Big Sur Bohemian Club

Gulf of Mexico Storm Watch

Posted by methaz on June 25, 2010 - 4:12pm
Topic: Supply/Production
Tags: deepwater horizon, gulf of mexico, hurricanes, oil spill [list all tags]

This is the first post by Chuck Watson (aka methaz), Director of Research and Development for Kinetic Analysis Corporation (KAC). KAC provides detailed impact and risk assessments to a wide variety of commercial and government clients, including most of the Caribbean governments, the UK Overseas Territories, and Bloomberg Business News. Over the last few years Chuck has provided exclusive insights in to the potential impact of storms on energy infrastructure here at The Oil Drum, and this year will be joining us as a contributor to help assess the impact storms may have on our energy infrastructure. - Gail

We now have our first serious threat to the Gulf of Mexico this year, in the form of Tropical Depression 1 (TD #1). The current official forecast is for the storm to hit the Yucatan Peninsula and, if it survives, cross the Bay of Campeche and strike the coast again near the Mexico/Texas border. Some of the more advanced computer models are showing that the system may make a more northward turn and become a strong tropical storm or hurricane after passing over Yucatan, potentially impacting the area of the Deepwater Horizon response. I would caution here that forecasting weak systems is tricky, and track/forecast models have a poor track record on storms at this stage.

That said, here is a map of some of the computer models, as of late Friday afternoon (7pm ET), including the official forecast track in bright red. We should have a better handle on where the storm is going, and if there is serious potential to impact the Gulf production areas or DH spill response, over the weekend. As discussed below, if it turns and strengthens, it could be problematic for the DH response.

 

 

If the storm crosses Yucatan directly as per the official Forecast, it should have minimal impact on PEMEX. The waves might cause problems for the DH response, but it is too early to tell. Since we don't really know at this stage if the storm will be a serious threat, below the fold I will discuss in general the impact hurricanes have on production in the Gulf, what a storm might do to the oil spill (and vice versa!), what this year might have in store, and what kinds of info we'll try to post here during incoming storms.

Note: This overview of hurricanes and GOMEX oil/gas production is based on research by Dr. Mark Johnson of the University of Central Florida and myself. This year we will be posting comments on incoming storms, forecasts, and results of our ongoing work here at The Oil Drum as conditions warrant.

Hurricanes and GOMEX Oil/Gas Production

Ever since offshore oil and gas production accelerated in the 1970s, hurricanes have been a factor. However, the rapid expansion of offshore production coincided with a period of lower hurricane activity resulting in part from a 20-30 year climate cycle known as the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO). If 2004's Hurricane Ivan was a wake up call, 2005's Katrina and Rita, combined with tight markets, were Mother Nature up-ending the bed and dumping us on the cold hard floor. We are now in a period of higher activity that is likely to last for another 5-10 years.

Hurricanes disrupt Oil/Gas production in two key ways: evacuation and actual damage. Offshore assets must be evacuated well in advance of an incoming storm. Precautionary shut-downs are made to prevent spills in the event platforms, rigs, and undersea pipelines are damaged. Thus, even if a storm completely misses the offshore assets, a storm in the Gulf can cause the loss of 3-5 days of production as crews shut down, evacuate, return, and restore production. Admiral Allen noted in a press conference today they would need to start shutting down the Deepwater Horizon operation 5 days before 34kt winds arrived, and it could take two weeks to resume operations. That seems excessive to me - 3 days evacuation, and 5-7 for recovery seems more in line with historical disruptions, but given the complexity and ad hoc nature of the response equipment may well be true. If 5 days to evacuate number is accurate, this is a serious problem, since 5 day forecasts are notoriously unreliable and have a "cone of uncertainty" of over 300 nautical miles. AL93 is already less they 4 days out, according to some models.

The damage a storm will cause depends on many factors. Waves are a major factor. Older platforms had an air gap (the distance between the normal, static water surface and the base of the platform) of 35 ft to allow waves to pass under the platform. Over time that grew to 55 ft. But Ivan, Katrina, and Rita firmly demonstrated that these air gaps are too small. Chevron's Petronius platform was hit by a 90ft wave in Ivan, and was shut down for six months. Another major problem is damage to the 33,000 mile network of pipelines that connects platforms with on-shore refineries. Undersea landslides, pressure damage, and damage to the infrastructure where the pipelines come onshore can cut off platforms for months. The high winds from a storm can strip off towers, cranes, and other superstructure from offshore assets.

