The timing has a subtle unnerving quality. A coalition of five environmental organizations filed a federal lawsuit contesting the Trump administration’s approval of BP’s newest and deepest drilling project on the exact sixteenth anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon explosion, which killed eleven workers, spilled over three million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, and permanently changed the lives of thousands of fishing families. It wasn’t a coincidental date. It seemed to make a statement.
Kaskida is the name of the project in question. Drilling equipment will descend 6,000 feet into Gulf waters and then push further into the seabed at BP’s $5 billion operation, which is located about 250 miles off the coast of Louisiana. The operation will reach a total depth of about six miles, which is deeper than Mount Everest. When operations start in 2029, BP anticipates extracting about 80,000 barrels of oil per day from six wells, drawing from an estimated 10 billion barrels of deposit.
Healthy Gulf, Turtle Island Restoration Network, Habitat Recovery Project, Sierra Club, and the Center for Biological Diversity, represented by Earthjustice, are the organizations filing the lawsuit. They contend that the project was approved by the Trump administration’s Interior Department without the necessary legal protections. The fundamental accusations are concrete. BP is accused of failing to show that it possesses the certified machinery, technical know-how, or real containment capabilities required to function safely at these extremely deep depths. The fact that the type of “loss of well control” incident that caused the 2010 disaster is reportedly six to seven times more likely at Kaskida’s location than at a typical deepwater well is especially startling. Just that figure begs the question of how this approval came about.
Additionally, according to the lawsuit, BP underestimated the volume of its worst-case spill by at least 500,000 barrels, a figure that the Interior Department used in its own environmental analysis. Although it’s still unclear how that got past scrutiny, it does cast doubt on the administration’s level of attention to detail.
For its part, BP makes a strong pushback. Since 2010, the company has completed more than 100 safely drilled deepwater projects, and it claims that new blowout-stopping equipment is now a standard part of its operations. A representative stated that “Deepwater Horizon forever changed BP” and that the lawsuit is “unfounded” and seems to be intended to prevent future offshore drilling in general as well as Kaskida. The final statement is most likely accurate; these organizations have been open about their wider opposition to the growth of fossil fuels. However, opposition to a particular, purportedly under-examined approval is not the same as opposition to expansion.
Additionally, the communities that are most directly at risk are not abstract. Fishermen who lost their jobs as a result of the 2010 spill were forced to perform cleanup work with insufficient chemical protections, according to Alyssa Portaro of the Habitat Recovery Project. These same individuals are now being asked to acknowledge that BP can safely drill six miles into the ground under conditions of extreme heat and pressure that even seasoned operators find intolerable. That request has a certain weariness to it, and it’s difficult to ignore it when reading their stories.
The larger context is also important. The Trump administration last month exempted Gulf oil-and-gas operations from some Endangered Species Act requirements, proposed cutting more than 30% of the budget and personnel from the agency in charge of overseeing offshore drilling, and moved to weaken well-control safety regulations created in the wake of Deepwater Horizon. The Rice’s whale, a species unique to the Gulf that lost about a fifth of its population following the 2010 spill, is one of the most vulnerable.
What the courts decide regarding those particular legal arguments regarding missing safety documentation will probably determine whether Kaskida moves forward. However, as this develops, it seems that the true issue isn’t limited to a single BP project. The question is whether the residents of the Gulf coast have any significant influence over the standards that the U.S. government is willing to hold the industry to.
