http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-07-13/lifting-drilling-moratorium-too-risky-bromwich-says.html

July 13, 2010, 4:30 PM EDT
–

(Updates with comments from commission in the fourth paragraph. For more on the Gulf oil spill, see SPILL .)

July 13 (Bloomberg) — Lifting the moratorium on deep-water oil drilling is too risky as companies have yet to show they are capable of preventing and containing spills following the BP Plc disaster, the main regulator for U.S. offshore drilling said.

Drillers must do a better job, and investigators must gather more data on the causes of BP’s Macondo well leak in the Gulf of Mexico before drilling can resume, Michael Bromwich, director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, said today at a hearing in New Orleans.

“So long as the spill is out there and has not been contained and the oil-spill response capabilities are all being consumed by the current spill,” Interior Secretary Kenneth Salazar finds it too risky, Bromwich told a presidential commission. “He hopes that prior to Nov. 30 he will have the comfort level to allow some deep-water exploratory drilling to continue, but he is not there yet.”

The commission, formed to investigate the spill that began in April, will also review the moratorium following two days of testimony about the ban’s economic effect on the Gulf Coast. Commission co-Chairman William Reilly questioned why regulators couldn’t increase inspections and take other steps that would allow the six-month moratorium to be lifted sooner.

“I’m less comprehending of the problems in determining that the rigs are safe than I have been,” the former head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency told reporters. “We’ve had almost three months already to make some determinations.”

‘Bully Pulpit’

Reilly said he was moved during the two-day hearing by testimony about the effect of the spill and moratorium on the local economy, including from Senator Mary Landrieu, a Louisiana Democrat, who told the commission yesterday that the ban would drive Gulf residents to the unemployment line.

“Whether you call it a moratorium, a suspension, a pause, the result will still be substantial loss of jobs,” Landrieu said. She told the panel that idling drilling rigs in the Gulf could affect as many as 46,000 workers.

Charlotte Randolph, president of Lafourche Parish in Louisiana, told the commission that the area is suffering a “slow death” as the drilling moratorium squeezes local businesses that support the oil industry.

Bob Graham, co-chairman of the commission, said the panel wouldn’t likely have the resources to evaluate the safety of the rigs or the ability of the oil industry to respond to another spill as BP’s well continues to leak oil. The panel could use its “bully pulpit” to ensure that the Obama administration knew the region’s concerns about the drilling ban, he said.

Moratorium Adjustments

Salazar has said the Interior Department will consider any recommendations made by the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Spill and Offshore Drilling.

The moratorium on deep-water drilling may be adjusted to allow some new wells to go forward before Nov. 30, Bromwich told the commission. Bromwich said he plans public hearings over the next 60 days to determine what additional safety measures are needed.
Salazar announced the new moratorium yesterday after a federal judge rejected an initial ban imposed in May. The ban was in response to the April 20 explosion on the BP-leased Deepwater Horizon drilling rig that killed 11 workers and triggered the largest oil spill in U.S. history.

The damaged Macondo well has been gushing as much as 60,000 barrels of oil a day, according to government scientists. BP had spent about $3.1 billion on containment efforts, cleanup and legal claims as of July 6, company data show.

Job Losses

The new moratorium identifies at-risk wells based on drilling configurations and technologies instead of water depth. The previous version barred drilling deeper than 500 feet (152 meters), a distinction U.S. District Judge Martin Feldman questioned in rejecting the ban.

“This second suspension of deepwater drilling is a clear sign that the administration is unwilling to follow the advice of their own scientists,” Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal said today in a statement. “The ultimate effect of this second moratorium is the same as the first — to shut down drilling operations in the Gulf and risk killing an estimated 20,000 jobs in Louisiana.”

The new ban has idled 21 rigs in the Gulf, 12 fewer than the number affected by the original moratorium, Bromwich said. Companies including Diamond Offshore Drilling Inc., the largest U.S. deep-water oil driller, have said they will move rigs to other countries as a result of the U.S. ban.

Reorganizing MMS

Reilly asked Bromwich if inspectors could be placed on affected rigs as a way to ensure the safety needed to lift the moratorium.

“Inspections leave a margin for error,” Bromwich said.

Bromwich is charged with reorganizing the renamed Minerals Management Service, the agency within the Interior Department that oversaw oil and gas development on federal properties prior to the BP disaster.

“The industry has been too casual in the oil spill response plans they’ve submitted,” Bromwich said. “Frankly, I think my agency has been too casual in approving them.”

“We’re not going to politely ask industry anymore to fix things,” Bromwich said. “We’re going to demand that they fix things.”

