by Sonia Shah
Registering tankers in these “flag of convenience” (FOC) countries allowed tanker owners to hire crews from wherever in the world they liked, and to pay them whatever they decided to, without deference to the labor standards that might constrain their terrestrial counterparts. According to the European Commission, the tax breaks and lower labor costs alone saved the owners of FOC ships about $1 million per ship every year.32
The calculus made sense throughout the cargo-shipping industry. Today almost 55 percent of the tons of goods shipped on the world’s oceans travels on FOC ships, providing a steady influx of cash for states willing to rent out their flags in exchange for looking the other way on safety and maintenance standards. In 2003, fewer than half of the ships that brought goods to Americans sailed under U.S. flags.33 Most cruise liners registered in the Bahamas and Panama.34 Criminals transporting Patagonian toothfish, illegal arms, and human slaves had been flying flags of convenience for decades.35
But although circumventing high labor standards may have improved bottom lines, it also added measurably to the danger of the sea-going endeavor. Human error causes most accidents,36 and poorly trained, underpaid seafarers are more likely to make mistakes. According to a lengthy investigation by the International Commission on Shipping, with increasing pressure to cut costs, working conditions for seafarers has deteriorated dangerously. “For thousands of today’s international seafarers,” writes Morris, “life at sea is modern slavery and their workplace is a slave ship.”37
In the fall of 2002, a subsidiary of Russian oil giant Alfa Group hired a tanker to ferry 77,000 tons of heavy fuel oil from Latvia to Singapore.38
The lineage of the Prestige was far from exalted. The tanker company that owned the Prestige was registered in war-torn Liberia, a popular FOC nation. The crew on the tanker had been hired out of the Philippines. The captain hailed from Greece. The tanker itself—a single-hulled giant built in Japan in the 1970s, whose hull had, just a year earlier, split and been patched up39—was registered in the tax-free-shipping nation of the Bahamas.40 Apportioning blame for what happened to this shady vessel would be next to impossible.
On November 13, the loaded-up tanker turned into the Bay of Biscay, a windy inlet where France and Spain curl around to meet the Atlantic. This stormy stretch of coast, called the Coast of Death by locals, had chewed many a ship in the past. As the Prestige turned into the bay, a storm kicked up. Careening in the vicious waves, the tired tanker ruptured. Its toxic cargo started to leak out.
When the storm finally subsided, the horrified Spanish government ordered the broken, half-sunk boat out of view. Tugboats towed the dying tanker one hundred miles off the coast. The gash widened, leaving a thickening trail of oil behind it. More than three thousand tons of fuel oil had already spilled into the bay, where its dense puddles hung partially submerged, like “blobs in a lava lamp,” as a U.S. government official put it.
The tanker looked like it might split in two, but the Spanish and Portuguese governments refused it access to any of its own ports, where the oil could be pumped into another ship.41 Broken and waiting, the oily pariah listed offshore. Then, finally, on November 19, the Prestige’s earlier wound re-opened, splitting the tanker along the seams of its earlier repair.42 It started to sink. Ninety percent of its oil, still in the ship’s hold, slipped under the waves.
“No one seems quite sure what will happen to the oil now,” opined the New York Times as the drama unfolded. “Optimists hope it will remain in intact containers, or solidify in the cold, deep waters even if it escapes.”43 It was thick, waxy, and might congeal, although what would happen when the Prestige finally hit bottom, two miles down, nobody knew.
