Dr. Vincent Wilson Department of Enviromental Sciences LSU
LSU Toxicologist Discusses Health Risks in the Gulf of Mexico
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Oil Dispersants have made BP disaster catastrophic
Chemical Dispersants Add to Toxicity of Crude Oil
Chemcial Dispersants Select out the Most Toxic Components of Oil
2 Million Gallons of Chemical Dispersant Have Been Sprayed in Gulf:
EPA Covering-up Effects of Dispersants
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You Got To See This!!! Feds Threaten Reporter Who Is digging In Sand **VIDEO**
By admin HERE...
September 19, 2010
What are they hiding? Uh…..Oil? That’s right; you can no longer build sand castles in the sand when you go to the beach. BP is only allowed to dig down 6 inches to look for oil and anyone else including reporters who attempt to dig its “illegal”.
I understand the reason to preserve national beach areas including the wildlife that uses these beaches, but when the government is using the sand digging ordiance that restricts sand castles in National Parks to hide the oil raises major concerns. Turning your head is not a solution….
Pensacola Beach
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Government Denies Gulf Waters Are Toxic **VIDEO**
By admin HERE...
September 18, 2010
James Fox – We spoke with government officials on September 15, 2010. They maintain that Gulf waters and beaches are safe and that there is no evidence to suggest the contrary. We then met with an independent lab and locals: what we found was not consistent with the governments position.
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Professor says HOMELAND SECURITY confiscated samples and NOTES with insider information on dispersant — “IN THE INTEREST OF NATIONAL SECURITY”
Video
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Inspector: “OIL starts BUBBLING to the surface” when SAND heats up — Secreting “black and brown oil”
Floridaoilspilllaw.com
September 20th, 2010 at 10:40 AM Times-Picayune, September 19, 2010:
Excerpts
[P]atches of brown sand exposed to the heat of the noonday sun often begin secreting oil. “There’s so much oil in some of these sands that when they heat up, the oil starts bubbling to the surface,” [Wisner land field inspector Forrest] Travirca said. “That’s one reason the cleanup crews have to wear those (protective) shoes. They’re literally walking on oil sometimes.” …
[Y]ards-long… huge, sticky mats of sand and sea shells bound together by oil residue… [that] were exposed to the sun [had] black and brown oil [that] was bubbling to the surface, tracing small black lines between shorebirds and hermit crabs before dripping into the Gulf. …
“You see birds and crabs and other animals walking on it and feeding in it. You see fishermen out there casting over this stuff, and they have no idea what’s below their boats. “This can’t be safe for critters and people.” …
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Reporter: “Entire communities where they’re vomiting blood” in Louisiana — “Very, very serious situation here” VIDEO) (Editor's NOTE: I have so far been unable to document the claims made here but am still trying to gather independent corroborative evidence--medically of course it is possible given the extremely toxic nature of the oil/dispersant combination now present in the Gulf of Mexico)
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Oil Eating Microbe Alcanivorax Borkumensis and The Ugly Truth
By Ali Schmidt
Testtherain.com HERE...
September 19, 2010
As some of you know, I was recently quoted in Dr. Riki Ott’s article ” Bio-Remediation or Bio-Hazard? Dispersants, Bacteria and Illness in the Gulf”. I wanted to take a few minutes to expand on my own personal research and what I have stated.
Let’s start with the pictures of the rashes and my first quote. “”I can say without hesitation that these skin rashes have nothing to do with scabies. Scabies is a parasite, which causes a skin infection and is extremely contagious. It spreads from person to person by direct skin contact or by wearing an article of clothing worn by an infected person.” Schmidt said, “If this were scabies you would see entire families infected and NOT just a single family member.”
In laymen's terms scabies is the medical name for body lice. A little more about scabies, It is not difficult to diagnose scabies. The parasite is identified by a simple skin scrapping and viewed under a microscope. It makes no sense for a doctor to prescribe antibiotics or steroid creams for scabies. Scabies are treated quite easily with scabicide drugs. Scabies are highly, highly contagious. In fact, you must treat every member of a family with a scabicide in order to avoid re-infestation. If these rashes in the gulf were scabies, we would be seeing this in epidemiological proportions. We would NOT just see one member of the family infected. www.medicinenet.com The rashes presenting in the gulf, look very bacterial.
The oil eating microbe Alcanivorax Borkumensis, has been flourishing in the gulf since the BP disaster. Alcanivorax Borkumensis is a gram negative bacteria meaning it has a very thin cell wall vs.gram positive bacteria which has a very thick cell wall. All gram negative bacteria are considered very harmful to the host. They can cause severe immune responses.
Alcanivorax Borkumensis is classified as a proteobacteria. Some other proteobacteria that are gram negative include but are not limited to E-coli, Salmonella, Pseudomonas,and Legionella, to name a few. E.Coli and Salmonella typically cause infections of the Gastrointestinal System. Pseudomonas and Legionella cause Respiratory illness. It has also been known to cause METHICIllIn RESISTANT STAPHLYCOCCUS AUREUS infections, otherwise known as MRSA. MRSA is a gram positive bacteria. HERE... is the relationship between MRSA and biofilms.
Alcanivorax Borkumensis genome was first sequenced in 2003 at the German Research Center for Biotechnology. In 2004 it was discovered that a specific gene of the genome AB was defective. In 2006, using isoelectrophoresis the gene was stripped and an artificial gene was inserted into the genome...
Oil eating microbes secrete biofilms which studies have shown to be rapidly colonized by other gram negative bacteria and can indeed cause human infection. In other words gram negative bacteria causes Alcanivorax Borkumensis to grow and multiply at a very quick rate. See report at original article with link above.
The result is NOT pretty: Oil+ Dispersants+Genetically modified bacteria + Some of the most dangerous bacteria known to man = Unprecedented disaster in the gulf. We also know it has been found in the air, which means it will be evaporated and all that you see here will come raining down on us. Remember, the more knowledge you have the better prepared you will be to deal with this situation when it does occur.
I would like to share a comment from Dr. Ott’s article that should cause everyone who reads this to sit up and take notice.
Calvin Ryan says: “This is NOT JUST HAPPENING , IN THE GULF AREA… I’m in Columbus ,OHIO and I have the same problem on my legs. Started this summer. I worked outdoors, doing underground locating of Utility Lines. Mainly Electric, Phone, and Cable T.V. Walking through a lot of grasses and weeds. Due to our work load we worked in the rain, and just after the rains. These sores are very painful. At first I thought it was some sort of Poison Ivy, but after fighting with it for several months, I finally went to the doctor. THEY ALSO DID NOT KNOW WHAT IT WAS, BUT THOUGHT I MAY HAVE A STAPH INFECTION……IS THIS STUFF BEING CARRIED NORTH BY RAIN STORMS?”
Unfortunately, I do believe it is. We are here to learn the truth, no matter how ugly that truth may be.
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Rick Steiner Got BP Disaster Right From The Beginning, Warns Crisis Is Far From Over
Dan Froomkin
Huffington Post
Updated: 08-25-10 12:04 PM
I first spoke to Rick Steiner more than three months ago -- about two weeks into the Deepwater Horizon disaster -- after a source recommended I talk to him for a story I was writing about the spill as a teachable moment. Steiner is a marine conservationist and activist in Alaska who started studying oil spills when the Exxon Valdez ran aground in 1989, and never stopped.
What Steiner said to me during that first interview was blunt, depressing -- and struck me as having the ring of truth. Little did I know how true.
"Government and industry will habitually understate the volume of the spill and the impact, and they will overstate the effectiveness of the cleanup and their response," he told me at the time. "There's no such thing as an effective response. There's never been an effective response -- ever -- where more than 10 or 20 percent of the oil is ever recovered from the water.