–Editors: Romaine Bostick, Margot Slade.
To contact the reporters on this story: Jim Efstathiou Jr. in New York at jefstathiou@bloomberg.net; Jim Snyder in New Orleans at jsnyder24@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Larry Liebert at lliebert@bloomberg.net

Special thanks to Richard Charter

July 3, 2010

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-oil-spill-20100703,0,1038308.story

Those shorelines will probably see tar balls in the months ahead, NOAA finds. Also, skimming boats prepare to go back to work, and efforts to help turtles and migrating birds are announced.
By Richard Simon and Molly Hennessy-Fiske, Los Angeles Times
July 3, 2010
Reporting from Washington and New Orleans

Hundreds of skimming boats prepared Friday to return to calmer gulf waters in the wake of Hurricane Alex and resume cleanup of the massive BP oil spill, which scientists now predict is likely to reach the Florida Keys and Miami in the months ahead.

Using computer simulations based on 15 years of wind and ocean current data, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released a report
http://response.restoration.noaa.gov/dwh.php%3Fentry_id=815
Friday showing a 61% to 80% chance of the oil spill reaching within 20 miles of the coasts of the Florida Keys, Fort Lauderdale and Miami, mostly likely in the form of weathered tar balls.

Shorelines with the greatest chance of being soiled by oil 81% to 100% stretch from the Mississippi River Delta to the western Florida Panhandle, NOAA scientists said in a
statement on its projections
http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2010/20100702_longterm.html
for the next four months.

Other areas of Florida have a low probability of oil hits. The Florida Panhandle has already seen tar balls wash up on beaches.

But the chances of oil reaching east-central Florida and the Eastern Seaboard are less than 1% to 20%, NOAA said. And it is “increasingly unlikely” that areas above North Carolina will be hit.

Meanwhile, officials were moving skimming vessels back to sea and were trying to protect the ecologically sensitive Chandeleur Sound area, said Coast Guard Adm. Paul Zukunft.

“It’s going to be a long weekend from an oil spill response perspective,” Zukunft said Friday. All skimming boats from Louisiana to the Florida Panhandle had been idle for three days because of dangerously high waves.

Officials hoped to move another containment ship above the gushing well by Wednesday to nearly double the 25,000 barrels of oil being recovered daily. As many as 60,000 barrels a day are spewing from the well, according to government estimates.

An operation to drill a relief well, the ultimate solution to stopping the leak, is seven to eight days ahead of its mid-August target date for completion.

But Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the national incident commander, said Friday: “I am reluctant to tell you it will be done before the middle of August because I think everything associated with this spill and response recovery suggests that we should under-promise and over-deliver.”

BP and the Coast Guard worked out an agreement Friday with wildlife groups in response to concerns that sea turtles were being incinerated when oil slicks are burned. The parties agreed to convene a group of scientists to develop plans for monitoring future controlled burns, said Cathy Liss, president of the Washington-based Animal Welfare Institute, lead plaintiff in a lawsuit on the issue.

Liss said the officials also agreed to notify her group of any burns conducted after Tuesday and whether they have a biologist or other trained observer nearby to protect the turtles. Officials had halted such burns through Tuesday because of the weather.
The environmental groups had initially requested a temporary restraining order to prevent the burns.

Meanwhile, U.S. Fish and Wildlife officials were making plans to start shipping thousands of sea turtle eggs marked for collection along the shores of Alabama and western Florida to the Kennedy Space Center this month.

Starting July 12, turtle eggs will be removed from nests, placed in boxes and shipped in special climate-controlled, vibration-resistant FedEx trucks to a climate-controlled, predator-proof warehouse at the space center, Jacksonville, Fla.-based Fish and Wildlife spokesman Chuck Underwood said. Hatchlings will be released at various locations and times along the nearby Space Coast to avoid drawing predators, he said.

Federal officials also announced that stopover grounds would be created along the Gulf Coast in an effort to assist some of the millions of birds that will soon begin their fall migration.

Paul Schmidt, assistant director for migratory birds at the Fish and Wildlife Service, said it would be impossible to redirect vast numbers of migrating birds around the still-expanding oil slicks. But he said safe grounds for feeding and breeding could be created in coastal marshes and up to 100 miles inland.

He said conservation groups would work with private landowners to flood crop fields, cut out invasive plants that have overgrown some habitats and burn off some plants to open more ground for the birds.

On the economic side, new efforts were underway in the courts and Congress to deal with the financial effects of the spill.

A coalition of business groups and Sen. Mary L. Landrieu (D-La.) filed a brief urging the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals to uphold a judge’s ruling striking down the Obama administration’s six-month deep-water drilling moratorium in the gulf.