Assets are generally built to withstand a 100 year event. However, that often results in a serious under-design of the entire system. While a 70 foot wave might be a 100 year event at any one point, it is only a 12 year event for at least one platform in the Gulf. Another issue is the harsh offshore environment. In effect these structures are sitting in a salt bath. Even with aggressive preventive maintenance, it is doubtful that a structure designed to handle a 120mph wind can still handle those loads after sitting in the Gulf for years or decades.

Restoration times are also a complex calculation. Some wells, especially older, nearshore assets, are simply not worth restoring as they are too far along in their production cycle to warrant the expense of repairing the damage. For major events like Katrina, another issue is the globally limited resources to replace damaged assets.

2010 Outlook

This doesn't look to be a good year for several reasons. First, we are still clearly in a warm phase AMO cycle, with the Atlantic sea surface temperatures above normal. Second, it is increasingly clear that we will be entering a La Nina phase of the ENSO cycle over the next few weeks. Thus, there will be more energy (SST) and favorable winds (La Nina). Historically, when those conditions exist, there is disruption to Gulf of Mexico (GOMEX) production. Our modeling indicates that 98% of years with climatology similar to this one will lose at least one week of production, as opposed to 40% of all years. On average, 98 million barrels of production are shut in in years like this one.

Oil Spills and Hurricanes

There has been a lot of discussion about the impact of a hurricane on the spill, and vice versa. Jeff Masters has a good discussion on the impact of oil on a storm topic here. As he points out, the size of the storm is large compared to the size of the slick. I agree that as far as the impact of the spill on storms, I seriously doubt it will be noticeable. In theory, an oil sheen should reduce the energy exchange between water and air, and reduce energy available, and therefore weaken a storm. Also in theory, some are arguing the oil will result in slightly higher SSTs, and therefore more energy and stronger storms. I think both arguments are of the "angels on pinheads" variety due to the size factor, and that wave and wind action will disrupt the slicks long before either process could come in to play.

The impact of a storm on the oil is whole different matter. I think the best thing the Gulf Coast could get this year is a direct hit by a big, wet, Cat 1 storm. Strong enough to clean things out, not so bad as to hurt folks much worst than they already are. The currents and wave action would probably mix up and disperse the oil, rain bands and surge would flush out the wetlands without pushing oil much further inland. A worst case might be a mid or southern Gulf bypassing storm - winds, waves could push the oil on to and beyond protective devices as well as deeper in to the marshes, but not be violent enough to seriously mix up the oil and disperse it, and no rain bands to dilute or wash out the wetlands. A direct hit by a stronger storm could potentially push oil far inland, but the mixing and dilution effects should mitigate that somewhat.

Either way, given climatology, we're almost certainly going to find out what a hurricane does to an oil spill this year . 

Deepwater Horizon oil spillFrom Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaThis article is about the oil spill. For the oil rig explosion, see Deepwater Horizon explosion."2010 oil spill", "BP oil spill", and "Gulf of Mexico oil spill" redirect here. For other oil spills in 2010, see 2010 oil spill (disambiguation), for the 2006 BP oil spill, see Prudhoe Bay oil spill, and for the 1979 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, see Ixtoc I oil spill. Deepwater Horizon oil spill
The oil slick as seen from space by NASA's Terrasatellite on May 24, 2010. Location Gulf of Mexico near Mississippi River Delta Coordinates 28.73667°N 88.38716°WCoordinates: 28.73667°N 88.38716°W Date April 20, 2010 – present (62 days) Cause Cause Wellhead blowout Casualties 11 dead
17 injured Operator Transocean under contract for BP[1] Spill characteristics Volume up to 6,200,000 barrels (260,000,000 US gallons; 986,000 cubic metres) Area 2,500 to 9,100 sq mi (6,500 to 24,000 km2) [2]

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill (also referred to as the BP oil spill, the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, the BP oil disaster or the Macondo blowout)[3][4][5][6] is a massive ongoing oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico that is now considered the largest offshore spill in U.S. history.[7]Some estimates placed it by late May or early June, 2010, as among the largest oil spills in the world with tens of millions of gallons spilled to date.[8] The spill stems from a sea floor oil gusher that resulted from the April 20, 2010 Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosion. The explosion killed 11 platform workers and injured 17 others.[9]

