http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/editorial/outlook/7166809.html

Aug. 22, 2010, 8:41PM
For the past two decades, the deep waters of the world’s oceans have been the so-called “final frontier” for the oil and gas industry as they raced to drill deeper, faster and farther out for resources and profits.

Now, with 11 men killed and an estimated 4.9 million barrels of oil spilled, it’s clear that some operators were taking too many gambles in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

Those days of big risks are over.

In the four months since the Deepwater Horizon exploded, the Obama administration has launched the most aggressive, advanced and swift offshore drilling reforms ever implemented.

The goal is simple: to raise the bar on safety and environmental protections so that deepwater drilling can safely resume.

To achieve this objective, we must eliminate the gap between the technology that allows oil and gas companies to tap reserves beneath 5,000 feet of water and the laws, regulations and tools needed to ensure that energy companies are operating safely and responsibly on the outer continental shelf.

We are aggressively pursuing reform in four fundamental areas.

First, we are raising the bar on industry’s safety practices and equipment.

The Department of the Interior has implemented tough new requirements for inspecting and testing blowout preventers, casing and cementing wells, and drilling plans. The CEOs of drilling companies must now – for the first time ever – put their signature on the line to certify that their rigs comply with the law.

Second, we are requiring companies that want to drill to prove they are prepared to deal with catastrophic blowouts and oil spills like the Deepwater Horizon.

BP’s failed attempts to contain its blowout – from the “containment dome” to the “top hat” – exposed its lack of preparedness for a disaster. The previous administration exempted operators from addressing worst-case scenarios in their exploration plans, but we have closed that loophole. The oil and gas industry’s inadequate preparedness is also one of the reasons the current deepwater drilling pause is so important: We need to put effective strategies in place for containing blowouts and responding to major spills.

Third, we are continuing our campaign to put science back in its rightful place in decisions about offshore oil and gas development. In March – before the BP oil spill – I canceled the previous administration’s plans to hold four oil and gas lease sales in the Arctic Ocean because we need to develop more information about the risks and impacts of drilling in that sensitive landscape.

In the Gulf of Mexico, we must proceed with similar caution. We have launched a new environmental analysis of the Gulf that will help guide future development decisions and Interior’s agencies will be required to complete more robust environmental review of proposed deepwater drilling projects.

Finally, it is essential that we build a strong and independent agency with the resources, tools and authority it needs to hold offshore operators accountable to the law.

We are dividing the conflicting missions of the agency once known as the Minerals Management Service because the people who are leasing offshore areas for development should be separate from those responsible for policing offshore energy operations.

The former Inspector General for the Department of Justice, Michael Bromwich, is spearheading these reforms and has already implemented a new internal investigations and review unit that will root out problems within the regulatory agency and target companies that aim to game the system.

In addition, under Bromwich, we are substantially increasing the number of inspectors for offshore oil and gas drilling rigs and platforms. For too long, the agency that regulates offshore drilling has been short on resources.

Together, the reforms we are implementing are strong, fair and risk-based. In shallow waters – where the risks are different than deep waters – drillers can continue drilling if they meet the new standards and play by the rules. Production throughout the Gulf of Mexico has also safely continued throughout the BP oil spill.

However, in the deep-water areas, where the Deepwater Horizon blowout occurred, it is necessary and appropriate to require operators to demonstrate improved safety, blowout containment and spill response practices before allowing drilling to continue.

To be sure, both the deep-water drilling moratorium and the reforms we are implementing have drawn fire from the same powerful interests who have, over the last two decades, systematically fought regulation and oversight of offshore drilling operations.

But make no mistake: Our country needs these reforms and we will deliver them. We will raise the bar for deep-water drilling. We will hold the industry accountable. And we will build the strongest and safest offshore energy development program in the world. Salazar is secretary of the Interior.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38800962

What happened to government by the people? This is a perfect example of inordinate corporate influence–actually, control– of important government regulatory roles that should –of course–be independent of those regulated. DV

With crisis shifting from response to recovery, focus will be on who’s to blame

BP employees and members of the U.S. Coast Guard in the command center at the Houma Joint Information Center listen to BP Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles speak about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in Houma, La., in June.\

By HARRY R. WEBER

* –
NEW ORLEANS – For months, the U.S. government talked with a boot-on-the-neck toughness about BP, with the president wondering aloud about whose butt to kick.

