http://chronicle.com/article/Government-Estimates-of-Oil/123766/

August 4, 2010

In the early days of the oil spill that followed the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico, university researchers helped disprove corporate and governmental assurances about the size and spread of the oil slick. Could that be happening again?

The rig, which was owned by Transocean Ltd. and leased to BP, was destroyed in the explosion on April 20, causing oil to spew from a ruptured well a mile below the surface.
The federal government on Wednesday issued a report saying that 4.9 million barrels of oil, plus or minus 10 percent, had leaked from the well from the time of the explosion until it was capped on July 15. The report also says that most of that oil has been captured, dispersed, or evaporated, leaving only 26 percent of it remaining in a form that could cause damage to the waters or coastlines.

But the report contains few details of how the government arrived at those figures, and it’s already producing some skepticism about whether the numbers will hold up.

Robert G. Bea, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California at Berkeley, said the government’s report leaves open a lot of basic questions about what measurements it used and what calculations it applied.

“There are not sufficient details provided to be able to evaluate the accuracies of the estimates,” said Mr. Bea, who has more than 55 years of engineering experience with offshore platforms, mostly in private industry.

And the 10-percent margin of error “seems to be incredibly small” given all the variables involved, said Mr. Bea, who has asked the Deepwater Horizon Study Group at Berkeley to make a careful review of the figures.

-Paul Basken

Special thanks to Richard Charter

The 64 million dollar question is can we trust this expert report? Who contributed the evidence to support the findings in this report? Same goes for the expected “earlier lifting” of ban on offshore oil exploration. This is 2010, but it makes me think of “1984”, where “doublespeak” and “doublethink’ ruled supreme. Are there any reports from scientists or coral reef or marine research organizations, institutes or networks which corroborate or refute these findings?
Milton Ponson, President
Rainbow Warriors Core Foundation
(Rainbow Warriors International) Tel. +297 568 5908
PO Box 1154, Oranjestad
Aruba, Dutch Caribbean
Email: southern_caribbean@yahoo.com http://www.rainbowwarriors.net

A second comment from the Coral-list today, Aug. 5:
Just a little remainder that the Gulf of Mexico is the 9th largest body of water in the planet, and the only way to know exactly how much oil remains from the BP oil spill is to obtain data on site, both on the surface and throughout the water column at a systematic number of stations throughout the Gulf, and through time. So that means, extensive space and time coverage.
There have been a few brave oceanographers working on shoestring budgets that have managed to divert their research vessels to survey “ground zero” and have detected subsurface plumes (and we know how much denial they encountered at first). But the spatial and temporal coverage, with hard data in hand, is not there yet.
So after reading the findings of the new report, we must demand: Show me the data. I mean, the raw data, the data that apparently, without anyone knowing, and perhaps with a flotilla of ghost oceanographic ships, and an army of oceanographers and marine biologists working 24/7 have been collected during the last 106 days. Then, once we have the data freely available to all researchers, and after we analyze those data, perhaps we can have a better idea of where the oil is, and what the impact has been and will be to the marine ecosystem.
Until then, it will be hard to believe a word of that report.
Sarah Frias-Torres, Ph.D. http://independent.academia.edu/SarahFriasTorres

published August 4, 2010

by Justin Gillis

WASHINGTON — The government is expected to announce on Wednesday that three-quarters of the oil from the Deepwater Horizon leak has already evaporated, dispersed, been captured or otherwise eliminated — and that much of the rest is so diluted that it does not seem to pose much additional risk of harm.

A government report finds that about 26 percent of the oil released from BP’s runaway well is still in the water or onshore in a form that could, in principle, cause new problems. But most is light sheen at the ocean surface or in a dispersed form below the surface, and federal scientists believe that it is breaking down rapidly in both places.

On Tuesday, BP began pumping drilling mud into the well in an attempt to seal it for good. Since the flow of oil was stopped with a cap on July 15, people on the Gulf Coast have been wondering if another shoe was going to drop — a huge underwater glob of oil emerging to damage more shorelines, for instance.

