How BP's $18.7-Billion Oil-Spill Settlement Could Help the Gulf of Mexico

Oil company  to pay US$18.7 billion to settle civil lawsuits over the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. An estimated 3.19 million barrels of oil poured into the Gulf during the months-long crisis, the largest marine spill in US history.

The payment will add to $14 billion that BP said it had already paid in claims, advances and settlements related to the spill.

Donald Boesch, a marine scientist and president of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science in Cambridge, spoke to  about BP’s settlement and what it will mean for restoration efforts and scientific studies in the Gulf. Boesch served on the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling. He was a witness in the US government’s lawsuit against BP for violating provisions of the Clean Water Act, and has advised the National Academy of Science's US$500-million Gulf Research Program.

What do you think of the settlement?

Now our challenge is to make sure we don’t blow it and that we use a scientifically sound basis for design and implementation of projects, account for outcomes and advance smart restoration while also using this opportunity to grow our scientific capacity.

That could have gone on for many more years, as the NRDA [the Natural Resource Damage Assessment process, which calculates the environmental costs of oil spills] is wont to do. So this resolves that and therefore provides a substantial amount of money in a time frame that could be very helpful.

If you had the opportunity to decide how this money would be spent, what would you do?

It mentioned that we have a crisis of the deterioration of the Mississippi Delta that has resulted from a whole bunch of things: oil and gas activity, flood protection, navigation. We have this very large dead zone in the Gulf that is the result of the industrial agriculture that has fed the nation and helps feed the world.

We have ideas and plans in place to address those issues, but they have lacked the resources. So I would think, let’s first look at the proposals and plans we have that have gone through the process of scientific and public review, and see if we can get those done and implemented.

If you look back at past efforts in responding to oil spills, notably the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska in 1989, it does not seem that restoration efforts have a good track record.

But the scale of this amount of money—when you add the additional money that BP has already committed under early restoration and the NRDA and the criminal settlement—the scale of $20 billion is really unprecedented.

One of the other challenges we have is that it is not entirely clear that we have the process in place to use the best and most rigorous science in a timely way to ensure the best sustainable outcome. That is a major challenge not only for the people in charge of spending those funds, but also for the scientific community to step up to the plate and avoid the stereotype of scientists coming up with a long list of things we don’t know and just saying we need more research.

Do you have concerns about how this money will be allocated? It is such a large amount.

Are there enough scientists who can do these studies?

If you go to some of their meetings, you will see a whole new generation of graduate students that have been brought in to work on this. So in a way, it has been a shot in the arm in terms of that part of the pipeline.

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