Meanwhile, in the waters above the Prestige’s watery grave, the slick of oil that had already spilled out took aim at a wide stretch of coastline. Along the shore, octopus-catchers and mussel-gatherers crowded onto the blackened beaches to squint at the brown foaming waves. The wind was kicking up. It would take about a week for the Prestige’s spilled oil to crash onto the shore.44
On December 5, the Prestige’s oil hit the coast. Hundreds of fishers rushed out in their boats to scoop out the oil. They carried it back to the shore in thick goops, but there was nowhere to put it. Others uselessly strung blocks of polystyrene along the netting stretched across their beloved estuaries. Most gave up after a few hours, defeated by the sheer quantity of oil and the fumes pressing against their unprotected faces.45
This wasn’t the worst of it. Slowly, oil started bubbling up from the deeps. Heavy oil was oozing out of the broken shipwreck like toothpaste out of a tube.46 A French submarine shot footage of the sunken tanker. It was leaking 125 tons of fuel oil a day from fourteen different cracks. At this rate, the oil would keep spilling out for three years, making the Prestige quite possibly the very worst oil spill of all time.47 By the fall of 2004, 64,000 tons of the Prestige’s spilled oil had polluted 2,600 kilometers of coastline.48
The Prestige was the fourth 1970s-era single-hulled tanker that had sunk in European waters since 1992.49 The European Union moved to speed up the retirement of single-hulled tankers, so as in the United States, they’d be phased out entirely by 2015, over a century after the innovation had been pioneered. Most of the single-hulled tankers on the sea would have to be scrapped by then anyway.
It was a belated, inadequate technofix, critics said. Double-hulled tankers weren’t sink-proof. A double-hulled chemical tanker had sunk off the French coast in 2000.50 Plus, the double-hulled ships would be more expensive to maintain. As they aged, if market conditions remained the same, they’d be even less likely to be well-maintained. Well-trained, properly paid seafarers were many times more crucial. As Peter Morris commented, “You can have the most expensive car on the line, but if you don’t know how to drive it, it won’t make a difference.”51 Yet little was done to curb the FOC nations and shipowners’ shady deals, nor to penalize the oil companies and other cargo owners who profited from it.
Testament to the efficacy of the oil industry’s public divorce from the dirty business of shipping their products since the Valdez, Alfa successfully avoided any lasting association with the horrific spill, even as the oil they had loaded onto the Prestige continued to pollute the French and Spanish coasts. In 2003, that most green of oil companies, BP, entered into a lucrative joint venture with Alfa with hardly a peep from the public.52 Not only that, just weeks before the Prestige hit bottom, Exxon’s re-named shipping company openly attempted to overturn the 1990 Oil Pollution Act. The company wants to bring the Valdez back to the Alaskan coast it had so despoiled, as the tanker was losing money on its new Mediterranean route. The company argued to the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that the Valdez was being “wrongly singled out” by being banned from the Sound.53
As the New Statesman put it:This reluctance to challenge the interests of the shipping industry—the shadiest and most rapacious on the planet—is typical of the feeble system of international maritime regulation, with flags of convenience making it almost impossible to enforce even such rules as there are. Reflect that even the shipping companies’ deep involvement in terrorism and illegal immigration—the two biggest current western political obsessions—has failed to persuade governments to regulate them adequately. Then ask yourself how likely they are to regulate for the sake of a few thousand birds or a few million prawns. . . .
If we really care about global ecology, we shall use oil more sparingly, move it around more carefully and, as a result, pay through the nose for it. . . . Weep for the guillemots and the gulls by all means, but remember that oil is always dirty and that it always has a price.54
Ironically, though, the vast majority of the 6 million metric tons of oil that enter the world’s oceans every year comes not from accidental spills but from chronic, routine, and deliberate ones. More than 40 percent drips off the car-clogged roads and highways into rivers and streams sliding into the sea. Another 30 percent leaks in because oil tankers are so tipsy when emptied of
oil. They fill up with sea water to stabilize themselves, then pump this oil-contaminated ballast water overboard when the tanker refills with oil.55
Today, several thousand oil-filled monoliths ferry half a billion barrels of oil around the world every day.56 The amount of oil shipped around on the world’s oceans dwarfs any other single commodity; of the 5.9 billion tons of goods shipped on the world’s oceans every year, over a quarter is crude.57 Generally speaking, the oil industry spills more than one thousand barrels of oil for every billion barrels they transport,58 and their evasion of public responsibility for this remains virtually unchallenged.
The oil industry’s latest technique, FPSOs, will require even more tankers ferrying even more oil around the world’s oceans.
