Gee, wonder what they’ll figure out at LSU?

http://www.nola.com/news/gulf-oil-spill/index.ssf/2010/05/bp_grant_money_expected_to_fin.html

Louisiana State University’s School of the Coast and Environment will be the first recipient of a grant from BP under what could become a $500 million, 10-year program to gather scientific information about the impact of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and the response to the spill on the marine and shoreline environment of the Gulf of Mexico, BP officials announced Monday.
Christopher D’Elia is dean of LSU’s School of the Coast and Environment
Christopher D’Elia, dean of LSU’s School of the Coast and Environment, said he expects the first money to pay for research into what has become one of the most troublesome concerns of the spill response — determining the effects of using hundreds of thousands of gallons of toxic dispersants on oil at and below the surface of the ocean.

D’Elia said the school had proposed that and several other research areas to BP officials during a recent meeting, and the company seemed most interested in the dispersant work.

“They seemed most concerned in finding out where the dispersants were going, whether there was a good mix of water, oil and dispersant, and the effects of the dispersants on oil and then following through the recovery phase,” he said. “We gave them a pretty big dollar amount of possible things to fund, and I think they’re still trying to mull over which one of the options to fund.”

D’Elia said he and other LSU officials, in discussing the grants with BP, insisted on a process that would assure that, while BP could choose the general topics to be studied, the actual research would be conducted under the traditional scientific peer review process, with the results published in established scientific journals.

“We expect to be asked, ‘How do we know you’re not being pressured to be mouthpieces for BP?’ and the answer is that they may help us select the research topics, but the work is done by us and its publication is in our province,” he said.

D’Elia pointed out that he and other LSU scientists were the first to raise concerns about the use of dispersants a mile below the Gulf surface at the well site. Those concerns were adopted by Louisiana Department of Wildlife & Fisheries Secretary Joe Barham and then by Gov. Bobby Jindal, who demanded that dispersant use be dropped by BP.

EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson last week requested that BP use less toxic dispersants than the two chemicals they have been using, and after BP officials insisted that the two versions of Corexit it was using were still the safest alternatives, Jackson on Monday ordered the company to significantly reduce the use of dispersants on the Gulf water surface, and to carefully monitor the effects of their use in the deepwater environment.

At the same time, BP had asked LSU scientists to come up with ideas on how to study the dispersants’ effects on the environment, D’Elia said.

BP spokesman John Curry confirmed that the broader research program would be overseen by a committee of independent scientists that will be chosen by the company. The studies it produces also are expected to be used in federal-state natural resource damage assessments required under the Oil Pollution Act of 1990.

“This will be a robust research program to investigate the impacts of dispersed oil and the dispersants,” Curry said.

He said between $2 million and $3 million will be given to researchers at a number of colleges and universities in states along the Gulf of Mexico, in addition to LSU, to begin the program.

“They’ll be studying pathways for the dispersed oil from the Deepwater Horizon incident and the impacts on the seabed, water column, water surface and the shoreline,” Curry said, “and also will be considering the interaction of dispersed oil with tropical storms, and will be considering technical improvements to the remediation process.”

D’Elia said the injection of research money into Gulf Coast universities comes just as the scientists at those universities have been attempting to persuade federal officials to make better use of their research abilities in determining the depth and breadth of the oil spill effects.
“I’m not sure the feds realize that the real experts on our coastal wetlands are really down here,” he said. The exception has been Jackson, he said, a New Orleans native with a degree in chemistry from Tulane.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7134581.ece

May 24, 2010

Oil spill brings ‘death in the ocean from top to bottom’

Frank Pope
It has been an hour since our sport-fishing boat started streaking through the freshly oil-soaked marshes of Pass a Loutre, but we’re still only halfway through the slick. Eighteen miles out and the stink of oil is everywhere. Rashes of red-brown sludge are smeared across vast swaths, between them a swell rendered faintly psychedelic with rainbow-coloured swirls.

Cutting the engines, we slide to a stop near Rig 313. We’re not supposed to be in the restricted zone, but other than the dispersant-spraying aircraft passing overhead there’s no one to see us. Despite the thick oil, we’ve seen only two clean-up boats out of the 1,150 that the response claims to have on site: one was broken down, the other was towing it.

