www.heraldtribune.com/article/20110725/ARTICLE/110729727

But the algae-spawning Mississippi plume is spreading to other areas of the Gulf of Mexico. “If it reaches the Florida Keys and lingers it could damage coral reefs and fish that inhabit them. It also could stir up toxic material left over from the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster, said Jerry Ault, a biologist with the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science.”
These lingering effects of the BP blowout combined with the now growing dead zone is a recipe for disaster–DV

by Kate Spinner

Published: Monday, July 25, 2011 at 12:54 p.m.
Last Modified: Monday, July 25, 2011 at 12:54 p.m.

More than a trillion gallons of polluted water — a volume equal to Tampa Bay — cascaded from the flood-swollen Mississippi Delta watershed into the Gulf of Mexico daily during May. Now, scientists say, the vast plume could trigger toxic algae blooms and harm sea life as far away as Southwest Florida and the Florida Keys.

Some of that dirty water is circulating in a large 10,800-square-mile eddy about 150 miles west of Sarasota. Another smaller, but more concentrated slug is flowing southeast toward the Florida Keys.

Loaded with nutrients, pesticides and other land-based pollutants, the contaminated water may feed blooms of toxic algae or create marine-life-killing “dead zones.”

They also could douse coral reefs with toxins or drive fish from spawning grounds off the Southwest Florida coast.

Scientists are closely watching the Mississippi water’s path through satellite tracking equipment.

“We have never seen a pulse of this type of water coming in,” said Mitchell Roffer, a biological oceanographer who runs a prominent fishing forecast service. “This is probably the largest pulse of fresh, discolored water to ever reach the keys.”

Growing signs of a troubled Gulf ecosystem have emerged without a clear explanation or obvious links to the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill last year or the Mississippi flooding this year.

Hundreds of dolphins and sea turtles have washed ashore dead in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. Lesions have been found on fish in the northern gulf and a large fish kill recently littered beaches in Collier County with hundreds of rotting fish.

Storm-water runoff from 40 percent of the U.S. flows into the Mississippi, including from the Midwest’s vast agriculture belt and major cities, including Chicago, St. Louis and Memphis, Tenn. During record floods this year the river jumped its banks, sweeping away homes and cars and scooping up sediments as it scoured the land.

River flows to the Gulf in May were the highest recorded since 1973 and the rate of discharge to the Gulf exceeded records going back to 1930, according to a report in June.

That report predicted an unprecedented dead zone forming in the northern Gulf as a result. The dead zone is caused by a proliferation of algae and bacteria that rob the sea of oxygen, suffocating the creatures trapped in it.

But the algae-spawning Mississippi plume is spreading to other areas of the Gulf of Mexico.

If it reaches the Florida Keys and lingers it could damage coral reefs and fish that inhabit them. It also could stir up toxic material left over from the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster, said Jerry Ault, a biologist with the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science.

Ault and a team of other scientists, including physical oceanographers, are studying the plume’s movement and impact. He said he is concerned that a combination of toxins from the oil spill and the Mississippi plume could hinder spawning by tarpon and other valuable sport and commercial fish off Florida’s west coast.

“This balance of the ecosystem, if you will, is affected by these far afield inputs,” Ault said.

The BP spill and the Mississippi floodwater have compounded chronic strains on the Gulf from oil and gas extraction, overfishing and storm-water runoff.

“The Gulf is under significant pressure,” Ault said.

The dead zone’s size depends on the amount of nutrients in the Mississippi and the weather. A stormy season mixes oxygen into the water. More calm weather this year could contribute to a record-breaking dead zone covering an area the size of Delaware and New Jersey combined.

Mississippi water usually flows west, muddying the northern Texas beaches. The difference this year is the Mississippi’s volume, impacting a wider area of the Gulf.

Past studies on much smaller Mississippi discharges have linked red tides in Southwest Florida to nutrient-rich water moving from the Delta to the edge of the west Florida shelf.

Red tide blooms have been conspicuously absent from Southwest Florida since the winter of 2007.

