publications

Point of View

Why Haven’t We Seen the Human
Face of the Oil Industry in the
Gulf of Mexico?

by Kristen Sukalac

Almost as much ink has been spilled about the Deepwater Horizon debacle as oil has leaked out of the damaged well since the April explosion. Most of the attention has been understandably focused on BP, the environmental situation and the technical response. Despite fundamental questions being asked about deepwater offshore drilling, the absence or silence of other major oil companies has been notable (except when they were called to testify before the U.S. Congress).

Clearly the first priority in this crisis was stopping the leak, and I certainly do not underestimate the technical challenge this effort entailed. Nonetheless, I believe that the wider oil industry squandered an opportunity to offset some of the negative impact of the crisis and gain some goodwill going forward. The explosion and ensuing oil spill had a technical, human and environmental impact. BP’s response to the crisis seems to have been channelled almost exclusively through technicians and lawyers. It was insufficient for the industry to focus solely on technical aspects, especially when it became apparent that no technical solution would be forthcoming quickly.

In mid-June, I had the opportunity to discuss the situation with the chief information officer of a major oil corporation (not BP). He surmised that other oil companies hesitated to send crews of volunteer employees to help clean up beaches, or other such gestures, because they did not want to be perceived as taking advantage of BP’s misfortunes in order to improve their own image. Perhaps, although I suspect that they really wanted to avoid being too closely associated with BP in its dark hour. Regardless of the real motivation, I think it would have been wiser for the industry to show some humanity and not just technical wizardry.

I looked at the web sites of some of the major oil companies to see what they said about industrywide assistance. The answer: not much. The company sites I visited showed:

• Only examples of technical assistance.
• No public declaration of assistance.
• Articles not optimized for searches using major, relevant keywords.
• Information locked in private sections of the site.
• Or all of the above.

For example:

• ExxonMobil provided a brief statement about their provision of “assistance in the form of personnel and equipment.”
• Shell published a brief, but fairly detailed, list of all the technical assistance it had provided.
• No information was available on the ConocoPhillips site, except on pages that return a “401 unauthorized” error (presumably because they were in a password-protected area of its web site.)
• The limited information on Chevron’s site was buried in remarks by the chairman and CEO at the 2010 annual stockholders meeting and from his testimony to Congress.

I also found links on the American Petroleum Institute’s web site to contributions of individual member companies, but those seem to have been removed in a subsequent update of the page dedicated to response efforts.

What could the oil companies have done differently?
Acting as a community under the umbrella of a trade association or other common platform, the other oil companies could have provided the human and environmental responses that BP and the Deepwater Horizon Unified Command did not. Here are some examples of initiatives that would have allowed non-technical personnel to get involved, and to put a human face on the industry.

• In the early days of the crisis, the other oil companies could have offered personnel to BP to strengthen community relations, both to expedite claims filing and to help local communities understand the technical aspects of the clean-up operations.
• A volunteer corps of oil company employees could have been created to help with waterfront clean-up.
• An oil industry initiative could have been put in place to offer advice, mentoring, zero-interest loans and other business support to the fishing community and other small, local businesses adversely affected by the oil spill.

Unfortunately, it’s probably too late for any of these ideas to be effective now. They would be viewed as window dressing at this stage. Moving forward, the entire industry is going to operate under a cloud of suspicion until people are satisfied that effective measures have been implemented to prevent a recurrence, and until this technical industry learns how to use a human voice to communicate with its stakeholders and to foster actual relationships with its various publics.

Note: As this issue is published, four oil companies have announced their commitment of US$1 billion for a Gulf Rapid-Response Plan.

Based in Paris, Kristen Sukalac is a partner and senior adviser at Prospero Communications, a management consultancy specializing in using the power of communication to help organizations working in international circles to navigate connectivity, complexity and contextualization for external and internal stakeholders. She has just joined IABC’s executive board as a director-at-large. She blogs at CommuniAction and is on Twitter.