Mexico's Accidental Gusher

For the past five weeks, Mexico's Bay of Campeche has presented a harrowing sight to an oil-thirsty world. A relentless flow of uncontrolled crude has been boiling to the surface, then bursting into an inferno. It is casting off a polluting slick that has broken into many splotches and is spreading. John Robinson, the Government oceanographer who heads the U.S. team studying the spill, says that it now reaches over an area 300 miles long and 25 miles wide. Some U.S. marine biologists fear that the spill, pushed by currents, could soon begin to hurt plant and fish life off the Texas coast, though no trace of the slick has yet been found in that area.

The oil is spewing from an exploratory well, about 57 miles off the Yucat an Peninsula, that blew out June 3 when a hot undersea drill hit a volatile pocket of oil and gas. The explosion and ensuing fire all but destroyed the rig. By last week estimates of the total loss ranged from just over 1 million bbl. to as much as 1.5 million bbl. That is much more than the previous record loss caused by the fabled Ekofisk blowout in the Norwegian North Sea in 1977, when an estimated 140,000 bbl. escaped before the well was capped after nine days.

To recover a portion of this spill and contain and dissolve the rest, Pemex, the Mexican State oil company, has put together a small army of 500 workers, 22 boats and twelve aircraft. But chances of halting the flow soon are dim because the undersea gauges and wellhead are blocked by debris from the shattered rig. Pemex is drilling two intercepting relief wells to tap the oil below its escape point and thus stop the leakage. But such a procedure can take at least two months.

On the bright side, the size of the latest blowout implies a major new find by Pemex. Director General Jorge Diaz Serrano estimates that the immediate area contains as much as 800 million bbl. of top-quality lightweight crude and "will considerably increase Mexico's oil reserves." Before this strike, the country's proven reserves of oil and gas stood at the equivalent of 40 billion bbl., well above those of both Venezuela and Nigeria but still far below Saudi Arabia's 160 billion bbl. Though Mexico is not a member of OPEC, it took a page from the cartel's book last week and lifted its prices from $17.10 per bbl. to $22.60.

Even with the spill, estimates are that the Bay of Campeche contains reserves of well over 5 billion bbl., an amount equal to all that the U.S. imports over 20 months. So the company plans to place twelve new rigs in the area this year.

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