"Most of the oil that goes into the water in a major spill stays there," he said. "And once the oil is in the water, the damage is done."
Steiner was also one of the first scientists to warn that much if not most of BP's oil was remaining underwater, forming giant and potentially deadly toxic plumes.I thought of Steiner last week, as I sat in a congressional hearing room listening to Massachusetts Democratic Rep. Ed Markey question Bill Lehr, a senior scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Lehr was one of the authors of an increasingly controversial federal report about the fate of BP's spilled oil that Obama administration officials misleadingly cited as evidence that the "vast majority" of the oil was essentially gone.
Markey's persistent questioning eventually got Lehr to acknowledge that, contrary to the administration spin, most of the spill -- including the oil that has been dispersed or dissolved into the water, or evaporated into the atmosphere -- is still in the Gulf ecosystem. Then Markey got Lehr to recalculate what percentage of the spill BP had actually recovered, through skimming and burning.
That amount: About 10 percent.
In other words, Steiner was right.
The other part of Steiner's prediction -- that the government and BP would low-ball the volume of the spill -- had already played out very publicly. BP and NOAA both opened with a 5,000 barrel a day estimate. NOAA officials stuck to that estimate for weeks, despite the fact that they had access to video feeds from the wellhead clearly showing how far off they were. More than two weeks after some of that video was made public, the government finally, grudgingly, upped its estimates to 12,000 to 19,000 barrels daily; then 20,000 to 40,000 barrels, then 35,000 to 60,000 barrels, before finalizing its estimate in early August at 62,000 barrels a day at the beginning of the spill, declining to 53,000 barrels a day toward the end.
So it wasn't until early August, two weeks after the well was capped, that the public was officially clued in that BP's blowout had -- by the end of June -- become the largest accidental offshore oil spill in history; totaling almost 16 times the Exxon Valdez.
I talked to Steiner again this week about where things stand now, what he expects will happen next, and what he hopes will come of it all.
The first thing we talked about was that NOAA report. Steiner said it was obviously full of guesswork -- and bad guesswork at that. "They shouldn't have even tried to issue these numbers right now," he said. "I smell politics all over it. The only plausible explanation is they were in a rush to hang the 'Mission Accomplished' banner."
And Steiner suspects the 10 percent recovery rate for BP is actually overstated. The report based its conclusions on operational reports showing that 11.1 million gallons of oil were burned and 34.7 million gallons of oily water were recovered through skimming.
But Steiner said the actual amount of oil recovered could be about half what the report claims. The oil-water mix, which officials evidently assumed was 20 percent oil, could well have been closer to 10 percent, he said. As for the burned oil figures, "they are simply coming from the BP contractors out there and then put into the Incident Command reports as gospel. As far as I know, there was no independent observation or estimation of those numbers."
And there's something else the government seems to have forgotten about when it comes to burning crude oil: "That's not technically removing it from the environment." Steiner said. "It either went into the air as atmospheric emissions, and some of that is pretty toxic stuff, or there's a residue from burning crude that sinks to the ocean floor, sometimes in big thick mats."
Steiner had even more critiques of the report -- and the response -- but his central point was one of the same he made when I first spoke with him, back in May: Once the oil is in the water, the damage is done. "You just can't fix most of the damage caused in marine oil spills. You just can't do it."
That doesn't mean there isn't a lot that BP should do. Just as the company has set up a $20 billion fund to compensate people and businesses hurt by the spill, Steiner has asked BP to set up a $20 billion restoration fund as well. The government's Natural Resources Damage Assessment process will eventually result in a bill to BP to recover damages.
That money can do a lot of good. Say it turns out that this year's bluefin tuna larvae have been wiped out. You can't bring a year's worth of tuna back to life, but you can take other steps to help the species -- say, by paying fishermen not to kill them. Similarly, for the Gulf as a whole, you can't take the oil out, but you can take some of the steps to heal it that were needed even before the spill. Those include reducing the massive amounts of fertilizer that flow out of the Mississippi River, forming a massive low-oxygen "Dead Zone" each year, or letting the river's sediment and sand rebuild the marshes and barrier islands of the Delta .
"If you can't fix directly the damage caused, do something positive for the net environmental benefit of the ecosystem that was ravaged by this event," Steiner said.
What's next? Some of the damage caused by BP will persist for a long, long time, Steiner said. "We'll see injury from this for decades, in one form or another." And the sea life that was killed outright is just the beginning. The question to ask is: "What is the immediate, sub-lethal, chronic injury that will manifest itself two, three, four years in the future?"
After the Exxon Valdez, for instance, scientists thought the Prince William Sound's population of Pacific herring -- crucial to both the food web and local fishermen -- had survived the spill. But four years later, apparently due to compromised immune systems, the population crashed, never to return.
"I'm worried about the same sort of thing in the Gulf," Steiner said.
Seabirds are also at long term risk, both because of possible nesting failures in the future, and because the oil has killed the vegetation that keeps some seabird islands from falling apart. "There's certainly going to be some accelerated erosion on those islands," he said.
And the plumes of underwater oil that some scientists now fear will not biodegrade rapidly may be around for some time, he said. That could have catastrophic effects on everything from plankton to sperm whales.
But ultimately, Steiner said, no one can predict what will happen with any certainty, because there are simply too many variables in complex ecosystems. The spill's effects could reverberate up and down the food chain, if any given predator is removed, or if any given food source vanishes. "I think there's going to be injuries that crop up in the next couple of years that are entirely unanticipated right now," he said.
All of which leads to the same conclusion: "Our singular policy objective should be that we have to do everything possible to prevent this sort of thing ever happening again."
Before the Obama administration lifts its deepwater-drilling moratorium -- currently set to expire on Nov. 30 -- Steiner said the government should do four things:
1. Complete a comprehensive risk assessment that establishes the "101 other ways" that deepwater blowouts can occur
2. Develop a much more effective risk mitigation system, i.e. better blowout preventers.
3. Develop better blowout response plans, such as the marine well containment system being developed by Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil and Shell.
4. Develop better oil spill response plan for worst-case scenarios -- with equipment ready to go, precontracted responders trained and drilled, protocols established for dispersants and burning, and regional citizens advisory councils.
The first three are crucial, because they are about prevention. But the fourth is still important, Steiner said. "We need to disabuse ourselves of the notion that effective oil spill response is possible, because it isn't. Yet they still need to prepare."
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One of the strangest things about our national discourse is that it doesn't sufficiently respect people who get things right. Indeed, particularly inside the Washington Beltway, it sometimes seems like the wronger you are about things, the more seriously you get taken.
And Steiner is used to getting punished, rather than rewarded, for his warnings -- even the ones that come true. He resigned from his tenured professorship at the Unversity of Alaska last year, to protest the university's decision to strip him of a NOAA grant because of his outspoken opposition to oil drilling in Alaska's Bristol Bay. (Editor's bold emphasis throughout)
"I feel sick that people don't want to hear the truth about risk," he told me.
The risk Steiner talks about the most these days is the one posed by our continued use of carbon -- to the grave detriment of the planet. As Steiner told me for that first story I called him about, all that carbon spewed into the Gulf was headed into the planetary ecosystem anyway, through our tailpipes.
"Our lives have been one enormous, century-long oil spill, globally," Steiner said.
The U.S. alone uses some 20 million barrels of oil a day. Simply adopting tougher efficiency standards for power plants, cars and trucks, and electricity transmission could cut that amount in half, Steiner said. "We're wasting twice the amount of the entire Deepwater Horizon spill ever day."
