But the Daily Fail will keep reminding us about the mountain of defunct EV batteries which will need dealing with every few years when your BEV needs a replacement

 

I watched a program on National Geographic probably 2/3 months ago that was covering the same subject. They were diving down to the ocean floor and it was horrendous what they've discovered. Rotten, leaking pipes. No capped holes, oil keep leaking and destroying everything. It was horrible

 

It’s (as always) a matter of will and allocating money to clean up this clown show. As far as the current US administration goes, they have neither but plenty of clowns. So the mess will only get worse as time rolls on. Another Deep Water Horizon incident may focus minds.

 

Only if the company is Foreign owned, otherwise business as usual.
Perhaps Joe public could bring a case against the geographic owner of the land/sea. That might make Trump reconsider the Gulf of America 😉

 

It’s a similar situation with wells on land, and coal mines. Etc. It is convenient and cheap to abandon, and to use corporate structure to lose things no longer valuable, it is expensive and unprofitable to clean up your mess when you are done.

 

The fully charged video about the methane leaks from wells in usa pops into my mind each time something like this pops up.

there is the video.

 

Stacks of abandoned wells like this all over Texas, many years ago I went to see a scheme for cheaply bringing them back into production. Unfortunately the test was a failure due to we believe corroded production tubing and or casing. In the end they scheme failed due to the cost of overhauling the wells plus taking on the liability for the well.

But on the other side on GOM platforms that are correctly decommissioned, the structure is often toppled to create an artificial reef.

 

The absolute minimum they should be doing is capping them properly.

 

Privatise the profits, socialise the costs. The mantra of big business in every sector all over the world.

 

Before I was injured at work I worked in the oil and gas industry for a long time.

It will be staggering just how much scrap equipment, tools and pipes have been left behind in our own waters.

One of the product lines was designed, and I'm sure it was a legal requirement, so parts could be removed from the sea bed.

For all the thousands of assembles sold to customers, only one tool for retrieval was ever ordered.

It's very clear that the companies drilling had zero intention of removing the tools and planned to leave them.

 

Another video regarding land drilled hills being left to leak methane.

 

Just for some sense of the scale of the problem in the Gulf of Mexico (or America whatever).

There’s currently around 2700 disused wells and 500 oil platforms awaiting remediation. They reckon by 2030 there could over over 5000 disused wells…

Abandoned offshore oil wells in the Gulf of Mexico likely to double by 2030 - Offshore Network

An analysis by Ocean Conservancy has shown that the number of abandoned offshore oil wells that are in need of decommissioning could likely double by 2030 - Content - Abandoned offshore oil wells in the gulf of mexico likely to double by 2030

offsnet.com

“Experts estimate the cost to decommission all Gulf of Mexico oil and gas infrastructure–including active and idle– could be anywhere from US$40mn to US$70bn.”

 

Clearing up your crap should be part of the t&c's when they grant a drilling licence

 

Watch the vid in the OP. Neatly sidestepped. Aided and abetted by the insolvency courts in the US. A disgrace.

 

It’s a bit like the SS Richard Montgomery World War Two shipwreck at the mouth of the Thames which sunk full of explosives. It’s a waiting major explosion and tidal wave for London for which actual action to do anything about it has been put off repeatedly. But at least they’ve monitored its condition regularly. Numerous videos on YouTube e.g.

I suspect these old oil rigs are not even monitored.

 

The oil rig closure numbers might ramp up depending on the outcome.

'Dieselgate': Five carmakers go on trial over emissions cheat claims

The trial is the latest chapter of what has become known as the "dieselgate" scandal.

www.bbc.co.uk

 

Why, diesel for cars is in big decline being displaced by EVs and hybrids. But overall oil consumption is still increasing.

 

One of the things I've heard from nuclear energy providers is the complaint that while they have to include the cost of remediation in their £/MWh bids, the fossil energy companies don't. The latter can just walk away from cleaning-up their mess and so of course, their prices are effectively way below the real lifetime cost of supply. So nuclear energy always looks expensive compared to gas and petroleum-based equivalents. I've no opinion on this as I don't have insight into the economics, but it seems a reasonable point.

 

That applies to renewables, remediation of the site is usually a requirement.

Fossil fuels are heavily subsidised with a lot of costs born by the general public. You can start with deaths from particulate pollution, then there's other healthcare costs from the carcinogenicity of many of the products, the costs of pollution damage to the environment, and the climate damage from carbon emissions, through to the costs of clearing up the mess at the end of extraction.

Not that the nuclear industry have been particularly good at clearing up after themselves. We are on the hook for something like £200bn in clean up costs currently.

And I guess we are yet to find out if renewables companies will really be held to higher standards.
At least if a solar developer or wind farm owner buggers off at the end of the useful life, leaving us to pay for the clean up of the site, it will be relatively cheap and mostly non hazardous to remediate.

 

The problem in the oil industry is that the developers don't decommission what they've built, but sell it on to smaller (leaner) operators, who then after a few more years sell it on again, and the companies at end of production don't have the resources to decommission the facility.

 

I agree that's what happens. I think it's an example of a nasty failure of business accounting, the same cause as the one which allowed water companies to borrow without investing. The value of an asset such as an oil well and rig ought to include, irrevocably attached, as a negative quantity the costed obligation for future liability. For an oil rig this is decommission and cleanup; for a sewage system this is the cost of modernisation and maintenance on a 50+-year timescale. The adjusted value should be used in every business statement of capital assets.

Then it would be clear that no audited business would pay for a deteriorating oil rig over a near-worthless supply, without the resources to decommission it. Any that did so, ending up with zero or negative assets which could not be covered by income, could make its directors guilty of fraudulent trading -- not a happy outcome for them.

 

It would probably destroy the investment case and that is not what the oil industry is about. Quick profit and run.

 

And not all is happy in Texas either

https://financialpost.com/pmn/business-pmn/shale-drillers-turn-against-each-other-as-toxic-water-leaks-hit-biggest-us-oil-field