Scientists think the fish kill in Collier was caused by oxygen depletion from an algae bloom, but the bloom’s origin is unclear. Ault said the problem could have stemmed from excessive local storm-water runoff.

Even if the Mississippi water causes little discernible negative effects for Southwest Florida or the Keys, large species of fish that swim in Southwest Florida waters rely on the northern Gulf for a seasonal feast of menhaden — a small baitfish that usually flourishes in riverine plume waters.

“That area where the Mississippi comes out is super important as a prey source,” Ault said, suggesting that recent blows from oil and pollution could lead to major fish kills or chronic reproductive problems that appear much later. “It’s this combination of effects. It’s not a single source. We’re adding to a stressed situation.”

Special thanks to Frank Jackalone, Sierra Club

From our “Money Never Sleeps” department…..

(07/21/2011)

Paul Quinlan, E&E reporter

A bipartisan group of nine senators unveiled legislation today that would send most of the billions of dollars in fines collected by the federal government from last year’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill to Gulf Coast states.

The bill would capture 80 percent of the Clean Water Act penalties resulting from the spill and divide it among Texas, Louisiana,
Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. Under current law, the money would flow into a Treasury trust fund to pay for future spill cleanups.

Total fines expected from the Deepwater Horizon disaster are expected to range from $5.4 billion to $21.1 billion. The final dollar figure will likely be negotiated between companies deemed responsible for the spill and the Justice Department.

“This is a very exciting and promising day for the Gulf Coast, a region of our country that has suffered significantly in the last several years from a variety of storms, hurricanes, floods and a major oil spill,” Louisiana Democrat Mary Landrieu said.

Of money diverted to the Gulf Coast, 35 percent would be divided among the five states in equal shares; 60 percent would go to a newly created, state-federal Gulf Coast Ecosystem Restoration Council; and 5 percent would go to a new science, monitoring and fisheries-management endowment.

Half the cash that goes to the council would be used for ecosystem restoration, while the other half would be further divided among states based on an “impact driven” formula, under the Senate proposal. The impact formula would be based on the weighted average of oiled shoreline miles, proximity to the crippled oil well and average coastal population.

The Senate deal emerged after months of closed-door meetings of Gulf State senators and staff led by Environment and Public Works Chairwoman Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.). The talks were salvaged by Landrieu’s after- hours phone call to Boxer at her home to encourage her to continue the effort, lawmakers said at a press conference this afternoon.

“We had some very, very tough meetings,” Boxer said. “Every once in a while, these magical moments happen where you find the sweet spot and everyone comes together.”

Boxer had declared two weeks ago that a deal had been reached and set a date for her committee to vote on a bill sponsored by Landrieu and Louisiana Republican David Vitter. The vote was called off after other senators publicly disputed that the group had reached a consensus (Greenwire, June 29).

Disagreements centered not only on how to fairly divide up the money among the states but also how to divide cash between economic
development and environmental restoration.

“The bill will speed economic and environmental recovery to the Gulf Coast following last year’s oil spill,” Mississippi Republican Roger Wicker said. “It represents a balanced approach by all Gulf state senators to support economic and environmental restoration.”

Boxer’s committee will likely vote on the bill before the August recess. The Congressional Budget Office has not yet assigned a pricetag to the legislation, but Landrieu said the figure would be “much less” than the project penalties and would be offset.

Also backing the bill are Sens. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), Thad Cochran (R-Miss.), Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), Marco Rubio (R- Fla.) and Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas.).

House lawmakers have yet to introduce a Gulf revenue-sharing bill. But Steven Bell, a spokesman for Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) who helped form the House’s Gulf Coast Caucus earlier this year, said late this afternoon that the lawmaker expects to introduce legislation soon that would closely resemble the Senate bill.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=120962&WT.mc_id=USNSF_51&WT.mc_ev=click

Press Release 11-143

Fluid sample collected directly from broken riser at Macondo well
The manipulator arm of a robotic vehicle (upper right) moves a sampler toward hot oil and gas.