But privately, it worked hand-in-hand with the oil giant to cap the runaway Gulf well and chose to effectively be the company’s banker – allowing future drilling revenues to potentially be used as collateral for a victim compensation fund.

Now, with a new round of investigative hearings set to begin Monday on BP’s home turf and the disaster largely off the front pages, there’s worry BP PLC could get a slap on the wrist from its behind-the-scenes partner. That could trickle down to states hurt by the spill and hoping for large fines because they may share in the pie.

“I don’t think they’ve been as tough as they should have been from Day 1,” said Billy Nungesser, president of Lousiana’s hard-hit Plaquemines Parish. “We were at war. You don’t go to war and hope people respond.”

In the past few weeks, public messages from BP and the government have been almost in lockstep. The government even released a report – criticized by academic researchers and some lawmakers as too rosy – asserting that much of the oil released into the Gulf is gone, playing into BP’s message that its unprecedented response effort is working. A recent AP poll shows that BP’s image, which took a beating after the oil spill, is recovering.

Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., said Thursday that White House support for the oil report shows the administration’s “pre-occupation with the public relations of the oil spill has superseded the realities on the ground.”

That differs from the atmosphere early on, when BP was the recipient of some very tough talk from the government. A little more than a week after President Barack Obama’s on-air comment about “whose ass to kick” in early June, BP executives encouraged White House officials at a meeting in Washington to back off on the rhetoric. They reminded the government that a bankrupt company pays no bills, according to a person who was briefed on the details of the meeting and spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the talks.

In mid-July, BP finally capped its runaway well and is now very close to sealing it from the bottom once and for all.

‘Trying to hide the football’
With the crisis shifting from response to recovery, the focus will be on who’s to blame and how much they should pay. The BP-government partnership raises questions about the government’s ability to be impartial in meting out punishment for the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history.
Many of those investigating the spill are not independent.

“Whether the public accepts that remains to be seen,” said Wayne R. Andersen, a retired federal judge and the only nongovernment member of a key spill investigative panel.

The Deepwater Horizon joint investigation team that Andersen is on will hold its fourth set of hearings beginning Monday in Houston, where BP’s U.S. offices are located. The panel is charged with reaching conclusions about what happened.

Congress and the Justice Department also are investigating, and various government agencies will be determining how much BP and others should pay in fines for the April 20 explosion that killed 11 workers and spilled 206 million gallons of oil.

The amount of spilled oil alone could mean a fine of up to $21 billion if BP were found to have committed gross negligence, and criminal charges could be in order if negligence is found. The figure is important to the Gulf because Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., is pushing legislation that would require that at least 80 percent of the civil and criminal penalties charged to BP under the Clean Water Act be returned to the Gulf Coast for long-term economic and environmental recovery.

So if the government reaches a settlement with BP on fines that are significantly lower or, on the criminal side, lets them off easy, that could rub a lot of Americans the wrong way. By the same token, if the government comes down too hard on BP, that might hurt the government’s interests, because BP’s financial health and its ability to meet its spill obligations are tied together.

BP executives declined repeated requests for interviews for this story.

There are also other companies’ interests to consider: Transocean, the owner of the rig that exploded, and Anadarko Petroleum, a minority owner of the undersea well, will be looking to protect themselves by shifting blame to BP, while BP also will be looking to shift blame.
“They’re all trying to hide the football,” said Daniel Becnel, a Louisiana lawyer suing BP and others over the oil spill.

The ties that bind
The entire oil and gas industry will be watching closely to see if BP’s ace in the hole – its relationship with the federal government – pays off.

The ties that bind BP and the government together started forming soon after the rig explosion.
BP and U.S. Coast Guard employees sat side-by-side in a command center in Robert, La., coordinating the spill response and fielding calls together from media from around the world. That setup later moved to a high-rise office building in downtown New Orleans.

According to a person who has worked in the command center, the response team in New Orleans occupies two floors. Coast Guard and BP leaders each have a set of offices and work areas. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation, and Enforcement, formerly known as the Minerals Management Service, also has its own office, the person said. At the height of the spill, more than 400 people were on the two floors. Now, about 200 folks sit in those offices on any given day.

Often, the people from the BP leadership team would go into the Coast Guard offices with issues and vice versa, the person said.

BP and the government also worked together to control media access.

