10/06/2010

Katie Howell, E&E reporter
A new staff report from the president’s commission investigating the Gulf of Mexico spill blasts the Obama administration for low flow-rate estimates and for assertions that much of the oil was “gone” after the leaking well was capped.

The draft staff working paper from the presidential commission says the Obama administration’s underestimation of how much oil was spilling into the Gulf of Mexico this summer and later remained there undermined public confidence in the government’s ability to handle the disaster.

The paper, one of four released today, details the government’s progress in shaping the flow-rate estimate throughout the summer. Government estimates initially pegged 1,000 barrels a day as the most accurate estimate for the leaking BP PLC well, but that number was quickly revised upward to 5,000 barrels a day, a figure that remained the go-to estimate for a month despite challenges from independent scientists. An interagency team of federal scientists later revised the number several times upward, finally settling on a peak flow rate of 62,200 barrels a day in early August.

“Federal government responders may be correct in stating that low flow-rate estimates did not negatively affect their operations. Even if responders are correct, however, loss of the public’s trust during a disaster is not an incidental public relations problem,” the report says.

“The absence of trust fuels public fears, and those fears in turn can cause major harm, whether because the public loses confidence in the federal government’s assurances that beaches or seafood are safe, or because the government’s lack of credibility makes it harder to build relationships with state and local officials, as well as community leaders, that are necessary for effective response actions,” it says.

Government officials, including senior White House aides and Cabinet officials, have acknowledged that the initial estimates were gross miscalculations and relied primarily on data from BP PLC. But the officials said their response efforts were always based on worst-case estimates, like the figure of 162,000 barrels a day that BP used in its drilling permit application.

While the commission’s staff is still evaluating those assertions, the report suggests the government should have disclosed those worst-case figures.

“Because the worst-case figures that emerged within days of the spill, although imprecise, ended up being roughly equivalent to the actual flow rate, we cannot at this point conclude that inaccurate official estimates adversely impacted the response and clean-up operations,” the report says. “It may, however, have been better practice for the government to disclose the estimates that drove the Unified Command operational plan — that is, the operational worst-case discharge figures.”

But federal officials say they were up front with the public about what the worst-case flow rate could be. In early May, retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said the worst-case scenario could be more than 100,000 barrels a day, Office of Management and Budget acting Director Jeffrey Zients and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Director Jane Lubchenco said today. They also defended the response effort.

“The federal government response was full force and immediate, and the response focused on state and local plans and evolved when needed,” Zients and Lubchenco said in a statement. “As directed by the President, the response was based on science, even when that pitted us against BP or state and local officials, and the response pushed BP every step of the way.”

Marcia McNutt, director of the U.S. Geological Survey and leader of the team that calculated the government estimates of the flow rate throughout the summer, told a joint hearing by the Interior and Energy departments last month that the government would be able to calculate an accurate flow rate within hours in the event of a future spill.

“We were going blind on how to calculate the flow rate for a mile-deep well,” McNutt said. In a future spill, “we know exactly what we would do, what technique to use and under what circumstances. We would have the right technology in the field within hours to days.”

Environmentalists are already using the report’s findings to blast the administration on its spill response and drilling regulation.

“How can we trust the government to expand drilling when they were trying to hide the problem in the first place? When our government aligns itself with the interests of oil corporations at the expense of the truth, the people and the environment lose,” Greenpeace USA Director Phil Radford said in a statement.

“This underscores the need for independent research that is not tainted by corporate dollars,” he added. “The impacts of this will be with us all for decades, and it is clearer than ever that it is going to take time — and a lot of work — to fully understand the true impacts of this disaster.”

Oil budget
The report also blasts comments made by White House climate adviser Carol Browner and NOAA’s Jane Lubchenco about a government paper released in August that described the fate of the oil in the Gulf.

That oil budget report estimated the fate of the oil and detailed how much had been burned and skimmed. It was meant to aid responders as an operational tool, but some government officials, including Browner and Lubchenco, hailed its findings immediately after its release. Browner and Lubchenco said on separate occasions that the report showed a significant quantity of the oil was “gone.”

“These references … likely contributed to public perception of the budget’s findings as more exact and complete than the budget, as an operational tool, was designed to be,” the report says. “The oil budget was never meant to be a precise tool, and its rollout as a scientific report obscured some important shortcomings.”

The oil budget and the federal government’s presentation of it have been widely criticized by lawmakers and outside scientists, primarily because it does not include any data used to calculate the findings.

The presidential commission’s report suggests that “government scientific study groups disclose more of their underlying methodologies, assumptions and data, allowing for greater review and input from the rest of the scientific community.”

Arctic drilling
The commission staff today also released three other reports. One questions the adequacy of Shell Oil Co.’s spill-response plan for its Arctic drilling proposal.