July 18, 2011

Taking another major step in sleuthing the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, a research team led by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) determined what chemicals were contained in a deep, hydrocarbon-containing plume. The plume was at least 22 miles long. The scientists mapped and sampled it last summer in the Gulf of Mexico; it was a residue of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

The researchers took a major step in explaining why some chemicals, but not others, made their way into the plume, they report this week in the online edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The National Science Foundation (NSF) funded the project through three Rapid Response Research grants, which enable support for fast-response research tied to events such as the Gulf oil spill.

“By any measure, this is a remarkable study,” says Don Rice, director of NSF’s chemical oceanography program. “Reddy and colleagues add several critical tiles to the growing Deepwater Horizon mosaic. We now have hints of why some earlier studies appear to refute one another.

“Most importantly,” says Rice, “we now have a far better understanding of how and why an oil ‘spill’ into the ocean from below differs from one from above. The significance of this work extends well beyond the Gulf of Mexico.”
It “helps explain and sheds light on the plume formation, and verifies much of what we thought about the plume’s composition,” said WHOI chemist Christopher Reddy, lead author of the study.

The data “provide compelling evidence” that the oil component of the plume sampled in June 2010 essentially comprised benzene, toluene, ethybenzene, and total xylenes–together, called BTEX–at concentrations of about 70 micrograms per liter, the researchers reported.

The BTEX concentrations in the plume were “significantly higher than background,” Reddy said. “We don’t know with certainty the adverse effects it might cause on marine life.”

WHOI scientist Judith McDowell said that acute toxicity levels of BTEX are in the range of 5 to 50 milligrams per liter for aquatic organisms–100 to 1,000 times greater than that observed in the plume. Sublethal effects, including neurological impairment, are observed at lower levels, she said. “In most instances the BTEX compounds are volatilized very quickly, such that exposure duration is very short,” McDowell said. “The persistence of BTEX at depth poses an interesting question as to the potential effects of these compounds on mid-water organisms.”

A critical component of the study was a one-of-a-kind fluid sample the team collected directly from the broken riser at the Macondo well. To accomplish this, the team used an isobaric gas-tight sampler, a unique piece of equipment developed by WHOI geochemist Jeff Seewald and his colleagues, and intended for use collecting fluids from deep-sea hydrothermal vents. With the gas-tight sampler and other necessary equipment, the lead scientists were shuttled from their active research vessel to a smaller boat and brought to the Ocean Intervention III, operating above the Macondo well. They were then given 12 hours–working with many unknowns–to do something never done before.

Using an oil industry remotely operated vehicle, they maneuvered the gas-tight sampler to the source of the spill to capture an “end-member” sample of fluid as it exited the riser pipe. No other such sample exists. By analyzing this sample, the scientists were able to determine what was in fluid spewing from the Macondo well before nature had a chance to weather it and the exact ratio of gas and oil in the fluid.

“Getting this sample was probably the most dramatic and thrilling thing I have done in my life,” Reddy said. Using petroleum industry terms, they found a gas-to-oil ratio (GOR) of 1,600 cubic feet of gas per barrel of oil. This value is smaller than other proposed values, Reddy said, suggesting “more oil may have been coming out of the well than other people calculated.”

Analyzing samples from the Macondo well and those they collected from the plume in June 2010 aboard the research vessel Endeavor, the researchers found that BTEX represented about 2 percent of the oil that came out of the well, but “nearly 100 percent of what was in the plume,” Reddy said. “A small, selective group of compounds took a right-hand turn” after exiting the well and formed the 3,000-foot-deep plume, he added.

This raises a number of questions, he said, including, “Why are those chemical there in those concentrations? Why are they so abundant in the water?” The answers have to do with the tendency of those chemicals that “like” to dissolve in water to migrate to the plume, Reddy said. Unlike other substances emanating from the well that degrade or evaporate in the water or at the surface, the compounds in the plume showed little evidence of biodegrading when the researchers examined the plume in June 2010.
“[O]il and gas experienced a significant residence time in the water column with no opportunity for the release of volatile species into the atmosphere,” the researchers reported. “Hence water-soluble petroleum compounds dissolved into the water column to a much greater extent than is typically observed for surface spills.”

