http://www.gfmag.com/latestnews/latest-news-old.html?newsid=9815285.0
—

(Adds information from oil release at a nearby platform on Saturday in paragraph eight, additional comments from Coast Guard captain throughout.)

By Ryan Dezember
Of DOW JONES NEWSWIRES

HOUSTON -(Dow Jones)- The U.S. Coast Guard and local government officials said an oil-like substance of unknown origin is washing ashore in parts of Louisiana that were among the hardest hit by BP PLC’s (BP, BP.LN) Deepwater Horizon oil spill last year.

The Coast Guard and a parish spokeswoman said they have mobilized oil-spill-response equipment and the Coast Guard has hired a contractor to lay containment booms in hopes of stopping the substance from penetrating inland waters and ecologically sensitive shorelines.

“We’re not clear where this is from,” said Coast Guard Capt. Jonathan Burton, who is based in Morgan City, La. “We don’t have an identifiable responsible party.”

Photos taken by Jefferson Parish officials show globs of reddish matter coming ashore on Elmer’s Island, a state wildlife sanctuary, that look very similar to the oil that washed on to northern Gulf beaches during last summer’s oil spill.

Other photographs, taken off Port Fourchon, depict vast stretches of the Gulf’s surface coated in a thin film and streaked with bright orange streams of thick matter.

The substance was first reported along Louisiana’s coast on Saturday, said Kriss Fortunato, a Jefferson Parish spokeswoman. On Sunday, however, the substance came ashore in greater amounts, coating miles of beaches, she said.

Jefferson Parish has no official estimate of how much of the material has reached land or lurks in near-shore waters, but “it’s a significant amount,” Fortunato said. Sheen believed to be associated with the goopy material reportedly stretches on the Gulf’s surface for miles, she said.

The Coast Guard said it does not suspect that the goopy matter is residual oil from BP’s 4.9-million-barrel spill. The agency is investigating whether the incoming oily substance could be related to crude released by a hurricane-damaged platform last Saturday, but so far there is no evidence that the two incidents are related, Burton said.

The platform, owned by Anglo-Suisse Offshore Partners LLC, leaked an undetermined amount of oil for between four and six hours during an operation to permanently seal it, Burton said. Executives with the privately held company were not immediately available for comment.

Burton added that the clean-up and containment effort is currently being paid for by the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund, a federal organization that holds oil royalties to cover spill-cleaning costs.

Both the local government and the Coast Guard have taken samples and of the matter and are performing tests independent of one another.

So far, the substance has washed ashore on Grand Isle, Fourchon Beach and Elmer’s Island. A sheen that is associated with oil spills has also been reported on the surface of Timbalier Bay, west of Grand Isle, the Coast Guard said.

Some 10,000 feet of boom has already been deployed on Grand Isle and an additional 19,000 feet of both hard and absorbent floating barrier has been ordered for the operation, Burton said in a news release.

The Coast Guard has hired environmental-response company ES&H to begin cleaning up the oily substance and has authorized the disaster-response contractor to buy whatever additional boom and equipment is needed to contain and clean up the substance.

In a separate investigation, the Coast Guard has determined that what was reported Saturday as potentially a miles-long oil slick is actually a plume of silt emanating from the Mississippi River.

Samples from the plume taken from a Coast Guard cutter have found only trace amounts of oil and grease in the murky cloud.

“At this point, the dark substance is believed to be caused by a tremendous amount of sediment being carried down the Mississippi River due to high water, possibly further agitated by dredging operations,” the Coast Guard said in a news release.

Some sightings relayed to the Coast Guard had the plume stretching from about six miles south of the Louisiana shoreline to 100 miles offshore.

-By Ryan Dezember, Dow Jones Newswires; 713-547-9208;
Ryan.Dezember@dowjones.com;

(END)
March 21, 2011 15:22 ET (19:22 GMT)

Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://weblogs.sun-sentinel.com/news/politics/dcblog/2011/03/does_cuban_oil_drilling_put_fl_1.html

Bob Graham’s recommendation for a mutual US-Mexico-Cuba safety response plan makes good sense and should be pursued despite the Cuban embargo. DV

By William Gibson
March 17, 2011 11:13 AM

Cuba has contracted with Repsol, a Spanish company, to dig exploratory offshore oil wells along its north coast beginning this year, a prospect that alarms Florida environmentalists and some members of Congress.

Florida leaders for years have struggled to maintain a federal ban on drilling in U.S. waters near the state’s shores, though some Republicans more recently have proposed expanded offshore production to generate jobs, raise revenue and boost U.S. supplies of oil and natural gas.

The Cuban wells would explore the narrow Florida Straits only 50 miles from the fragile ecosystem of the Florida Keys. The rigs would be directly in the path of the Gulf Stream, a powerful current that carries water alongside the South Florida beaches and up the East Coast.

“We aim to drill in Cuba in the second half of this year,” company spokesman Kristian Rix said on Thursday.

“Regarding safety, we are confirdent that we have the right personnel and materials to drill safely and succesfully in the area,” he said.

Repsol, an energy giant, has long experience with offshore operations.