Indeed, Steiner's biggest fear is not what will happen to the Gulf -- or even that drilling will begin again without sufficient safeguards. It's that this spill will fade into history without fundamentally changing the way people think about oil, and without accelerating the drive toward sustainable, low-carbon energy sources.
"We're not getting anywhere with that. That's the thing that really worries me," he said.
"The transcendent, take-home lesson from all of this is that we need to hasten our transition to sustainable energy. Some of the costs of oil become very clear in oil spills, but the real costs also include climate change, wars to secure oil supplies, health impacts from breathing atmospheric emissions, and supporting petro-dictators.
"We know we need to transition to sustainable, clean, low-carbon energy, and we know how. We know that the chronic, day-to-day degradation of our biosphere caused by our oil addiction -- global warming, ocean acidification, coral reef death, sea level rise, floods and droughts, crop failure, forest fires, ice melt, biodiversity loss -- is cumulatively more devastating than all the oil spills we can throw at ourselves."
The oil spill wasn't the only warning sign this summer. Thousands of people have died from the record heat, forest fires have raged across Russia, floods have ravaged Asia.
"The only real way to atone for the Deepwater Horizon disaster is to kick our disastrous oil habit, and become better stewards of our endangered home planet," Steiner said. "We'll see if we learn that lesson this time around."
A much smaller oil spill in Santa Barbara 40 years ago helped mobilize the Earth Day movement, which in turn led to most of the major environmental legislation of the 20th century. By contrast, Steiner said, "the only thing we got out of Exxon Valdez was safer tankers."
So what will be the legacy of a spill of this immensity?
"The real tragedy of Deepwater Horizon would be if we look back on this in 10 years and say: all we got out of that was better response plans," Steiner said. "That would be the real tragedy. Then all of the lives would have been lost for nothing -- and that includes human and non-human lives."
Showing posts with label Gulf Oil Health Effects. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gulf Oil Health Effects. Show all posts
Monday, September 20, 2010
Saturday, September 18, 2010
Gulf Oil Update: Day 152
What's Going On In The Gulf?
Washington's Blog
Thursday, September 16, 2010
BP and the government decided that millions of gallons of dispersants should be dumped into the Gulf to sink and hide the oil.
They succeeded in sinking it. As ABC, CBS and NPR note, huge quantities of oil are blanketing the ocean floor, killing virtually all of the sealife which lives there.
And giant new underwater plumes have been found in the water column itself.
But officials don't want to hear about them. As one member of the oil spill recovery team said:
“My biggest concern is there’s [a plume of oil] five miles by 30 miles out there that was reported and no one responded. The Coast Guard said for days that they wanted to run tests, and if they don’t test it when it’s called in, they’ll never find it”
But didn't the oil-eating microbes eat alot of the oil? No ... they mainly ate gas.
And the oil is not staying underwater.
Oil is suddenly emerging in many parts of the Gulf.
Oil "patties", 1 to 3 inches across, have been discovered floating along the seawall in Alabama.
As the Christian Science Monitor notes, oil can remain hidden under sand for decades: MORE...
Obama Oil Spill Commission INTIMIDATING SCIENTISTS — Investigating whether they ILLEGALLY SAMPLED GULF without permits
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Shallower plume found at Deepwater Horizon site
Nature.com HERE...
September 12, 2010
A previously unidentified plume of hydrocarbons approximately 200 meters deep has been discovered by scientists on the R/V Cape Hatteras. The new plume appears to run south and east of the Deepwater Horizon site.
Earlier in the week, the Cape Hatteras collected samples to the west of the main plume, which runs southwest from the well site at about 1,200 meters. A number of research cruises have been collecting data on this plume, which the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is aggregating onto one grid. But on Thursday last week, the R/V Oceanus, conducting research under the same National Science Foundation (NSF) grant as the Hatteras, reported lower beam transmission, a data signal indicative of increased methane levels and the presence of hydrocarbons, between 200 and 300 meters. The Hatteras steamed more than 10 hours back to where these readings were taken, in the vicinity of the well site, to investigate further. "While I would like to have found the western edge of the main plume we've all been mapping," chief scientist Tracy Villareal said, "this new development was way too exciting not to pursue.”
Indeed, data collected by the Hatteras all day on 10 September along a transect some 40 nautical miles long, provided strong evidence of a new, shallower plume. Those data include real-time high beam attenuation measurements, says Villareal, and elevated levels of methane in lab tests of water samples. Antje Vossmeyer, a scientist with the University of Georgia, Athens, working on board the Hatteras (see picture), reports measuring consistently elevated methane on the order of as much as 100 times background levels along this transect.
By end of the day on Friday, the Hatteras had completed the transect, which ran south and east of the well. Villareal notes that while some earlier models indicated a plume to the southeast of the well, the model placed it at much great depths. "This is not the plume shown on the model," he said. "This is an entirely new one." The final station on Friday recorded smaller anomalies, indicating that the eastern edge of the plume might be near. On Saturday 11 September, the ship ran a transect northward, on the east side of the well, hoping to locate the northern edge of the plume.
Last week, the Oceanus also discovered oiled sediment on the bottom of the Gulf, reported in a previous 'oil spill science' post and on the University of Georgia marine science department Gulf Oil Blog.
This search for oil faces many challenges, not least of which is the sheer size of the Gulf of Mexico. The Hatteras can steam for hours and cover mere inches on the map. So much water, often thousands of meters deep, offers so many places oil could be, or could go. It would take months, even years, of the methodical, careful sampling these scientists are carrying out to say with any confidence that all the oil has been found.
It will take even more work, back in labs as well as at sea, to say what effect that oil has had on the Gulf's ecosystems. But those on the Hatteras, working diligently through station after station on this 27-day cruise, believe it is important to try. They clearly get excited about discoveries such as the new plume, which warranted a posting on the lab whiteboard, "We are documenting a new hydrocarbon plume. Very cool!”
UPDATE:
The distribution of these newly-identified layers showing elevated concentrations of methane and particles present an unusual pattern, but scientists involved in the sampling mission are emphasising that their origin is not yet clear. “We cannot with any level of confidence whatsoever link this methane or other data to the Deepwater Horizon wellhead,” cautioned Samantha Joye, a University of Georgia Athens scientist on board the R/VOceanus, which is working in tandem with the Hatteras. (Two scientists on the Hatteras, including Vossmeyer, collect data specifically for Joye's studies.) “At this time, use of the word plume is even inappropriate.”
The northern Gulf of Mexico contains many natural seeps, and there is, as yet, no clear linkage between these latest data and the well blow-out. This contrasts with the plume found earlier in the summer, where it was possible to track an increasing intensity of hydrocarbons along transect lines running southwest from the wellhead, clearly connecting that deep plume to the well.
To determine whether this new feature derives from Deepwater Horizon, Joye says, will require “fingerprinting” the samples in the lab after the cruise ends this Thursday. Throughout Sunday and Monday, the Hatteras continued running transects in shallower waters to the north of the well site, collecting data to map the extent and intensity of these new layers.
Posted on behalf of Melissa Gaskill
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Focusing in on oil
Obama Oil Spill Commission INTIMIDATING SCIENTISTS — Investigating whether they ILLEGALLY SAMPLED GULF without permits
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Shallower plume found at Deepwater Horizon site
Nature.com HERE...
September 12, 2010
A previously unidentified plume of hydrocarbons approximately 200 meters deep has been discovered by scientists on the R/V Cape Hatteras. The new plume appears to run south and east of the Deepwater Horizon site.