Shell is pushing to drill exploratory wells in Alaska’s Chukchi Sea, but plans have been put on hold as the federal government reviews offshore drilling safety in the wake of this summer’s spill.

“Shell’s exploratory drilling [contingency plan] is currently the only formal industry proposal for contingency planning and oil spill response in the Arctic. While Shell’s plan acknowledges many of the challenges of spill response in the Arctic, questions remain as to whether its solutions to those challenges are realistic,” the report says.

The report also says the presidential commission should examine regulatory standards that govern Arctic drilling and whether they need to be amended and should consider calling for increased Coast Guard capacity to respond to a potential Arctic spill.

Other reports from the commission staff detail government decisionmaking and use of dispersants (see related story).

The reports were written by staff members of the bipartisan commission and do not necessarily reflect the views of the entire panel.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

This is hilarious–ya gotta read it! DV
http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/10/02/1854198/tony-tells-raul-how-to-cope-with.html#storylink=fbuser

October 1, 2010 by Yale Environment 360

Energy companies are rushing to develop unconventional sources of oil and gas trapped in carbon-rich shales and sands throughout the western United States and Canada. So far, government officials have shown little concern for the environmental consequences of this new fossil fuel development boom.

by Keith Schneider

The most direct path to America’s newest big oil and gas fields is U.S. Highway 12, two lanes of blacktop that unfold from Grays Harbor in Washington State and head east across the top of the country to Detroit.

The 2,500-mile route has quickly become an essential supply line for the energy industry. With astonishing speed, U.S. oil companies, Canadian pipeline builders, and investors from all over the globe are spending huge sums in an economically promising and ecologically risky race to open the next era of hydrocarbon development. As domestic U.S. pools of conventional oil and gas dwindle, energy companies are increasingly turning to “unconventional” fossil fuel reserves contained in the carbon rich-sands and deep shales of Canada, the Great Plains, and the Rocky Mountain West.

Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming hold oil shale reserves estimated to contain 1.2 trillion to 1.8 trillion barrels of oil, according to the U.S. Department of Energy, half of which the department says is recoverable. Eastern Utah alone holds tar sands oil reserves estimated at 12 billion to 19 billion barrels. The tar sands region of northern Alberta, Canada contains recoverable oil reserves conservatively estimated at 175 billion barrels, and with new technology could reach 400 billion barrels. Deep gas-bearing shales of the Great Plains, Rocky Mountain West, Great Lakes, Northeast, and Gulf Coast contain countless trillions of feet of natural gas. If current projections turn out to be accurate, there would be enough oil and gas to power the United States for at least another century.

Will a pipeline like this one in Alaska soon run tar sands oil all the way to refineries on the Gulf Coast? (Ryan McFarland/Wikimedia Commons)
ut even as one of the largest energy booms in history has erupted along a great arc of the continent, the consequences are prompting civic discontent, lawsuits, and political battles in state capitals. The boom is producing fresh scars on the land and new threats to scarce water supplies. Government studies show that exploiting unconventional fossil-fuel reserves generates more C02 emissions than drilling for conventional oil and gas and uses three to five times more water. “It’s a pact with the devil,” says Randy Udall, a consulting energy analyst from Colorado. “The tar sands and shale oil and shale gas require a lot of water. It sets up a collision course for the West.”

In communities from Wyoming to Texas, thousands of trucks now rumble down rural roads, carrying the huge amounts of water — 2 million to 4 million gallons per well — needed to free oil and natural gas from shales by blasting them with high-pressure fluids. In places such as North Dakota, which receives modest amounts of rainfall, local residents and conservationists worry that the energy boom will deplete aquifers.

And the explosion in development of these unconventional fossil fuels raises a troubling question at the national level: At a time when the country should be embracing a renewable energy revolution, it is hurtling in the opposite direction, developing on a massive scale sources of energy that cause considerably more environmental harm than conventional oil and gas drilling.

Highway 12 is a crucial supply route for this burgeoning industry, with fossil fuel companies using the road to reach a good portion of the West’s new oil and gas domain that lies to the north and south of the highway. The companies transport equipment 900 miles north to Alberta, Canada, where they are spending $15 billion annually to develop the region’s tar sands, now the single largest source of oil imports to the U.S. and the fastest-growing source of CO2 emissions in Canada, according to the Pembina Institute, a Canadian environmental think tank.

In North Dakota — which has become the fourth-largest oil-producing state in the country, with an estimated 100 million barrels being pulled out of deep shales this year and where 1,000 wells will be drilled in 2010 — Highway 12 crosses the $5 billion, 2,151-mile Keystone Pipeline. It is the centerpiece of a $31 billion network of major transport lines either planned or under construction to carry oil from the middle part of the continent to refineries in Texas, Oklahoma, and Illinois that are being modernized and expanded at a cost of more than $20 billion. In all, according to company reports and state economic development offices, the oil industry is spending nearly $100 billion annually in the U.S. to perpetuate the fossil fuel era.