The Coast Guard and BP coordinated access for The Associated Press aboard the Helix Q4000 vessel in early August on the day of the so-called static kill operation, in which mud and later cement was pumped into the runaway well from the top. Accompanying the AP reporter and photographer on a BP-chartered helicopter to the vessel were six BP employees and a Coast Guard liaison. A photographer working for the White House also was aboard.

Retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the government’s point man on the spill response, told the AP that the complexity of the response and technical know-how required made BP the natural partner.

“That may seem a little bit at odds and maybe not well understood by the American public or even some leaders, but it is in fact how we have been managing oil spills in this country for 20 years,” Allen said.

And, he said, the law dictated that the responsible party clean up the mess.

“You have to be able to tell them what you want, and they have to write a check,” Allen said. “It would be inadvisable to do that anywhere but sitting next to each other.”

‘Replace them with who?’

When asked if independent industry experts could have been brought in to work on the response instead of BP – knowing that the government would be investigating the oil giant – Allen quipped, “Replace them with who?”

Allen said the government doesn’t have the competence or capacity to deal with drilling a relief well and the type of technology it takes.

“Would you suggest I bring in a competitor?” Allen said. “One of the conundrums of this response is, and one of the things that I think is causing everybody some problems, is the federal government does not own the means of production to solve this problem at the wellhead.”
On the flip side, could independent investigators have been brought in to render judgment?

Andersen, the retired judge recently appointed to the joint Coast Guard-Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation, and Enforcement investigative panel, said that when you are dealing with a highly technical and narrow area of expertise, there is going to be overlap of the knowledge of the regulators and those they are regulating.

“Naturally, that needs to be out on the table,” Andersen said.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://www.pnj.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2010100817023

Oh great, just what we need; Rubio leading the charge for drilling in Florida waters; watch out for this guy–he’s dangerous. DV

KRIS WERNOWSKY * KWERNOWSKY@PNJ.COM * AUGUST 17, 2010

Senate hopeful Marco Rubio believes the option of offshore drilling isn’t a dead issue for Florida.

He said the issue has to be framed as one of energy independence and national security.

Rubio brought his stump speech to a group of 50 supporters at McGuire’s Irish Pub in Pensacola on Tuesday, touching on issues ranging from the oil spill and health care to religious freedom and immigration.

With the region still stinging from a ruined tourism season, with hotels still empty and a question mark over the safety of fish in the bountiful waters of the Gulf of Mexico, Rubio said a measured and safer approach to drilling will help the nation ween itself off foreign oil.

Rubio’s solution to the spoiled tourism season includes a business incubation program similar to one subsidized by the federal government after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans.

“Unfortunately, this has wiped out the tourism season, the hundred days a year where northwest Florida really benefits from visitors,” he said. “There’s no way to recover from that other than concentrate on creating initiatives here locally”

Judy DeCrescenzo, 59, of Pensacola asked Rubio to weigh in on a controversial plan to build an Islamic community center near the former site of the World Trade Center.

With Meek as the Democratic nominee, the poll shows Rubio, a Republican, leading a three-way race against Meek and Crist by a statistically significant margin — Rubio 38 percent, Crist 33 percent, Meek 18 percent and 11 percent undecided.

With Greene as the Democratic nominee, Crist remains in first place, but by a margin so narrow it’s a statistical tie — Crist 39 percent, Rubio 38 percent, Greene 12 percent and 11 percent undecided.

In the Democratic primary, Meek leads Greene by 40 percent to 26 percent, with 6 percent choosing other candidates and 28 percent still undecided.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/2010/0817/Obama-s-new-offshore-oil-drilling-rules-too-many-loopholes

Richard is right; requiring an EA instead of an EIS is a major concession to quick permitting for more offshore oil, potentially without much needed environmental controls in place. DV

The White House’s new guidelines for offshore oil drilling in deep water were intended to make it tougher for oil companies to avoid detailed environmental reviews.

By Mark Clayton, Staff Writer / August 17, 2010

The Obama administration’s new guidelines for offshore oil drilling, which are intended to require much more detailed environmental reviews for deep-water drilling, have upset not only the oil industry, but environmentalists, too.

The recommendations unveiled by the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) and the US Department of the Interior on Monday were touted as ratcheting back widespread uses of “categorical exclusions.”