Skimming and burning are the most visible elements of the clean-up operation, and that’s no accident. Over the past few days it’s become clear that far more oil is gushing from the seabed than BP had admitted. Oil has been prevented from reaching the surface by dispersants injected into the flow some 5,000ft below, but is spreading through the midwater in vast, dilute plumes.
Along with the marine toxicologist Susan Shaw, of the Marine Environmental Research Institute, I’ve come to peer into the hidden side of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Wreathed in neoprene and with Vaseline coating the exposed skin around our faces, we slip into the clear water in the lee of the boat. Beneath the mats of radioactive-looking, excrement-coloured sludge are smaller gobs of congealed oil. Taking a cautious, shallow breath through my snorkel I head downwards. Twelve metres under, the specks of sludge are smaller, but they are still everywhere.

Among the specks are those of a different hue. These are wisps of drifting plankton, the eggs and larvae of fish and the microscopic plants and animals that form the base of almost all marine food webs. Any plankton-eating fish would now have trouble distinguishing food from poison, let alone the larger filter-feeders.

Onshore, small landfalls of the same sludge have started to cause panic among locals as they coat the marshes. Here, just a few feet beneath the surface, a much bigger disaster is unfolding in slow motion.

“This is terrible, just terrible,” says Dr Shaw, back on the boat. “The situation in the water column is horrible all the way down. Combined with the dispersants, the toxic effects of the oil will be far worse for sea life. It’s death in the ocean from the top to the bottom.”

Dispersants can contain particular evils. Corexit 9527 – used extensively by BP despite it being toxic enough to be banned in British waters – contains 2-butoxyethanol, a compound that ruptures red blood cells in whatever eats it. Its replacement, COREXIT 9500, contains petroleum solvents and other components that can damage membranes, and cause chemical pneumonia if aspirated into the lungs following ingestion.

But what worries Dr Shaw most is the long-term potential for toxic chemicals to build up in the food chain. “There are hundreds of organic compounds in oil, including toxic solvents and PAHs (polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons), that can cause cancer in animals and people. In this respect light, sweet crude is more toxic than the heavy stuff. It’s not only the acute effects, the loss of whole niches in the food web, it’s also the problems we will see with future generations, especially in top predators.”

When a gap in the slick opens, I dive on one of the huge steel legs of the rig. Swirling around it are dozens of some of the biggest fish I’ve seen in nearly 20 years of diving. Huge cobia, amberjack, mangrove snapper and barracuda thrive on the shelter provided by the rig structures, creating some of the most sought-after game fishing in the United States: our skipper claimed that he’d hosted three world record-breaking catches last year.

“They’ll be healthy enough now, but it’s just a matter of time,” Dr Henry Bart, a fish biologist at Louisiana’s Tulane University, told me later. “Cobia feed on upper water-column species. The oil is going to magnify up through the food chain.”

What happens to marine species in the dark, unseen waters below us is less certain. In the Gulf the depths are better known than almost anywhere in the world, for the oil industry has to show what exists on the seabed before any drilling can begin. This, along with an on-going Census of Marine Life, has helped to reveal that life within seabed sediments is astoundingly varied.

A pod of sperm whales resides off New Orleans and is believed to be dining on giant squid. These ultimately depend on the tiny specks of life that are slowly being poisoned at the surface.
What happens next, no one can say for sure.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://www.nytimes.com/gwire/2010/05/25/25greenwire-interior-probe-finds-fraternizing-porn-and-dru-45260.html

Date: May 25, 201

 Noelle Straub, E&E reporter

Federal officials who oversaw drilling in the Gulf of Mexico accepted gifts from oil companies, viewed pornography at work and even considered themselves part of industry, the Interior Department inspector general says in a new report.

Those revelations, sure to intensify criticism of federal oversight of offshore drilling as the massive Gulf leak continues, will take a starring role at a congressional hearing tomorrow.

The investigation uncovered violations of federal regulations and ethics rules by employees of the Lake Charles, La., office of the Minerals Management Service, the federal agency that oversees offshore drilling.