At Girassol off Angola, TotalFinaElf’s colossal FPSO would store 2 million barrels of oil above the deep-water corals that dotted the nearby seabed.59 Every five days or so, a tanker would come around to the platform to fill up on a few million barrels of oil. If such a facility were anchored in American waters, it would have to unload its oil onto tankers fortified with double hulls. But it is unlikely that Angolan authorities will require any such measures.60
Underwater pipeline networks, although expensive and cumbersome for the oil industry to build, are much safer than transferring and conveying huge amounts of oil around on the surface of the water in tankers and other vessels, as FPSOs require, part of the reason why U.S. regulators had banned FPSOs from the Gulf of Mexico until 2002.61
In a single year, the hive of oil industry activity in the Gulf of Mexico emitted fully eight hundred spills of oil within ten miles of the Texas coast; over two-thirds of these spills were not from the Gulf’s extensive network of underwater pipelines but from the vessels ferrying the oil to and fro.62
FPSOs can pitch and heave a dozen feet up and down and roll around up to 15 degrees.63 (To put this in perspective, recall that the Ocean Ranger sank after listing between 10 and 15 degrees.) In one industry-funded study, twenty FPSOs were found to have reported more than two hundred spills of about forty-five hundred barrels each over about six years.
Potentially worse than the quantifiable risks of oil spills are the unknown risks posed by FPSOs drilling in deep waters. According to the Minerals Management Service, the arm of the U.S. Department of Interior tasked with regulating offshore oil development, the deep ocean is “so poorly understood that little more than conjecture about possible impacts are possible.”64
Deep-sea drilling will produce even more waste than drilling in shallow water, watching environmentalists say, and what will come up the pipes from deep under the deepest seas could be much more exotic and potentially more toxic to the living water and air above it, too.65 When oil companies drill into the rock at the bottom of the sea, they bring out more than just the oil. They also bring up large volumes of the rock itself, plus the ancient waters trapped in the rock, and any other compounds that lived inside those prehistoric sedimentary layers. They don’t surgically siphon off the oil, either. They introduce new chemicals and compounds to the underworld. Mud saturated with various chemicals is shot down the holes to cool the rotating drillbit. Shattered dinosaur-era rocks, ancient water, natural gas, and chemically charged muds—now daubed with oil—spew out of the well along with the oil.
For years, rigs in the North Sea threw these contaminated wastes overboard. Today, somewhere around 300 million gallons of toxic sludge are piled in more than a hundred goopy mountains at the bottom of the North Sea. Some of these piles of waste are more than eighty feet tall, the droppings of an intestinally challenged oil predator.66The piles of waste contaminate the waters with barium, oil, zinc, copper, cadmium, and lead, spreading in some cases more than one hundred square kilometers from the field. Regulators fret about moving them in case the contamination spreads even further.67 FPSOs, drilling deeper holes, will have that much more waste to dispose of; in lightly regulated regions such as the waters off the coast of West Africa, environmentalists have good reason to suspect that the uncharted pristine sea floors of the deep ocean will be similarly marred.
Puncturing the deepest sea-bottoms could also potentially disrupt methane hydrate beds, bizarre geological formations that haunt the depths.
When oil and gas seep out on land, the gas simply floats up into the atmosphere. Under the deep sea, however, the natural gas wafting out of cracks in the sea-floor starts to form hydrates, solid icelike compounds made of methane under cold, high-pressure conditions. Worms and other creatures burrow into the yellow mounds, feeding on the methane-loving bacteria that swarm on their surface.68 If you could hold a piece of methane hydrate in your hand and light it with a match, it would explode into flames. There is fire in this ice.