Oil industry executives say their investments are consistent with the national goal of producing more energy to increase security. Oil companies are also profiting handsomely from the exploitation of these unconventional sources of oil and natural gas. The stakes became clear earlier this year, when ExxonMobil paid $41 billion to buy XTO Energy, a major player in unconventional fuels production, especially natural gas.

Last year, in a much-disputed draft environmental impact statement that summarized the need for the new Keystone-XL pipeline — which will transport oil from Alberta’s tar sands to U.S. refineries — the U.S. Department of State tacitly backed the new energy boom. “The increasing demand for crude oil in the U.S. cannot be entirely met by efforts to conserve use of refined petroleum products or the increased use of renewable energy,” the department said. “As crude oil demand increases, the overall domestic supplies of crude oil are declining.” The department’s analysts added that without the pipeline and the new supplies of oil it would carry, the country “would remain dependent upon unstable foreign oil supplies from the Mideast, Africa, Mexico, and South America.”

One of the flashpoints is occurring in northern Idaho and eastern Montana, where oil companies want to use Highway 12 to dispatch the largest convoy of oversized trucks ever assembled to Alberta’s tar sands and elsewhere. The trucks, nearly as long as football fields and so wide they cover both lanes of the highway, haul refining and processing equipment that weighs hundreds of tons and is as tall as a mansion.

ConocoPhilips was granted a road permit in Idaho last month to haul four Korean-built oversized oil-processing units from Lewiston, Idaho, where they were offloaded from Columbia River barges, to the company’s expanding refinery in Billings, Montana. Earlier this month, Idaho Second District Judge John Bradbury revoked the permit, asserting that the state did not adequately assess the hazards of the shipment, particularly the consequences of an accident involving one of the immense processing units blocking the highway. Local officials in Montana are considering similar legal action.

The court judgment in Idaho, which is set for an appeal on Oct. 1, could have significant ramifications for ExxonMobil Canada, which wants to make 207 oversize hauls next year along Highway 12. Exxon’s trucks will carry even larger Korean-built units to be assembled into a new tar sands oil processing plant in Alberta. The company says it must use Highway 12 because the loads are too big to fit under bridges along interstate highways or rail lines.

Despite opposition, the oil and gas industry is undeterred. The Bakken Shale that lies 10,000 feet beneath a 200,000 square mile expanse of North Dakota, Montana, and Saskatchewan is said by the U.S. Geological Survey to contain more than 4 billion barrels of oil and trillions of cubic feet of natural gas. Oil industry geologists say there is much more than that in the Bakken, and in a second oil-rich shale reserve, the Three Forks, that lies below it.

Spurred by the Bakken riches, energy companies are now spending tens of millions of dollars to lease mineral rights in Wyoming and Colorado and are drilling exploratory wells in the Niobrara Shale, which sprawls beneath both states.

“It just almost boggles the mind,” Lynn Helms, director of the North Dakota Department of Mineral Resources, told a veterans group in Minot on Sept. 2. “It is not like the traditional oil and gas play.”

A 2006 study by the Department of Energy that looked at rising energy demand and diminishing freshwater supplies found that the collision between the two was occurring most violently in the fastest-growing parts of the country that also happened to have the scarcest water resources — California, the Southwest, the Rocky Mountain states, and the Upper Great Plains.

It takes four to six gallons of water to produce one barrel of tar sands oil, which is four times more water than it takes to produce oil from conventional reserves, according to a 2009 study by Argonne National Laboratory.

Moreover, producing tar sands oil, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council, generates as much as three times as many greenhouse gases per barrel as conventional oil production.

Extracting unconventional fossil fuel reserves like the Bakken formation uses a lot of water because getting to the oil and natural gas requires rupturing the deep shale to create open spaces and crevices through which the oil and gas can flow. The pulverizing process, called hydraulic fracturing or “fracking,” involves sinking drill bits two miles deep and then turning them to move horizontally through the shale. An armada of tank trucks hauls several million gallons of water to each well site, where pumps shoot it down the well at such super high pressure — 8,000 pounds per square inch — that the rock splits.

The practice is risky. Earlier this month, an oil well undergoing fracking near Kildeer, N.D. ruptured. The blowout leaked 100,000 gallons of fracturing fluid and crude oil before being plugged two days later.

Fracking has caused contamination of surface and groundwater in other states and harmed drinking water in some communities, according to a number of reports from local environmental organizations.

Earlier this year, a supervisor with the North Dakota Game and Fish Department formally opposed a farmer’s plan to sell a third of the water in eight-foot-deep Trenton Lake to a Texas energy developer. “Trenton Lake just doesn’t have the depth and capacity without seriously impacting the lake,” said the supervisor, Fred Ryckman. “The oil industry can find water elsewhere.”

