Just opened up my book started reading the first sentence in the paragraph. When I heard what sounded like freight train coming through my bedroom. I jumped out of the bed. And then there was a pumping sound that consecutively got much faster, and with each thumb I felt the rig actually shape, and there was an initial booms.
The lights went out, and there was a huge explosion. This is a clip from National Geographics documentary about the deep Water Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico. There are dozens of documentaries like this about the disaster, and even in future films starring Mark Wahlberg.
No, that is a genuine dinosaur tooth gonna flip out, good man, Mike, are you seeing this?
They all say the same thing.
The destruction of the deep Water Horizon had been building for weeks in a series of mishaps.
They pledged repeatedly to run a safer operation, yet they continue.
To cut costs. The tension in every drilling operation is between doing things safely and doing them fast.
You'd hope that the whole industry, all of the oil companies, would have learned from these mistakes. But now a lot of experts think Diana is following in some of the exact same footsteps.
They're facing the long term risks of a blowout or a catastrophic Still.
Now it's clear that they are running the operations at greater capacity levels than was designed.
A lot of the right words that Exxon had written down, but just no depth to it, no details on the security provisions that needed to be in place to prevent a disaster.
One reason this is all so incredibly disturbing is that the Deepwater Horizon disaster in twenty ten was one of the most catastrophic oil spills in history, and yet it happened under BP, one of the world's largest oil companies, in the Gulf of Mexico, an area that's been producing oil for almost a century and has some of the world's best regulations and industry oversight. In other words, in the best case scenario, we had one of the worst spills in history. There are two things that make deep
water offshore drilling projects especially risky. The first is that when you're drilling in more than five thousand feet of water, there's about an elephant's worth of pressure bearing down on every square inch of your equipment, So the chances of a screw loosening or a part breaking are really high. The second is that almost every time you drill for oil,
you get gas as well. The two tend to hang out together, and that gas needs to be managed because if it comes rushing to the surface and finds a spark, which there are many on an oil rig, things can go boom. That's a big part of what happened with the explosion of the deep Water Horizon rig, and it turns out there are a lot of similarities between what happened in the Gulf then and what's happening in Guyana now. In both cases, oil companies decided to continue production despite
known issues with equipment. In Guyana, excell On hot a problem early the first production rigs gas compressor was faulty. That's part of the reason that instead of reinjecting the gas underground as they had planned, they started burning it off or flaring it. They sent it off to be fixed, but it didn't work, so they set it off again, and again it didn't work, so they redesigned it, and Exon says that its redesigned gas compressor was fully functional as of the end of twenty twenty two and that
it is taking safety and maintenance seriously in Guyana. But the company is also proudly talking about how they've managed to fast track everything in this project. Remember, they say their existing wells are producing above design capacity, meaning more than they're designed to produce. And unlike the Gulf region, Guyana is really new to the oil business. That includes regulating the industry too.
The government has admitted that it doesn't have yet the full capacity to do deepwater regulation, and people who are former government officials who I interviewed were very clear that it lacks anything close to the regulatory capacity to oversee deepwater drilling.
A high risk project with little oversight fast tracking production, what could go wrong? The thing is, even though it seems like fast tracking oil production would bring the money in sooner, it actually kind of puts the whole endeavor at risk before it has a chance to make Guyana rich.
The World Bank said this publicly in twenty nineteen. They gave the Guyanese government twenty million dollars to create an agency that would regulate the oil and gas industry to try and prevent these kinds of really risky moves, But so far that hasn't happened. And S and P Global even said that Guyana is quote only a corruption scandal or environmental accident away from total disaster on the oil front. So it's starting to seem more likely that Guyana will
have a massive oil disaster than a massive payday. If a blowout were to happen on any of Guyana's offshore wells, the cost to its communities and industries would be astronomical. Remember when Excellon's president and Guyana Alistair Routledge talked about how the oil companies had taken on all the.
Risk excell Mobile has and see, you take all of the risk up front, so if we never made an economic development, we would swallow all of the costs that went into that investment.
Well, now that risk has transferred entirely to Guyana, that is, unless one scrappy Guyanese lawyer gets her way in court.
