As the world’s oldest, biggest oil fields slowly tap out, companies are spending ever more to drill farther afield and in deeper water to keep the world’s cars and furnaces going. This has led to environmental disruption from the Amazon to the Arctic. Now, it has caused a spreading stain over hundreds of square miles of the Timor Sea between Australia and Indonesia, where oil is spilling unabated from a well drilled by PTTEP, based in Thailand. Still, for the most part, damage from oil spills happens far from the gas stations and parking lots frequented by consumers of this enduring commodity. That’s one reason Peter Maass, no friend of big oil, said here last year that it was more ethical to drill in United States waters than to continue to outsource our environmental problems.
It’s clear the Timor Sea spill will keep spreading for weeks to come, given that the company announced last month that it plans to stanch the flow by sending a new rig to drill a temporary well, hopefully lowering the pressure driving the leak in the failed platform. But that plan has been delayed.
I was in those waters in 1979, while exploring the world shortly after college as part of the crew of a sailboat called Wanderlust (I discuss how that voyage led to my life as a journalist in this slide show). The Timor Sea is where I first saw the “green flash” (I swear it). I sat in the rigging for long hours (before the days of GPS) as we tried to find and approach Ashmore Reef, which is nothing but some sand bars and coral. When we dove in after anchoring, expecting a leisurely snorkeling adventure, we exited the water just as quickly after realizing the shallows were thick with sea snakes.
That was all two decades before oil drilling began in waters to the east. Luckily for those snakes, it appears that the winds, in this case at least, are carrying the slick somewhere else.