Transcript:

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The price that we pay for oil is not just the price per barrel; ultimately, it's also the cost of cleaning up any spill. I’m Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet.

ambience: oil drilling

We’re listening to the sound of an oil drilling operation. Every year, thousands of spills and leakages put million of gallons of oil into US coastal waters.

“Given the amount of oil that's transported worldwide there's really no way to have a completely safe system. As the use of oil has increased over the years, the amount of material released, at least accidental releases, continue to increase in frequency.”

Dr. Chuck Kennicott is part of the Geochemical Environmental Research Group at Texas A & M University.

“Once oil is released to the environment, it depends on a number of factors what the ultimate impact will be of a spill. These factors include everything from the amount of material spilled, the weather conditions at the time that the oil is spilled, the type of material that's spilled, and how quickly people can react to try and clean up the spill. Once oil has been spilled there are a number of techniques that can be used to try to mitigate the spill: the physical removal of oil from the environment, dispersing the oil into the water, and then a third possibility is actually using some biological agent to consume some portion of the oil. The relative number of spills that have happened are increasing awareness and it's apparent that there needs to be a national policy as well as a national readiness to react to these types of spills in a timely manner. It appears that in a number of these spills if the proper types of equipment and the money had been available very early on in the spill that the ultimate impacts would have been very much reduced.”

Pulse of the Planet is presented by the National Science Foundation. I’m Jim Metzner.

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