To many, the most shocking aspect of the Deepwater Horizon tragedy was the extent to which BP was able to inure itself from any substantive government oversight. The unfortunate U.S. Minerals Management Service, tasked with overseeing the petroleum giant, appears to have been much more adept at applying a rubber stamp than in enforcing tough, no-nonsense regulations.

Details have slowly emerged that BP was, in essence, running its own show, obeying existing regulations only as it saw fit. As anyone who has studied the development of corporate business in the past century can tell you, self-regulation just doesn’t work very well. Without some kind of hammer for enforcement in the hands of government, the profit motive, which invariably entails cost avoidance at an institutional level, will run rampant.

In short, the cheap way will almost invariably take precedence over ensuring safety. In an industry as complex, and as potentially dangerous, as deepwater oil exploration and drilling, all of the factors above came together in a deadly confluence of events -- the aftereffects of which are continuing to wash up on beaches all along the states bordering on the Gulf.

With all of this said, when the news came out last week that tentative plans were being made to explore the waters around the Bahamas for oil, no doubt it elicited a big, “Uh oh” from many more persons than myself. Visions of another deepwater disaster, but this time in the Caribbean Sea, were not pleasant ones.

Fortunately, it appears that the scale and scope of the Gulf disaster has raised a note of caution about such an exploration. Dr. Earl Deveaux, the Bahamian Minister of Environment, was recently quoted as saying that the country was at best 10 – 15 years away from even considering a deepwater drilling application. That’s some good news, and I hope that it proves to be true.

The predicament that a world addicted to oil now finds itself in is not pretty. No industrial nation can live without the precious resource for any appreciable period of time. As previously stated in this column, there is no alternate energy source, or even a combination thereof that can come close to the EROEI (energy returned on energy invested) found in crude oil.

Briefly, EROEI is the ratio of the amount of usable energy acquired from a particular energy resource to the amount of energy expended to obtain that energy resource. When the EROEI of a resource drops below a certain level, it becomes an ‘energy sink’ and can no longer be considered as a primary source.

Given that it is an irreplaceable resource, the search for oil has become all the more frantic in recent years for one reason – all of the ‘low hanging fruit’, in other words, huge, land-based oil fields that can be drilled relatively easily, have been found and mapped. There are no more surprises or ‘finds’ involving the aforementioned. This specifically pertains to fields with 5 billion or more barrels of ultimately recoverable oil, called ‘super-giants’, and ‘world-class giant’ fields with 500 million to 5 billion barrels of recoverable product.

The above set of facts tells the story on why cutting-edge oil explorations have moved to more dangerous and difficult venues, such as the deepwater drilling, and inhospitable climes, such as Alaska. That’s also why oil companies are eagerly awaiting the partial melting of the polar ice caps, so that they can move in and start possibly extracting some of the alleged rich oil deposits there.

With increased danger and risk also come higher costs of investment, thus bringing down the EROEI and making each barrel obtained more expensive. That will ultimately translate to rising prices at the pump, as well as creating far more potential deadly, far-reaching environmental disasters, as already noted.

The more inaccessible the places that are drilled for oil, the harder it is to maintain effective control over the situation, especially when there’s an accident or miscalculation. On land, the process of capping a well and stopping the oil flow is generally a manageable process – at 5,000 feet below sea level, it’s a nightmare.

In closing, I’ll mention that currently there is a high level of trepidation among some observers in regard to Cuba’s reported plans to allow deepwater drilling off its shores commencing early next year, in an area just 60 miles south of Florida’s Key West. The oil rig slated to be used in the planned exploration is very similar to BP’s Deepwater Horizon unit. Trinidad and Tobago, which features a very profitable on- and offshore oil extraction and processing industry, has also recently made known its own plans for deepwater drilling explorations.

The trend is clear – in the Caribbean, and anywhere on the globe that a sizable pot of oil can be located, plans will be drawn up to go and get it, regardless of the difficulties and dangers involved. Let us fervently hope that a fiasco rivaling that of the Gulf of Mexico doesn’t ultimately sully the crystal clear waters and beaches in the region.