Earlier in the week, the Cape Hatteras collected samples to the west of the main plume, which runs southwest from the well site at about 1,200 meters. A number of research cruises have been collecting data on this plume, which the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is aggregating onto one grid. But on Thursday last week, the R/V Oceanus, conducting research under the same National Science Foundation (NSF) grant as the Hatteras, reported lower beam transmission, a data signal indicative of increased methane levels and the presence of hydrocarbons, between 200 and 300 meters. The Hatteras steamed more than 10 hours back to where these readings were taken, in the vicinity of the well site, to investigate further. "While I would like to have found the western edge of the main plume we've all been mapping," chief scientist Tracy Villareal said, "this new development was way too exciting not to pursue.”
Indeed, data collected by the Hatteras all day on 10 September along a transect some 40 nautical miles long, provided strong evidence of a new, shallower plume. Those data include real-time high beam attenuation measurements, says Villareal, and elevated levels of methane in lab tests of water samples. Antje Vossmeyer, a scientist with the University of Georgia, Athens, working on board the Hatteras (see picture), reports measuring consistently elevated methane on the order of as much as 100 times background levels along this transect.
By end of the day on Friday, the Hatteras had completed the transect, which ran south and east of the well. Villareal notes that while some earlier models indicated a plume to the southeast of the well, the model placed it at much great depths. "This is not the plume shown on the model," he said. "This is an entirely new one." The final station on Friday recorded smaller anomalies, indicating that the eastern edge of the plume might be near. On Saturday 11 September, the ship ran a transect northward, on the east side of the well, hoping to locate the northern edge of the plume.
Last week, the Oceanus also discovered oiled sediment on the bottom of the Gulf, reported in a previous 'oil spill science' post and on the University of Georgia marine science department Gulf Oil Blog.
This search for oil faces many challenges, not least of which is the sheer size of the Gulf of Mexico. The Hatteras can steam for hours and cover mere inches on the map. So much water, often thousands of meters deep, offers so many places oil could be, or could go. It would take months, even years, of the methodical, careful sampling these scientists are carrying out to say with any confidence that all the oil has been found.
It will take even more work, back in labs as well as at sea, to say what effect that oil has had on the Gulf's ecosystems. But those on the Hatteras, working diligently through station after station on this 27-day cruise, believe it is important to try. They clearly get excited about discoveries such as the new plume, which warranted a posting on the lab whiteboard, "We are documenting a new hydrocarbon plume. Very cool!”
UPDATE:
The distribution of these newly-identified layers showing elevated concentrations of methane and particles present an unusual pattern, but scientists involved in the sampling mission are emphasising that their origin is not yet clear. “We cannot with any level of confidence whatsoever link this methane or other data to the Deepwater Horizon wellhead,” cautioned Samantha Joye, a University of Georgia Athens scientist on board the R/VOceanus, which is working in tandem with the Hatteras. (Two scientists on the Hatteras, including Vossmeyer, collect data specifically for Joye's studies.) “At this time, use of the word plume is even inappropriate.”
The northern Gulf of Mexico contains many natural seeps, and there is, as yet, no clear linkage between these latest data and the well blow-out. This contrasts with the plume found earlier in the summer, where it was possible to track an increasing intensity of hydrocarbons along transect lines running southwest from the wellhead, clearly connecting that deep plume to the well.
To determine whether this new feature derives from Deepwater Horizon, Joye says, will require “fingerprinting” the samples in the lab after the cruise ends this Thursday. Throughout Sunday and Monday, the Hatteras continued running transects in shallower waters to the north of the well site, collecting data to map the extent and intensity of these new layers.
Posted on behalf of Melissa Gaskill
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Focusing in on oil
By Samantha Joye PhD, University of Georgia, Marine Biology
The Gulf Oil Blog
Published: September 6, 2010 8:55am
September 5th, 2010: Sometimes, I get a feeling that the day is going to offer some surprises. This morning, I had a feeling.
We’ve spent a lot of time in the Southwest quadrant over the past two weeks searching for oil and gas. We’ve seen mostly weak signals. The sediments at the sites we visited during that time were oxidized and did not contain a lot of gas or oil.
Until we sampled at a site about 20 miles offshore from Mississippi, we did not see oil along the seafloor. At that station, we saw a thin layer (couple of mm) of what looked like sedimented oil. We won’t know the oil content (or source) until we do detailed analyses after the cruise but oil has a distinct feel and this sediment felt oily. We got a glimpse of what we had expected to see.
Today, at a site about 16 nautical miles from the wellhead, we dropped the multicorer into a valley. When the instrument returned from the bottom, it contained something we had not seen before: a layer of flocculent, sedimented oil that was cm’s thick.
At a natural oil seep, the entire sediment column is saturated with oil. Cores of sediment collected from natural seeps are oil-stained top to bottom and often the water overlying the sediment core has a thick (mm to cm) layer of crude oil floating at the top. Natural oil seep sediments are distinctive. The photos of cores [proceed to the Gulf Oil Blog to view pictures of core sediments] shown from GC185 are extreme examples (they are VERY oily!) but the point is that the entire sediment column is oil stained at a natural seep. At the site we visited today, the oil obviously came from the top (down from the water column) not the bottom (up from a deep reservoir).
What we found today is not a natural seep.
We collected control sediments in a region to the south east of the wellhead that was never overlain by the blowout oil slick. Those sediments consisted of fine grained sediment mixed with calcareous ooze. There was no hint of oil in the control sediments.
The near shore sediments contained grayish muddy clay and a thin layer of orange-brown oil at the surface.
The sediments we collected today were similar at the bottom — gray muddy clay — but the upper few cm consisted of oil floc — we call it “oil aggregate snow”, because it settled down to the water column to the seafloor just like snow falls from the sky to the ground.
If you take a close look at the snow layer, oil aggregates are clearly visible. Also visible are pteropod shells (which must have been recently deposited because the shells dissolve rapidly) and remnants of zooplankton (skeletons) and benthic infauna (dead worms and their tubes). Microbial aggregates are visible and abundant but the normal invertebrate fauna you’d expect to see in these sediments are not.
We will determine how much oil is in this thick layer and evaluate the rates of microbial breakdown when we return to UGA. We want to know how much oil there is along the seafloor at other sites. So, tomorrow, we will go to a site about 12 nautical miles northwest of the wellhead and run a full station there. We’ll see what the sediments look like there and with that knowledge, we’ll decide where to go next.
Bio-Remediation or Bio-Hazard? Dispersants, Bacteria and Illness in the Gulf
Riki Ott (Marine toxicologist and Exxon Valdez survivor at RikiOtt.com)
The Huffington Post
Posted: September 17, 2010 12:28 AM
Ocean Springs, MS -- A grandmother made me rethink all the bio-remediation hype. The "naturally-occurring oil-eating bacteria" have been newsworthy of late as they are supposedly going to come to the rescue of President Obama and BP and make good on their very premature statement that "the oil is gone." (Editor's NOTE: one in particular Alcanivorax borkumensis is detailed HERE...)
We were talking about subsurface oil in the Gulf when she said matter-of-factly, "The bacteria are running amok with the dispersants." What? "Those oil-eating bacteria -- I think they're running amok and causing skin rashes." My mind reeled. Could we all have missed something so simple?
The idea was crazy but, in the context of the Gulf situation -- an outbreak of mysterious persistent rashes from southern Louisiana across to just north of Tampa, Florida, coincident with BP's oil and chemical release, it seemed suddenly worthy of investigating.
I first heard about the rash from Sheri Allen in Mobile, Alabama. Allen wrote of red welts and blisters on her legs after "splashing and wading on the shoreline" of Mobile Bay with her two dogs on May 8. She reported that "hundreds of dead fish" washed up on the same beach over the following two days. This was much too early for the summer sun to have warmed the water to the point of oxygen depletion, but not too early for dispersants and dispersed oil to be mixed into the Gulf's water mass. By early July, Allen's rash had healed, leaving black bruises and scarring.