The oil companies are the same the world over. They want to make money and that's all they are interested in, and you have to find some way to show them that actually they can't do it because there are rules, or there are there is something else that will stop them. But the something else that would stop them is not morality. It's not the Germond it's not. Oh it's a bad deal for us. You should give us more. Oh it's
an abusive deal. Oh it's an exploitative deal. The more abusive and exploitative the deal is, the more money they make.
This is Melinda Jenkie and she has another idea for that, something else. This is light, sweet crude, and I'm Amy Westerveld. Stay with us.
On the light that we go in.
Yeah, that metallic sound is her take. Oh my god, the metal tank.
I just need to I'm in the middle of.
Melinda Jankie works in a home office right next to the pen her rescue dogs stay in when strangers like me are visiting her. She lives in a bustling residential neighborhood full of family homes. It's easy to miss Jankie's house because it's set back from the street, hidden by trees that are filled with birds.
And I think everyone should be able to wake up in the morning and there's just something very beautiful in front of them, flowers and birds and the sound of the birds, birds song.
Even in the middle of the flowers and the birds and the dogs, Janki is always working on a zillion things at once.
Well, here we are in my office, which is as you can see, full of books, full of papers. This is really where I do most of my work.
She was sitting at her desk under a life sized painting of a yellow jaguar, which seems very apt. Jenki is not a large woman, and she doesn't speak loudly, but there's a quiet rage about her.
But it's not necessarily where I do my thinking, because thinking and work are not always the same thing. I do a lot of my thinking with my trees and my plants. I do a lot of my thinking with the stars at night.
Nature is what has drawn Jenkie back to Guyana over and over again. She grew up in a neighborhood Georgetown called Sabriyanville, near the ocean.
And so every night for the first few years of my life, I went to bed with the sound of the sea in my ear, and Sabrineville was very quiet. We lived with our neighbors basically, so all the children were in all the houses all of the time. And I would say I was obviously brought up by my mother and father, but I was also brought up by all the other parents in the neighborhood.
By the time Jankie was twelve. Guyana had descended into constant unrest. There were politically motivated killings, riots in the streets, The economy was unstable and it seemed like an unsafe place to raise kids, so her parents made the tough decision to leave. They moved the family first to Zambia, then to Trinidad, and eventually Jankie went to the UK to study law at Oxford University. Loads of Guyanese people leave the country to study in the US or the UK.
Brain drain is something government officials are constantly trying to get on top of, and so many people mentioned it to us. In fact, only about fifty percent of Guyanese people actually live in Guyana, and in the vast majority of cases, once people leave, they don't come back. After Jankie finished at Oxford, she got hired at one of the top corporate law firms in London. It was about as far away as you could get from waking up to the birds and falling asleep to the sound of
the ocean. After a few years, she was ready for something new.
And at the time it seemed like BP was a good place to go.
Yes, BP that BP as in one of the largest oil companies in the world. The company that was overseeing the deep water horizon drilling, JANKI negotiated for them throughout Europe.
The work was It's very interesting. I had far more responsibility than I would have had if I'd stayed in the law firm. I met some very interesting people, and I traveled. And you know, when you're young, the idea of seeing the world is very attractive. You want to go to other places, you want to meet other people, you want to experience other cultures, and you just want to learn.
But at a certain point she just couldn't do it anymore.
I was in a meeting and one of the people at the table turned to me and he said, Oh, this is such sexy work. And I thought to myself, you know, this is really time to leave.
It wasn't so much the work she was tired of, as the context She missed being surrounded by nature. She was also getting pretty tired of having to prove to white Europeans that she, a brown woman from the global South, knew what she was talking about. She had a standing offer to work as a partner in a prestigious corporate firm in Guyana, so she went for it. She'd be doing roughly the same sort of commercial work that she'd been doing, but in a place she loved and on her own terms.
You know, sometimes when I look out of the window, there's a hummingbird there, and that's very beautiful, and I don't want to wake up to an alarm clock, and I have not woken up to alarm clock for decades.
It was during these years that these two very different parts of Janki's life, her childhood in Guyana, growing up surrounded by unloving nature, and her career in London negotiating for a BP, came together into a whole new chapter.
Well, I think when you grew up with nature, then you have a relationship with the world around you, and then if you're a lawyer, you sort of at some point I suppose the to connect. And I wanted to protect Guyana's environment. I wanted to protect the nature that I grew up with and that I think everybody should have a chance to grow up with.
