By Dan Molinski Of DOW JONES NEWSWIRES
CARACAS (Dow Jones)–Venezuela’s government is expanding its efforts to clean up large oil slicks in Lake Maracaibo following sharp criticism that it has ignored the month-old problem.
In a press conference earlier this week, Rafael Ramirez, the country’s energy minister and president of state oil firm Petroleos de Venezuela SA, or PDVSA, became the first top official to speak about the oil slicks–some up to 40 kilometers long–that began appearing on the lake’s surface more than a month ago.

Ramirez said more than 2,100 people are now working to clean up the spill, which he said was likely caused by leaks from the maze of old, decaying underwater pipelines that carpet the bottom of the lake. A couple weeks ago, PDVSA sent out a brief statement saying 50 workers and local fishermen were being assigned to scoop up oil at the lake.

The Lake Maracaibo basin in western Venezuela is one of the world’s largest centers for oil production, and major foreign-oil companies have been pumping crude from under and around the lake for nearly a century. Oil spills, shipping traffic and other industry-related wear-and-tear have left the lake heavily polluted.

Ramirez’s comments Wednesday came as local lawmakers in the state of Zulia have for weeks been urging the national government, led by President Hugo Chavez, to clean the spill.

Eliseo Fermin, the head of Zulia state’s Legislative Council and an opponent of the Chavez government, told Dow Jones Newswires Tuesday that an environmental emergency needs to declared for the lake.

Fermin agrees with Ramirez that decaying underwater pipelines are to blame, although he said the oil slicks probably aren’t from one or a couple leaks, but instead hundreds or even thousands of leaks in the “spaghetti-plate” of pipelines.

Fermin said the ecological damage of the lake could end up being “the biggest environmental crime in the history of South America.”

Despite such dire warnings, Ramirez downplayed the significance of the oil slicks by comparing them with the two-month-old oil spill in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico that began after an explosion at a British Petroleum PLC (BP, BP.LN) rig.

“You can’t draw parallels between the gusher in the Gulf of Mexico–where 35,000 barrels to 100,000 barrels of oil per day flow into the sea–and the leak detected in Lake Maracaibo,” Ramirez said.
Ramirez also said most of the old, underwater pipelines were already there when the government of President Hugo Chavez took control of PDVSA from anti-Chavez forces in 2003.

While most oil production in Venezuela still comes from the Lake Maracaibo region, most of the oil fields in the region have reached maturity and are now in decline. Environmentalists worry that the oil industry will eventually abandon the area altogether, leaving a huge mess behind.

-By Dan Molinski, Dow Jones Newswires; 58-414-120-5738

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http://devilsexcrement.com/2010/07/01/the-lake-maracaibo-oil-spill-is-sixteen-tomes-denser-than-the-one-in-the-gulf-of-mexico/

The Devil’s Excrement: The Lake Maracaibo oil spill is sixteen times denser than the one in the Gulf of Mexico
July 1, 2010
Orders of magnitude continue to get this Government into trouble. I could not believe it when I heard Minister of Energy and Oil Rafael Ramirez say today that the oil spill in Lake Maracaibo is far from the environmental disaster of the one caused by BP in the Gulf of Mexico. I could not find the link, so I went into Bloomberg and copied it, just so you make sure I am not BSing you:

So, Ramirez says that the 8,000 barrels being leaked or spilled are not a disaster like the Gulf and , as usual, they are the fault of the private oil companies that came before his time. Something the Prosecutor fully agrees with. Amazing!

Go figure!

But let’s put this into perspective. The US Government estimates that from 35,000 to 60,000 barrels of oil are spilling from the Macondo well disaster into the Gulf of Mexico which looks like this in Google Earth:

but on the same scale, Lake Maracaibo looks like this:

Now, spilling 8,000 barrels a day of oil into the bottom picture of Lake Maracaibo would seem to be as much of a disaster as spilling 60,000 barrels a day into the top picture, no?

In fact, according to Wikianswers, the Gulf of Mexico has an area of 615,000 square miles, so that in the worst case scenario the BP spill corresponds to 0.097 barrels spilled per square mile every single day.

In contrast, Lake Maracaibo, according to the same Wikianswers is 5,130 square miles in size, which corresponds to the spill that ramirez thins is irrelevant to 1.56 barrels of oil per square mile being dumped, spilled or leaked per day. Even worse, Lake Maracaibo is an enclosure, while the Gulf is open to the seas, which should dilute the effects of the spill.

Thus, the statement about this spill not being a disaster is another irresponsible statement by Ramirez, who has oil spills, rotten food and suitcases bounce off his cynical and Teflonic face almost daily.

But orders of magnitude don’t lie, per unit of area, the spill into Lake Maracaibo is 16 (sixteen times) denser than the one in the Gulf of Mexico.

But hey, maybe they can take advantage of it and dump some rotten food into Lake Maracaibo and mix it with the oil. Who would notice?

Or who would report anyway?
Special thanks to Richard Charter