Assuming that the government’s calculations stand scrutiny, that looks increasingly unlikely. “There’s absolutely no evidence that there’s any significant concentration of oil that’s out there that we haven’t accounted for,” said Jane Lubchenco, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the lead agency in producing the new report.

She emphasized, however, that the government remained concerned about the ecological damage that has already occurred and the potential for more, and said it would continue monitoring the gulf.

“I think we don’t know yet the full impact of this spill on the ecosystem or the people of the gulf,” Dr. Lubchenco said.

Among the biggest unanswered questions, she said, is how much damage the oil has done to the eggs and larvae of organisms like fish, crabs and shrimp. That may not become clear for a year or longer, as new generations of those creatures come to maturity.

Thousands of birds and other animals are known to have been damaged or killed by the spill, a relatively modest toll given the scale of some other oil disasters that killed millions of animals. Efforts are still under way in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida to clean up more than 600 miles of oiled shoreline. The government and BP collected 35,818 tons of oily debris from shorelines through Sunday.

It remains to be seen whether subtle, long-lasting environmental damage from the spill will be found, as has been the case after other large oil spills.

The report, which is to be unveiled on Wednesday morning, is a result of an extensive effort by federal scientists, with outside help, to add up the total volume of oil released and to figure out where it went.

The lead agency behind the report, the oceanic and atmospheric administration, played down the size of the spill in the early days, and the Obama administration was ultimately forced to appoint a scientific panel that came up with far higher estimates of the flow rate from the well. Whether the new report will withstand critical scrutiny is uncertain; advocacy groups and most outside scientists had not learned of it on Tuesday.

The government announced early this week that the total oil release, from the time the Deepwater Horizon exploded on April 20 until the well was effectively capped, was 4.9 million barrels, plus or minus 10 percent. That estimate makes the Deepwater Horizon disaster the largest marine spill in history. It is surpassed on land by a 1910 spill in the California desert.

As the scientists did their calculations, they were able to rely on direct measurements of the fate of some of the oil that spewed from the broken well. For example, BP and its contractors succeeded in capturing about 17 percent of it with various containment mechanisms, the report says.

The outcome for much of the oil could not be directly measured, but had to be estimated using protocols that were scrutinized by scientists inside and outside the government, Dr. Lubchenco said.

The report calculates, for example, that about 25 percent of the chemicals in the oil evaporated at the surface or dissolved into seawater in the same way that sugar dissolves in tea. (The government appears to have settled on a conservative number for that estimate, with the scientific literature saying that as much as 40 percent of the oil from a spill can disappear in this way.)

The aggressive response mounted by BP and the government — the largest in history, ultimately involving more than 5,000 vessels — also played a role in getting rid of the oil, the report says. Fully 5 percent of the oil was burned at the surface, it estimates, while 3 percent was skimmed and 8 percent was broken up into tiny droplets using chemical dispersants. Another 16 percent dispersed naturally as the oil shot out of the well at high speed.

All told, the report calculates that about 74 percent of the oil has been effectively dealt with by capture, burning, skimming, evaporation, dissolution or dispersion. Much of the dissolved and dispersed oil can be expected to break down in the environment, though federal scientists are still working to establish the precise rate at which that is happening.

“I think we are fortunate in this situation that the rates of degradation in the gulf ecosystem are quite high,” Dr. Lubchenco said.

The remaining 26 percent of the oil “is on or just below the surface as light sheen or weathered tar balls, has washed ashore or been collected from the shore, or is buried in sand and sediments,” the report says.

Some fishermen in Louisiana are worried about the buried oil, fearing that storms could stir it up and coat vital shrimp or oyster grounds, a possibility the government has not ruled out.

Testing of fish has shown little cause for worry so far, and fishing grounds in the gulf are being reopened at a brisk clip. At one point the government had closed 36 percent of federal gulf waters to fishing, but that figure is now down to 24 percent and is expected to drop further in coming weeks.

States are also reopening fishing grounds near their coasts. The big economic question now is whether the American public is ready to buy gulf seafood again.

The new government report comes as BP engineers began pumping heavy drilling mud into the stricken well on Tuesday, with the hope of achieving a permanent seal or at least revealing critical clues about how to kill the well before the end of the month.