And because Guyana is quite a small country, with just under eight hundred thousand residents, she was able to get involved in protecting its environment in a very real way.
There was a meeting at the Pegasus hotel. I wanted to go, but I had no way to go to the meeting because I was just this completely unimportant individual.
The meeting was focused on environmental regulation and it was by invitation only. Jenkie was able to score an invite through a friend, so.
I went and it was interminably boring. But in the break I was able to talk to one of the government officials and say to him that I had looked at their draft Environmental Act and I thought that it was inadequate.
This is the sort of thing that makes people either love or hate Melinda Jankie. She says exactly what she thinks in every situation, but especially when she cares deeply about something. This time she was talking about the need to build in real safeguards for Guyana's valuable ecosystems. The country has been through phase after phase of what economists
call the resource curse. It happens when a less developed country puts all of its focus on the economic benefit attached to selling a particular resource like gold or diamonds or oil. But instead of untold riches, what those countries generally get is an unstable economy that lives or dies by the price of whatever commodity they're now dependent on selling.
Janki figured if the government was going to go to the trouble of writing a new environmental production Act, it should have some teeth, and so at the Pegasus Hotel in the mid nineties, she said just that to a government official and it actually paid off.
He didn't brush me off. He said, oh, well, send me something about it. So I wrote a paper explaining why I thought this act was inadequate. The next thing I knew was they asked me if I'd like to actually work on this as a consultant, and so I said yes, and I was hired.
Jenki's input transformed the proposed regulation from one that sounded okam paper but really didn't do much, to one of the most rigorous pieces of environmental legislation, not just in the region but in the world. Companies that wanted to tap Diana's resources would have to undertake serious environmental and climate impact assessments. And this was about three years or so before the Kyoto Protocol was adopted, which means climate impact assessments were not a thing that a lot of
countries were really doing at the time. Jankie also wrote in requirements for comprehensive environmental management. She introduced the idea of natural capital and the need to protect it. Natural capital is the monetary value of all the things that a healthy ecosystem does for us, like keeping our air and drinking water clean, or storing carbon to curb climate change.
Jankie insisted that the government protect that value. It's an incredibly progressive piece of environmental regulation, even by today's standards, never mind back in the mid nineties. That work also earned Jankie a lot of credibility in the realm of environmental law, so much so that when the government was drafting a new constitution a few years later, Jankie had the ear of some pretty important people and was able to add in some very valuable protections.
I decided that I would write something and send it to them as a sort of background that would add to the discussion. So I looked at constitutions around the world that at that time had the right to healthy environment, and then I put forward the arguments for having it in the constitution today.
Article one nine j of Guyana's Constitution grants every citizen quote the right to an environment that is not harmful to his or her health or well being. It also requires the state to protect the environment for the benefit of present and future generations. You may remember we did
a whole season of damages on rights of nature. It's a legal concept that gives constitutional rights to ecosystems, which then also gives rights to communities around those ecosystems to be able to legally protect them, whether they're forests or watersheds or lakes. What Guyana wrote into its constitution is the flip side of that coin. It grants humans the right to a healthy environment. So if a corporation or the government is doing something that infringes on that right,
they can be sued for violating the constitution. This constitutional amendment was written years before Exelon would strike oil off Guyana's coast. But like I mentioned before, the country had already been through several waves of extractive colonialism and Janki and many other Guyanese citizens were over it.
Guyana has had bonanza after bonanza, gold, boux side, diamonds, timber, you name it. For fifty five years, the political parties have run this country into the ground.
Its gold, box, side, timber, and diamonds had all been pillaged to make foreign companies money Janki hoped that enshrining the right to a healthy environment in the country's constitution would give citizens some protection next time anyone wanted to plunder their resources.
Where are Guyana's gold reserves? Where is the money from the gold? Where is the money from the box side, Where is the money from the diamonds, Where is the money from the sugar, Where is the money from the agriculture, Where is the money from the fishing, etc. The list is almost endless because we are so full of wealth
and yet the people in this country are poor. We have people sleeping on the streets and eating out of the bins, So there is no point in anybody saying oil is going to make Guyana rich.