The gusher, now estimated by the quasi-official Flow Rate Technical Group to be flowing at 35,000 to 60,000 barrels (1,500,000 to 2,500,000 US gallons; 5,600 to 9,500 cubic metres) of crude oil per day,[10][11] originates from a deepwater wellhead 5,000 feet (1,500 m) below the ocean surface.[12] The exact spill flow rate is uncertain due to the difficulty of installing measurement devices at that depth and is a matter of ongoing debate.[13] The resulting oil slick covers a surface area of at least 2,500 square miles (6,500 km2), with the exact size and location of the slick fluctuating from day to day depending on weather conditions.[14] Scientists have also reported immense underwater plumes of oil not visible at the surface.[13]

Experts fear that the spill will result in an environmental disaster, with extensive impact already on marine and wildlife habitats.[15][16]The spill has also damaged the Gulf of Mexico fishing and tourism industries. There have been a variety of ongoing efforts to stem the flow of oil at the wellhead. Crews have been working to protect hundreds of miles of beaches, wetlands and estuaries along the northern Gulf coast, using skimmer ships, floating containment booms, anchored barriers, and sand-filled barricades along shorelines. The U.S. Government has named BP as the responsible party in the incident, and officials have said the company will be held accountable for all cleanup costs resulting from the oil spill.[17][18]

Contents [hide]

• 1 Background
  • 1.1 Deepwater Horizon drilling rig
  • 1.2 Explosion
• 2 Volume and extent of oil spill
  • 2.1 Spill flow rate
  • 2.2 Spill area
  • 2.3 Underwater oil plumes
  • 2.4 Expansion predictions
  • 2.5 Independent monitoring of contamination
• 3 Efforts to stem the flow of oil
  • 3.1 Short-term efforts
  • 3.2 Long-term efforts
• 4 Containment and cleanup
  • 4.1 Dispersants
  • 4.2 Additional technologies for cleanup
• 5 Consequences
  • 5.1 Ecology
  • 5.2 Fisheries and tourism
  • 5.3 Other economic consequences
  • 5.4 Litigation
  • 5.5 Health consequences
  • 5.6 U.S. and Canadian offshore drilling policy
  • 5.7 Spill response fund
• 6 Reactions
  • 6.1 U.S. government
  • 6.2 International governments
  • 6.3 BP public relations
  • 6.4 Public reaction
    • 6.4.1 Public opinion
  • 6.5 Charity
• 7 Investigations
• 8 See also
• 9 References
• 10 External links

[edit]Background[edit]Deepwater Horizon drilling rigMain article: Deepwater HorizonDeepwater Horizon prior to explosion.
Location of the Deepwater Horizon on April 20, 2010

The Deepwater Horizon was a 9-year-old semi-submersible Mobile Offshore Drilling Unit(MODU), a massive floating, dynamically positioned drilling rig built by Hyundai Heavy Industries[19] that could operate in waters up to 8,000 feet (2,400 m) deep and drill down to 30,000 feet (9,100 m).[20] It was owned by Transocean, operated under the Marshalese flag of convenience, and was under lease to BP until September 2013.[21] At the time of the explosion, the Deepwater Horizon was drilling an exploratory well at a water depth of approximately 5,000 feet (1,500 m) in the Macondo Prospect located in the Mississippi Canyon Block 252, in the United Statesexclusive economic zone about 41 miles (66 km) off the Louisiana coast in the Gulf of Mexico.[22][23][24][25][26] Production casing was being run and cemented by Halliburton Energy Services. Once the cementing was complete, it was due to be tested for integrity and a cement plug set to temporarily abandon the well for later completion as a subsea producer.[23][27] BP is the operator and principal developer of the Macondo Prospect with 65% of interest, while 25% is owned by Anadarko Petroleum Corporation, and 10% by MOEX Offshore 2007, a unit ofMitsui.[28] BP purchased the mineral rights to drill for oil in Macondo at the Minerals Management Service's lease sale in March 2008.[29]

[edit]ExplosionMain article: Deepwater Horizon explosionAHTS and PS vessels combat the fire on the Deepwater Horizon while the United States Coast Guard searches for missing crew.