That designation by the Interior’s Minerals Management Service (MMS) had exempted many deep-water drilling operations from detailed environmental review under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).

In the wake of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, environmental and other groups found that BP’s Macondo well that was gushing oil – as well as most other deep-water wells in the region – had been graced with a categorical exclusion.

“In light of the increasing levels of complexity and risk – and the consequent potential environmental impacts – associated with deep-water drilling, we are taking a fresh look at the NEPA process and the types of environmental reviews that should be required for offshore activity,” said Interior Secretary Ken Salazar in a statement.

While Congress wrangles over just how to tighten environmental requirements for offshore drilling, the Obama Administration says categorical exclusions will now be used far more sparingly. Steps the CEQ called for in its review include:

* Reviewing the use of categorical exclusions for outer continental shelf, or OCS, oil and gas exploration and development “in light of the increasing levels of complexity and risk – and the consequent potential environmental impacts – associated with deep-water drilling.”

* Comprehensive NEPA review of individual deep-water exploration activities, including site-specific information “where appropriate,” a loophole that angers some environmentalists.

* Amending the OCS Lands Act to eliminate the current 30-day timeframe for approving exploration plan – and modify NEPA practices to reflect new environmental findings since the BP oil spill.

“The recommendations in this report are targeted to ensure robust environmental reviews for future oil and gas exploration and development,” Nancy Sutley, CEQ chair, said in a statement.

But limiting use of categorical exclusions could create costly delays and curb job growth, the American Petroleum Institute (API), an industry lobby group says.

“We’re concerned the change could add significantly to the department’s workload, stretching the timeline for approval of important energy development projects with no clear return in environmental protection,” Erik Milito, upstream director for API, said in a statement. “Environmental review of offshore operations under existing rules is extensive, and decisions on categorical exclusions, which are intended to avoid repetitive analysis, require review.”

Many environmentalists, however, were only marginally less irked about the recommendations than the oil industry – arguing that there were too many loopholes that would still allow categorical exclusions.

Under a directive signed Monday by Michael Bromwich, the new director of the MMS’s successor agency, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Enforcement and Regulation (BOEM) “shall narrow its use of categorical exclusions.”

In the very next paragraph, the requirement “not to use” such exclusions is spelled out for equipment typically used in deep-water drilling – including floating drill rigs. But the last sentence in the paragraph also appears to leave open the possibility of a return to relatively light – some argue superficial – environmental review after the current six-month moratorium on deepwater drilling expires.

“If and when the July 12 suspension is no longer in force, all plans submitted for approval that propose an activity that involves [deep-water drilling equipment] shall be subject to an environmental assessment.”

What that means, says Richard Charter, an offshore drilling specialist for the Defenders of Wildlife, is that a few months from now when the moratorium on deep-water drilling in the Gulf is over, the standard for deep-water environmental review could be just an “Environmental Assessment,” or EA.

Under NEPA, the EA is a cursory document of a few pages that could easily devolve into a rubber-stamping exercise, he says. What’s needed, he argues, is an “Environmental Impact Statement” – a very detailed review – for each deep-water well proposal.

On the plus side, he notes, BOEM is planning to conduct a supplemental environmental impact statement for the Gulf – a major evaluation that could do a lot of good, Charter says. Until then, however, the Bromwich memo paves the way for new activities in the Gulf to continue using categorical exclusions “if they are in shallow enough water and without certain risk factors,” he says.

“The Bromwich memo cuts both ways,” Mr. Charter says. “It does curb some excesses in the use of categorical exclusions.

“But this is also an interim step that will pave the way for Interior to declare that drilling can now proceed safely. We will just have to wait and see if that word ‘safely’ means anything or not,” he says.

The BOEM will soon begin a formal comprehensive review and evaluation of its use of categorical exclusions, the Interior Department reported. While that review is going on, those exclusions will be used much more sparingly, Bromwich said. After the review is complete, BOEM says it will unveil a new approach that incorporates CEQ recommendations.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://wildsingaporenews.blogspot.com/2010/08/gulf-oil-spill-giant-underwater-plume.html

19 Aug 10;

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Experts said Thursday they have mapped a 35-kilometer (22 mile) long underwater plume of oil that spewed from BP’s ruptured Gulf of Mexico well, seeming to challenge US government assertions that most of the oil has disappeared.