Usually when someone criticizes the government in Guyana, people accuse them of being against whatever political party is in power, which also ties into long standing racial divides. So it's worth noting that Jankie is an equal opportunity critic when it comes to Guyanese politicians, and she couldn't believe that despite all all of her efforts and all of the careful language embedded into Guyanese law, both parties governments just didn't enforce any of it.
We reached the huge milestone of declaring ten billion oil equivalent barrels offshore Guyana.
My heart just sank because I know oil is a disaster and it's the worst possible thing that could have happened to Guyana. And people just began to go crazy at the idea of all this oil wealth. And sure enough, the first thing that we saw was that they entered into a new agreement which was secret. They wouldn't release it to people. When they finally released it, it was atrocious.
As we talked about last episode, the original contract between Exxon and Guyana was signed in eighteen ninety nine, but at the time, Guyana's oil was not that attractive because Exon was still drilling in Venezuela, where it was much easier to access oil. Plus, the Guyanese government had granted Exon extraordinarily long exploration permits, so the company was quite happy to just camp out on its offshore blocks in
Guyana until it needed them. When Exon did leave Venezuela, it returned to Guyana and after it found oil, lots of it, the company signed a new contract with the government. But no matter what the contract said, Exxon and its subsidiary ESSO would still be required by law, the law Jankie helped to write to do a comprehensive environmental impact assessment. According to Jenkie, that is not exactly what happened.
So ESSO started to do this environmental impact assessment. It was absolutely atrocious for a start, Jankie says.
Environmental impact assessments are supposed to be conducted by an independent third party, but Exon used to firm and has an ongoing contract with.
That rule was breached from day one. But people were so excited about this oil that no one was focusing on.
This second Jankie says, each part of the offshore drilling project should have its own environmental impact assessment, but that didn't happen here.
You need an environmental impact assessment for each one of the eight production wells, each of the six deep water wells, each of the three gas wells, the sewage, the ballast, the produced water, the cooling water, the transportation of the oil, and so on. Even the seismic studies should have an environmental impact assessment because of the impact on marine mammals.
The one that ESSO drafted for its first production site does consider the impact of a large scale spill. They calculated that if twenty thousand barrels a day were spilled for thirty days, that quote little irreversible damage would be expected, although it could take a decade or more for all resources to fully recover, so.
The total spill would be six hundred thousand barrels of oil. Well, in nineteen eighty nine, the Exxon Valdez spilled two hundred and fifty seven thousand barrels of oil, so roughly half what we're talking about at the moment. That spill covered eleven thousand square miles. It killed hundreds of thousands of birds and animals, and unknown quantities of salmon and herring, and nearly thirty years later, the area has not recovered
and probably never will. This environmental impact assessment is a totally inadequate assessment of the risk.
And the straw that broke Melinda Janki's back was when she noticed that Guyana's Environmental Protection Agency there EPA issued as is permit the same day received their Environmental Impact Assessment and Environmental Management Assessment. Those documents are each hundreds of pages long.
So it is a mystery as to when exactly the Environmental Protection Agency read these documents if in fact they did read them.
Jenki started going to every government event or meeting she could about the oil project.
So at this event, the advisor to the President on oil was telling people that they didn't really know the oil industry and they had to trust the oil companies.
Let that sink in for a second. Knowing all we know about how oil companies conduct business, the government was opting to trust them in good faith, and JANKI was not going to let that happen.
I was utterly outraged by that, particularly as it was coming from someone who was very close to the president. And I began talking to someone there and he said he would like to do a case, but nobody would do the case for him to challenge the oil and I said, I'll do it.
It was one of those further moment decisions you make without really thinking it through. Jankie had been out of the litigation game for years by this point, and she wasn't working with a firm anymore, but she wanted to take on the oil companies, and she figured she'd be able to find another lawyer to join her.
I thought, I'll get someone else to help with this, but in fact I couldn't get anybody to help with it.
Many of the country's lawyers were already either working for ESSO or for the government or for a supplier connected to the project. Again, Ghana is small. There are only so many lawyers and law clerks there. Jankie was quickly finding that a whole lot of them just couldn't join her because of those conflicts of interest, And then there's the issue of folks just not want in that smoke. By this point, it wasn't just exon pushing the oil project.
