25 years after the Exxon Valdez oil spill (in which 11 million gallons of oil spilled into Alaska’s Prince William Sound), 22 out of 24 affected species remain unrecovered, and thousands of gallons of oil are still present on area beaches. Says Professor Rick Steiner, a leading expert on oil spills, “Oil spills can have long-term even permanent ecological injury from them.”
Both the Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon disasters have proven that cleaning up a major marine oil spill is a “mythology.” Only an estimated 7% of the oil was recovered in the Valdez disaster; and only 3% in the BP spill, despite billions of dollars spent in clean up efforts.
Will we learn from these lessons, as companies vie for drilling rights in the Arctic? Shell has plans to drill in the Chukchi Sea in the American Arctic as soon as 2015. According to Steiner, “Really, the only thing that can be done to prevent a major Arctic offshore oil spill is to not drill in the Arctic.”