MORE...
Dr. Riki Ott’s Concern Over Dispersants
____________
Gulf Shores Alabama Mayor Opens West Beach Pass Despite Oil On Beach
By admin
September 15, 2010
The Mayor of Gulf Shores, Robert Craft, opened West Beach Pass the gateway to the most pristine estuary in Alabama; the only oil free area left in the state. The mayor stated, “There’s no indication of any contaminates coming in from the mouth of the Pass”.
James Fox visited the beaches there and took footage of the oil in the waters.
Will you allow your children to swim in these waters?
Toxic Oil & Dispersant Found On Gulf Floor 8/17/10
Oil Sedimenting on Floor of Gulf of Mexico also Affecting Phytoplankton
Thursday, July 8, 2010
Gulf Oil Update: Day 80
Censorship and Cover-up in the Gulf Oil Disaster
World Socialist Web Site, wsws.org
6 July 2010
The Obama administration has intensified its cover-up of the BP oil disaster. On July 1 it issued an order barring the public and the news media from coming within 65feet of clean-up operations without permission from the Coast Guard. The transparent aim of the order, which purports to protect the safety of clean-up workers, is to prevent the population from viewing the devastation wrought by the BP oil blowout.
The gag order states that that anyone not authorized by the Coast Guard “must not come within 20 meters [65 feet] of booming operations, boom, or oil spill response operations under penalty of law.” The wording—“oil spill response operations”—could be construed as covering the entire affected region, which stretches from the Mississippi Delta to the Florida Panhandle.
Journalists who “willfully” defy the White House order could be prosecuted as Class D felons and face up to five years in prison and a $40,000 fine. Exceptions to the ban will be considered on a case-by-case basis by the Coast Guard captain of the Port of New Orleans.
In defending the order, Coast Guard Commander Thad Allen stated that the measure aims to protect clean-up workers, but he failed to cite a single incident of safety being compromised by “unauthorized personnel.”
The real concern the White House has is that clean-up workers might reveal something about the dangerous conditions under which they work and the real scale of the environmental devastation—defying a gag order imposed by BP. An unknown number of these workers—likely hundreds, perhaps thousands—have become sick from exposure to oil and toxic dispersants and may well face a lifetime of chronic ailments.
The new effort to gag the media continues a campaign launched three weeks ago by the administration to reach what Obama adviser David Axlerod called an “inflection point” in the Gulf crisis. In a string of public relations events from June 11 through June 17, President Obama visited the Gulf for two days, gave a nationally televised Oval Office speech on the blowout, and met in the White House with BP CEO Tony Hayward and Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg.
That meeting resulted in the announcement that BP would finance a $20 billion settlement fund, which would be “independently” administered. This was presented by Obama as a major concession wrenched from the oil company and a boon to the many thousands of Gulf residents whose livelihoods have been destroyed as a result of BP’s actions.
In reality, the deal was a boon to BP, effectively placing a cap over its major liabilities—for a disaster whose total costs will be reckoned in the hundreds of billions of dollars—and shielding it from lawsuits and damage claims.
“Investors in BP should know that there’s now an alternative to the litigation system in place,” Independent Claims Facility administrator Kenneth Feinberg told CNBC. “I think that’s a really helpful sign if you’re an investor.”
Feinberg has already declared that the fund will be off limits to the majority of those affected by the blowout—people in the tourism industry, fishermen who operate on a cash basis, Gulf coast homeowners whose property values will plunge.
The carefully scripted and orchestrated series of events in mid-June was meant to signal a halt to the anti-BP posturing by the government and begin a tamping down of media coverage of the catastrophe. In effect, the American people were told the poisoning of the Gulf, with all of its consequences, would continue at least until BP completed its relief wells some time in August—and they should get used to it!
The latest move to censor coverage of the Gulf crisis is in keeping with this strategy and is in line with the Obama administration’s policy ever since the Deepwater Horizon rig blew up on April 20, killing 11 workers. The primary concern of both BP and the White House has been to cover up the gravity of the pollution of vast parts of the Gulf of Mexico and beaches and wetlands in at least four US states.
At stake is not only the population’s right to know what is happening to the seas, shores and wildlife that are now treated as the private property of BP, it is quite simply impossible to formulate an adequate response outside of an independent assessment of the extent of the damage.
There are by now countless reports of journalists and citizens being ordered away from beaches or blocked from viewing the spill from the land, air and sea by BP, the Coast Guard and hired security agents. In mid-June, the White House banned airplanes from flying over the spill zone at altitudes below 3,000 feet, and helicopters below 1,500 feet, without a special exemption from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).
CNN’s Anderson Cooper reported last week that journalists have been repeatedly barred from a government mobile hospital in Venice, Louisiana that is treating clean-up workers.
BP and its supplier Nalco, have even refused to reveal to scientists the chemical composition of Corexit, the dispersant that has been dumped by the hundreds of thousands of gallons into the Gulf to break up the oil, because, they say, it is a trade secret. BP simply defied an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) order issued one month ago, to cease use of Corexit pending further testing. Obama decided not to pursue the matter.
For nearly two months, BP and government stonewalling made it impossible even to assess how big the blowout was. Insisting from the first that BP was “in charge” of the clean-up, the administration colluded with the oil giant to block independent analysis of the gusher one mile beneath the surface of the Gulf. Only under steady criticism from scientists did the administration repeatedly revise upward the rate of the oil erupting from the sea floor. The spill is now, by all accounts, the largest in history.
All of this underscores the necessity to take the response to the oil disaster out of the hands of BP and the Obama administration.
The Gulf disaster requires a mass response. It is first of all necessary to bring together the best scientists and engineers in the world, give them full and unfettered access to all information related to the disaster, and place them in charge of hundreds of thousands of well-trained, well-equipped and well-paid workers.
The resources necessary for this undertaking can be realized by nationalizing BP and the entire oil industry and converting the industry into a public utility, democratically run by the working population in the interests of society as a whole.
This, in turn, requires the mass mobilization of the working class, independently of both parties of big business, based on a socialist program that rejects the “right” of corporations and financiers to unfathomable wealth at the expense of the people and the environment of the planet.
l27,000 abandoned oil wells in Gulf of Mexico
By Hiram Lee
wsws.org
8 July 2010
There are 27,000 abandoned oil wells in the Gulf of Mexico. In spite of the potential for oil leaks due to corrosion and underground pressure, the wells are not inspected by the US government or any agency within the oil industry. These revelations were uncovered as part of an investigative report conducted by the Associated Press which describes the Gulf of Mexico as “an environmental minefield.”
According to the AP, over half of the 50,000 wells which have been drilled in the federal waters of the Gulf of Mexico have been abandoned, with 23,500 of them considered permanently sealed. As many as 3,500 of the wells are considered “temporarily abandoned.” The oldest of the abandoned wells investigated by the AP date back to the 1940s.
Wells are abandoned by oil companies when they are considered to no longer be profitable, or when the potential for the amount of oil to be drawn from the well is not as high as the company may have initially believed. According to the AP, “Some owners temporarily abandon wells to await a rise in oil prices.”
The standard procedure for plugging a well to be abandoned permanently by an oil company involves cutting riser piping 15 feet beneath the seabed, filling the well with heavy liquid, often referred to as drilling mud, to prevent the flow of oil and capping the well with cement plugs which can be up to 200 feet in length.
