I'm no expert, but I do know a bit about drilling for fossil fuels, because I work in the industry and know the geniuses who do it for a living.

Here I sit, listening to some talking head on TV mention the Exxon Valdez. You may remember that disaster - a tanker full of oil had an accident twenty years ago and made a huge environmental mess.

Here's what I'm on about . . . Drilling for oil and gas is done with such amazing care these days, and with such expertise. You wouldn't believe the precautions taken, or the incredible complexity of modern drilling; for instance, drilling horizontal wells thousands of feet through shale.

So here's a good antidote, excerpted below, from Jonah Goldberg:

Having completed Underwater Helicopter Egress Training, you head over to New Orleans and get on the now terrifying helicopter and fly to a mobile drilling rig more than a hundred miles out in the Gulf of Mexico — but not before the safety instructor shows you a home movie of a family finishing a helicopter tour. The mother and stuffed-bunny-carrying daughter exit first; then the father, who, in a moment of wholesome excitement, raises his arms as if to say, “That was great!” and has both his hands sliced off while the wife shrieks in horror and blood splatters the lens and, presumably, the bunny. The video has the desired effect. Everyone in the room immediately issues a Memo to Self: “Do Not Raise Arms until Clear of the Helicopter and You Are Home on Your Couch, and Even Then, Be Careful.”

The thoroughness of the training course — which took twice as long as the rig tour itself — is both useful and instructive, and not only because National Review cruises do not teach you how to maximize the survivability of a leap off the Lido deck (you have an 11 percent chance of surviving a 200-foot jump into water if you lack my vital training). It reminds you how seriously the oil industry takes safety. Now, fans of the cable series Black Gold — one of the many TV shows that profile incredibly dangerous professions, along with Ice Road Truckers, Deadliest Catch, Grizzly Bear Teasers, and (no doubt coming soon) Gay Zionist Party Planners of Yemen — might object. In the show (which was much disparaged by the pros I talked with), wildcat oilmen constantly find themselves in death-defying predicaments, having their bodies smashed and twisted by huge oil-slathered apparatuses. But those operations are akin to the “pro wrestling” matches conducted by teenagers in basements and backyards and posted on YouTube.

At major oil installations, like the platforms in the Gulf of Mexico or on the North Slope of Alaska, the scene is more like NASA Flight Control. At Noble Paul Romano, a mobile drilling platform (i.e., one that’s not planted into the sea floor, but floats attached to enormous anchors) run by Marathon Oil, safety is an obsession (hence my Underwater Helicopter Egress Training), and they’ve won all sorts of awards to prove it. The last environmental “mishap” occurred nearly two years ago, in July of 2007, when a tiny amount of oil spilled in the air-compressor room. No oil hit the water. In fact, no significant spill has been recorded (and they record everything) since the Noble Paul Romano went into service a decade ago. And, as of this writing, they’d gone 361,768 man-hours injury- and accident-free. I asked what the last injury was. The answer: A guy smashed his finger with a hammer or some equipment. Now keep in mind: This is a massive contraption where chains, pipes, pulleys, and other moving parts hold hundreds of thousands of tons, and giant drilling doodads burrow through solid rock a couple of miles beneath roiling open seas to suck out oil and gas, almost literally without spilling a drop. That mankind can do such things with as much bloodshed as the average suburban male endures while building a tree house says something wonderful about human ingenuity.


Not surprisingly, opponents of offshore drilling often seem concerned more about the safety of the environment than that of oil workers. For instance, they assert that oil rigs discharge mercury into the Gulf of Mexico. That is possible, but the total amount would equal about 0.7 percent of the mercury poured into the Gulf by the Mississippi River, and the Florida Institute of Technology has found that methylmercury levels around oil rigs are indistinguishable from those in other areas. Other complaints include the claim that oil rigs are inherently risky because they lie in the path of hurricanes, which could cause oil spills. This is true up to a point — hurricanes are a major challenge, and they cause real damage. I asked a manager on the Noble Paul Romano what it is like onboard during a hurricane. He answered, “I don’t know and I really wouldn’t want to find out.” He doesn’t know because, days in advance of the hurricane, crews work tirelessly to secure the installation and leave. When they return, metal is often twisted, structures washed away. The metal stairs running alongside the exterior of another rig I visited, the Lobster, were badly buckled in spots from hurricane damage. Nonetheless, hurricanes don’t cause major spills. Roughly 75 percent of the rigs in the Gulf of Mexico were hit by two back-to-back Category 5 hurricanes, Katrina and Rita, in 2005. According to the Minerals Management Service, no major spills resulted.

The simple fact is that environmental safety, or “stewardship” — or, if you prefer, bad-publicity-and-trial-lawyer-phobic ass-covering — is something of a religion on these rigs. If your candy-bar wrapper blows overboard, or if you drop a ballpoint pen over the side, you have to file an incident report and prove to both management and numerous federal agencies that you did everything possible to retrieve it from the ocean. There’s zero tolerance for anything going in the water that’s not supposed to be there. This ethos is hardly unique to Gulf Coast operations. As I reported from the North Slope of Alaska (see “Ugh, Wilderness!” in the Aug. 6, 2001, issue of National Review), the image, popularized by greens, of rapacious oil companies’ staining Mother Nature’s knickers has long been myth rather than reality. “If I took a leak out there, I’d get fired,” an engineer told me on the North Slope. “In the winter, if you spill some coffee into the snow, you’d better go get a shovel and dig it up.”