How does oil affect the environment?
Crude oil is used to make the petroleum products we use to:
- Fuel airplanes, cars, and trucks
- Heat homes
- Make products such as medicines and plastics
Although petroleum products make life easier, finding, producing, and moving crude oil may have negative effects on the environment. Technological advances in oil exploration, production, and transportation and enforcing safety and environmental laws and regulations help to avoid and reduce these effects.
How does technology help reduce the impact of drilling for and producing oil?
Exploring and drilling for oil may disturb land and marine ecosystems. Seismic techniques used to explore for oil under the ocean floor may harm fish and marine mammals. Drilling an oil well on land often requires clearing vegetation. However, technologies that significantly increase the efficiency of exploring and drilling activities also reduce their effect on the environment. Satellites, global positioning systems, remote sensing devices, and 3-D and 4-D seismic technologies make it possible to discover oil reserves with fewer exploratory wells. Mobile and smaller slimhole drilling rigs reduce the size of the area that drilling activities affect. Using horizontal and directional drilling makes it possible for a single well to produce oil from a much larger area, which reduces the number of wells necessary to develop an oil resource.
What is hydraulic fracturing?
Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, is used to produce oil from shale and other tight geologic formations (underground rock layers). This technique has helped the United States to significantly increase oil production and reduce oil imports. Fracking can affect the environment. Fracturing rock requires large amounts of water, and it uses potentially hazardous chemicals to release the oil from the rock strata. In some areas of the country, significant water use for oil production may affect the availability of water for other uses and could affect aquatic habitats. Faulty well construction or improper handling may result in leaks and spills of fracturing fluids.
Fracking also produces large amounts of wastewater that contain harmful compounds. Because treating the wastewater can be difficult and expensive, in some places it is pumped (injected) deep underground; however, this disposal method may cause earthquakes that are large enough to damage buildings.
How do we prevent oil spills?
Most oil spills are the result of accidents at oil wells or on the pipelines, ships, trains, and trucks that move oil from wells to refineries. Oil spills contaminate soil and water and may cause devastating explosions and fires. The federal government and oil industry work together to reduce the potential for accidents and spills and to clean up spills when they occur.
After the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Prince William Sound, Alaska, in 1989, the U.S. Congress passed the Oil Pollution Act of 1990. This law requires all new oil tankers built for transport between U.S. ports to have a full double hull. In 1992, the International Maritime Organization also established double-hull standards for new oil tankers in the International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships (MARPOL). The amount of oil spilled from ships dropped significantly during the 1990s partly because of these double-hull standards.
The Deep Horizon drilling rig explosion and oil spill in the Gulf of America in 2010 prompted the U.S. government and the oil industry to review drilling technologies, procedures, and regulations to help avoid similar accidents in the future. The U.S. government also replaced the Minerals Management Service (MMS), which administered offshore oil and natural gas leases, with the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) and the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) to provide more effective oversight and enforcement of environmental regulations for offshore energy development.
In response to several major accidents involving trains carrying crude oil, the U.S. Department of Transportation and the Federal Railroad Administration set new standards for railroad tank cars, braking controls, and speed restrictions to reduce the potential for railroad accidents and oil spills.
How do old well sites become artificial reefs?
When oil and natural gas wells become uneconomic, they must be properly plugged and abandoned under state and federal regulations, and the area around the well must be restored. These procedures properly seal off subsurface rock formations and remediate (restore) well sites to their original condition. Wells that are not properly plugged and abandoned are potentially hazardous, and leaking fluids and gases could interfere with future surface development. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is working to address this issue.
Some old offshore oil rigs are tipped over and left on the sea floor in a Rigs-to-Reefs program. Within a year after a rig is toppled, barnacles, coral, sponges, clams, and other sea creatures cover the rig. These artificial reefs attract fish and other marine life, and they increase fish populations and recreational fishing and diving opportunities.