During March and April 2010, several platform workers and supervisors expressed concerns with well control. At approximately 9:45 p.m. CDTon April 20, 2010, methane gas from the well, under high pressure, shot up and out of the drill column marine riser, expanded onto the platform, and then ignited and exploded.[27][30] Fire then engulfed the platform.[31] Most of the workers were evacuated by lifeboats or were airlifted out by helicopter,[32][33] but eleven workers were never found despite a three-day Coast Guard search operation, and are presumed to have died in the explosion.[30][34] Efforts by multiple ships to douse the flames were unsuccessful. After burning furiously for approximately 36 hours, the Deepwater Horizon sank on the morning of April 22, 2010.[35]

On the afternoon of April 22, a large oil slick began to spread at the former rig site.[36] Two remotely operated underwater vehicles (ROVs) unsuccessfully attempted to cap the well.[37] BP announced that it was deploying a ROV to the site to assess whether oil was flowing from the well.[38] On April 23, a ROV reportedly found no oil leaking from the sunken rig and no oil flowing from the well.[39] Coast Guard Rear AdmiralMary Landry expressed cautious optimism of zero environmental impact, stating that no oil was emanating from either the wellhead or the broken pipes and that oil spilled from the explosion and sinking was being contained.[40][41][42][43] The following day, April 24, Landry announced that a damaged wellhead was indeed leaking oil into the Gulf and described it as "a very serious spill".[44]

As of June 19, BP has not given a cause for the explosion.[45]

[edit]Volume and extent of oil spillMain article: Timeline of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill

The Deepwater Horizon spill has surpassed in volume the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill as the largest ever to originate in U.S.-controlled waters; it is comparable to the 1979 Ixtoc I oil spill in total volume released (Ixtoc discharged 140 to 148 million gallons; as of June 16, Deepwater Horizon has discharged 73 to 126 million gallons).[46]

[edit]Spill flow ratePhoto of oil spill live video, May 11, 2010

In their permit to drill the well, BP estimated the worst case flow at 162,000 barrels (6,800,000 US gallons; 25,800 cubic metres) per day.[47]BP initially estimated that the wellhead was leaking only 1,000 barrels (42,000 US gallons; 160 cubic metres) a day.[44] On April 28, based on satellite pictures, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimated that the leak was likely 5,000 barrels (210,000 US gallons; 790 cubic metres) a day.[48][49] Geologist and oil industry consultant Simon James Hesketh said a more realistic figure was 20,000 barrels (840,000 US gallons; 3,200 cubic metres) a day and oceanographer Ian MacDonald and other sources using satellite imagery put the number as high as 25,000 barrels (1,100,000 US gallons; 4,000 cubic metres) a day.[44][50][51][52][53] According to BP, estimating the flow is very difficult as there is no metering of the flow underwater and because of the presence of natural gas in the outflow.[48] The company initially refused to allow scientists to perform more accurate, independent measurements of the flow, claiming that it is not relevant to the response and that such efforts might distract from efforts to stem the flow.[13] Former Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency Carol Browner and Congressman Ed Markey (D-MA) both accused BP of having a vested financial interest in downplaying the size of the leak.[54]

On May 12, BP released a 30 second video of the spill at the site of the broken pipe. Experts contacted by National Public Radio and shown the footage put the leak rate substantially higher than the early estimate.[55] Timothy Crone, an associate research scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, estimated at least 50,000 barrels (2,100,000 US gallons; 7,900 cubic metres) a day was leaking from the well by using another well-accepted method to calculate fluid flows.[56] Eugene Chaing, a professor of astrophysics at the University of California, Berkeley, estimated the leak to be 20,000–100,000 barrels (840,000–4,200,000 US gallons; 3,200–16,000 cubic metres) a day.[55][57] Steven Wereley, an associate professor at Purdue University used particle image velocimetry to initially arrive at a rate of 70,000 barrels (2,900,000 US gallons; 11,000 cubic metres) per day, with a margin of error of 20 percent.[58]