Nevertheless, environmentalists worry about the prospect of rigs so close to marine sanctuaries in the Keys. The Deepwater Horizon spill south of Louisiana last summer, which fouled the Gulf Coast and ruined its tourist season, demonstrated the risks of a big spill.

Former Florida Senator Bob Graham urged U.S. officials on Wednesday to form a pact with Cuba and Mexico to enforce safety standards and establish disaster-response plans in case of a spill.

“Potential sites are close enough to the United States that if an accident like the Deepwater Horizon spill occurs, fisheries, coastal tourism and other valuable U.S. natural resources could be put at great risk,” Graham and William Reilly, co-chairmen of a national commission on offshore drilling, told the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works.

Graham, a Democrat from Miami Lakes, said he and Reilly plan to meet with Mexican officials next month to press for a regional agreement on drilling practices to guard against another disaster. He said that Mexico, which has closer ties to Cuba, could act as an intermediary for establishing a regional agreement.

“We have no comment on the agreement on standards,” said Rix, “other than that we operate to the highest international standards and will continue to do so, always respecting the legal framework.”

Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://www.nola.com/news/gulf-oil-spill/index.ssf/2011/03/evaporating_oil_from_bp_spill.html#incart_mce

Published: Thursday, March 10, 2011, 5:58 PM
Updated: Thursday, March 10, 2011, 5:59 PM
By Mark Schleifstein, The Times-Picayune

A new study about the way oil from the BP Deepwater Horizon accident evaporated into the air confirms that cleanup workers were exposed to high levels of airborne pollution, and that the fumes also may have made their way onshore in Louisiana.

The study does not attempt to assess the resulting health and environmental effects.

The study’s authors also found that the way fumes from the oil combined with particles already in the air could provide a major clue to the way harmful air pollution forms from vehicle and other exhausts in urban areas.

Last June, scientists took air samples during flights over the vast area where oil was on the surface of the Gulf of Mexico.

The researchers found that 30 percent of the oil that made its way to the surface was made up of “light volatile organic carbon molecules” that evaporated within 10 hours. Another 10 to 20 percent of the surface oil was made up of heavier compounds that took several days to evaporate.

The lighter compounds combined with particles in the air and were found in a narrow plume stretching from the Macondo well northwest towards the mouth of the Mississippi River. A much wider plume of aerosols associated with the heavier compounds was found stretching across the northern edge of the oil, also moving northwest with prevailing winds towards the Louisiana coastline.

While the report does not directly address the environmental and human health effects of the aerosols, the results do indicate that offshore clean-up workers were exposed to both the vapors and the aerosol compounds, and that prevailing winds may have carried the aerosols onshore, said Joost de Gouw, lead author of the peer-reviewed report in the March 11 edition of Science magazine.

“These concentrations were high,” de Gouw said. “They are much higher than what you and I are exposed to in cities. We need to have a closer look at how these plumes of aerosol impacted people on shore.”

Some of those concerns will be addressed in future research papers by members of the same scientific team, which includes de Gouw, a research scientist with NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory and the Cooperative Institute for Research and Environmental Sciences in Boulder, Colo., other NOAA scientists and researchers with the University of Colorado, University of Miami, University of California-Irvine, Carnegie Mellon University and the National Center for Atmospheric Resarch.

While the study does not attempt to assess the pollutants’ health effects on workers or civilians, the differing evaporation rates support a theory that half of urban air pollution comes from organic aerosol particles from the slower-evaporating oil found in vehicle exhaust.

“Down the line, we may have to reduce emissions of these compounds to improve air quality,” said de Gouw.

In urban areas, scientists have been unable to distinguish between the aerosols formed by lighter and heavier organic compounds because they’re often also associated with heavier nitrogen oxide compounds, deGouw said.

The BP spill provided a laboratory-like setting that allowed separate reviews of the lighter compounds — which quickly attached themselves to particles in the air in the narrow plume — and the broader area of heavier compounds, which took much longer to attach to particles and form aerosols.

The federal Environmental Protection Agency in 2006 tightened its regulations of particulate matter to limit the amount of particles that are 2.5 micrometers in diameter or smaller to 35 micrograms per cubic meter of air. It would take several thousand particles of that size to fill the period at the end of this sentence.

Larger particles, sized 2.5 to 10 micrometers, are limited to 150 micrograms per cubic meter of air because they also cause fewer health problems.

When inhaled, both sizes of particles can reach deep inside of lungs, resulting in health problems, ranging from aggravated asthma to premature death in people with heart and lung disease. Particle pollution also is the main cause of visibility impairment in cities and national parks.

A podcast on this study featuring de Gouw is available on the web through CIRES at http://cires.colorado.edu/news/press/2011/gulf-air-quality.html.

An abstract of study is available on the web at www.sciencemag.org.