Several factors can cause abandoned wells to leak or fail, including erosion or aging in the cement used to plug the wells and repressurization of wells due to changes in geological conditions. Erosion in well casing or other areas of the well structure can allow oil and gas to escape to the surface. This can occur gradually or in a sudden catastrophic blowout.
The permanent sealing of an offshore well is costly and time consuming, costing as much as $200,000 and taking as many as 10 days work. Many oil companies get around this by classifying their wells as “temporarily abandoned,” so they can plug the wells in a less thorough and expensive process. Federal regulations only mandate that companies provide a yearly plan stating their intentions to either return to the well or to seal it permanently in the future.
Using this loophole, companies can leave their wells in a kind of legal limbo for years. They can do so knowing they will face no repercussion from governmental regulating industries. The AP found that the federal Minerals Management Service (MMS) has issued fines of “just $440,000 on seven companies from 2003-2007 for improper plug-and-abandonment work.”
The AP reports that “About three-quarters of temporarily abandoned wells have been left in that status for more than a year, and many since the 1950s and 1960s—even though sealing procedures for temporary abandonment are not as stringent as those for permanent closures.”
BP has abandoned no less than 600 wells in the Gulf of Mexico.
Relief wells could be ineffective.
A contractor with BP has said the company is ahead of schedule in drilling its first relief well. Billy Brown, the president of Blackhawk Specialty Tools, a company hired by BP to work on the cementing process of the relief well plan, claims BP is within ten feet of intersecting with its leaking Macado well. Brown recently told reporters “hopefully in the next two weeks we are going to be hearing some very good things.”
National Incident Commander Thad Allen gave reporters a different estimate on Tuesday saying, “They have about 264 feet left to go before they can get to a point where they can potentially intercept the well.” Allen is standing by the timeline which places completion of the first relief well in mid-August, even though he says BP is a week ahead of schedule.
The relief wells are intended to intersect the blown-out Macado well at a depth of 18,000 feet. Once the wells intersect, a heavy liquid will be pumped into the leaking well in order to stop the flow of oil. The Macado well will then be plugged with concrete.
While BP’s plan to stop the leak with relief wells has been promoted as the ultimate solution to the Deepwater Horizon disaster and the more trustworthy fall-back plan once all other efforts to stop the leak had failed, there is a real possibility the relief wells could also be ineffective.
David Rensink, the incoming president of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, has discussed the difficulties involved with intersecting the leaking well. Rensink told reporters, “You’re trying to intersect the well bore, which is about a foot wide, with another well bore, which is about a foot wide.” Rensink has said making contact on the first attempt “would truly be like winning the lottery.”
There is a danger that if BP misses its target, it could drill into a high-pressure zone and cause a gas “kick” which might lead to a blowout in the relief well itself. However, even if the company does hit its target on the first try, there is still no guarantee of success.
In an online discussion hosted by the Washington Post, John Hofmeister, the former president of Shell Oil and the current CEO of Citizens for Affordable Energy, discussed the possibility that the Macado well casing could have been damaged during the April 20 blowout or eroded by the leaking oil, putting the success of a relief well in doubt. Damage to the casing could allow the mud to be forced into the well to escape and prevent it from bringing the flow of oil to a halt.
“If the casing is compromised,” wrote Hofmeister, “the well is that much more difficult to shut down, including the risk that the relief wells may not be enough. If the relief wells do not result in stopping the flow, the next and drastic step is to implode the well on top of itself, which carries other risks as well.”
Oil spill reaches Texas and Lake Pontchartrain
By Tom Eley
wsws.org
7 July 2010
Laboratory analysis on Tuesday confirmed that tar balls found washed ashore on beaches in Galveston, Texas, over the weekend originated from the BP’s Macondo well, which is gushing out millions of gallons of oil per day 50 miles southeast of Venice, Louisiana.
Oil has now washed ashore in all the Gulf states—Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida—in a 550-mile stretch, about equivalent to the length of Great Britain from its northern to southern tips.
Tar balls and oil sheen have also been discovered in Louisiana’s Lake Pontchartrain, the estuary located directly to the north of New Orleans. Since the large saltwater lake is connected by only a thin strait to the Gulf, the arrival of the tar balls suggests that the oil and its toxic effects will increasingly penetrate into inland areas.
On Monday the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration expanded its ban on Gulf fishing to more than 81,000 square miles, about a third of all federal waters in the Gulf. The ban already includes most of the region’s richest fishing areas, effectively shutting down one of the coast’s largest industries.
BP’s efforts to collect the oil, meanwhile, are floundering.
In its skimming operations, BP has been able to collect less than 1,000 barrels of oil per day by its own count. Yet in an environmental impact statement produced only one month before the April 20 blowout on the Deepwater Horizon, BP told the federal government that it would have the ability to skim and remove 491,721 barrels per day, the Washington Post reports.
Obama administration regulators did not question the estimate before approving BP’s operations at the Macondo site. BP’s daily collection average, 900 barrels, has been about two tenths of one percent of what the oil giant assured the federal government it could remove. In fact the total amount of oil skimmed in the 77 days of the disaster—67,143 barrels—is but 13 percent of what BP claimed prior to the blowout that it could remove in a single day.
BP and the Obama administration have sown confusion about the effectiveness of the skimming, reporting on Monday that 671,428 barrels had been skimmed. This would be an impressive figure, were it not the case that it was at least 90 percent seawater.
Skimming operations have been made ineffective in recent days by choppy waters, conditions which are expected to continue for the next week.
Walter, a skimming boat captain, told World Socialist Web Site reporters that skimming is ineffective. “We’re barely doing anything. Out of 150 million gallons, we haven’t picked up two million,” he said. “They deliberately sunk all the oil to the bottom as a PR move. There just isn’t much for us to skim.”
John, a cleanup worker from Missouri, said that a six-man boat crew, working all day, sometimes can gather only fifteen gallons of oil. Dean Blanchard, a shrimper, has seen boats return after a day’s work with only 4-5 gallons.
BP has burned a much larger share of the oil, 238,095 barrels in all, and it claims that 632,410 barrels have been recovered from siphoning operations at the wellhead. The burning of the oil has been harshly criticized over concerns about potential damage to human health caused by the resulting airborne pollutants.
But the largest amount by far has been lost into the deeper waters of the Gulf. At the high-end spill rate estimate, according to PBS, the blowout has produced 300 million gallons, or about 7,143,000 barrels. The low end in the range of official estimates, 87 million gallons or just over 2 million barrels, is simply not credible, given BP’s claim that it has siphoned, burned, or skimmed about half of that amount.
With each passing day the social and ecological catastrophe caused by the spill worsens. The fishing and tourism industries have been all but shut down. The consequences to human health are only now beginning to come into focus, with hundreds or perhaps thousands of clean-up workers developing health problems from acute exposure to the toxic mix of oil and chemical dispersants. Entire species, some already endangered, now face annihilation.
Scientists have expressed fear that the Gulf region could reach an ecological tipping point where a substantial share of sea life will vanish from vast areas of what was once one of the most biologically rich zones in the Western Hemisphere.
Now a British team of scientists has warned that the oil disaster is likely to raise the level of arsenic in the sea water substantially.
Arsenic, a highly poisonous metallic element, occurs naturally in sea water. Normally it is deposited in sediment on the seafloor and covered up. However, oil seems to disrupt this natural settling process, and also carries substantial levels of arsenic itself. Fish and other organisms consume the arsenic, and it accumulates and concentrates as it moves its way up the food chain toward humans. In addition, arsenic can disrupt photosynthesis in simple marine plants and cause genetic defects in animals.
“Oil spills stop the normal process because the oil combines with sediment and it leads to an accumulation of arsenic in the water over time,” said Professor Mark Sephton of Imperial College. “Our study is a timely reminder that oil spills could create a toxic ticking time bomb, which could threaten the fabric of the marine ecosystem in the future.”