Interior Acting Inspector General Mary Kendall said her greatest concern is “the environment in which these inspectors operate — particularly the ease with which they move between industry and government.”

She added: “We discovered that the individuals involved in the fraternizing and gift exchange — both government and industry — have often known one another since childhood.”

MMS Lake Charles District Manager Larry Williamson told IG investigators that many of the MMS inspectors had worked for the oil and gas industry and continued to be friends with industry representatives.

“Obviously, we’re all oil industry,” he said. “Almost all of our inspectors have worked for oil companies out on these same platforms. They grew up in the same towns. Some of these people, they’ve been friends with all their life. They’ve been with these people since they were kids. They’ve hunted together. They fish together. They skeet shoot together. … They do this all the time.”

A source told IG investigators that oil and gas officials on the platform had filled out inspection forms, which would then be completed or signed by an MMS inspector.

The IG also “found a culture where the acceptance of gifts from oil and gas companies were widespread throughout that office,” although that has improved in recent years, the report says.

Two employees at the Lake Charles office also admitted to using illegal drugs during their employment at MMS. The IG found that many of the inspectors had e-mails that contained inappropriate humor and pornography on their government computers. And between June and July 2008, one MMS inspector conducted four inspections of offshore platforms while in the process of negotiating and later accepting employment with that company.

While the report was not due to be released yet, Kendall said in light of the Gulf disaster, she felt compelled to release it now. The investigation was sparked by an anonymous letter in October 2008 to the U.S. attorney’s office in New Orleans alleging that a number of MMS employees had accepted gifts from companies.

The IG presented the findings to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Louisiana, which declined prosecution, the report says.

The report is a follow-up to a blockbuster IG report released in 2008 that detailed a sex, drugs and illegal gifts scandal at MMS (E&ENews PM, Sept. 10, 2008).

Details

A former MMS inspector sent an e-mail with pictures of the company plane on which he, an oil company official and others flew to Atlanta for the 2005 Peach Bowl game.

“E-mails for MMS inspectors from the Lake Charles office revealed that in 2005, 2006, and 2007, various offshore companies invited MMS personnel to events such as skeet-shooting contests, hunting and fishing trips, golf tournaments, crawfish boils, and Christmas parties,” the report says.

One former MMS official wrote an e-mail saying he had “good friends” in the industry that he “wouldn’t write up.”
The gift culture declined after Don Howard, the former regional supervisor at the MMS office in New Orleans, was fired in 2007 for accepting a gift, the report says.

“Prior to our investigation of Howard, receiving gifts such as hunting trips, fishing trips, and meals from oil companies appears to have been a generally accepted practice by MMS inspectors and supervisors in the Gulf of Mexico region,” it says.

The IG found numerous instances of pornography and other inappropriate material on the e-mail accounts of 13 employees, six of whom have resigned. There were 314 instances in which the seven remaining employees received or forwarded pornographic images and links from their government e-mail.

An MMS clerical employee told investigators that she began using cocaine and methamphetamine with an inspector when she started working at the agency about two years ago. The MMS inspector admitted that while he did not use the drug at work, he might have been under the influence of crystal methamphetamine at work after using it the night before.

A source told IG inspectors that company personnel completed inspection forms using pencils, and MMS inspectors would write on top of the pencil in ink and turn in the completed form. While IG inspectors reviewed a total of 556 files to look for any alteration of pencil and ink markings, notations or signatures and found a small number with pencil and ink variations, they could not discern if any fraudulent alterations were present on these forms.

Interior response

Kendall will testify tomorrow before the House Natural Resources Committee at an oversight hearing on the oil spill, the panel announced today. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar had already been scheduled to appear before the committee.

“The Inspector General report describes reprehensible activities of employees of MMS between 2000 and 2008,” Salazar said in a statement. “This deeply disturbing report is further evidence of the cozy relationship between some elements of MMS and the oil and gas industry.”

“I appreciate and fully support the Inspector General’s strong work to root out the bad apples in MMS, and we will follow through on her recommendations, including taking any and all appropriate personnel actions,” he added. “In addition, I have asked the Inspector General to expand her investigation to determine whether any of this reprehensible behavior persisted after the new ethics rules I implemented in 2009.”

