By Debra Wirth
The 20,000 tonnes of crude oil which "escaped" into the seas off Western Australia made nationwide front page news for several days running. When it became disabled on Sunday, July 21, the Greek tanker Kirki left a slick at least 90 kilometres long and 10 kilometres wide. The slick came closest to the coast near Jurien Bay and Cervantes, but it will have an impact on the marine environment and the people of the areas both to the north and south of those towns. It was probably the worst oil spill in Australian history. That only means that we have been relatively lucky — so far.
Spills, fires and other accidents involving oil are a daily occurrence around the world. They are, as Greenpeace said of the WA spill, an inevitable consequence of the world's almost exclusive dependence on an energy source which is not only dangerous to humans but incredibly environmentally destructive in every stage of its use.
At risk now and for an indeterminable time into the future is the entire unique and widely varied marine ecosystem of that stretch of the WA coast.
Our dependence on and never-ending frantic search for oil continue not because it is the only possible source of energy but because it has proved to be the most profitable source. The big companies and governments which own and control the reserves have no interest in finding safer and more environmentally friendly alternatives when they are doing very well as it is. Oil spills and burning wells, such as those currently ablaze in Kuwait and Iraq, are only minor problems to the big companies involved in the very profitable mining and refining of oil.
This was illustrated very clearly in the Exxon Valdez Alaskan spill when the balance sheets were being drawn up. There was no consideration that oil itself might be the problem and that it was time to look for alternatives. Instead the American Petroleum Institute concluded that more research needed to be conducted into better clean-up technology and better tanker construction for the transportation of oil. It proposed a US$250 million five-year plan in which "quick action centres" would be set up to rush equipment and workers to oil-stricken sites.
A similar centre has been established in Geelong, Victoria, by a subsidiary of the Australian Institute of Petroleum — the oil companies' umbrella organisation. The centre is equipped with millions of dollars' worth of pollution control equipment and has the ability to deploy it anywhere in the country within 24 hours. It did respond to the WA spill, chartering a Qantas 747 and
an Ansett freight aircraft to fly booms, skimmers, dispersant chemicals, helicopter spraying systems and technical advisers to Perth.
Limits on 'clean-up'
However, the time and place of an oil spill cannot be predicted, and each area affected will place restraints on the type of clean-up technology that can be employed. In the case of the WA spill, chemical dispersants could not be used on the slick over crayfish breeding grounds. The clean-up effort in that area was therefore restricted to the more manual methods of skimming and breaking up the slick.
This method is, of course, less environmentally harmful. However, if the Exxon experience is anything to go by, it will also be far from thorough.
In other areas, chemical dispersants were used. The main active ingredient in the dispersant is glycol ether, which breaks the oil down into droplets. This speeds up the evaporation process.
According to Greenpeace, when the fumes given off by evaporating oil are inhaled by marine life, the result can be pulmonary difficulties and death. The dispersant also makes some of the oil sink to the ocean floor, threatening seagrasses and reefs which are a major part of the ecosystem in the waters off Cervantes and Jurien Bay.
Chemical dispersants can be extremely damaging to the marine environment, both in the short and long terms, and their effect is in no way as simple and as harmless as "mixing milk in coffee", as one senior research scientist employed on the WA spill told the media.
The Environmental Protection Agency in the US also began experimenting with oil-eating microbes after the Alaskan spill in an effort to find a "biological" solution to oil spills. That says something about the US government's priorities: even its environment department makes no pretense of looking for a more environmentally sustainable alternative.
No fix
Moreover, the research into better clean-up technology for oil spills gives the impression that the environment can be returned to the state it was in before disaster struck. This myth is perpetuated by the lack of information on clean-up efforts after a certain period and about how the area is recovering — or failing to do so. The impression is always that the clean-up has been totally successful, and therefore no more attention need be paid to the area. The commercial media are by and large not
interested in chasing up the long-term effects of oil spills.
It is not possible, however, to return an area which has been saturated with oil to its previous state. Estimates of recovery time, such as that offered by Exxon on Prince William Sound, are simply false. A paper by Laurindo Garcia on the Alaskan spill documents the region's wildlife. The sound is home to the largest concentration of orcas in the world, one quarter of the US population of sea otters and the entire US population of nesting Canadian geese. Grizzly bears and bald eagles also live in the area.
The habitat of the Prince William Sound species has been irreversibly changed even though some of the spilled oil was removed. The full impact will not be apparent for many years to come. The region will certainly not be completely recovered by 1994, as the Exxon company scientists predicted.
The effects of oil on marine life, Greenpeace points out in a paper released just after the WA spill, are not restricted to the visible effects of birds and animals, beaches and rocks being coated with oil. The coating of birds and animals causes a loss of insulation, and the bird or animal can then die of hypothermia. The animals also swallow the oil while attempting to clean themselves. This causes damage to the intestinal tract. Inhalation of oil and fumes, which becomes a worse problem when a chemical dispersant has been used, may also result in damage to the lungs and "toxic pneumonia". There is also evidence of disorders to liver, heart and nervous system as well as genetic damage and other reproductive effects as a result of exposure to oil.
According to Greenpeace, the fate of the sea lion population in the area is of the greatest concern. If the oil reaches the islands which the sea lions inhabit, the impact will be disastrous. Oil on their coats will reduce their insulating capacity. The population at present includes a large number of young pups which are particularly at risk.
Oil covering the leaves and stems of seagrasses will kill them, and reefs polluted with oil can take decades to recover, if they recover at all. The entire ecosystem of an area is, of course, changed if not destroyed by the impact of big oil spills.
Some of the components of oil will evaporate or dissolve in the water. What is left can be broken down to some extent by the winds and waves, but this takes longer than just a few years. Some of the oil will wash up on the beaches in tar balls. Some of what is broken down will be eaten by bacteria or plankton, which in turn will be eaten by fish and so on. The food chain is infected for an indeterminate length of time.
Profits above all
Aside from the adverse publicity which comes from causing such an environmental catastrophe, oil companies are largely unconcerned about the actual devastation of the environment.
The Exxon Valdez was refloated shortly after the Alaskan spill and sent south to San Diego for overhaul. Sufficient care was not taken in temporarily patching it up, however, and it spilled more of its oil off San Diego, creating another slick 29 kilometres long. Rather than then writing the ship off as scrap, the company simply changed its name and kept it in operation.
With this sort of complete disregard for their crews' safety and the environment on the part of oil companies, it is little wonder that accidents continue to occur. They are, indeed, inevitable. The huge quantities of oil currently moved around the world cannot be transported without major spills by any technology currently available or likely to become available in the foreseeable future.
Moreover, even if foolproof means of oil transport existed, and oil companies could be forced to use them, oil use cannot be made environmentally harmless. The only way to solve the world's energy needs in a long-term way is to find a more sustainable and non-polluting source of energy. The "right" of oil companies to continue to jeopardise the planet needs to be challenged. So do governments which do nothing in the face of ongoing disasters on the scale of the WA oil spill.
Greenpeace's first statement on the WA oil spill concluded: "What we have in the face of this enormous threat, is a government which allows oil tanker traffic through the Great Barrier Reef and unprecedented oil exploration throughout the sensitive Australian coastline — a government apparently committed to allowing these sorts of disasters to continue unabated for the sake of oil company profits".