The government was all for it too. And there's a very real and relatively recent history in Guyana of the government suppressing opposition, sometimes violently. That's a big part of why Jankie's family left Guyana when she was a kid. Now she was asking someone to take on that risk for a case that only had a few thousand dollars
worth of crowdfunding. That's right. To fund the case. They got donations from citizens and from some Guyanese people who were living outside of the country to get things going. She started by filing cases around the permits, arguing that the environmental impact assessments were faulty and that the Guyanese government had violated its own laws by issuing an extra long permit to essout, and she had an early win.
We cut SS permits down from over twenty three years to five years.
Jankie felt like if the government would just use the laws that were already on the books, they could make this project too expensive to be worth Exon's attention at all, because remember, part of what's driving Exon's increased presence in Guyana is the fact that it can move quickly and
cheaply there. So if the government would just tell the oil companies to slow down, be careful with all the rules, then the contract that's got so many people upset, the one we talked about last time, that some are pushing to renegotiate, it would kind of be beside the point.
I think it's foolish, and I think it's naive. Exxon and its partners are not going to come back to the table to renegotiate anything unless they get a better deal.
She says. Those pushing for contract renegotiation should be cheering on these cases too.
It's my feeling that if we actually properly enforce those laws, this operation would have to be show and if that happens, then for throughnegotiation people at least then you could say, if you were being commercially minded, as opposed to naive, you can only restart if you give us a proper deal.
Keep in mind that Jankie has been inside the belly of the beast, so to speak. She has been the person on the other side of that conference table trying
to get oil companies more money. So she has a better idea than most how to negotiate against them, and since she knows they won't come back to the table, her weapon of choice is lawsuits, which is why in late twenty twenty two, she filed her sixth case, this time arguing that the government is not requiring a large enough insurance policy from Axon because you know, a spill would likely be much more catastrophic than what they're projecting.
It's the first of Jenkie's arguments that seems to have prompted a major marketing response from Exon. Here is Exon Guyana's president, Alistair Routledge, in a promotional video about of all things insurance. See if you can spot some of the tactics we laid out last time.
Recognizing the ongoing discussion and in many cases misinformation around oil spill insurance. Exomobile Guyana wishes to categorically state that it has insurance coverage that meets international industry standards for all its petroleum activities in Guyana.
Everyone else is spreading misinformation and we've got it covered. But what Jenki has focused on in her suit goes beyond the sort of insurance that Routledge is talking about. She's arguing for something called financial assurance, which is effectively an unlimited liability policy, meaning you break it, you fix it. There's no limit on the amount of money Exon could have to spend to clean up a major disaster. But
here's the thing. Guyanese law already requires financial assurance as part of Exon's drilling permits, and still, Jankie says, the government is just not enforcing its own laws, which is part of what makes Guyana such an appealing place to do business for companies like Exxon. The government is providing little oversight of the project. We talked earlier about a faulty gas compressor on Exon's first production rig. The company claims that today the compressor is fixed and everything is
working as it should be. Jankie's point is the fact that it wasn't working for so long is exactly the kind of thing that makes the unlimited liability policy necessary. If the companies were continuing to pump oil with a piece of equipment they knew was faulty, she argues, how can Guyana trust that won't happen again, or that it won't be catastrophic next time, because remember.
Little things were what caused the bpmcondo well blowout. The bpmcondo well blowout happened in the Gulf of Mexico. The United States of America has more experience, more resources, more expertise, more technology, more boats, more everything than anybody. And that happened in just in the Gulf of Mexico, and yet it was devastating.
Gana not only lacks a regulatory system for oil, it also does not have a bench of petroleum experts just hanging out in Georgetown waiting to jump into action if a blowout occurs, or even just a large spill. And according to Exon's own environmental impact assessments for some of its more recent production sites, in some parts of the offshore project, if there were a spell, ocean currents could carry oil throughout the Caribbean, impacting up to fourteen Caribbean islands.
This country knows nothing about oil and even less about oil danger and oil spills. The risk to Guyana is incredible. This oil production. This is a reckless gamble by the government of Guyana with the future of Guyana. It's a reckless gamble by the governments of Guyana for the entire Caribbean. The maps show that if there is a well blowout, that oil is going to end up on in Caribbean countries, our Caribbean sisters and brothers.
