http://www.propublica.org/documents/item/bp-strategy-presentation-march-2010#document/p38

http://www.propublica.org/ion/blog/item/bps-big-plans-for-deep-wells-deep-profits

A BP presentation from March 2010-a month before the Deepwater Horizon disaster-spelled out the company’s “key sources of growth” beyond 2015. First on the list?
“Expanding deepwater.”

The document also includes a bar graph that proclaims BP as the “leading deepwater company” based on 2009 production numbers. According to the graph, BP produced the equivalent of 150 million more barrels of oil per day than did its closest rival, Shell.

BP’s document also shows that the company spent less on production costs than its competitors. In a June 15 hearing before lawmakers, some of those same oil companies told Congress that BPdid not follow design standards that they considered to be the industry norm.

BP’s Doug Suttles recently joined his industry peers in questioning the administration’s six-month moratorium on deepwater drilling.
“I understand why people might want to put a moratorium in place, but my personal view on this is we need to look very rapidly at what needs to be done that gives you confidence to restart (drilling in deepwater) because the consequences of stopping are also significant,” said Suttles, in comments reported by The Times-Picayune of New Orleans.

The moratorium was lifted last week, when U.S. District Judge Martin Feldman ruled that the rationale behind it was “heavy-handed, and rather overbearing.” Feldman, in 2008 and 2009 financial disclosures, reported owning stock in several oil companies. (Disclosure: Feldman is the same judge who earlier this year dismissed a libel lawsuit against ProPublica.) Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has said the administration may issue a new, narrower moratorium.

In tackling the Gulf disaster, BP has often cited the depth of this well as a primary challenge to containing the gusher. By now, multiple reports-including one in today’s New York Times-document how the technology to drill to greater depths has surged ahead, while the technology to clean up a spill hasn’t been updated for decades.

While other oil company executives assured lawmakers that their companies would have done things differently than BP did in designing the well, they weren’t able to put as much distance between themselves and BP when grilled on their own preparedness for a major oil spill.
At the June 15 hearing, lawmakers pointed out that the major oil giants are using very similar oil spill response plans that contain many of the same mistakes, including references to marine mammals that don’t live in the Gulf as well as contact information for deceased experts. All the plans were prepared by the same consulting group.

“When these things happen, we are not well-equipped to deal with them,” Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson told the House Energy panel.
Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://www.newsweek.com/2010/07/01/katrina-and-the-oil-spill-useful-comparison.html

Those awful FEMA trailers are back, this time as temporary housing for workers responding to BP’s disaster in the gulf. And in bad news for Obama, the public rates his handling of the mess similar to how Bush bungled the hurricane response.

Chris Bickford / The New York Times-Redux
A FEMA trailer in Venice, La., last month.

For its impact on Louisiana residents and the widespread criticism of the federal response, the disastrous Gulf of Mexico oil spill inevitably draws comparisons to Hurricane Katrina. The parallels only intensified as Tropical Storm Alex slammed the gulf and halted BP’s containment effort and The New York Times reported that cleanup workers were being housed in formaldehyde-tainted trailers once provided to hapless Katrina refugees.

The government banned the trailers from being used as long-term homes, then sold them in 2006, the Times reported. Now some cleanup contractors needing to house workers are buying them, even though the Federal Emergency Management Agency says they are not to be used for housing. “The price was right,” one of the contractors told the newspaper.

The government’s bungling of Katrina is never far from President Obama’s mind; he has visited the gulf several times in an effort to avoid criticism that his predecessor faced.

By many measures, Katrina looks like the worse disaster. The oil spill will certainly not take the same human toll as the hurricane, which caused around 1,500 deaths. Eleven workers were killed in BP’s Deepwater Horizon drilling-rig accident, with several deaths also reported among response workers. In addition to the damage Katrina wrought, the hurricane itself triggered one of the largest oil spills in U.S. history, releasing a reported 6.5 million gallons in various locations along its path, not including what may have spilled from fuel tanks in submerged cars or sunken boats. There’s also Katrina’s price tag, which the National Hurricane Center estimated at $84 billion, the largest ever for a hurricane. The economic cost of the gulf spill remains to be seen, not to mention the price to the environment and all the life forms that live in the gulf-which contribute in various ways to the livelihoods and ways of life of many humans.

While we await the final toll of the spill, which is in day 73, Americans have shown levels of frustration similar to what happened after Katrina. On June 7 a poll showed that more Americans had a negative view of the federal response to the oil spill than had a negative view of the much-criticized Katrina response. Worse for the Obama administration, another poll released Wednesday asked responders to compare Obama’s handling of the oil spill with George W. Bush’s handling of Katrina, and nearly six in 10 people said Obama’s response was the same or worse than Bush’s. A poll of Louisiana residents released June 15 drew a similar conclusion. “Obama’s Katrina” isn’t a phrase the White House wants to hear, but it’s one that could gain traction if the polling continues in this vein.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

06/29/2010

Mike Soraghan, E&E reporter

Environmental and liberal groups announced today that they have collected more than 400,000 signatures urging President Obama to reverse his plan to allow drilling in new offshore areas.

“The American public does not want more drills and spills,” said Anna Aurilio, director of the Washington office of Environment America, at a Capitol Hill news conference. “If anything, they want more windmills.”

Aurilio stood in a hearing room with cardboard boxes that bore the names of the eight environmental groups that circulated petitions against the expansion of drilling. Among them were Environment America, Greenpeace, Oceana, MoveOn.org and the Sierra Club. She was joined by Athan Manuel of the Sierra Club and three Democratic House members, Kathy Castor of Florida, John Garamendi of California and Frank Pallone of New Jersey.

