Gulf of Mexico at risk from continuous invisible oil spills
The US Gulf coast is at risk from hundreds of thousands of gallons of spilled oil, leaking from old equipment, according to SkyTruth. From the 12-year-old Taylor Energy site to more recent spillages, it said countless "invisible spills" of 100,000 gallons or less are putting coastlines, people and wildlife in danger. SkyTruth said the situation is unlikely to change as much of the oil industry's 20-30-year-old infrastructure is prone to leakage in harsh weather, while a lack of penalties for underreporting spills and no assessment of contractors' fitness to operate gives companies no incentive to clean up.
Hurricane Ivan would not die. After traveling across the Atlantic Ocean, it stewed for more than a week in the Caribbean, fluctuating between a Category 3 and 5 storm while battering Jamaica, Cuba, and other vulnerable islands. And as it approached the US Gulf Coast, it stirred up a massive mud slide on the sea floor. The mudslide created leaks in 25 undersea oil wells, snarled the pipelines leading from the wells to a nearby oil platform, and brought the platform down on top of all of it. And a bunch of the mess---owned by Taylor Energy---is still down there, covered by tons of silty sediment. Also, twelve years later, the mess is still leaking.

The Taylor Energy site will continue to leak for the next century, according to the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement. Since the storm, its oil slick stretches over eight square miles on an average day. Meanwhile, Taylor Energy gone bankrupt with only 9 wells plugged, and is suing the federal government for $432 million in trust for leak response, saying there's nothing left to do. “Taylor is the most blatant example of everything that can go wrong with conventional offshore drilling,” says David Manthos, program coordinator at environmental watchdogging nonprofit SkyTruth.

While the Taylor Energy spill is the worst case scenario, it's not the US’s only low-profile leaker. Every year thousands of oil and chemical spills occur in waters around the country, but unless you live in a highly impacted area like Louisiana, you probably only hear about a handful of them. That's partly because the Coast Guard classifies many spills---up to 100,000 gallons---as minor or moderate, and small spills get less of everything: less media attention, less regulation, less environmental impact assessment, and most critically, less funding to clean them up.

It makes sense that not every greasy pelican is national news. But as a group, they probably should be. Oil is toxic. Oil spills, however small, have a cumulative environmental impact. But the regulations in place to prevent them are limited, and in some cases, absurd. For instance, the US Coast Guard basically relies on oil companies to use the honor system when reporting leaks. And since oil leaks happen not only because oil technology is often either too old or too new, but also because of human error, that's what we call a real conflict of interest.

Size Doesn't Matter

Oil leaks have been around longer than humans have been drilling. In Gulf of Mexico and off the coast of California, petroleum naturally seeps up through the seafloor. But natural oil seeps are slow, and old. The oil droplets rising through the water from the seafloor create only the thinnest of slicks on the surface, and the organisms that live over these seeps---like oil-gobbling bacteria---have evolved to cope with it. But the majority of ocean life never developed the appetite for oil.

Or much defense against it. Air breathing animals like dolphins and turtles suck in oil if they surface in a slick, and when even small amounts of oil end up in their lungs, they suffer fatal pneumonia-esque health issues. Plants and algae can't photosynthesize under a grungy film. And even a few molecules of oil can kill fish larvae.

Human physiology isn't a fan either. "Oil slicks can be very noxious. My graduate students have become ill from the fumes when we've gone out there," says Ian MacDonald, an oceanographer at Florida State University. MacDonald and his students have turned the collapsed Taylor Energy site into something of a lab, because it reliably leaks between 84 and 1,470 gallons per day.

Except, Size Definitely Matters

Each red dot above represents an oil spill reported to the National Response Center between 2005 and today. They're concentrated in the Gulf, but you can zoom out to see spills in other areas, are click on a spill to see when someone reported it.

Even a few thousand gallons of spilled oil is consequential. Even more consequential are more than 30,000 of those so-called small spills each year. Which is probably the bare minimum spill estimate, says Manthos of SkyTruth. Really, it's hard to know if this figure is complete, and even harder to calculate the volume of oil being leaked. Some new oil equipment is smart enough to know when, and measure how much, it leaks. But those sensors can malfunction. Plus most oil infrastructure is way older. Most of the time oil companies, activists, and the US Coast Guard are all doing some version of educated guessing.