Salazar noted that within 10 days of becoming Interior secretary, he asked the Justice Department to reopen criminal investigations of employees involved in the 2008 report and promised to update departmental ethics policies and overhaul MMS’s royalty collection system (E&ENews PM, Jan. 29, 2009).

Several of the employees mentioned in the new report have resigned, been fired or been referred for prosecution, Interior said. Those who are still working at MMS will be placed on administrative leave pending the outcome of a personnel review, the department added.

Salazar also has asked the inspector general to investigate whether there was a failure of MMS personnel to adequately enforce standards or inspect the Deepwater Horizon offshore facility and whether there are deficiencies in MMS policies or practices that need to be addressed to ensure offshore operations are conducted in a safe and environmentally sensitive manner, Interior said.

Salazar has signed a secretarial order splitting MMS into three agencies to separate its energy development, enforcement and revenue collecting functions. The three jobs currently performed by MMS, which collects $13 billion in revenue every year, “are conflicting missions and must be separated,” he said last week (E&ENews PM, May 19).

Reaction

The report drew swift rebukes from lawmakers.

“As if catching MMS employees literally in bed with industry officials wasn’t enough, MMS safety inspectors were flying high in private jets taking bribes while allowing oil and gas companies to fill out their own safety inspection forms,” said House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Nick Rahall (D-W.Va.). “It’s past time for MMS to stop acting as a farm team for the industry — the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion is proof that this isn’t just a game.”
Senate Interior Appropriations Subcommittee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein said her panel will hold a hearing on the administration’s proposed restructuring of MMS on June 16.

“This new Inspector General report is yet another black eye for the Minerals Management Service,” Feinstein said. “Once again, MMS employees have been found culpable of performing shoddy oversight of offshore drilling. The report reveals an overly cozy culture between MMS regulators and the oil industry. … The agency clearly falls short of providing effective oversight of the safety of deepwater drilling or the ethical collection of drilling royalties.”

Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said there have been 10 IG reports and nine Government Accountability Office reports on MMS, but it took a “massive catastrophe to get anyone to read these reports and agree on the need for a massive bureaucratic overhaul.”

“In typical Washington fashion, it takes something going horribly wrong, yet entirely avoidable before anyone pays attention to the long-standing need for reform,” Issa added in a statement. “The report released today echoes the same problems that have been exhaustively reported on for years. From Toyota to Tylenol to BP, we are seeing the consequences of what can happen when the Congress and the Administration abdicate their obligations to scrutinize the bureaucracy and conduct ongoing and vigilant oversight.”

Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/26/AR2010052603800.html

By Karen Tumulty
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, May 26, 2010; 4:26 PM

As his administration comes under increasing criticism for its handling of the spreading environmental catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico, President Obama will hold a White House news conference Thursday, his first since February, in an attempt to retake command of the message. He’ll do so as the crisis reaches yet another moment of high risk, both in the Gulf and in Washington.

At the scene of the oil spill, the oil firm BP — attempting the latest of inventive but thus far ineffective maneuvers to stop the gusher that has been spewing from the gulf floor for five weeks — has begun to pour 50,000 barrels of dense mud into the well. The exercise, known as a “top kill,” has effectively stopped other spills in the past but has never been tried at the mile-down depth of this one.

Meanwhile, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar is scheduled to deliver the results of a review demanded by Obama that gives an accounting of the federal government’s policies with regard to energy exploration on the outer continental shelf, including whether there are adequate safeguards with respect to regulations and inspections. Obama is expected to announce a series of new policies in response.

The news conference will also come on the day before the president travels to the gulf to inspect the scene and also to send a message of engagement. With reporters having their first opportunity to put a full range of questions to Obama about the spill and his administration’s handling of it, here are five that should be asked:

1. In explaining and defending your decision in March to open up additional offshore areas to drilling, you argued that improvements in technology have made drilling significantly less risky. Just 18 days before the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, you said: “It turns out, by the way, that oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills. They are technologically very advanced.” What kind of assurances were you given that this was the case and by whom? What do you think of those assumptions now?