Through the afternoon, in what is known as a static kill, engineers pumped mud weighing about 13.2 pounds per gallon at slow speeds from a surface vessel through a pipe into the blowout preventer on top of the well. If all goes well, cement may be applied over the next few days. But officials said they could be confident the well was plugged only when one of two relief wells now being drilled was completed, allowing the well to be completely sealed with cement.

“The static kill will increase the probability that the relief well will work,” Thad W. Allen, the retired Coast Guard admiral who is leading the federal spill response effort, told reporters on Tuesday. “But the whole thing will not be done until the relief well is completed.”

The static kill operation could last for close to three days. After it is completed, work can resume on the final 100 feet of the first relief well, which officials say should be completed by Aug. 15 unless bad weather intervenes.

Special thanks to Coral-list.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/?wpisrc=nl_natlalert

The Washington Post
4:26 PM (7 minutes ago)

——————–
News Alert
04:18 PM EDT Tuesday, August 3, 2010
——————–

BP says its engineers have begun pumping heavy drilling mud into the blown-out Gulf of Mexico oil well in hopes of choking it for good.

BP spokesman John Barnes says crews launched the so-called “static kill” process Tuesday at 3 p.m. Central time to plug up the well and then possibly seal it with cement.

For more information, visit washingtonpost.com:
http://link.email.washingtonpost.com/r/VP6EHT/2689BV/SLUJ0Z/P044AB/LHQTY/CM/t
Special thanks to Richard Charter

Ed Cake, quoted here, is a veteran of fighting offshore oil; I met him at an OCS coalition meeting in DC in the late 80’s; good to see he is still working to protect his coast. DV
IPS News
August 3, 2010

http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=52352

By Dahr Jamail

GULFPORT, Louisiana, Aug 2, 2010 (IPS) – Contrary to recent media reports of a quick recovery in the Gulf of Mexico, scientists and biologists are “deeply concerned” about impacts that will likely span “several decades”.

“My prediction is that we will be dealing with the impacts of this spill for several decades to come and it will outlive me,” Dr. Ed Cake, a biological oceanographer, as well as a marine and oyster biologist, told IPS, “I won’t be here to see the recovery.”

Cake’s grim assessment stems partially from a comparison he made to the Exxon Valdez oil disaster and the second largest oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico (BP’s being the largest), that of the Ixtoc-1 blowout well in the Bay of Campeche in 1979.

“The impacts of the Exxon Valdez are still being felt 21 years later,” Cake said, “The impacts of the Ixtoc-1 are still being felt and known, 31 years later. I know folks who study oysters in bays in the Yucatan Peninsula, and oysters there have still not returned, 31 years later. So as an oyster biologist I’m concerned about that. Those things are still affected 31 years later, and that was a smaller spill by comparison.”

He is also concerned about deepwater habitats. Given that BP has used at least 1.9 million gallons of chemically toxic dispersants, the vast majority of the oil has remained beneath the surface, and much of that has sunk to the sea floor.

As an example, he cited “a new coral colony ecosystem” within 10 miles of BP’s blowout Macondo Well, which was found by a pipeline company whilst it was producing an environmental impact assessment statement of the route of the pipeline.

“They found some amazing coral communities that no one knew about, and now they will be covered in oil,” Cake said, “Those will not recover.”

Dr. Stephen Cofer-Shabica, an oceanographer in South Carolina, focuses on the biology of barrier islands. He monitored the affects of the Ixtoc-1 oil disaster on Padre Island National Seashore in south Texas.

“You can go back now, 31 years later, and there’s still oil in the sand there [Padre Island],” he told IPS. But his main concern is now about what the state of Louisiana is doing in response to BP’s oil disaster.

Louisiana’s Governor Bobby Jindal has authorised the dredging and building of sand berms near Louisiana’s barrier islands in an effort to keep oil away from the shore. One area where the dredging project is still underway is the Chandeleur Islands.