Hydrates can respond quite violently to perturbations in their temperature-pressure environment. Eight thousand years ago, over a thousand cubic miles of quivering methane hydrate beds exploded with volcanic force when the seas above them got too warm. They slid almost five hundred miles off the continental slope into the Norwegian Sea, leaving behind massive craters on the sea floor. The gigantic tidal waves drowned miles of coastline.69
Oceanographer Jeremy Leggett was on a drilling ship when a core of methane hydrate was brought up to the surface. Out of its depth and pressure, the cylinder of dirty ice literally fizzed away in front of him. The frightened drilling engineer demanded the drilling abruptly end.70 If they cracked through more hydrate and enough gas was released, the bubbly foam it would form at the surface would be so thick and fluffy that the boat would literally drown in it.71
At Girassol and other deep-water drilling sites, oil companies will obviously try to avoid the hydrates. But scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are worried. “A dangerous situation can result if a small amount of friction from a drill bit is applied erroneously,” the government scientists warn on their Web site. “In fact, it could start a rapid and potentially catastrophic meltdown in a hydrate bed, which could harm drilling operators and the animals who rely on hydrates for habitat and food.”72
The consortium of oil companies banded together to innovate deepwater technology, DeepStar, had looked into the problem of methane hydrates in some detail, but their main goal was figuring out how to get the stuff out of their pipelines.73
Oil, lured out of its dark chambers in the earth’s crust, is warm, more than 100 degrees Fahrenheit. If forced to travel through pipes drowned under thousands of feet of water, that warm oil quickly starts to cool. Soon, the chill and the burden of tons of water on the trek through the long underwater pipelines starts to vex the associated gas. The warm puffs crystallize, turning into hydrate. Soon, the gases floating along thicken into a slush of hydrate clogging the pipe. The flow of oil slows to a trickle.
It could be a major problem for deepwater oil production, especially because the same deep, cold conditions that made it more likely to happen also make it so much harder to access the pipe to unclog it.74 At Girassol, they had insulated the pipes to prevent the hydrates from forming, but it wasn’t cheap.75
Deepwater oil development could also disrupt the habitats of still-unknown deep-sea creatures, potentially even introducing them to new ocean territories with disastrous consequences for local species. It takes just long enough for the giant FPSOs to drain their oilfields for the swimming marine creatures in their general vicinity to incorporate the rigs into their ecosystems. Plants and animals attach themselves to platform bottoms and fish and other swimmers dart in and out of their shade. In and of itself, this isn’t a bad thing. The trouble is that these mini-ecosystems are made mobile by the slow-moving FPSOs, which then can become a vector for introducing invasive new species to the world’s seas. When the oilfields run dry and the FPSOs slowly steam to their next drilling site, the mini-ecosystems they spawn are able to trail alongside, thereby colonizing new stretches of ocean.
Larvae from the invasive Australian spotted jellyfish, for instance, had found the floating oil platforms perfect
nurseries and promptly settled in. By the time the larvae had come of age, in the summer of 2000, their platforms had moved on. The now fully grown jellyfish found themselves in the Gulf of Mexico. Voracious, the highly efficient feeders feasted on the larvae and eggs of shrimp, crab, and other species. Fishermen and women watched as the invaders crowded out the gentler native jellies, devouring the youngest members of the fishery upon which their future angling success depended.76
What’s more, the community of deep-sea creatures that FPSOs could encounter and introduce to the world are only barely known. Scientists do know the deep sea isn’t the barren underwater desert that regulators and the offshore industry sometimes make it out to be. Biomass—the sum total of the mass of all the creatures living down in the deeps—predictably declines with depth, but curiously, diversity increases. Some oceanographers say the deep sea could hold more biodiversity than tropical rainforests, but of course the diverse creatures won’t include iridescent blue butterflies and lianas but a full menu of pallid worms and dark, angry-looking fish.77
One of the biggest predators of the deep sea, the giant sea squid (topping sixty feet, it is the largest invertebrate on earth) had never been seen alive until recently. For thousands of years, scientists suspected the fantastical creatures existed only because their corpses mysteriously appeared in fishermen’s nets and in the stomachs of sperm whales. Scores of intrepid missions to glimpse the creatures in their natural habitat have failed. Then, in 2005, Japanese scientists pursued sperm whales with a robotic camera dunked 3,000 feet underwater in hopes of capturing the first-ever footage of a live giant squid. This time, a 26-foot-long squid wrapped two of its ten waving tentacles around the provided bait. The creature got stuck and struggled to break free for over four hours, leaving behind an 18-foot-long piece of tentacle. It was the first time the legendary monster had been seen alive, testifying to the chasm of knowledge about the deeps.78
