The Deepwater Horizon disaster set new records for holding polluters to account. But it had much less impact on laws regulating offshore drilling or US oil dependence.
The Deepwater Horizon oil disaster catalyzed a decade of research on oil contamination in the Gulf of Mexico, from surface waters to the seabed, with surprising findings.
Donald Boesch, University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science
The BP Deepwater Horizon blowout on April 20, 2010 triggered the largest offshore oil spill in history. Ten years later, post-spill reforms are being undone and the Gulf of Mexico remains vulnerable.
In 2004 an underwater avalanche destroyed an oil platform off Louisiana, causing a 14-year spill. An expert on oil and gas seeps in the Gulf of Mexico warns that this could happen in other places.
Oysters are big business along the Gulf Coast, but raising them off-bottom – which yields a premium product – is just starting there. Hurricane Michael showed it won’t be easy.
What would you pay to keep trash off your favorite beach, or pollution away from a national park? Economists can tease these values out of our travel choices and use the numbers to help make policy.
The search for oil was once depicted in movies and books as a boys’ own adventure. But as films such as Deepwater Horizon show, in an age of anxieties over fossil fuels, oil’s story is now a darker one.
The new movie ‘Deepwater Horizon’ depicts the blowout that triggered the 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. A professor of petroleum engineering assesses what the film gets right and wrong.