The real cost will be in terms of "second thoughts"....
Say you are planning a project. It's risky enough, leasing one of these giant platforms, it costs you hundreds of thousands per day. You drill a hole in deep water, as much as 10,000 feet, and then downward into the geology from that. Costs money. You might or might not get as much product out of it as you originally planned.
The calculation you do is pretty simple: Cost of drilling versus expected payback, given the price you think you can get some years in the future for the crude oil, and the amount of crude oil is only an estimate.
Now, add to this calculation the possibility that you are found responsible for the biggest oil slick since the Exxon Valdez. Cleanup, fines, lawsuits.... It took Exxon a decade or more of legal fees to fight the fines they had for defiling Prince William Sound.
The boss might be a geologist, but the bean counters that are advising him are saying: "this business is stupidly risky. Let's just drill the least risky projects we have and leave this to Exxon"....
A further point: At this point, are you going to drill offshore South Beach in Florida? What about off the Florida Gulf Coast where all of the millionaire mansions are? Cape Cod? This did more to kill off "drill baby drill" than a years' worth of protests. The images in the next few weeks will start to come in: Oily water birds, dead alligators along all of that swampland, all of those docked shrimp boats..... it is going to be worse than Katrina for some of these communities.
Do you know what will turn a Republican into a Democrat? A big oil slick washing up in front of his beach house.
So the real cost will be: Second thoughts. People will rethink the projects they have and discount them based on the risk. People will see the extent of the catastrophe and rethink the wisdom of some of these other drilling projects.
What won't get rethought, for awhile yet, is the idea that we are dependent on this toxic mess for the lifeblood of our economy and our society. That's the real root cause. Maybe that is around the corner... if the Peak Oilers are right.
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