Almost 150 oil and gas drilling rigs are operating in North Dakota this month, nearly tying a state record, and more than all but two other states, Texas and Pennsylvania. The oil and gas rush has been an economic boon to North Dakota, with more than 7,000 laborers migrating into the state; North Dakota’s unemployment rate has dropped to 3.6 percent, the nation’s lowest. The energy boom has also filled state coffers. When North Dakota’s budget cycle ended in June, state Budget Director Pam Sharp proudly reported an $800 million surplus.

Clearly, most North Dakota officials are not worrying — yet — about the environmental consequences.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE68T6FS20100930
—

Thu, Sep 30 2010

By Joshua Schneyer

NEW YORK (Reuters) – University researchers said on Thursday they recently found alarming levels of cancer-causing toxins in an area of the Gulf of Mexico affected by BP’s oil spill, raising the specter of long-lasting health concerns.

Oregon State University (OSU) researchers found sharply heightened levels of chemicals including carcinogens in the waters off the coast of Louisiana in August, the last sampling date, even after BP successfully capped its runaway Gulf well in mid-July.

Near Grand Isle, Louisiana, the team discovered that polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) — which include carcinogens and chemicals that pose various risks to human health — remained at levels 40 times higher than before the area was affected by the oil spill.

The compounds may enter the food chain through organisms like plankton or fish, a researcher said.

“In a natural environment a 40-fold increase is huge,” said Oregon State toxicologist Kim Anderson, who led the research. “We don’t usually see that at other contamination sites.”

The PAH chemicals, which are often linked to oil spills, are most concentrated in the area near the Louisiana Coast, but levels have also jumped 2 to 3 fold in other spill-affected areas off Alabama, Mississippi and Florida, Anderson said.

As of last month, PAH levels remained near those discovered while the oil spill was still flowing heavily, Anderson said. The team will continue to sample for chemicals in months to come.

Although BP has sealed its well, experts are still cataloging the environmental and health hazards left in the wake of the spill. Scores of research teams, including Anderson’s, are working with Federal Superfund grants to measure how the spill affected the environment.

Also on Thursday, Arizona Congressman Raul Grijalva told Reuters he would press for a congressional investigation into whether estimates of the oil spill volume and its related environmental risks were misrepresented in a federal report from early August.

BP’s ill-fated Macondo well spilled a total of up to 4.9 million barrels before it was capped, the report said. But it also suggested that most of the oil had been dispersed naturally or removed by clean-up efforts at the time.

Grijalva, who chairs a subcommittee that oversees some wetlands damaged by the spill, said it was unclear whether the Federal report was peer-reviewed and whether its estimates remain accurate.

“I don’t want to let BP off the hook, and my suspicion is that the numbers may be wrong and that the oil is still a danger,” Grijalva said in an interview.

BP representatives were not immediately available for comment.

(Editing by David Gregorio)

Special thanks to Richard Charter

For Immediate Release Contact: John Mann
September 30, 2010 (916) 718-7420

Assemblymember Pedro Nava Probed Environmental Hazards from Oil Production

(Goleta) The City of Goleta hosted an oversight hearing today conducted by Assemblymember Pedro Nava, Chair of the Assembly Committee on Environmental Safety and Toxic Materials, to examine the long term environmental hazards from oil and gas production along the California coast and in the Goleta Valley. (See agenda below.)

“The oil industry has abandoned facilities and infrastructure not only in Goleta, but all along the Santa Barbara County coast,” said Nava. “They pose threats to both the environment and public safety. It is imperative that we determine who has oversight responsibility to make sure that these sites and their corresponding infrastructure are properly removed so that the coast and its residents are protected.”

Nava continued, “Without any new drilling, 23 oil rigs off the California coast in federal waters will be set for decommissioning between 2015 and 2030. We will eventually see a clear horizon off the California coast.”

“Said Roger Aceves, “One of the more significant discussions missing from the politics and headlines about offshore oil is what to do about the aging oil-works that already dot the Santa Barbara Channel coastline. In Goleta, we face the constant threat of a high impact explosion, release or spill of hydrogen sulfide-laden oil and gas from an aging infrastructure. State Agencies must be held accountable for the conditions of these facilities and they should be working with local governments to protect our environment.”

Said Paul Thayer, Executive Director, California State Lands Commission, “The State Lands Commission wants to prevent and mitigate public and environmental hazards on state tide and submerged lands. These hazards can include marine debris, improperly abandoned oil wells and shipwrecks. The Commission requires hazard removal by responsible parties and continues to seek state and federal funding to address hazards where no responsible parties can be found.”

The oversight hearing featured state agencies and local government representatives who outlined and discussed their programs to address the long-term clean-up of abandoned oil and gas wells and production facilities. The public was invited to testify.

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Special thanks to Richard Charter