“We needed to have an ‘end-member’ sample, so that we could compare how nature affected the hydrocarbons as they left the riser pipe,” Reddy said. “So this story is really about, ‘From pipe to plume: what chemicals got off the elevator to the surface and migrated to the plume.'” The findings have “direct implications for the ecotoxicological impact of plumes,” Reddy said. “Now that we know the compounds were there for a certain time, we need to look at what that would mean to ocean life. This paves the way to look at any environmental effects.”

The key to locating and mapping of the plume and the collection of samples from the plume was the use of the mass spectrometer TETHYS integrated into the autonomous underwater vehicle Sentry, funded by NSF. Developed by Richard Camilli of WHOI’s Deep Submergence Laboratory, the mass spectrometer is capable of identifying minute quantities of petroleum and other chemical compounds in seawater instantly. During the June 2010 expedition, Sentry/TETHYS crisscrossed the plume boundaries continuously 19 times to help determine the trapped plume’s size, shape, and composition. This knowledge of the plume structure guided the team in collecting physical samples using a traditional oceanographic tool, a cable-lowered water sampling system that measures conductivity, temperature, and depth (CTD). The CTD also was instrumented with a TETHYS the mass spectrometer to positively identify areas containing petroleum hydrocarbons.

Guided by the Sentry/TETHYS system, the team collected about 100 samples–a painstaking and rigorous process undertaken under strict natural resource damage assessment (NRDA) protocol and supervision. Since TETHYS is limited in its ability to analyze petroleum hydrocarbons, Reddy said, the best samples were brought back to the land-based laboratories for more sophisticated analyses, which included the help of NOAA.

The current results validated the findings reported with TETHYS, Reddy said. Other WHOI researchers who joined Reddy and Camilli in the study were Sean P. Sylva, Karin L. Lamkau, Robert K. Nelson, Catherine A. Carmichael, Cameron P. McIntyre, Judith Fenwick, and Benjamin Van Mooy. Also participating in the study were J. Samuel Arey of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology at Lausanne and G. Todd Ventura of Oxford University. The research was also funded by the U.S. Coast Guard.
-NSF-

Media Contacts
Cheryl Dybas, NSF (703) 292-7734 cdybas@nsf.gov
Joel Greenberg, WHOI (508) 289-3326 jgreenberg@whoi.edu

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent federal agency that supports fundamental research and education across all fields of science and engineering. In fiscal year (FY) 2011, its budget is about $6.9 billion. NSF funds reach all 50 states through grants to nearly 2,000 universities and institutions. Each year, NSF receives over 45,000 competitive requests for funding, and makes over 11,500 new funding awards. NSF also awards over $400 million in professional and service contracts yearly.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/science_technology/Deepwater_oil_still_trapped_beneath_ocean_.html?cid=30713406

Tuesday 19.07.2011
Jul 18, 2011 – 21:36

Over 150 dolphins have washed up in the Gulf of Mexico since the start of the year (Keystone)

by Simon Bradley, swissinfo.ch

A “significant” share of the millions of gallons of oil that spewed from BP’s Deepwater Horizon well is still trapped beneath the ocean, says a Swiss-based expert.

Samuel Arey, an environmental chemist from Lausanne’s Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), has carried out research into the behaviour of the oil and gas released from the damaged well deep beneath the Gulf of Mexico.

Eleven rig workers were killed on April 20, 2010, and the US government estimates some 206 million gallons of oil were released from the Deepwater Horizon well 1,600 metres beneath the surface of ocean. The well was capped three months later but it resulted in the worst offshore oil spill in US history.

Arey, and researchers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts, United States, used a remotely operated vehicle to gather samples in June 2010 from the base of the rig. As well as the surface spill, they analysed a separate large plume at 1,100 metres below the surface that was moving horizontally.