The oily underwater cloud measured two kilometers wide and 200 meters (650 feet) thick and was drifting through the Gulf at a depth of at least 900 meters, according to the paper by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) marine biologists, published in the journal Science.

The plume was seen as not dissipating as rapidly as experts had expected, despite widespread use of dispersants which the government has insisted have been vital to the breakdown of vast amounts of oil.

The observations were made in late June, several weeks before the ruptured wellhead was capped, and about two months after an explosion sank the BP-leased Deepwater Horizon rig, triggering the largest ever maritime oil spill.

Challenging US government estimates based on natural processes rapidly dissipating the toxic crude, the authors said deep-sea microbes were degrading the plume only slowly and predicted the oil would endure for some time.

“We’ve shown conclusively not only that a plume exists, but also defined its origin and near-field structure,” said lead author Richard Camilli.

The oil already “is persisting for longer periods than we would have expected,” he added.

“Many people speculated that the sub-surface oil droplets were being easily downgraded. Well, we didn’t find that. We found that it was still there.”

US and BP officials earlier this month proclaimed that about three-quarters of the oil which gushed into the Gulf had been cleaned up or dispersed through natural processes.

Around 4.9 million barrels of oil are believed to have spewed from the fractured wellhead before it was capped last month. US officials say that of that amount, 800,000 barrels were contained and funneled up to ships on the surface.

The leak not only threatened livelihoods of fishermen and tourism businesses along the US Gulf coast, but also stoked fears of long-term ecological damage.

On August 4, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said the “vast majority” of oil had been evaporated, removed by cleanup teams or was dispersing naturally.

The remaining 26 percent — or about 1.3 million barrels of oil — was classified as “residual oil” and “is either on or just below the surface as residue and weathered tar balls, has washed ashore or been collected from the shore, or is buried in sand and sediments,” the report said.

The Woods Hole team used a robotic submarine equipped with an underwater mass spectrometer to detect and analyze the plume, making repeated horizontal sweeps to ascertain its size and chemical composition.

They followed the “neutrally buoyant” cloud as it migrated slowly, at 0.27 kilometers per hour, southwest of the leaking well.

The plume was then tracked for a distance of about 35 kilometers before the approach of Hurricane Alex forced the scientists to turn back.

The spectrometer found petroleum hydrocarbons at concentrations of more than 50 micrograms per liter, a level that meant the samples had no smell or oil and were clear. The impacts on biodiversity remain uncertain, though.

“The plume was not a river of Hershey’s Syrup,” said Christopher Reddy, a marine biochemist. “But that’s not to say it isn’t harmful for the environment.”

The damaged well was capped on July 15. Earlier this month BP engineers plugged the site with heavy drilling fluid and then sealed it with cement.

The company aims to permanently seal the well in the second week of September, a US official said on Thursday.

Major study charts long-lasting oil plume in Gulf
Seth Borenstein, Associated Press Yahoo News 20 Aug 10;

WASHINGTON – A 22-mile-long invisible mist of oil is meandering far below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico, where it will probably loiter for months or more, scientists reported Thursday in the first conclusive evidence of an underwater plume from the BP spill.

The most worrisome part is the slow pace at which the oil is breaking down in the cold, 40-degree water, making it a long-lasting but unseen threat to vulnerable marine life, experts said.

Earlier this month, top federal officials declared the oil in the spill was mostly “gone,” and it is gone in the sense you can’t see it. But the chemical ingredients of the oil persist more than a half-mile beneath the surface, researchers found.

And the oil is degrading at one-tenth the pace at which it breaks down at the surface. That means “the plumes could stick around for quite a while,” said study co-author Ben Van Mooy of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, which led the research published online in the journal Science.

Monty Graham, a scientist at the Dauphin Island Sea Lab in Alabama who was not involved in the study, said: “We absolutely should be concerned that this material is drifting around for who knows how long. They say months in the (research) paper, but more likely we’ll be able to track this stuff for years.”

Late Thursday, federal officials acknowledged the deepwater oil was not degrading as fast as they initially thought, but still was breaking down “relatively rapidly.” Jane Lubchenco, chief of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said agency scientists and others were “working furiously” to come up with actual rates of biodegradation.

She noted a bright spot from the slow breakdown of the oil: Faster would mean a big influx of oil-eating microbes. Though they are useful, they also use up oxygen, creating “dead zones” that already plague the Gulf in the summer. Dead zones are not forming because of the oil plume, Lubchenco said.