On May 24, U.S. Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, who is coordinating the government response, announced that the director of the United States Geological Survey (USGS), Marcia McNutt, is leading the Flow Rate Technical Group — scientists from the U.S. Coast Guard, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Minerals Management Service, the United States Department of Energy and academics outside government tasked with providing the government with an independent scientific assessment of the scope of the disaster and of BP's efforts to stop the flow of oil.[59][60][61] The Flow Rate Technical Group initially put the volume of oil flowing from the blown-out well at 12,000 to 19,000 barrels (500,000 to 800,000 US gallons; 1,900 to 3,000 cubic metres) per day,[62] and the government increased its official estimate to that range on May 27.[63][64][65] While the United States Geological Survey put forth that range as the best estimate for the lower and upper boundaries of flow rate, other scientists involved in drafting the figure viewed it as an estimated minimum.[66] According to Ira Leifer, a member of the Flow Rate Technical Group, the group was only provided a seven minute segment of low-quality video selected by BP, which showed a lot of variability from very low to very high flows.[67]

On June 10, based on additional video, members of the Flow Rate Technical Group calculated updated estimates for the period prior to the cutting of the riser pipe and the insertion of the Riser Insertion Tube Tool (RITT).[68] The majority concluded that, given the limited data available and the small amount of time to process that data, the best estimate for the average flow rate was likely between 25,000 and 30,000 barrels (1,100,000 and 1,300,000 US gallons; 4,000 and 4,800 cubic metres) per day, with a lower limit of 20,000 barrels (840,000 US gallons; 3,200 cubic metres) per day and an upper limit of 40,000 barrels (1,700,000 US gallons; 6,400 cubic metres) per day.[68] The new calculation suggested that an amount of oil equivalent to the Exxon Valdez disaster could have been flowing into the Gulf of Mexico every 8 to 10 days.[68][69][10] On June 15, after taking into account the increased flow rate after the riser was cut, McNutt estimated that the leak spilled between 35,000 and 60,000 barrels (1,500,000 and 2,500,000 US gallons; 5,600 and 9,500 cubic metres) a day.[70][71] The updated estimates are believed to be more accurate because it was no longer necessary to measure multiple leaks, and detailed pressure measurements were available as was more than a week of high-resolution newly-released video by BP.[72]

On June 18, oceanographer John Kessler said that the crude gushing from the well contains 40 percent methane, compared to about 5 percent found in typical oil deposits. Methane is a natural gas that could potentially suffocate marine life and create "dead zones" where oxygen is so depleted that nothing lives. "This is the most vigorous methane eruption in modern human history," Kessler said.[73] On June 20 an internal BP document was released by Congress revealing that BP estimated the flow could be as much as 100,000 barrels (4,200,000 US gallons; 16,000 cubic metres) per day, "if BOP (blowout preventer) and wellhead are removed and if we have incorrectly modeled the restrictions".[74][75]

[edit]Spill areaOil slicks surround the Chandeleur Islands, Louisiana in this aerial photo

The spread of the oil was initially increased by strong southerly winds caused by an impending cold front. By April 25, the oil spill covered 580 square miles (1,500 km2) and was only 31 miles (50 km) from the ecologically sensitive Chandeleur Islands.[76] An April 30 estimate placed the total spread of the oil at 3,850 square miles (10,000 km2).[77] The spill quickly approached the Delta National Wildlife Refuge andBreton National Wildlife Refuge, where dead animals, including a sea turtle, were found.[78][79][80] On May 14, the AP reported that a publicly available model called the Automated Data Inquiry for Oil Spills indicates about 35 percent of a hypothetical 114,000 barrels (4,800,000 US gal; 18,100 m3) spill of light Louisiana crude oil released in conditions similar to those found in the Gulf now would evaporate, that between 50 and 60 percent of the oil would remain in or on the water, and the rest would be dispersed in the ocean. In the same report, Ed Overton says he thinks most of the oil is floating within 1 foot (30 cm) of the surface.[81] The New York Times is tracking the size of the spill over time using data from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the US Coast Guard and Skytruth.[82] By June 4, the oil spill had landed on 125 miles (201 km) of Louisiana’s coast, had washed up along Mississippi and Alabama barrier islands, and was found for the first time on a Florida barrier island at Pensacola Beach.[83][84][85] On June 9, oil sludge began entering the Intracoastal Waterway through Perdido Pass after floating booms across the opening of the pass failed to stop the oil.[86]

