Should the U.S. Give Canada the Oil-Drilling Business?
Today, BP spending on the Gulf oil spill has hit $100 million per day (source: James Heron, Wall Street Journal). AP reports the total oil spill price-tag so far: $2.65 billion. See overview article on the Gulf Oil Spill.
An article in the July Oilweek Magazine simultaneously suggests that Canada might be best suited to take over oil and gas exploration.
The article says that Worker Safety is the thing that Canadian oil exploration has that other countries have not yet mastered. And that the investment pays off when you start looking at the price-tag that less-than-spectacular Safety Procedures can bring.
"The EH&S stool has three legs," McKenzie-Brown writes: "customs and social attitudes; regulatory and industrial codes; technical skills and operating environments. If the legs aren´t the same length, the stool wobbles. Since the three legs of the Canadian stool are level and strong, there are good reasons to encourage the industry to reach out to new operating environments."
"People [doing safety turnarounds at gas plants] now have fall-arrest equipment. They don´t do anything without fire protection and breathing air equipment. A friend of mine tells me that at the plant he works at, the safety bill used to be $20,000. Now it´s like $300,000 to $400,000. Every time someone goes into a vessel, someone has to be there to watch. They may need to have specialized safety equipment or even specially trained personnel to watch that person in the vessel." His point is that this investment pays off in a relatively safe and accident-less history of oil and gas incidents.
With oil leaking in the Gulf of Mexico, Canada is well-positioned to deal with the heightened risks—and reap the bountiful rewards—of frontier exploration, says Peter McKenzie-Brown. He argues that Canada has Environmental, Health & Safety -- or EH&S -- so embedded in its policies and the fabric of its business culture that Canada is in prime position to pick up the slack in oil drilling that the U.S. may be unable to handle.
It comes down to EH&S - McKenzie-Brown says that Safety is the third leg of a stool that U.S. oil companies have shortened beyond repair. Source: "It’s a matter of safety," Oilweek Magazine. Read more: http://www.oilweek.com/articles.asp?ID=745#ixzz0sA9ufQxV
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