Nobody really knows.

And that’s a ridiculous state of affairs in the 21st century.  Almost 5 years after the BP spill riveted everyone’s attention on the risks of offshore oil production in the Gulf of Mexico and beyond, we’re still relying almost entirely on pollution reports submitted to the government by the polluters themselves who are, of course, subject to fines and other sanctions for those spills. Evidence of non-reporting and chronic under-reporting of oil spills was uncovered by our 2012 analysis of NRC reports and comparison with satellite imagery, an analysis recently validated in a peer-reviewed study published by scientists at Florida State University.

And just today, the Associated Press published a jaw-dropping, in-depth story and video describing the chronic Taylor Energy oil leak a few miles offshore in the Gulf of Mexico that’s been steadily oozing oil into the Gulf since 2004. This is a site that our partners in the Gulf Monitoring Consortium, researchers at Florida State, and tireless pilot and biologist Bonny Schumaker of On Wings of Care have documented repeatedly since we first “discovered” it on satellite imagery back in the spring of 2010.  Yet even industry folks were surprised when AP reporters contacted them about the ongoing, apparently unfixable Taylor Energy leak.

Some information is better than none, but the unverified and demonstrably inaccurate information we get is not a credible foundation for building public policy governing offshore oil and gas development.