Those countries depend largely on tourism and fishing for their economies, two industries that could be wiped out for years if oil were to wash up on shore in a big way. Jenkie says she remembers watching the people of Valdez, Alaska fight for years to get Exxon to properly clean up that spell, and she doesn't think the Guyanese government should trust that they're going to get any better treatment, especially if Guyana finds itself on the hook for damages in
other countries. Jenkie argues that because the industry isn't properly regulated, the government could be held liable for any damages the project inflicts on neighboring countries.
So you have a situation where Guyana's oil production could potentially destroy Caribbean economies. We are talking about billions of dollars worth of loss in addition to devastating the biodiversity of the region, and you can't put a price on that. It's all very well to say, well, we can compensate the tourism sector, but you can't walk into a shop and buy a new sperm whale. The wildlife that is in this part of the world is incredible. We have rare species and all of this is at risk because
of this oil drilling. So has a permit. Now, if Essay is in breach of that permit, who's liable. Well, of course we would say that SOO is liable, But I already told you this is an offshore company that doesn't have billions of dollars worth of assets. It's going to come back to Guyana.
In other words, if there's a massive spill in the region and nearby countries like Trinidad or Barbados have their fishing and tourism industries ruined by oil from Guyana, they're likely to come looking to Guyana for compensation.
SO doesn't have the billions of dollars that it could compensate people for. And what happens then, well, the Caribbean countries could come to Guyana and ask Guyana to pay compensation. Now, under international law, you can be liable for trans boundary harm.
Jankie says. There's every reason to believe that Guyana would be found liable because even international financial analysts are calling attention to the lack of oversight on the project.
Ghana is not doing its due diligence. It's not ensuring that s SO adheres to the Environmental Protection Act, it's not ensuring that s is running its operations properly. Why on Earth would you allow somebody to continue producing oil when you know that their gas compressor is defective. What sort of government allows an oil company to operate above the safety limits.
Then there's the pollution that's produced even when everything is working as it should. Greenhouse gases which exacerbate climate change, and volatile organic compounds and particulate matter, which have been linked to lower life expectancy, and a whole host of respiratory and cardiac issues are part for the course in
oil and gas production. You cannot produce and refine oil and gas without generating carbon dioxide and methane, the two primary drivers of climate change, and Guyana isn't just on the frontier of the global oil industry, it's also on the front lines of the climate crisis. Here's investigative journalist Antonia Jujaz again.
By twenty thirty, Georgetown and most of the coast is expected to be underwater.
That's the same year financial analysts predict Guyana will finally pay off Exxon.
I think it's really important that people stop thinking of Guyana as a developing country that needs to be helped and starts looking at us and saying, well, these guys are a carbon sink and they are under threat because of Exon Mobile and of the oil companies. And we have a responsibility to rein in those oil companies because those are oil companies coming from the global North.
That's our story. Next time, Lights Sweet Crude is a drilled and Damage's co production. Both shows are critical frequency originals. Our editor and senior producer is Sarah Ventri. Sound design, mixing and mastering by Martin Saltz Austwick. Our fact checker is Anna Pujel Mazzini, and our first amendment attorney is James Wheaton. The show is reported and written by me Amy Westerboldt, additional reporting by Keana Wilberg in Guyana and
Antonio Juhaz in DC. We had additional assistants in Guyana from Jamal Thomas, Salvador de Caarre's Wilderness Explorers and the staff at Kaiman House. Special thanks to Michael McCrystal for his help as well. Our theme song is Bird in the Hand by Foreknown. The song nam Tera Dishmann is performed by Joyce or Milla Harris in Guyana. The song Liquidator is a cover of a Harry j Allstars song performed by the Young Ones of Guyana, licensed by BME Music.
The song Beiji Bogi is written and recorded by Bill Rogers and licensed from the BBC Music Library. Special thanks to Susy Buttress of the Casual Birder podcast for her bird song recordings which we used in this episode. Our artwork is by Matt Fleming. Marketing is handled by the Great Maggie Taylor pr and media outreach by the wonderful folks at Tink Media. Lauren Passel, Ariel Nissenblatt, and Devin Andrade.
The show is supported in part by generous grants from the Doc Society, File Foundation, the William Collins Kohler Foundation, and you are listeners. If you would like to support our work, you can sign up for our newsletter at drilled podcast dot com. You can also access transcripts of the show there and additional information. Paid subscribers also get access to ad free episodes, early releases, and bonus content.
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