The underwater oil was measured close to BP’s blown-out well, which is about 40 miles off the Louisiana coast. The plume started three miles from the well and extended more than 20 miles to the southwest. The oil droplets are odorless and too small to be seen by the human eye. If you swam through the plume, you wouldn’t notice it.

“The water samples when we were right in the plume look like spring water,” study chief author Richard Camilli said. “You certainly didn’t see any oil droplets and you certainly didn’t smell it.”

The scientists used complex instruments – including a special underwater mass spectrometer – to detect the chemical signature of the oil that spewed from the BP well after it ruptured April 20. The equipment was carried into the deep by submersible devices.

With more than 57,000 of these measurements, the scientists mapped a huge plume in late June when the well was still leaking. The components of oil were detected in a flow that measured more than a mile wide and more than 650 feet from top to bottom.

Federal officials said there are signs that the plume has started to break into smaller ones since the Woods Hole research cruise ended. But scientists said that wouldn’t lessen the overall harm from the oil.

The oil is at depths of 3,000 to 4,000 feet, far below the environment of the most popular Gulf fish like red snapper, tuna and mackerel. But it is not harmless. These depths are where small fish and crustaceans live. And one of the biggest migrations on Earth involves small fish that go from deep water to more shallow areas, taking nutrients from the ocean depths up to the large fish and mammals.

Those smaller creatures could be harmed by going through the oil, said Larry McKinney, director of Texas A&M University’s Gulf of Mexico research center in Corpus Christi.

Some aspects of that region are so little known that “we might lose species that we don’t know now exist,” said Graham of the Dauphin Island lab.

“This is a highly sensitive ecosystem,” agreed Steve Murawski, chief fisheries scientist for the federal agency NOAA. “The animals down at 3,300 to 3,400 feet grow slowly.” The oil not only has toxic components but could cause genetic problems even at low concentrations, he said.

Lubchenco said NOAA is “very concerned about the impact” of the oil below the surface and federal officials last week started more aggressive monitoring of it.

For much of the summer, the mere existence of underwater plumes of oil was the subject of a debate that at times pitted outside scientists against federal officials who downplayed the idea of plumes of trapped oil. Now federal officials say as much as 42 million gallons of oil may be lurking below the surface in amounts that are much smaller than the width of a human hair.

While federal officials prefer to describe the lurking oil as “an ephemeral cloud,” the Woods Hole scientists use the word “plume” repeatedly.

The study conclusively shows that a plume exists, that it came from the BP well and that it probably never got close to the surface of the Gulf of Mexico, Camilli said. It is probably even larger than 22 miles long, but scientists had to stop measuring because of Hurricane Alex.

Earlier this week a University of South Florida team reported oil in amounts that were toxic to critical plant plankton deep underwater, but the crude was not necessarily in plumes. Those findings have not been reviewed by other scientists or published.

The plume is probably still around, but moving west-southwest of the BP well site at about 4 miles a day, Camilli said.

While praising the study that ended on June 28, Murawski said more recent observations show that the cloud of oil has “broken apart into a bunch of very small features, some them much farther away.” Texas A&M’s McKinney said marine life can suffer harm whether it is several smaller plumes or one giant one.

NOAA redirected much of its sampling for underwater oil after consulting with Woods Hole researchers. The federal agency is now using the techniques that the team pioneered with a robotic sub and an underwater mass spectrometer, Murawski said.

Previous attempts to define the plume were “like watching the Super Bowl on a 12-inch black-and-white TV and we try to bring to the table a 36-inch HD TV,” said Woods Hole scientist Chris Reddy. The paper, fast-tracked for the world of peer-reviewed science, was written on a boat while still in the Gulf, he said.

Reddy said he could not yet explain why the underwater plume formed at that depth. But other experts point to three factors: cold water, the way the oil spewed from the broken well, and the use of massive amounts of dispersants to break up the oil before it gets to the surface.

The decision to use 1.8 million gallons of dispersants amounted to an environmental trade-off – it meant less oil tainting the surface, where there is noticeable and productive life, but the risk of longer-term problems down below.

Retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the government’s point man on the Gulf oil spill, said it was a choice between two difficult options – with the discussions going on in front of the president. In the end, officials decided to “accept the implication of the hydrocarbons in the water column rather than Barataria Bay or the Chandeleur Islands” in Louisiana.

