said 27,000 permanently or temporarily abandoned oil wells exist in the gulf, and with few exceptions, none of them have been regularly inspected for leaks.

So the question is this: Can a person of average intelligence reasonably believe that among the 27,000 capped oil wells, some of which date back to the 1940s, none have ever leaked and none are leaking now, and none will leak in the future? The oil companies say, “Believe it.”

Murphy’s Law says, “Fools if you do.” I say those living near and visiting our coastlines might want to keep a stock of baby oil on hand because if the legacy of offshore drilling is thousands of capped abandoned wells under the waves and only the word of the oil companies that they will never leak – well, the Age of the Endless Tar Balls may be upon our shores from here to eternity. That’s a long, long time.

Richard A. Joyce is an associate professor in the mass communications department at Colorado State University-Pueblo. He is an award-winning journalist who served as managing editor, and subsequently editor and general manager of the Cañon City Daily Record during the years 1988-1994. The opinions he expresses in this column are strictly his own, and do not represent in any way the views of anyone else at the Redstone Review or at Colorado State University-Pueblo. He can be reached at phase15@mac.com.

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