This week BP announced that it will proceed with high-risk oil exploration in spite of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. It made the declaration in response to opposition from a group of shareholders.
“The position is the same now as it was at the strategy update earlier in the year. We are committed to three core areas of deep-water oil, unconventional gas and enhanced recovery on super-sized fields,” a spokesman said in London. “The world needs oil to meet growing demand and total risk aversion would just drive up prices.”
World Socialist Web Site, wsws.org
6 July 2010
The Obama administration has intensified its cover-up of the BP oil disaster. On July 1 it issued an order barring the public and the news media from coming within 65feet of clean-up operations without permission from the Coast Guard. The transparent aim of the order, which purports to protect the safety of clean-up workers, is to prevent the population from viewing the devastation wrought by the BP oil blowout.
The gag order states that that anyone not authorized by the Coast Guard “must not come within 20 meters [65 feet] of booming operations, boom, or oil spill response operations under penalty of law.” The wording—“oil spill response operations”—could be construed as covering the entire affected region, which stretches from the Mississippi Delta to the Florida Panhandle.
Journalists who “willfully” defy the White House order could be prosecuted as Class D felons and face up to five years in prison and a $40,000 fine. Exceptions to the ban will be considered on a case-by-case basis by the Coast Guard captain of the Port of New Orleans.
In defending the order, Coast Guard Commander Thad Allen stated that the measure aims to protect clean-up workers, but he failed to cite a single incident of safety being compromised by “unauthorized personnel.”
The real concern the White House has is that clean-up workers might reveal something about the dangerous conditions under which they work and the real scale of the environmental devastation—defying a gag order imposed by BP. An unknown number of these workers—likely hundreds, perhaps thousands—have become sick from exposure to oil and toxic dispersants and may well face a lifetime of chronic ailments.
The new effort to gag the media continues a campaign launched three weeks ago by the administration to reach what Obama adviser David Axlerod called an “inflection point” in the Gulf crisis. In a string of public relations events from June 11 through June 17, President Obama visited the Gulf for two days, gave a nationally televised Oval Office speech on the blowout, and met in the White House with BP CEO Tony Hayward and Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg.
That meeting resulted in the announcement that BP would finance a $20 billion settlement fund, which would be “independently” administered. This was presented by Obama as a major concession wrenched from the oil company and a boon to the many thousands of Gulf residents whose livelihoods have been destroyed as a result of BP’s actions.
In reality, the deal was a boon to BP, effectively placing a cap over its major liabilities—for a disaster whose total costs will be reckoned in the hundreds of billions of dollars—and shielding it from lawsuits and damage claims.
“Investors in BP should know that there’s now an alternative to the litigation system in place,” Independent Claims Facility administrator Kenneth Feinberg told CNBC. “I think that’s a really helpful sign if you’re an investor.”
Feinberg has already declared that the fund will be off limits to the majority of those affected by the blowout—people in the tourism industry, fishermen who operate on a cash basis, Gulf coast homeowners whose property values will plunge.
The carefully scripted and orchestrated series of events in mid-June was meant to signal a halt to the anti-BP posturing by the government and begin a tamping down of media coverage of the catastrophe. In effect, the American people were told the poisoning of the Gulf, with all of its consequences, would continue at least until BP completed its relief wells some time in August—and they should get used to it!
The latest move to censor coverage of the Gulf crisis is in keeping with this strategy and is in line with the Obama administration’s policy ever since the Deepwater Horizon rig blew up on April 20, killing 11 workers. The primary concern of both BP and the White House has been to cover up the gravity of the pollution of vast parts of the Gulf of Mexico and beaches and wetlands in at least four US states.
At stake is not only the population’s right to know what is happening to the seas, shores and wildlife that are now treated as the private property of BP, it is quite simply impossible to formulate an adequate response outside of an independent assessment of the extent of the damage.
There are by now countless reports of journalists and citizens being ordered away from beaches or blocked from viewing the spill from the land, air and sea by BP, the Coast Guard and hired security agents. In mid-June, the White House banned airplanes from flying over the spill zone at altitudes below 3,000 feet, and helicopters below 1,500 feet, without a special exemption from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).
CNN’s Anderson Cooper reported last week that journalists have been repeatedly barred from a government mobile hospital in Venice, Louisiana that is treating clean-up workers.
BP and its supplier Nalco, have even refused to reveal to scientists the chemical composition of Corexit, the dispersant that has been dumped by the hundreds of thousands of gallons into the Gulf to break up the oil, because, they say, it is a trade secret. BP simply defied an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) order issued one month ago, to cease use of Corexit pending further testing. Obama decided not to pursue the matter.
For nearly two months, BP and government stonewalling made it impossible even to assess how big the blowout was. Insisting from the first that BP was “in charge” of the clean-up, the administration colluded with the oil giant to block independent analysis of the gusher one mile beneath the surface of the Gulf. Only under steady criticism from scientists did the administration repeatedly revise upward the rate of the oil erupting from the sea floor. The spill is now, by all accounts, the largest in history.
All of this underscores the necessity to take the response to the oil disaster out of the hands of BP and the Obama administration.
The Gulf disaster requires a mass response. It is first of all necessary to bring together the best scientists and engineers in the world, give them full and unfettered access to all information related to the disaster, and place them in charge of hundreds of thousands of well-trained, well-equipped and well-paid workers.
The resources necessary for this undertaking can be realized by nationalizing BP and the entire oil industry and converting the industry into a public utility, democratically run by the working population in the interests of society as a whole.
This, in turn, requires the mass mobilization of the working class, independently of both parties of big business, based on a socialist program that rejects the “right” of corporations and financiers to unfathomable wealth at the expense of the people and the environment of the planet.
l27,000 abandoned oil wells in Gulf of Mexico
By Hiram Lee
wsws.org
8 July 2010
There are 27,000 abandoned oil wells in the Gulf of Mexico. In spite of the potential for oil leaks due to corrosion and underground pressure, the wells are not inspected by the US government or any agency within the oil industry. These revelations were uncovered as part of an investigative report conducted by the Associated Press which describes the Gulf of Mexico as “an environmental minefield.”
According to the AP, over half of the 50,000 wells which have been drilled in the federal waters of the Gulf of Mexico have been abandoned, with 23,500 of them considered permanently sealed. As many as 3,500 of the wells are considered “temporarily abandoned.” The oldest of the abandoned wells investigated by the AP date back to the 1940s.
Wells are abandoned by oil companies when they are considered to no longer be profitable, or when the potential for the amount of oil to be drawn from the well is not as high as the company may have initially believed. According to the AP, “Some owners temporarily abandon wells to await a rise in oil prices.”
The standard procedure for plugging a well to be abandoned permanently by an oil company involves cutting riser piping 15 feet beneath the seabed, filling the well with heavy liquid, often referred to as drilling mud, to prevent the flow of oil and capping the well with cement plugs which can be up to 200 feet in length.
Several factors can cause abandoned wells to leak or fail, including erosion or aging in the cement used to plug the wells and repressurization of wells due to changes in geological conditions. Erosion in well casing or other areas of the well structure can allow oil and gas to escape to the surface. This can occur gradually or in a sudden catastrophic blowout.
The permanent sealing of an offshore well is costly and time consuming, costing as much as $200,000 and taking as many as 10 days work. Many oil companies get around this by classifying their wells as “temporarily abandoned,” so they can plug the wells in a less thorough and expensive process. Federal regulations only mandate that companies provide a yearly plan stating their intentions to either return to the well or to seal it permanently in the future.
