{"id":14558,"date":"2012-07-06T15:20:39","date_gmt":"2012-07-06T20:20:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/?p=14558"},"modified":"2012-07-09T13:20:49","modified_gmt":"2012-07-09T18:20:49","slug":"how-exxon-learned-from-its-mistakes-a-conversation-with-steve-coll","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/2012\/07\/06\/how-exxon-learned-from-its-mistakes-a-conversation-with-steve-coll\/","title":{"rendered":"How Exxon Learned From its Mistakes: A Conversation With Steve Coll"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Photo by CHRIS WILKINS\/AFP\/Getty Images<\/p>

A cleanup team walks through the oily surf at Naked Island on Prince Williams Sound, a week after the Exxon Valdez oil tanker ran aground in March 1989 and spilled 11 million gallons of crude oil.<\/p><\/div>\n

Just after midnight on March 24, 1989 the Exxon Valdez oil tanker struck a reef in Prince William Sound, Alaska. 11 million gallons of oil spilled into the water<\/a>, which soon made its way to shore. It took three years to clean up<\/a>. It was the worst oil spill in history.<\/p>\n

That was until two years ago, when the BP Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico<\/a>. That spill released 206 million gallons of oil into the sea<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In his new book, ‘Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power<\/a>‘, reporter Steve Coll<\/a> takes a look inside the largest oil company in the world, a juggernaut with annual revenues of 450 billion dollars. “That’s more than economic activity of most countries,” Coll says in the first part of our interview<\/a>. \u00a0In part two, we talk to Coll about\u00a0how the company reacted to both disasters.<\/p>\n

Q: <\/span>One of the things you talk about in the book about the corporate culture at ExxonMobil. It’s clouded in secrecy; it almost resembles a cult. And you\u2019re saying that culture came out of the aftermath of the Exxon Valdez spill.<\/p>\n

A: <\/span>If we follow the metaphor that ExxonMobil is like a state, then the Valdez spill is kind of like 9\/11 for them. It was a huge shock, it cost them their reputation overnight. Fifteen years later, they would run focus groups on why they were so hated, and they\u2019d enter into wordplay games and say: ‘I\u2019ll say Exxon,’ and all of their subjects would immediately say: ‘Valdez.’<\/p>\n

So it was a huge stain on their reputation and their sense of themselves. Economically, it was costly, but they have the cash flow to deal with the settlements. But afterwards they undertook a series of sweeping reforms to try, essentially, to achieve a day-to-day practice in which nothing like that could happen again. Their goal was, basically, to ring all human fallibility out of their enormous daily industrial operations, whether at refineries, offshore oil platforms, or gas drilling. Everything.<\/p>\n

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