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Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://www.myfoxorlando.com/dpp/money/031111-Gas-prices-stir-debate-on-oil-drilling

Fox, Orlando: Gas prices stir debate on oil drilling

Updated: Friday, 11 Mar 2011, 10:34 PM EST
Published : Friday, 11 Mar 2011, 10:34 PM EST

WINTER PARK, Fla. (WOFL FOX 35) – Sky high prices at the pump is fueling talk among Republican lawmakers for more offshore oil drilling. One of the areas targeted for drilling is just off the coast of the Florida.

During the Florida Legislature’s current 60-day session, a proposed drilling ban will go before both the House and the Senate. It would prevent oil production from the high water line basically to international waters.

“These issues always come up when all prices spike,” said Rep. Scott Randolph, D-Orlando, who is concerned that disasters like the BP oil spill could be repeated due to poor oversight and regulation. “It’s clearly been shown the federal agencies in charge of overseeing oil drilling in the Gulf have been completely inept at those regulations,” he added.

Rep. Scott Plakon, a Republican from Longwood, disagrees. “Now might be the safest time in decades to drill out in the Gulf because this tragedy’s bought a lot of attention to safety issues, ” said Plakon, who believes drilling offshore will help pump life into the economy. “There are thousands of jobs that have been lost there, so we need to get these people back to work.”

However, Rep. Randolph worries about Florida’s pristine coastline. “Florida has a huge tourism industry. As we saw with the one well 50 miles off the coast of Louisiana and the impact that it had here in Florida.” Randolph said he would support oil drilling if someone could prove it’s safe, but right now, he doesn’t see that happening and even if it does, he says it still won’t affect gas prices. “Anybody that thinks it’s going to significantly reduce oil prices, it’s just not. Not enough oil’s going to come out of the Gulf to change that price.”

Concern over rising prices has people at the pumps talking about the politics of energy, and the alternatives to oil.

After the Gulf oil spill, Governor Crist called a special session, asking the legislature to put a constitutional drilling ban to the voters — but they didn’t.

In the 1970s, the pain of Arab oil embargoes and the Iranian Revolution led the United States to flirt with energy independence. But in the years since, consumers seem only to be intermittently lulled and angered at the pump.

The big question is, what now? How much will we pay before we find a solution to the energy equation?

Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://thehill.com/blogs/e2-wire/677-e2-wire/149099-interior-backs-another-deepwater-permit-but-gop-attacks-press-on-

By Ben Geman – 03/12/11 12:59 PM ET

The Interior Department has approved the second deepwater drilling permit for the type of project halted after BP’s oil spill, but it’s unlikely to slow GOP allegations that the White House is blocking U.S. energy development.

Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement late Friday approved a permit for BHP Billiton to resume drilling begun in early 2010 about 120 miles from the Louisiana coast.

It’s the second permit approved under enhanced safety requirements since the Obama administration lifted the federal moratorium on deepwater drilling in October. Interior imposed the freeze on deepwater Gulf of Mexico projects in late May in response to the April 20 blowout of BP’s Macondo well.

Houston-based Noble Energy won approval Feb. 28 for the first permit under the beefed-up safety rules Interior has imposed in recent months, which include requirements that companies demonstrate their capacity to quickly contain deepwater blowouts.

The new permit will allow BHP, which is Australia’s largest oil-and-gas producer, to resume the Gulf of Mexico drilling that it began February 16 in 4,234 feet of water, according to a spokeswoman for Interior’s ocean energy bureau.

Interior officials said when approving Noble’s permit that other approvals were expected in the weeks and months ahead.

But the plans for resumed permitting have not abated GOP criticism, especially as increased gasoline and oil prices have put energy at the top of the Republican political agenda.

House Republican leaders – blaming the White House for rising costs – on Thursday launched their “American Energy Initiative,” which includes planned bills to widen U.S. drilling and speed-up permitting for various kinds of energy projects.

And Republicans have scheduled multiple hearings next week to make their case.

Among them: The House Natural Resources Committee will hold a Wednesday hearing titled “The Obama Administration’s De Facto Moratorium in the Gulf of Mexico: Community and Economic Impacts,” and follow up with a Thursday session on “Harnessing American Resources to Create Jobs and Address Rising Gasoline Prices.”

In addition, 20 Republicans floated legislation Friday that would force the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality to report annually to Congress on the number of permit applications for various kinds of projects that remain under environmental review.

“We have got a permitting process that is failing America, and we have an opportunity today to show America just how bad that problem is,” said Rep. Bill Johnson (R-Ohio), the bill’s lead sponsor, on the House floor Friday.

“We are going to show the American people through a report . . . just how flawed that permitting process is, requiring them to show the permits that are in-cycle and what the economic implications are of not authorizing permits to go after American resources,” he said.

President Obama sought to seize control of the political narrative on energy prices Friday. He held a news conference in which he stressed the administration’s commitment to oil-and-gas production, while highlighting his push for a broader energy strategy that promotes green alternatives and conservation.

Obama also said he was prepared to tap the Strategic Petroleum Reserve if necessary. “If we see significant [supply] disruptions or shifts in the market that are so disconcerting to people that we think a Strategic Petroleum Reserve release might be appropriate, then we’ll take that step,” Obama said, while emphasizing that there isn’t currently a supply shortage.

Special thanks to Richard Charter