“The American people are way ahead of the U.S. Congress on this issue,” Castor said at the event. “We’ve got to fight through Big Oil’s PR campaign. They downplay the risks. They contribute to campaigns.”

The oil industry says the environmental campaign does not prove any groundswell of opposition to offshore drilling.

“Hundreds of thousands of Americans have said they are in favor of offshore drilling,” said Cathy Landry, spokeswoman for the American Petroleum Institute. “And even after the spill, polls indicate the majority of Americans support expanded development.”

The comments solicited by environmental groups were submitted to the Interior Department as part of the process of evaluating the Obama administration’s offshore drilling policy, embodied in a five-year plan released in March. The deadline for comments for this stage of the process is tomorrow.

In releasing the five-year plan, Obama announced what he called an “expansion” of offshore drilling, proposing new drilling off the coasts of Alaska, Florida and Virginia. Most of those proposals have been scaled back, but the environmental groups want Obama to turn more fully away from drilling (E&E Daily, March 31).

As he tried to assert his control over spill response and policy in late May, Obama delayed the proposed oil lease sale off the coast of Virginia and suspended two planned exploration projects by Royal Dutch Shell PLC off the coast of Alaska. He also declared a moratorium that was later lifted by a federal judge (E&E Daily, May 28).

That still allows preliminary exploration activities along the southern Atlantic Coast and could allow the Virginia and Alaska drilling projects to restart in the next five-year plan. The petitions sought to block those possibilities. Each group’s wording was somewhat different, but each stated that new drilling should be stopped.

Special thanks to Richard Charter.

COASTA~2

Hello All,

I put together some photos that illustrate what we have been seeing during our surveys over the last eight weeks on the Gulf coast in terms of pre and post oil landfall impacts to beach-nesting birds, shorebirds and shorebird habitat. This can be considered part of the visual data that the CBC is collecting.

You may circulate this PDF to any appropriate parties.

Best,

Margo

Margo Zdravkovic
Director
Coastal Bird Conservation/Conservian
Conserving Coastal Birds and their Habitats throughout the Western Hemisphere.
Phone 561-504-4251

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jun/30/biologists-find-oil-spill-
deadzones

Methane at 100,000 times normal levels have been creating oxygen-depleted
areas devoid of life near BP’s Deepwater Horizon spill, according to two
independent scientists

Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent
Thursday July 1 2010
The Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jun/30/biologists-find-oil-spill-
deadzones

Scientists are confronting growing evidence that BP’s ruptured well in the
Gulf of Mexico is creating oxygen-depleted “dead zones” where fish and other
marine life cannot survive.

In two separate research voyages, independent scientists have detected what
were described as “astonishingly high” levels of methane, or natural gas,
bubbling from the well site
[http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/may/08/deepwater-horizon-blast-m
ethane-bubble” title=””>”astonishingly high], setting off a chain of
reactions that suck the oxygen out of the water. In some cases, methane
concentrations are 100,000 times normal levels.

Other scientists as well as sport fishermen are reporting unusual movements
of fish, shrimp, crab and other marine life, including increased shark
sightings closer to the Alabama coast.

Larry Crowder, a marine biologist at Duke University, said there were
already signs that fish were being driven from their habitat.

“The animals are already voting with their fins to get away from where the
oil spill is and where potentially there is oxygen depletion,” he said.
“When you begin to see animals changing their distribution that is telling
you about the quality of water further offshore. Basically, the fish are
moving closer to shore to try to get to better water.”

Such sightings ? and an accumulation of data from the site of the ruptured
well and from the ocean depths miles away ? have deepened concerns that the
enormity of the environmental disaster in the Gulf has yet to be fully
understood. It could also jeopardise the Gulf’s billion-dollar fishing and
shrimping industry.

In a conference call with reporters, Samantha Joye, a scientist at the
University of Georgia who has been studying the effects of the spill at
depth, said the ruptured well was producing up to 50% as much methane and
other gases as oil.

The finding presents a new challenge to scientists who so far have been
focused on studying the effects on the Gulf of crude oil, and the 5.7m
litres of chemical dispersants used to break up the slick.

Joye said her preliminary findings suggested the high volume of methane
coming out of the well could upset the ocean food chain. Such high
concentrations, it is feared, would trigger the growth of microbes, which
break up the methane, but also gobble up oxygen needed by marine life to
survive, driving out other living things.

Joye said the methane was settling in a 200-metre layer of the water column,
between depths of 1,000 to 1,300 metres in concentrations that were already
threatening oxygen levels.

“That water can go completely anoxic [extremely low oxygen] and that is a
pretty serious situation for any oxygen-requiring organism. We haven’t seen
zero-oxygen water but there is certainly enough gas in the water to draw
oxygen down to zero,” she said.

“It could wreak havoc with those communities that require oxygen,” Joye
said, wiping out plankton and other organisms at the bottom of the food
chain.

A Texas A&M University oceanographer issued a similar warning last week
on his return from a 10-day research voyage in the Gulf. John Kessler
recorded “astonishingly high” methane levels in surface and deep water
within a five-mile radius of the ruptured well. His team also recorded 30%
depletion of oxygen in some locations.

Even without the gusher, the Gulf was afflicted by 6,000 to 7,000 square
miles of dead zone at the mouth of the Mississippi river, caused by run-off
from animal waste and farm fertiliser.

The run-off sets off a chain reaction. Algae bloom and quickly die, and are
eaten up by microbes that also consume oxygen needed by marine life.

But the huge quantities of methane, or natural gas, being released from the
well in addition to crude presents an entirely new danger to marine life and
to the Gulf’s lucrative fishing and shrimping industry.

“Things are changing, and what impacts there are on the food web are not
going to be clear until we go out and measure that,” said Joye.

Special thanks to Richard Charter