Their research has been published in the latest online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal.

swissinfo.ch: What are the main findings of your research?
Samuel Arey: As oil and gas ascend to the surface, some materials are retained by the deep ocean and stay there as they dissolve rapidly into the water.

This is different from a conventional oil spill, which usually happens at the sea surface. When that happens the light, volatile components, such as the gases methane, ethane and propane, but also the light hydrocarbons like benzene, toluene or xylene, typically escape rapidly into the atmosphere.

But in the case of a deepwater spill they don’t have this option. First they are exposed to the water column for many hours and this enables a significant quantity of compounds to be dissolved and retained in the deep ocean.

When we think about applying conventional wisdom about oil spills and ecological damage we need to recognise that there is a new impact that needs to be taken into account.

swissinfo.ch: There is still uncertainty over the fate of the oil. Some scientists say up to 50 per cent may still be floating around out there below the surface. What are your figures?
S.A.: I don’t know. A significant fraction of oil is trapped in the deep ocean but I’m not able to give a number. The study published now will provide an important basis to be able to then properly estimate what fraction was retained.

swissinfo.ch: Will the natural process of weathering, microbial activity and evaporation eventually break down any residual oil?
S.A.: Different components will last different amounts of time. Some components can be degraded by microbes within days, weeks or months, such as methane or ethane. Others may last for many years or even decades.

But because this spill was so deep I suspect in general it will not arrive at the atmosphere. The transport times for water at that depth to arrive at the surface is likely to be in the order of many years, so it’s not likely that evaporation will be a significant process.

If any oil lands on underwater sediments it may get trapped and stay indefinitely. You may argue that their environmental relevance is limited to organisms on the seafloor in the sediment, but we have experience of oil spills on the sea surface where once oil lands on a beach and then becomes buried in sediment, fifty years later the oil is still there and relatively fresh.

That kind of process can preserve oil for a long time and continues to have an ecological impact on organisms living in that part of the ecosystem.

swissinfo.ch: Some two million gallons of dispersants were used to break up the oil, including some below the surface. Could such products have caused lasting damage?
S.A.: I think the jury is still out on that one. I think it’s difficult to say whether dispersants overall decreased or increased the environmental impact. There are arguments on both sides and I haven’t been convinced either way.

swissinfo.ch: What are the main lessons learned from your research?
S.A.: I think the most important lesson is that the use of deep-sea oil extraction wells has important risks that are significantly beyond what the industry anticipated when wells were first drilled. This will continue to be an issue in the coming years as pressure increases to develop these kinds of drilling sites.

______________________________________________________

DEEPWATER HORIZON TIMELINE
April 20, 2010: an explosion on the drilling rig “Deepwater Horizon” starts a fire that causes the deaths of 11 workers.

April 22: the platform sinks. The safety valves on the oil well below the sea surface fail to function and crude oil begins to leak into the sea.

May 7: BP tries to seal the well with a cement and steel dome. The attempt failures. In the absence of a definitive solution, BP positions a funnel over the well to suck up parts of the crude oil. It also begins drilling two relief wells. The objective is to gain access to the main well and block it with cement.

July 15: BP announces it has stopped the oil leak.

August 3: BP starts an operation intended to seal the well permanently by injecting mud and cement into it through the nearby relief wells.

PENDING LAWSUITS
According to BP’s September 2010 report, the accident started with a “well integrity failure”. This was followed by a loss of control of the pressure of the fluid in the well. The “blowout preventer”, a device which should automatically seal the well in the event of such a loss of control, failed to engage. Hydrocarbons shot up the well at an uncontrollable rate and ignited, causing a series of explosions on the rig.

The US Justice Department is suing BP and the rig owner Transocean as being directly responsible for the spill.

Transocean, Halliburton and BP – which owns the actual well – continue to be locked in legal dispute over who is to blame.

Multiple lawsuits have also been filed against BP, Transocean and Halliburton by private citizens and businesses affected by the spill.

