A group of environmental organizations filed a federal lawsuit on April 20, the sixteenth anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon explosion, to prevent BP from drilling one of the deepest oil wells ever attempted in the Gulf of Mexico. The timing wasn’t accidental. It was a declaration.
Kaskida is the name of the project in question. Since discovering the field in 2006 and spending years creating the kind of high-pressure drilling technology that might actually reach it, BP has been quietly working toward it for almost 20 years. The location, which is about 250 miles off the coast of Louisiana at a water depth of about 6,000 feet, is in an area that is, by all reasonable standards, at the edge of what humans have been able to drill safely. As some of the plaintiffs have noted, the wells would extend about six miles below the sea floor, which is deeper than Mount Everest’s height. However, that detail changes when you consider a blowout as opposed to a summit.
In March, the Trump administration approved BP’s development plan, describing it as “a major step forward” that would lower energy costs for American families, create jobs, and unlock 275 million barrels of previously unrecoverable oil. Without much publicity, the $5 billion project was approved by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management of the Interior Department. The attorneys then became involved.
Earthjustice filed a challenge in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, requesting that the court examine and overturn that approval on behalf of five organizations, including the Sierra Club, Healthy Gulf, and the Center for Biological Diversity. Political opposition to oil drilling in general is not the foundation of the legal argument. It’s more specific and, in some respects, more difficult to reject: the organizations claim that the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management approved a plan that lacked legally required information and, in multiple instances, relied on figures that were clearly incorrect.
BP’s own worst-case spill estimates are one of the main allegations. The plaintiffs claim that BP miscalculated the possible volume of a catastrophic blowout by at least 500,000 barrels, and the Interior Department chose to use BP’s figures in its environmental analysis instead of realizing the mistake. According to the groups, in the worst case, Kaskida might leak up to 4.5 million barrels of oil into the Gulf. Deepwater Horizon spilled about 3.2 million, for comparison. The possibility that the government’s own analysis was based on a floor that was already too low raises some concerns.
What the groups refer to as a failure of qualification is the subject of the second pillar of the legal case. A “loss of well control” incident, the type of catastrophic pressure failure that led to the 2010 disaster, is statistically six to seven times more likely at Kaskida’s depth than at a normal deepwater well. According to the lawsuit, BP has not proven through the necessary documentation that it possesses the tools, knowledge, or containment capacity necessary to handle a blowout at that depth. According to BP, it has safely drilled over 100 deep-water wells since 2010, and Kaskida is the result of decades of technological advancement. A representative for the company described the lawsuit as “unfounded.”
It’s difficult to ignore the unique challenge here: In addition to causing the worst offshore oil spill in American history, BP is currently requesting permission to drill even deeper into the same body of water. The new project is not inherently unlawful because of that past. However, it appears to increase the burden of proof. A federal appeals court will now decide whether the administration truly met that burden.
The case feels more complicated because of the larger regulatory framework. Scientists fear that the Trump administration’s recent proposals to weaken the well-control regulations put in place after Deepwater Horizon, merge the two offshore safety agencies that were purposefully split after the 2010 accident, and exempt Gulf drilling operations from some Endangered Species Act requirements could hasten the decline of the Rice’s whale, a species unique to the Gulf that lost about a fifth of its population in the wake of the spill. The newly combined oversight agency’s budget cuts would result in a more than 30% decrease in safety personnel.
It’s genuinely unclear if all of this points to an administration that has simply stopped paying attention to the lessons of 2010 or one that has placed a calculated wager on energy production. It is evident that a federal court will now have to decide whether Kaskida’s approval complied with the legal requirements, not the political ones or BP’s own guarantees, but the actual statutory obligations that dictate what regulators must confirm before approving a project of this nature. The question at hand is that. The question is more specific than the environmental movement would sometimes like. However, it might be the perfect one.