2. BP is now in the position of making many of the key decisions on how to deal with it — a situation that is drawing growing criticism. White House officials note the administration is following a process established under the 1990 Oil Spill Act, which was passed in response to the Exxon Valdez incident; they also concede that the government, effectively, has no choice but to let BP take the lead because it lacks the equipment and expertise to do the job. In at least one instance in which the federal government has attempted to overrule BP, which was over its use of dispersant chemicals that the Environmental Protection Agency says are too toxic, the company has not complied. What do you say to those who say too much control has been ceded to BP? And what kind of changes, if any, should be made in the process for dealing with future oil spills?

3. Salazar has pledged reform of the Minerals Management Service, the agency responsible for offshore drilling, which is now recognized as having been too compliant with the wishes of the oil industry. But his proposals — for instance, splitting the agency into separate leasing, revenue collection and oversight — have dealt largely with the organizaton of the MMS. If the problem is, as you have said, a cozy culture in the agency, is it enough simply to redraw the organization chart? How can you quickly change a culture that has taken decades to develop?

4. On May 6, Salazar announced a moratorium on the issuance of final permits for “new offshore drilling activity.” Critics such as the Center for Biological Diversity note, however, that this policy has never been put into writing, and that its definition “has become steadily narrower as the Interior Department changes it to exclude whatever drilling permits MMS issues on any given day.” And the New York Times has reported that since the April 20 explosion on the rig, waivers have continued to be granted for drilling projects. What, exactly, does this moratorium cover?
5. Should anyone in the government be fired as the result of this disaster?

Washington Post staff writer Juliet Eilperin contributed to this report.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

Alaska Dispatch
May 26, 2010

 http://www.alaskadispatch.com/dispatches/energy/5464-crews-check-risk-after-pump-station-oil-spill

Joshua Saul | May 26, 2010
 
Alyeska Pipeline Service Co. photo
 http://www.alaskadispatch.com/images/media/photos/news/energy/oil-spill-pump-station-9-05-26-10.jpg
Several thousand barrels of crude have spilled into a containment area
at Pump Station 9 near Delta Junction.

While small amounts of oil kept leaking from the top of a damaged oil tank along the trans-Alaska oil pipeline Wednesday, workers examined the tank’s integrity and began estimating when the pump station could be powered back up.

The oil began spilling Tuesday morning from an oil tank at Pump Station 9 near Delta Junction, about a hundred miles south of Fairbanks. Alyeska Pipeline Service Co., which operates the line on behalf of BP and four other oil companies, said several thousand barrels have spilled into a containment area.

Alyeska spokesperson Michele Egan said they’re not used to actually seeing the crude.

“It’s very unusual for us, but it’s completely contained,” she said.

No oil was flowing through the line Wednesday afternoon. Risk assessment crews from Alyeska are looking at the station and at Tank 190, according to Tom DeRuyter, an on-scene coordinator for the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation. One team completed a risk assessment on the station’s communication system, which caused the spill when it failed to shut off the oil flowing from the main pipeline back into the tank. The oil spilled out of the tank through vapor vents, and the tank was damaged near its top when the oil overflowed.

DeRuyter said two other risk assessment teams were working Wednesday: One was looking at reenergizing the pump station, and the other was examining the structural integrity of Tank 190.

Egan said while Pump Station 9 is shut down, North Slope producers are only pumping 16 percent of their normal output. There are tanks on the North Slope that can store the oil that would normally be flowing through the line, Egan said, and they have about 48 hours’ worth of capacity.

DeRuyter described the process Alyeska use to clean out their containment area: “They’ll be draining out the oil that’s in the secondary containment through the dewatering system. They’re going to hook into that and pull the oil out, and then they’ll need to go in and remove the oiled gravel that’s in there.”

DeRuyter said he hasn’t yet seen any startup plan for getting oil flowing again.

“From what I understand, there is still a light weeping of oil coming out of the vents,” he said.

Pump Station 9 provides the pressure that pushes crude over the Alaska Range and through Thompson Pass and complete its journey to Valdez, according to the agency that regulates the pipeline.

Contact Joshua Saul at jsaul@alaskadispatch.com.  Special thanks to Richard Charter