BUILDING SWITZERLAND
An insight into the country’s most spectacular architectural and engineering feats

Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://wallstcheatsheet.com/stocks/oil-still-washing-ashore-one-year-after-bp-capped-the-gulf-spill.html/

By Emily Knapp
July 17 2011

It’s been a year since BP (NYSE:BP) stopped the flow of its damaged Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico and crude oil is still washing ashore. As of July 9, roughly 491 miles of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida coastline were contaminated by BP oil, slightly less than half of the total number of miles oiled since the the U.S.’s worst offshore spill began.

Estimates have 4.9 million barrels of oil spilled into the Gulf after the Deepwater Horizon (NYSE:RIG) drilling rig exploded on April 20, 2010. It wasn’t until July 15, 2010 – a year ago today and almost three months after oil first began flowing freely into the ocean – that BP was able to cap the flow.

While Tim Zink, a spokesman for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration characterizes current oiling as having a light sheen with tar balls of all shapes and sizes, compared to heavy and moderate oiling experienced in the past, a recent Louisiana survey found that 5 miles of beaches and 8 miles of marsh were still heavily oiled.

BP has chosen today to announce that it has so improved Gulf drilling operating standards that they exceed U.S. regulatory requirements. “BP’s commitment in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon (NYSE:RIG) incident is not only to restore the economic and environmental conditions among the affected areas of the Gulf Coast, but also to apply what we have learned to improve the way we operate,” said Chief Executive Officer Bob Dudley. The fact that BP shares remain about 30% below their pre-spill price might also have something to do with it.

Of course, nothing can reverse the effects of BP’s (NYSE:BP) negligence that led to last year’s disastrous oil spill. Eleven workers were killed and seventeen were injured when the $385 million rig exploded, with the spill shutting down thousands of square miles of fishing grounds for months and killing off scores of local wildlife. Seafood coming from the Gulf wasn’t officially declared safe by the government until March 4, 2011.

The U.S. government estimates that 4.9 million barrels worth of oil were poured into the ocean over the course of the 87-day spill. BP estimates that the spill was probably closer to 4 million barrels, of which only 850,000 were captured, burned, or skimmed off the water, according to a 2010 annual report. As of July 7, damage claims and cleanup cost BP $6.57 billion, $500 million of which will go to the Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative over the next 10 years, which will take samples and analyze different aspects of the spill in order to aid clean-up efforts and act to prevent another such catastrophe in the future.
Meanwhile, the government has collected 44,800 samples as evidence in a damage assessment in order to determine BP’s fines. In April, BP agreed to give $1 billion to restoration projects.

1
Tweet
3
Share http://wallstcheatsheet.com/stocks/oil-still-washing-ashore-one-year-after-bp-capped-the-gulf-spill.html/ on Twitter
The URL http://wallstcheatsheet.com/stocks/oil-still-washing-ashore-one-year-after-bp-capped-the-gulf-spill.html/ has been shared 3 times.View these Tweets.
in

__________________

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/07/15/bloomberg1376-LOC9D21A1I4H01-4GLC6GRP0EJ62BVIL8U3C3SGV0.DTL

San Francisco Chronicle

BP Oil Still Washing Ashore One Year After End of Gulf Spill
Friday, July 15, 2011

July 15 (Bloomberg) — Crude oil continues to wash ashore along the Gulf of Mexico coast a year after BP Plc stopped the flow from its damaged Macondo well, which caused the worst U.S. offshore spill, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said.
On June 4, the last available tally from field inspections, 530 miles of coastline in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida remained contaminated by oil, said Tim Zink, a spokesman for the agency. That’s down from a high of 1,074 miles. The U.S. government estimates that 4.9 million barrels were spilled into the Gulf from Macondo before London-based BP succeeded in capping the flow a year ago today.

“I’d characterize it as a light sheen and tar balls of all shapes and sizes,” Zink said in an interview yesterday. “For roughly the first year, it was heavy, moderate to light oiling. This is light.”