Also, a bipartisan group of Gulf Coast lawmakers launched a drive to pass a package of tax breaks to aid struggling businesses hurt by the spill.

richard.simon@latimes.com

molly.hennessy-fiske@latimes.com

Times staff writers Bob Drogin in New Orleans and Nicole Santa Cruz in Los Angeles contributed to this report.
Special thanks to Richard Charter.

From: Depnews [mailto:Depnews@dep.state.fl.us]
Sent: Thursday, July 01, 2010 12:29 PM
Subject: FLORIDA ANNOUNCES IMPROVED OILED BIRD RECOVERY PLAN

For immediate release: JULY 1, 2010
Contact: PUBLIC INFORMATION ESF14 – 850-921-0217

FLORIDA ANNOUNCES IMPROVED OILED BIRD RECOVERY PLAN
~New response plan ensures quick recovery of oiled birds~

TALLAHASSEE – The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) together with federal partners today announced the creation of an oiled bird recovery plan for rapid response to distressed birds. The recovery plan was created and approved by the Incident Command Sector Mobile, with assistance from impacted states, to ensure oiled birds are recovered within 60 minutes of their initial report. Under the plan, a Florida Panhandle Group will be established in Panama City to coordinate the rapid recovery and rescue of injured wildlife on Florida’s shores.

“It is critical that trained personnel respond rapidly to reports of wildlife in distress due to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill,” said FWC Executive Director Nick Wiley. “We are hopeful that this new plan created in coordination with our federal partners will better protect Florida’s precious wildlife.”

The Florida Panhandle Group will consist of three task forces, covering two to three counties each throughout Northwest Florida. The Group is made up of 150 field personnel including biologists, wildlife rehabilitators and Vessels of Opportunity captains. When an oiled bird is reported to the Oiled Wildlife Hotline, the corresponding task force in that region will be notified and the nearest trained wildlife experts will quickly respond.

FWC, in coordination with the State Emergency Operations Center (SEOC), would also like to remind Floridians and visitors to report any sightings of wildlife oiled or injured as a result of Deepwater Horizon oil spill by calling the Oiled Wildlife Hotline number at 1-866-557-1401. The hotline operator will contact the nearest response team and dispatch it to attempt to rescue the animal.

People naturally want to help injured animals. However, untrained rescuers may cause more harm than good. The public should not touch, approach or try to rescue the animal. Handling oiled wildlife may pose a serious health and safety risk to both would-be rescuers and the animal they are trying to rescue. The chemicals in oil are toxic and only trained personnel with appropriate protective gear and equipment should handle and treat oiled animals.

Such rescues require hazardous-material training, permits and animal-handling skills to ensure human safety and the best interests of the animal. The Oiled Wildlife Hotline number is staffed 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. For more information, please visit http://myfwc.com/OilSpill/OilSpill_FAQs.htm or http://sero.nmfs.noaa.gov/sf/deepwater_horizon/Public_Flyer_Marine_Wildlife_Response_Action_Plan.pdf

For the latest information regarding Florida’s response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, visit www.deepwaterhorizonflorida.com or follow www.Twitter.com/FLDEPalert.

-30-

The Department of Environmental Protection values your feedback as a customer. DEP Secretary Michael W. Sole is committed to continuously assessing and improving the level and quality of services provided to you. Please take a few minutes to comment on the quality of service you received. Simply click on this link to the DEP Customer Survey. Thank you in advance for completing the survey.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

By Dan Molinski Of DOW JONES NEWSWIRES
CARACAS (Dow Jones)–Venezuela’s government is expanding its efforts to clean up large oil slicks in Lake Maracaibo following sharp criticism that it has ignored the month-old problem.
In a press conference earlier this week, Rafael Ramirez, the country’s energy minister and president of state oil firm Petroleos de Venezuela SA, or PDVSA, became the first top official to speak about the oil slicks–some up to 40 kilometers long–that began appearing on the lake’s surface more than a month ago.

Ramirez said more than 2,100 people are now working to clean up the spill, which he said was likely caused by leaks from the maze of old, decaying underwater pipelines that carpet the bottom of the lake. A couple weeks ago, PDVSA sent out a brief statement saying 50 workers and local fishermen were being assigned to scoop up oil at the lake.

The Lake Maracaibo basin in western Venezuela is one of the world’s largest centers for oil production, and major foreign-oil companies have been pumping crude from under and around the lake for nearly a century. Oil spills, shipping traffic and other industry-related wear-and-tear have left the lake heavily polluted.

Ramirez’s comments Wednesday came as local lawmakers in the state of Zulia have for weeks been urging the national government, led by President Hugo Chavez, to clean the spill.

