In the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon spill, BP spent $14 billion on cleanup, over a four-year period, sifting beach sand for oil and working to restore over 22,500 kilometers (14,000 miles) of shoreline. Overseen by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the cleanup entered the third phase with efforts to restore barrier islands, marshes, and oyster beds. However, in the deep-sea habitat near the well site, there is little anyone can do but wait, and scientists say that it will be decades before the habitat is fully recolonized by marine invertebrates.

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Yet it would be unfair to blame BP entirely for the oil spill. As consumers of products ranging from plastics and gasoline to natural gas, we are all, in some ways, complicit in the spill. Ultimately, reducing the impact of the oil industry is going to depend on reducing our own consumption and demanding that companies and politicians do a better job of protecting and restoring ecosystems affected by the oil industry.

In the worst-case scenario, it pays to have a recovery plan. On March 24, 1989, the Exxon Valdez oil tanker ran aground in Prince William Sound, Alaska, releasing 40 million liters (11 million gallons) of petroleum into the marine environment (Figure 9.30). The immediate impact of the spill included the deaths of approximately 250,000 sea birds, 2,800 sea otters, 300 harbor seals, and 22 killer whales. It is unknown how many marine invertebrates and fish also died.

Exxon was heavily criticized for its limited response to the spill at the time, but the chemical and mechanical cleanup techniques it employed remain the standard in the industry. The most critical step in the cleanup process is to lay out floating booms and other barriers to contain oil slicks and prevent them from entering sensitive coastal areas. Next, a skimmer is used to collect the oil from the water’s surface. Passive skimmers are either enclosures that skim off only the top layer of oil or are made of materials that mop up oil. Suction skimmers, by contrast, are like vacuum cleaners that suck up the oil and pump it into a storage tank.

A second key element of the cleanup process, which was used widely during the Deepwater Horizon spill, involved using a dispersant, a chemical that thins and dissolves the thick crude. Unfortunately, Corexit, one of the most commonly used dispersants, has been implicated as a potential cause of health problems among workers, including liver, kidney, lung, nervous system, and blood disorders.

After the immediate cleanup concluded, Exxon agreed to pay the U.S. and Alaskan governments $900 million for environmental restoration and research. Much of the marine community has recovered, including bald eagles, salmon, river otters, and sea otters. However, tens of thousands of liters of oil remain buried in the beaches of Prince William Sound and will not be removed by natural processes for a considerable period of time, perhaps a century.

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The most important outcome of the Valdez Spill was the passage of the Oil Pollution Act of 1990, which required companies to have a program in place to prevent oil spills and a detailed cleanup plan in the event of a significant accident. The Oil Pollution Act also led to the phase-out of large single-hull tankers by banning them from U.S. waters after 2010. Double-hull tankers have a second, inner hull and are 5 times less likely to spill oil. In the event of a hull breach, double-hulls will spill far less oil.

In response to growing concerns that fracking could pose a threat to drinking water, draft legislation proposed in 2012 required that companies disclose all chemicals they use for hydraulic fracturing on federal lands in the United States. Three years later, in March 2015, the Bureau of Land Management of the Department of Interior released a set of new rules governing fracking on federal public and Native American tribal lands. A key requirement, which the gas and oil industry had long resisted, was that drilling companies must indeed disclose the chemical composition of any hydraulic fracturing fluids used.

In addition, drillers are required to protect any aquifers penetrated during drilling, using strong concrete barriers to prevent contamination by fracking fluids. There are also requirements to provide more secure storage of waste fracking fluids recovered from wells to reduce the exposure of air, water, and wildlife to the fluids. With more than 100,000 gas and oil wells on federal lands, which encompass over 3 million square kilometers (1.2 million square miles), these new rules apply broadly to gas and oil drilling on federal lands because 90% of the new wells being drilled on those lands employ fracking.

The only way to guarantee that a spill is not going to occur in a particular region is to ban oil exploration altogether. Following the 1969 oil spill in Santa Barbara, California, that state halted the leasing of offshore tracts within 3 miles of its coastline. Other sensitive areas have also restricted oil exploration and drilling. In 2003 Norway declared the Lofoten Islands oil-free, because of their rich cod and herring fisheries along with their abundant wildlife. One of the most contentious oil-free zones is the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. The refuge is the largest protected wilderness in the United States, but the U.S. Geological Survey estimates that it contains 10.3 billion barrels (433 billion gallons) of oil.

The status of drilling on the refuge has repeatedly been a hot-button issue during election years. Proponents have claimed that drilling would have no impact on local wildlife and would allow the United States to reduce its dependency on foreign oil. Opponents argue that oil development is particularly harmful in the high Arctic region because the extreme cold and short summer growing season mean that the land would take centuries to recover in the event of a spill.