The pollution of Gulf coast beaches is one of several headwinds BP faces as Europe’s second-largest oil company seeks to rebuild its business and reputation in the U.S. The U.K. oil producer’s share price remains about 30 percent below its pre- spill level and has gained 13 percent since the spill ended.

How long the oiling will persist, the extent of damage it has caused and how much it may yet inflict it still being studied. A November estimate by NOAA, disputed by BP, found about 1.1 million barrels of oil unaccounted for after adjusting for amounts that were recovered, dispersed into the sea, burned and evaporated into the air. NOAA is investigating a surge in deaths of baby dolphins along the Gulf coast during the spring calving season, Zink said.

Cleanup Workers

As of June 7, 1,162 people were still employed in spill clean-up, the U.S. Coast Guard reported. That’s down from a peak of 48,200 staff a year ago. William Benson, a Coast Guard spokesman in New Orleans, said officials weren’t available to discuss the details of the clean-up efforts.

Compounding the difficulty of calculating how much oil may remain to wash ashore or harm wildlife is a dispute between BP and NOAA over how much escaped from the well during the 87-day spill. The Macondo well began spilling into the Gulf April 20, 2010, after Transocean Ltd.’s Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded and sank 40 miles (62 kilometers) off the Louisiana coast. After stopping the leak on July 15, 2010, the well was plugged by cement and declared dead by the government Sept. 19.

The volume of oil spilled into the Gulf is key to determining the size of penalties that could be levied against the company for violations of U.S. environmental laws. The catastrophe killed 11 rig workers, injured 17, destroyed a $365 million drilling vessel and shut thousands of square miles of fishing grounds for months.

Spill Estimate Disputed

BP has said the U.S. government’s estimate of 4.9 million barrels overstated the spill. BP said in its 2010 annual report that the spill probably was closer to 4 million barrels, of which 850,000 barrels were captured, burned or skimmed off the water.

The 23 percent of the oil NOAA can’t account for may have settled to the bottom of the sea or remain suspended in the water as tar balls that currents may eventually wash ashore, the agency said. The estimate hasn’t been revised, agency spokesman John Ewald said.

“We really didn’t mount the comprehensive kinds of sampling studies or mappings required to better assess where the oil was distributed initially and where it eventually ended up,” Robert Weisberg, a professor of Physical Oceanography at the University of South Florida, said yesterday in an interview.

Mounting Bills

BP spokesman Tom Mueller didn’t respond to questions about the company’s estimate of spillage or damage. Payments for damage claims and cleanup costs reached $6.57 billion as of July 7, according to a BP website.

The Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative, funded with $500 million from BP in payments spread over 10 years, announced $1.5 million of “stop-gap” grants for oil sampling June 30. The Initiative is reviewing another round of proposals for work to be done beginning in September, according to its website.

“There will be additional work done,” Weisberg said. “These monies will do more to prepare us for some subsequent environmental assault than shed much light on the Deepwater Horizon event. It’s a little too late.”

NOAA has collected 44,800 samples as evidence for a National Resource Damage Assessment, Zink said. The NRDA is an official determination of the damage BP caused, which will be the basis for fines to be levied. The samples include 17,365 from sediment and 12,647 from water, he said. About half have been validated by third parties, he said.

‘Get a Picture’

“We’re starting to get a picture of the damage that was done,” Zink said. “At the end of the day, it’s a legal case.”

BP in April agreed to fund $1 billion of restoration projects, and an initial restoration plan may be released this year after consultation with the trustee council for the oil spill, comprised of two federal agencies and representatives of the affected states, Zink said.
Seafood harvested in the Gulf of Mexico is safe, NOAA declared in a March 4 statement. A third of the Gulf was closed to fishing at the height of the spill.

–With assistance from Brian Swint in London. Editors: Susan Warren, Will Kennedy.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/07/15/bloomberg1376-LOC9D21A1I4H01-4GLC6GRP0EJ62BVIL8U3C3SGV0.DTL#ixzz1SQ5u5qi

Special thanks to Richard Charter