Eliseo Fermin, the head of Zulia state’s Legislative Council and an opponent of the Chavez government, told Dow Jones Newswires Tuesday that an environmental emergency needs to declared for the lake.

Fermin agrees with Ramirez that decaying underwater pipelines are to blame, although he said the oil slicks probably aren’t from one or a couple leaks, but instead hundreds or even thousands of leaks in the “spaghetti-plate” of pipelines.

Fermin said the ecological damage of the lake could end up being “the biggest environmental crime in the history of South America.”

Despite such dire warnings, Ramirez downplayed the significance of the oil slicks by comparing them with the two-month-old oil spill in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico that began after an explosion at a British Petroleum PLC (BP, BP.LN) rig.

“You can’t draw parallels between the gusher in the Gulf of Mexico–where 35,000 barrels to 100,000 barrels of oil per day flow into the sea–and the leak detected in Lake Maracaibo,” Ramirez said.
Ramirez also said most of the old, underwater pipelines were already there when the government of President Hugo Chavez took control of PDVSA from anti-Chavez forces in 2003.

While most oil production in Venezuela still comes from the Lake Maracaibo region, most of the oil fields in the region have reached maturity and are now in decline. Environmentalists worry that the oil industry will eventually abandon the area altogether, leaving a huge mess behind.

-By Dan Molinski, Dow Jones Newswires; 58-414-120-5738

_________________

http://devilsexcrement.com/2010/07/01/the-lake-maracaibo-oil-spill-is-sixteen-tomes-denser-than-the-one-in-the-gulf-of-mexico/

The Devil’s Excrement: The Lake Maracaibo oil spill is sixteen times denser than the one in the Gulf of Mexico
July 1, 2010
Orders of magnitude continue to get this Government into trouble. I could not believe it when I heard Minister of Energy and Oil Rafael Ramirez say today that the oil spill in Lake Maracaibo is far from the environmental disaster of the one caused by BP in the Gulf of Mexico. I could not find the link, so I went into Bloomberg and copied it, just so you make sure I am not BSing you:

So, Ramirez says that the 8,000 barrels being leaked or spilled are not a disaster like the Gulf and , as usual, they are the fault of the private oil companies that came before his time. Something the Prosecutor fully agrees with. Amazing!

Go figure!

But let’s put this into perspective. The US Government estimates that from 35,000 to 60,000 barrels of oil are spilling from the Macondo well disaster into the Gulf of Mexico which looks like this in Google Earth:

but on the same scale, Lake Maracaibo looks like this:

Now, spilling 8,000 barrels a day of oil into the bottom picture of Lake Maracaibo would seem to be as much of a disaster as spilling 60,000 barrels a day into the top picture, no?

In fact, according to Wikianswers, the Gulf of Mexico has an area of 615,000 square miles, so that in the worst case scenario the BP spill corresponds to 0.097 barrels spilled per square mile every single day.

In contrast, Lake Maracaibo, according to the same Wikianswers is 5,130 square miles in size, which corresponds to the spill that ramirez thins is irrelevant to 1.56 barrels of oil per square mile being dumped, spilled or leaked per day. Even worse, Lake Maracaibo is an enclosure, while the Gulf is open to the seas, which should dilute the effects of the spill.

Thus, the statement about this spill not being a disaster is another irresponsible statement by Ramirez, who has oil spills, rotten food and suitcases bounce off his cynical and Teflonic face almost daily.

But orders of magnitude don’t lie, per unit of area, the spill into Lake Maracaibo is 16 (sixteen times) denser than the one in the Gulf of Mexico.

But hey, maybe they can take advantage of it and dump some rotten food into Lake Maracaibo and mix it with the oil. Who would notice?

Or who would report anyway?
Special thanks to Richard Charter

June 28, 2010

http://www.2theadvocate.com/news/97247929.html

By LISA DEMER
McClatchy Newspapers
Published: Jun 27, 2010 – Page: 8A

ANCHORAGE, Alaska The federal government should consider barring oil giant BP from drilling on federal land or holding onto its existing leases, says a recently retired federal attorney who spent years dogging BP’s operations in Alaska.

“There comes a point in time where we say enough is enough,” said Jeanne Pascal, who worked for 18 years as a Seattle-based attorney for the Environmental Protection Agency. “Because BP has definitely turned into a major serial environmental criminal.”

Pascal said that BP has been convicted of environmental violations three times since 2000 twice in Alaska and that the April 20 Deepwater Horizon blowout in the Gulf of Mexico that sparked what President Barack Obama calls the biggest environmental disaster in the nation’s history fits a pattern of behavior. She said BP got off too easy when it was allowed to plead guilty in 2007 to a misdemeanor for a record North Slope spill in 2006. No individual was charged.