Given the slow rate at which the oil is degrading in the cold water, Samantha Joye of the University of Georgia, and others say it is too early to even think about closing the books on the spill: “The full environmental impacts of the spill will thus not be felt for some time.”

Gulf Plume Resists Oil-Eating Microbes
Jeremy Hsu livescience.com Yahoo News 20 Aug 10;

A massive oil plume from the Deepwater Horizon blowout may survive for longer than expected against the petroleum-eating microbes in the Gulf of Mexico, according to a new study.

Researchers took a “forensic snapshot” in late June that showed higher-than-expected oxygen levels in the plume from the oil well that began gushing in April. If microbes had swarmed into the area, their feeding frenzy should have reduced oxygen levels.

But the scientists said they have only just begun to analyze all the hydrocarbon molecules found in the oil plume, which typically serve as food for the microbes. They also cautioned that the study represented just one moment in time and space, and does not show what has happened to the plume since June.

“This was two weeks in June and a relatively small area in a very large body of water,” said Christopher Reddy, a marine geochemist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI) in Massachusetts, during a press conference on Thursday.

A monster of a plume

A research ship and its companion underwater robot tracked the oil plume out to at least 22 miles (35 kilometers) from the leaking oil well. Scientists aboard spent 10 days taking samples before the threat of Hurricane Alex forced them to break off.

“Unfortunately we were not able to track this out beyond 35 kilometers, although the data suggested that the plume extended for much farther than we tracked it,” said Richard Camilli, a chief WHOI scientist of applied ocean physics and engineering, and lead author on the study paper detailed in the Aug. 19 issue of the journal Science.

At the time, the plume stretched 1.2 miles (2 km) in width and reached 650 feet (198 meters) deep. The researchers found the plume was located more than 3,000 feet (914 m) below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico, holding stable at a depth of 1,100 (335 m) feet down.

Mass spectrometers aboard the robotic sub that were lowered from the ship allowed the team to begin fingerprinting the hydrocarbon molecules in the oil.

But the overall chemical analysis remains incomplete, and so the total amount of oil in the plume remains unknown. Questions about the possible hazards of the oil plume for marine life also remain up in the air.

“Without the complete picture of all the components of hydrocarbons, we can’t say much about its bioactivity or toxicity,” Camilli said.

The microbe buffet table

When the Deepwater Horizon rig first sank and unleashed an oil spill into the Gulf, experts had counted upon microbes to help break down the oil plumes. But the latest findings suggest that the microbes may feed slower than expected.

The plume also retained its massive size more than three months after the oil began gushing from the well.

Still, the results did not surprise David Valentine, a marine geochemist at the University of California, Santa Barbara who did not take part in the new study. He had participated in a separate expedition that found higher levels of microbial activity closer to the oil well.

Valentine pointed out that the new study has not yet analyzed many of the hydrocarbons in the oil plume. He added that the microbes might have quickly swarmed the leaking oil well area at first, but then slowed down in activity during the following months.

Furthermore, microbes probably break down certain hydrocarbons faster than others, Valentine said.

“I think we’ll find it’s a buffet [of hydrocarbons] down there,” Valentine told LiveScience. “The filet mignon may go quickly, but the taco bar will stay around for a while.”

The study’s researchers also gave their own warnings about drawing any premature conclusions.

“Microbes are a lot like teenagers,” Reddy said. “They work on their own time, their own scale, they do what they want when they want, and so it is often difficult to make predictions about microbe degradation, and in fact it may vary substantially in the Gulf in any one time.”

Lost and not yet found

The WHOI team hopes to also get a sense of what hydrocarbons have evaporated, and what has remained in the oil plume.

But first, researchers must relocate the oil plume again. That task of finding the missing plume has become harder since BP managed to temporarily cap the leaking oil well on the bottom of the Gulf.

“The faucet has been shut off,” Reddy acknowledged. “We don’t know where these hydrocarbons are, we saw them in June.”

The capping of the oil well means that researchers can no longer track the oil plume from its source, Valentine explained. “It’s a needle in a haystack problem,” Valentine said. “It’s a very large area, and it’s not a massive feature yet. But it will expand. Somebody will find it.”

Special thanks to Richard Charter