Using this loophole, companies can leave their wells in a kind of legal limbo for years. They can do so knowing they will face no repercussion from governmental regulating industries. The AP found that the federal Minerals Management Service (MMS) has issued fines of “just $440,000 on seven companies from 2003-2007 for improper plug-and-abandonment work.”
The AP reports that “About three-quarters of temporarily abandoned wells have been left in that status for more than a year, and many since the 1950s and 1960s—even though sealing procedures for temporary abandonment are not as stringent as those for permanent closures.”
BP has abandoned no less than 600 wells in the Gulf of Mexico.
Relief wells could be ineffective.
A contractor with BP has said the company is ahead of schedule in drilling its first relief well. Billy Brown, the president of Blackhawk Specialty Tools, a company hired by BP to work on the cementing process of the relief well plan, claims BP is within ten feet of intersecting with its leaking Macado well. Brown recently told reporters “hopefully in the next two weeks we are going to be hearing some very good things.”
National Incident Commander Thad Allen gave reporters a different estimate on Tuesday saying, “They have about 264 feet left to go before they can get to a point where they can potentially intercept the well.” Allen is standing by the timeline which places completion of the first relief well in mid-August, even though he says BP is a week ahead of schedule.
The relief wells are intended to intersect the blown-out Macado well at a depth of 18,000 feet. Once the wells intersect, a heavy liquid will be pumped into the leaking well in order to stop the flow of oil. The Macado well will then be plugged with concrete.
While BP’s plan to stop the leak with relief wells has been promoted as the ultimate solution to the Deepwater Horizon disaster and the more trustworthy fall-back plan once all other efforts to stop the leak had failed, there is a real possibility the relief wells could also be ineffective.
David Rensink, the incoming president of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, has discussed the difficulties involved with intersecting the leaking well. Rensink told reporters, “You’re trying to intersect the well bore, which is about a foot wide, with another well bore, which is about a foot wide.” Rensink has said making contact on the first attempt “would truly be like winning the lottery.”
There is a danger that if BP misses its target, it could drill into a high-pressure zone and cause a gas “kick” which might lead to a blowout in the relief well itself. However, even if the company does hit its target on the first try, there is still no guarantee of success.
In an online discussion hosted by the Washington Post, John Hofmeister, the former president of Shell Oil and the current CEO of Citizens for Affordable Energy, discussed the possibility that the Macado well casing could have been damaged during the April 20 blowout or eroded by the leaking oil, putting the success of a relief well in doubt. Damage to the casing could allow the mud to be forced into the well to escape and prevent it from bringing the flow of oil to a halt.
“If the casing is compromised,” wrote Hofmeister, “the well is that much more difficult to shut down, including the risk that the relief wells may not be enough. If the relief wells do not result in stopping the flow, the next and drastic step is to implode the well on top of itself, which carries other risks as well.”
Oil spill reaches Texas and Lake Pontchartrain
By Tom Eley
wsws.org
7 July 2010
Laboratory analysis on Tuesday confirmed that tar balls found washed ashore on beaches in Galveston, Texas, over the weekend originated from the BP’s Macondo well, which is gushing out millions of gallons of oil per day 50 miles southeast of Venice, Louisiana.
Oil has now washed ashore in all the Gulf states—Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida—in a 550-mile stretch, about equivalent to the length of Great Britain from its northern to southern tips.
Tar balls and oil sheen have also been discovered in Louisiana’s Lake Pontchartrain, the estuary located directly to the north of New Orleans. Since the large saltwater lake is connected by only a thin strait to the Gulf, the arrival of the tar balls suggests that the oil and its toxic effects will increasingly penetrate into inland areas.
On Monday the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration expanded its ban on Gulf fishing to more than 81,000 square miles, about a third of all federal waters in the Gulf. The ban already includes most of the region’s richest fishing areas, effectively shutting down one of the coast’s largest industries.
BP’s efforts to collect the oil, meanwhile, are floundering.
In its skimming operations, BP has been able to collect less than 1,000 barrels of oil per day by its own count. Yet in an environmental impact statement produced only one month before the April 20 blowout on the Deepwater Horizon, BP told the federal government that it would have the ability to skim and remove 491,721 barrels per day, the Washington Post reports.
Obama administration regulators did not question the estimate before approving BP’s operations at the Macondo site. BP’s daily collection average, 900 barrels, has been about two tenths of one percent of what the oil giant assured the federal government it could remove. In fact the total amount of oil skimmed in the 77 days of the disaster—67,143 barrels—is but 13 percent of what BP claimed prior to the blowout that it could remove in a single day.
BP and the Obama administration have sown confusion about the effectiveness of the skimming, reporting on Monday that 671,428 barrels had been skimmed. This would be an impressive figure, were it not the case that it was at least 90 percent seawater.
Skimming operations have been made ineffective in recent days by choppy waters, conditions which are expected to continue for the next week.
Walter, a skimming boat captain, told World Socialist Web Site reporters that skimming is ineffective. “We’re barely doing anything. Out of 150 million gallons, we haven’t picked up two million,” he said. “They deliberately sunk all the oil to the bottom as a PR move. There just isn’t much for us to skim.”
John, a cleanup worker from Missouri, said that a six-man boat crew, working all day, sometimes can gather only fifteen gallons of oil. Dean Blanchard, a shrimper, has seen boats return after a day’s work with only 4-5 gallons.
BP has burned a much larger share of the oil, 238,095 barrels in all, and it claims that 632,410 barrels have been recovered from siphoning operations at the wellhead. The burning of the oil has been harshly criticized over concerns about potential damage to human health caused by the resulting airborne pollutants.
But the largest amount by far has been lost into the deeper waters of the Gulf. At the high-end spill rate estimate, according to PBS, the blowout has produced 300 million gallons, or about 7,143,000 barrels. The low end in the range of official estimates, 87 million gallons or just over 2 million barrels, is simply not credible, given BP’s claim that it has siphoned, burned, or skimmed about half of that amount.
With each passing day the social and ecological catastrophe caused by the spill worsens. The fishing and tourism industries have been all but shut down. The consequences to human health are only now beginning to come into focus, with hundreds or perhaps thousands of clean-up workers developing health problems from acute exposure to the toxic mix of oil and chemical dispersants. Entire species, some already endangered, now face annihilation.
Scientists have expressed fear that the Gulf region could reach an ecological tipping point where a substantial share of sea life will vanish from vast areas of what was once one of the most biologically rich zones in the Western Hemisphere.
Now a British team of scientists has warned that the oil disaster is likely to raise the level of arsenic in the sea water substantially.
Arsenic, a highly poisonous metallic element, occurs naturally in sea water. Normally it is deposited in sediment on the seafloor and covered up. However, oil seems to disrupt this natural settling process, and also carries substantial levels of arsenic itself. Fish and other organisms consume the arsenic, and it accumulates and concentrates as it moves its way up the food chain toward humans. In addition, arsenic can disrupt photosynthesis in simple marine plants and cause genetic defects in animals.
“Oil spills stop the normal process because the oil combines with sediment and it leads to an accumulation of arsenic in the water over time,” said Professor Mark Sephton of Imperial College. “Our study is a timely reminder that oil spills could create a toxic ticking time bomb, which could threaten the fabric of the marine ecosystem in the future.”
This week BP announced that it will proceed with high-risk oil exploration in spite of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. It made the declaration in response to opposition from a group of shareholders.
“The position is the same now as it was at the strategy update earlier in the year. We are committed to three core areas of deep-water oil, unconventional gas and enhanced recovery on super-sized fields,” a spokesman said in London. “The world needs oil to meet growing demand and total risk aversion would just drive up prices.”
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