“The Chandeleur project is totally futile and a waste of resources, and I can’t believe they are still doing it,” Dr. Cofer-Shabica said, “That’s what I find totally unfathomable. There’s oil floating around underwater, that has been dispersed and these barrier islands, as constructs, will not have any effect on that oil at all.”

According to Dr. Cofer-Shabica, the so-called fix is actually a hugely destructive problem. “From an oceanographic perspective, this was biologically destructive, especially when you start digging up the bottom in shallow water, and building these barrier islands.”

He added, “Louisiana is in a precarious position anyway because of the subsiding that is happening in the delta, and on top of that you have worldwide sea-level rise, so it has two physical factors that are working against its marshes. So building barrier islands to presumably keep oil out, amidst rising sea levels, makes no sense.”

In addition to this, he said that the biological impacts of building islands “are larger than the physical impacts,” and said this of dredging sediment from those areas: “You’re in shallow water that is biologically rich with clams, worms, and bacteria, that will all be dug up and destroyed.”

Dr. Cake is also worried about oil contaminating the oysters. He has seen much oil in Louisiana’s marshes. “One of the experts with us worked for NOAA on the Exxon Valdez spill, and he told me if the oil is on the marsh grass, it’s in the oysters.”

BP and the Coast Guard are currently under scrutiny for having used so much oil dispersant, an industrial solvent that breaks up the oil so that it will sink below the surface.

For example, a 1979 report, “Effects of Corexit 9527 on the Hatchability of Mallard Eggs” in the Bulletin of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology, showed that even though dispersants are applied to minimise oil impacts to visible and charismatic species, Corexit actually enhances the lethal effects of crude oil on birds that are exposed.

Corexit 9527 penetrates eggshells and shell membranes as readily as crude oil. When applied to an eggshell near the embryo, the embryo would fuse to the shell membrane and die within 24 hours.

“Corexit breaks the oil up into micro-globules,” Dr. Cake said, “That’s the harmful part for oysters. Oysters are filter feeders, and they feed on a range of three to 12 millionths of a meter as particles. You can grind up graphite from a pencil in fine enough particles and they’ll run it through their system. It’s the same with the micro- globules of oil. They’ll be taken in, but in going through the system, and in absorbing some of that oil, it’ll cause lesions. So it’s actually what the Corexit does to the oil that’ll affect the oysters in the end.”

According to Dr. Cake, his study teams have people watching and monitoring affected areas.

“In the past month, in Bretton and Chandeleur Sounds, oil was there during the day, it was sprayed with Corexit at night, and the next day it was gone. Where did it go? It went to the bottom, and that’s adjacent to where these oyster farms are. So at that point, there’s a lot less water for that Corexit to disperse into, and there may be an impact from that on the oysters.”

Cake said that while scientists have found very large plumes of dispersed oil at depth, “I’m not sure that oil will ever get here as dispersed clouds. It’s getting here as sunken clouds, because that’s what they [BP] wanted it to do. Sink it, get it out of sight out of mind.”

Chasidy Hobbs with Emerald Coastkeeper in Pensacola, Florida, is on the City of Pensacola Environmental Advisory Board and Escambia County Citizens Environmental Committee. Hobbs also directs the environmental litigation research firm, Geography and Environment.

“We’re poisoning the entire Gulf of Mexico food web,” Hobbs, who is also an instructor and advisor in the Environmental Studies Department at University of West Florida, told IPS. “It’s crazy, and it’s criminal. I’m deeply concerned with the long-term ecological and human impact.”

Dr. Cake is among a large and growing group of scientists who are discussing a grim future for much of the Gulf of Mexico as a result of BP’s disaster.

“The oil itself on the bottom is being eaten by bacteria. This has always been the case in naturally occurring seeps across the Gulf. But now we’ve introduced much more oil, and as the bacteria grow they are consuming the oxygen that is in that area. And that oxygen loss will result in dead/hypoxic zones, like the one off the West side of the Mississippi over towards Galveston where there’s one that is 3,000 square mile area of dead bottom. Now we’re looking at that along the eastern part because of the presence of so much more bacteria.”

Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://www.southernpoliticalreport.com/storylink_81_1533.aspx

Bill Davis
Editor, StateHouse Report (SC)
August 1, 2010 –

State Sen. Jake Knotts may believe that he “ain’t no tree-hugger,” but he’s beginning to sound more and more like one.

“We got to do what we can to protect our state’s beaches. They’re the most valuable things we got in South Carolina,” said Knotts, who helped kill a proposed bill in committee earlier this year that would have asked the state Department of Health and Environmental Concerns to expedite permits for offshore drilling.

Knotts, better known for his love of guns and West Columbia, said this week that the ongoing disaster in the Gulf of Mexico has brought into sharp focus the need for the legislature to make sure “all the I’s are dotted and all the T’s crossed” before the state clears the way for any offshore exploration, whether it’s for natural gas or oil.

The moratorium against offshore exploration along the Atlantic coast was lifted late during the Bush administration, and while the Obama administration has yet to reinstate the moratorium, exploratory efforts have been put on hold.

Bill could be up again

But with gas prices always poised to rise again, interest in offshore drilling could force a bill back onto the South Carolina legislative agenda when the General Assembly returns in January.

Knotts said this week that he is not against drilling, per se. But he just wants to make sure the oil industry and the federal government have their collective acts together and that before any drilling ever starts here, they have learned valuable lessons from the Gulf spill that threatened everything from jobs to the entire ecosystems along the coasts of Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana.

“A, what, seven-inch crack in a pipe took nearly 90 days to close?” Knotts said, making a home-spun argument for alternative energy. “All I know is a windmill falls over, and oyster beds aren’t ruined; fish and shrimp loads aren’t impacted. You just put up another windmill and keep on.”

Music to someone’s ears

Knotts’ words are music to the ears of environmentalists like Dana Beach, the executive director of the S.C. Coastal Conservation League, who said drilling profitably off the S.C. coast is at best a “fiction.”

Beach, who is waiting before he nails Knotts’ picture to his trophy wall, was referring to the belief held by many of the state’s scientists that there are not enough oil deposits off the coast here to warrant interest from the oil industry, and natural gas about 50 to70 miles offshore.

“Well, then he’s got nothing to worry about,” said state Sen. Paul Campbell (R-Berkeley), who served with Knotts on the same committee.

Campbell supports drilling

I won’t mince words. I’m for offshore drilling,” said Campbell, a former regional president of aluminum maker Alcoa. “If we don’t go after [drilling], we’re being irresponsible, especially in terms of the number of jobs and opportunities it could bring the state.”

Like Knotts, Campbell said he would support efforts to search for fuel sources off the coast, but only if there were a comprehensive management and safety-response plan in place.

Planning pounded by cuts

But who would run the plan? DHEC, often criticized for being under-manned, under-funded, and overly-friendly with testing subjects, has been hit hard by recent budget cuts.

In this year’s state budget, DHEC has seen nearly 50 percent of its operating budget from state general funds cut, according to a department memo. The agency’s overall budget has been affected because the state general funds are matched by federal contributions.

“DHEC does a great job,” said Knotts. “But they’re already overloaded. They do a good job with the money they’re given.” Given the hamstrung nature of the department, Knotts said now would be the worst time to call for expedited permits.

That topic will be the main discussion point next Friday at Coastal Carolina University, where its 13th annual economic growth summit, put on by the business school ,will tackle the issue “Consequences of Offshore Drilling on the Carolina Coast, positive and negative.”

The event will bring together an academic panel of experts on issues ranging from tourism to ecology. Ralph Byington, the college’s business dean who worked on an oil rig in a former life, said these are crucial issues to coastal areas like Conway, where the school is located, as well as the rest of the state.

Crystal ball: Like abortion, offshore drilling looks like an issue that will be reintroduced and fought over for years to come. And that would be a monumental waste of time, according to the SCCCL’s Beach, because there are bigger issues to deal with. For example, because of limited drilling opportunities off our coast and expanded ones off mid-Atlantic states like Virginia, Beach said the legislature – and the federal government — needed to focus on not preparing for a mess of the state’s own making, but a potential fiasco floating south from neighboring states.

http://www.statehousereport.com/

Special thanks to Richard Charter