Black gold close to shore

“BP plans deep-water drilling off Libya” ran a Telegraph headline on July 27. It is reported that British Petroleum, an oil giant in its own right and currently in the limelight after the massive oil spillage disaster in the Gulf of Mexico that brought about one of the worst environmental disasters of all times, has acquired oil and gas fields off the Libyan coast, in the Gulf of Sirte, a deal worth $900 million.

It is believed that drilling should start off in the next few weeks and BP intends to go deeper this time: At a depth of 1,700 metres below sea level, the new well in Sirte will be 200 metres deeper than in the Gulf of Mexico. As far as Malta is concerned this is strikingly close to home.

Latest statistics from the US Energy Information Administration (US EIA) suggest that with an estimated 43.7 billion barrels, Libya has the largest proven oil reserves in Africa, and most analysts agree that the country is still largely unexplored. This implies that the potential for discovering further oil deposits on Libyan territory, land and sea, is comparatively huge, which would suggest that BP could find Libya fertile ground for developing further its oil exploration and recovery ventures. ES EIA statistics show that over the last two decades oil production and exports from Libya are of another scale of magnitude compared to domestic consumption.

It is well known that the Mediterranean is one of the most heavily oil polluted seas in the world. But the kind of marine oil pollution in question tends to be of a chronic nature, not acute, as with the major accident in which BP was involved in the Gulf of Mexico. The continuous shipment of oil from North Africa to Southern Europe, where substantial refinery activity takes place as mainstream activity in the industrialised EU nations, is the culprit. As the oil tankers are released from their oil cargo in the various ports, they are usually refilled with ballast water, which is basically sea water itself flooding into their holds to ensure more buoyancy of these superstructures for safe transit across the Mediterranean waters.

Despite all efforts to release all the oil from its holds, any oil tanker will still have to make do with oil residue that remains firmly attached to the inside walls of the holds themselves, eventually contaminating the ballast water being introduced. This will ultimately end up in the sea when the tanker is refilled with its precious cargo since there is not enough time to separate the oil from the ballast water at any port of call, since the distances across the Mediterranean tend to be rather short particularly moving north-south and vice versa.

There is no definite chemical formula for crude oil. It is a very dense viscous liquid comprising a wide-range mixture of hydrocarbons which also include various impurities; the most notable and often most quoted is sulphur. Some authors discuss the chemistry of crude oil in terms of the PONA system – Paraffins, Olefins, Naphthalenes and Aromatics. Paraffins and olefins are usually straight chain hydrocarbons, the essential chemical difference being that olefins are unsaturated and characterised by carbon-carbon double bonds. On the other hand, naphthalenes are generally saturated structures, similar to paraffins, but their molecular structures are typically dominated by ring structures. Aromatics, on the other hand, are another category of crude oil component which include so-called benzene rings, a delocalised unsaturated six-carbon structure which may either exist as a free constituent in the crude itself, or bound to other hydrocarbon chains in various permutations.

In practice, the total number of separate single chemical components making up crude oil is infinite, and the mixture also varies from place to place depending on the oil formation process – which usually takes millions of years and is of biogenic origins – and the conditions of the rock substratum within which it eventually settles. Crude oil deposits exert pressure on the rock systems within which they are retained. In part, this explains the difficulty BP has been encountering over the last few months in the Gulf of Mexico in containing its spill, and the fear that an underwater blast of crude may recur unless release wells are drilled in appropriate sites.

The petroleum industry is often labelled by environmentalists as a dirty industry, both at extraction and production stage but also when the crude is treated in refineries. The refining of crude oil produces various components, not the single chemical constituents of the crude, but mixtures themselves which have dominated our everyday life since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution or rather the gradual shift from a coal-fired to a crude-oil based civilisation.

The essential infrastructural component in an oil refinery is a giant fractionating tower which is designed to separate the crude into its main, not elemental, components, for uses ranging from bitumen and lubricating oils to fuels and liquefied petroleum gas.

An overall assessment of the situation requires a deep insight into the politics of crude oil. Perhaps that is where the temperatures rise far beyond what the industrial fractionating tower would permit! However, having BP behind our doorstep drilling relatively close to our shores makes one wonder what the considerations may be, particularly on the Maltese economy, should any unforeseen complications arise. In the same way that Malta should not stay sitting pretty in the aftermath of the Franco-Libyan nuclear deal negotiated just a couple of summers ago.

sapulis@gmail.com

Mr Pulis specialises in environmental management.