Big Oil's Reality Check

The giant Gulf of Mexico spill has made it clear that oil companies need to acquire a touch of humility and re-orient their safety and environmental protection practices accordingly.

Humility is regarded as a conservative virtue.

Typically, you won't find much humility at oil companies. Finding and producing oil requires a workplace culture of chutzpah and risk-taking. The risk-averse will not spend billions of dollars looking for an unseen treasure beneath thick, buggy jungles, remote, frigid tundra, or thousands of feet of unforgiving seawater.

The giant Gulf of Mexico spill, however, makes a case for oil companies to acquire a touch of humility and re-orient their safety and environmental protection practices accordingly.

At a Senate subcommittee hearing May 5, Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN) asked members of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission what oil executives could learn from their nuclear brethren about minimizing the chances of big accidents.

Commissioner George Apostolakis replied that a humbling question should be asked regularly: "What if we’re wrong?" What if, in spite of all the safeguards, something has been overlooked, that something goes hugely awry, and bites the company hard in the butt?

That's why, Apostolakis offered as an example, operators of nuclear power plants are required to prepare community evacuation plans, even though the odds that they would have to be used are minuscule.

The term of art in the nuclear industry is "defense in depth." If something goes wrong, there's a backup in place, and a backup to the backup. Defense in depth costs more. The consequences of a catastrophic accident cost a hell of a lot more.

"What if we’re wrong?" is not a bad place for the oil industry and its wayward Minerals Management Service regulators to start as they think about the post-spill future. A little conservative humility would do them a lot of good.