See also, ‘ Spillover effect,’ for how other oil companies and sectors fared in BP’s wake.
▼ Big Oil has been seen as a corporate bad boy ever since the U.S. Supreme Court broke up John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil in 1911, but its reputation would hit a new low 99 years later. BP PLC, the world’s third-biggest publicly traded energy company — and fourth-biggest public company of any kind — flirted with annihilation this year after a deadly explosion aboard the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig on April 20 and the environmental disaster that spread across the Gulf of Mexico in the four months that followed.
Based on an estimated spill rate of between 53,000 and 62,000 barrels per day, nearly five million barrels of crude oil escaped into the Gulf, contaminating beaches, wetlands and the sea floor itself. Fisheries remain closed over a wide area, and tourism is down. As of Sept. 29, BP had spent US$11 billion in spill-related costs. It has sold off another US$11 billion in assets, and plans to sell more as a way to finance a US$20-billion trust to compensate claimants for damages. The company’s market capitalization is down 33% since April 20. The market cap of Anadarko Petroleum, BP’s minority partner on the well, is off by US$9.5 billion, and rig operator Transocean’s has declined US$7.8 billion. Plus, BP chief executive Tony Hayward — who infamously complained in the midst of the crisis that he’d “like his life back” — lost his job, replaced by his American deputy, Bob Dudley.
Ask any American, and they’ll tell you none of these players has suffered enough. The accident and its aftermath didn’t just expose BP’s duplicity in its earlier green-tinged promises to move “Beyond Petroleum.” (Few fell for that anyway.) It also undermined whatever faith the public still had in oil companies’ competence to manage the risks inherent in their business. And when corporate accountability is found catastrophically lacking, regulation and political expediency rush in.
The Gulf oil spill resulted in an outright ban on the drilling of exploratory wells that was only recently lifted. The National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling is expected to recommend extensive changes to industry practices and regulation before year-end. Deep-water drilling licences will likely become much harder to come by, not only in the U.S. but in most developed countries, including Canada. That’s bad news for an industry that’s seen its access to the world’s 1.34 trillion barrels of recoverable oil reserves shrink to about 20% as governments from Russia to Venezuela progressively nationalize their oil industries. The multinationals are similarly shut out of China, which this year surpassed the United States as the world’s largest consumer of energy.
Though extracting, transporting and refining a liquid natural resource is a difficult, messy business, this latest stream of mishaps began to look like a pattern. A court ruling this year against Syncrude Canada in the 2008 death of 1,600 waterfowl threw the existence of tailings ponds into a legal grey area that could expose mine operators to future lawsuits. Two separate leaks on Enbridge Inc.’s pipeline network in the U.S. Midwest refuelled efforts to block the transshipment of oilsands-derived bitumen to the American refining heartland. Even China National Petroleum Corp. faced a PR debacle with a spill resulting from a pipeline explosion in the port of Dalian last July.
The costs to come for Big Energy are as yet incalculable. Public revulsion against the oil and gas industry increases the likelihood that contentious expansions — such as new oilsands mines in Alberta, shale gas extraction in Quebec and the northeastern U.S., oil pipelines and tanker terminals in British Columbia, and TransCanada Corp.’s Keystone XL bitumen pipeline direct from Alberta to the Gulf Coast — will not go ahead, or at least be burdened by onerous new regulations and trade-offs with regional stakeholders. Insurance rates have gone up for all producers, and millions more will likely be spent on image-burnishing initiatives.
Oil, of course, is a globally traded commodity, and those new costs of doing business will in time be passed on to consumers. If the industry’s market value has been hit as a result of its bad image — in fact, North American energy indexes are down only slightly since April — its profitability will soon revert to the mean. The addict seldom has a kind word for his dealer, but he keeps coming back for more.
There are compelling signs, however, that oil demand in the developed world has peaked and is now in a secular decline. While many market watchers expected American consumption to rebound after the recession, it has continued to hover well below the 20 million barrels a day it averaged over the past decade. On a per capita basis, the drop is more dramatic. Between 1982 to 2007, consumption averaged 2.6 gallons per person per day. Today, it is below 2.3 gallons, an 11% decline.
Hatred of Big Oil may hasten that slide. Though Democrats and Republicans see different ways to do it, there is today a bipartisan resolve to wean America off imported oil. “History shows that by far the most influential force in shaking up the energy business is government intervention,” Canadian energy economist Peter Tertzakian wrote recently in his blog, The End of Energy Obesity. “Over the coming years, energy producers must recognize that demand-side management policies in developed countries like the United States are going to be an influential trend acting on their businesses.”
Demand management is more easily applied to home electricity and natural gas consumption than the gas pump, where decisions are largely left up to the consumer. But for consumers, too, the BP spill may have finally helped connect the dots between spoiled beaches and blithely driving to the gym — only to run on a treadmill.