Scott West agrees. He was the EPA special agent in charge of the criminal investigation division in Seattle that investigated BP Alaska’s operations.

“The people who are making the decisions playing fast and loose on that (Gulf) rig ‘Hurry up, we are over time, we are over budget, let’s take the shortcut’ if they’d seen some of their peers go to jail for those kinds of decisions, maybe they would have said, ‘You know, my bonus this year just isn’t worth it,”‘ West said, referring to congressional allegations that BP cut corners to save money on the Deepwater Horizon project.

‘Look at their record’

Both West and Pascal have been speaking out publicly since their retirements.

“BP keeps saying that they follow safety protocols and safety is their goal and health is their goal and the environment is their goal,” Pascal said. “But look at their record.”

That record includes:

A felony conviction in 2000 for failing to report immediately illegal dumping of hazardous waste by a contractor at its Endicott oil field in Alaska’s Beaufort Sea. The punishment: Five years’ probation, $7 million in fines and civil penalties and another $15 million to create an environmental management system.
A misdemeanor conviction in 2007 stemming from the biggest oil spill ever on Alaska’s North Slope. In March 2006, a BP worker discovered crude leaking from a corroded Prudhoe Bay transit pipeline 200,000 gallons in all. BP, which admitted that its system for monitoring and preventing corrosion was inadequate, was put on three more years’ probation and ordered to pay $20 million in fines and penalties.
A felony conviction last year for a 2005 Texas City, Texas, refinery explosion that killed 15 people, injured another 170 and devastated a community. BP Products North America Inc. was fined $50 million and put on three years’ probation.
Pascal said there were other ruptures, explosions and near misses over the years, plus a propane price-fixing case in the Midwest that BP settled with a deferred prosecution.

‘Operate to failure’

West said he thinks that BP made a conscious decision not to invest in aging infrastructure for North Slope fields with declining oil production.

“We kept hearing a phrase called ‘operate to failure,”‘ a reference West said meant that critical systems and equipment were operated until they broke down instead of being maintained.

The federal investigators in the Texas City case were “finding the exact same patterns of neglecting worker safety and environmental concerns to save a few dollars,” West said. “That, of course, indicated to us that it was corporate-wide. It wasn’t just isolated to a particular operating unit.”

BP insists that it puts safety first and is following up on what it promised to do after the 2006 Alaska spill.

BP debarred

Before she retired in March, Pascal specialized in debarment, a process in which companies are prohibited from federal contracts because of environmental crimes or performance issues. It’s time-consuming, complex and even when successful, might not prevent a company from operating, Pascal said.

Under the federal Clean Water Act, BP was debarred in 2008 as a result of the 2007 Alaska conviction, but the action simply meant that it couldn’t get any new federal contracts at Prudhoe Bay. It didn’t lose its state-issued leases or its ability to operate the field. The only contracts that might be affected relate to its sales of fuel to the military, and a different BP company refines the oil and sells the fuel.

“So it did not have any (significant) impact on its business,” Pascal said of the 2008 EPA debarment action.

Because of the Gulf leak, the federal agencies involved with BP the EPA; the Interior Department, which oversees federal drilling leases; and the Defense Department, which buys the fuel need to evaluate whether a more sweeping debarment is in order, she said.

Aiming for leadership

Targeting the company’s executives is another possible way to make a tougher legal point, Pascal and West argue.

West said the investigation into BP’s 2006 spill at Prudhoe was at first aimed at bringing felony charges against corporate executives on the theory that they knew pipes were dangerously corroded and didn’t act.

That position seemed to be supported by Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrea Steward in a June 12, 2007, e-mail in which she said that pledges from BP officials that, “They had changed their attitude of aggressive cost cutting in 2005 and that they were changing how they did things” weren’t enough to avoid prosecution.

West is still angry that two months later prosecutors decided to allow BP to plead to a misdemeanor.

“Here we had a case where we had the potential to go way high. Even to the London headquarters of BP … and we’re settling for a corporate misdemeanor?” said West, who said his team had only begun to examine 62 million pages of documents that BP provided.

U.S. Attorney for Alaska Karen Loeffler, who headed the office’s criminal division at the time, defended the decision.

“We knew everything that we were going to be able to prove,” she said. The $20 million fine, she said, “sent a very strong message.”

Pascal and West said that for a company the size of BP, whose quarterly profits are measured in the billions of dollars, the fine was minuscule.

“To me the message has been given to BP loud and clear,” West said. “You are protected. You are beyond prosecution.”
Special thanks to Richard Chartera