[edit]Underwater oil plumes

University of California, Berkeley engineering professor Robert Bea argued there was "an equal amount that could be subsurface", subsurface oil being "near impossible to track".[87] On May 13, tarballs began washing up on the shores of three Louisiana parishes.[88] On May 15, researchers from the University of Southern Mississippi, aboard the research vessel RV Pelican, identified oil plumes in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, including one as large as 10 miles (16 km) long, 3 miles (4.8 km) wide and 300 feet (91 m) thick in spots. The shallowest oil plume the group detected was at about 2,300 feet (700 m), while the deepest was near the seafloor at about 4,200 feet (1,300 m). Other researchers from the University of Georgia have found that the oil may occupy multiple layers. The undetermined amount of hydrocarbons in these underwater plumes may explain why satellite images of the ocean surface have calculated a flow rate of only 5,000 barrels (210,000 US gallons; 790 cubic metres) a day, whereas studies of video of the gushing oil well have variously calculated that it could be flowing at a rate of 25,000–80,000 barrels (1,100,000–3,400,000 US gallons; 4,000–13,000 cubic metres) a day.[13] On May 27, marine scientists discovered a second oil plume, stretching 22 miles (35 km) from the leaking wellhead toward Mobile Bay, Alabama. The oil has dissolved into the water and is no longer visible, and researchers say they are worried these undersea plumes may be the result of the use of chemical dispersants to break up the oil.[89]

Marine biologist Rick Steiner said that the likelihood of extensive undersea plumes of oil droplets should have been anticipated from the moment the spill began, given that such an effect from deepwater blowouts had been predicted in the scientific literature for more than a decade and had been confirmed in a test off the coast of Norway. He criticized NOAA for not setting up an extensive sampling program to map and characterize the plumes in the first days of the spill.[90] BP has challenged the validity of the multiple reports from scientists that vast plumes of oil from the spill were spreading underwater, stating its sampling showed no evidence that oil was massing and spreading in the gulf water column.[91]

[edit]Expansion predictions

Scientists monitoring the spill with the European Space Agency Envisat radar satellite stated that oil had reached the Loop Current, which flows clockwise around the Gulf of Mexico towards Florida and becomes the Gulf Stream.[92] The scientists warn that because the Loop Current is a very intense deep ocean current, its turbulent waters will accelerate the mixing of the oil and water.[92] Ruoying He of North Carolina State University, head of the Ocean Observing and Monitoring Group, said if the oil reached the Gulf Stream, then south Florida, including the Keys, would likely be affected. On May 19, NOAA acknowledged that a small portion of the oil slick has reached the Loop Current.[93] On June 3, a computer modelshowed that oil would likely reach the Loop Current and travel to Atlantic Seaboard beaches by July.[94] Changes in weather as well as the Loop Current itself could affect the outcome, but the maximum possible speed would be 100 miles (160 km) per day.[94] The main stream would likely stay 50 to 60 miles (80 to 100 km) offshore, but pockets of oil could reach the coast.[94] Whether oil comes ashore farther north depends on local winds, but the Gulf Stream moves away from the coast southeast of Charleston, South Carolina, at the Charleston Bump.[95] Few tar balls would be likely to reach the Carolinas, and significant environmental damage appeared very unlikely because oil would be heavily diluted.[96]

James H. Cowan, a biological oceanographer at Louisiana State University, said a hurricane could result in oil reaching farther inland, even affecting rice and sugar cane crops.[97] A hurricane could also delay actions that would lead to a permanent solution, and it could spread the oil further or deeper in the ocean.[97] Jeff Masters, founder of Weather Underground, indicated that a hurricane's passage over a sandy beach might help in the cleanup efforts, such as what happened during Hurricane Henri's passage over the Ixtoc I spill area; however, it would likely not have such a beneficial effect in marshlands and rocky beaches. Additionally, Masters pointed out the possibility of more widespread damage to coastal areas, airborne oil droplets immersed in hurricane winds, and a chance that the oil spill may cause explosive deepening of hurricanes in the Gulf.[98]

[edit]Independent monitoring of contamination

Wildlife and environmental groups accused BP of holding back information about the extent and impact of the growing slick, and urged the White House to order a more direct federal government role in the spill response. In prepared testimony for a congressional committee, National Wildlife Federation President Larry Schweiger said BP had failed to disclose results from its tests of chemical dispersants used on the spill, and that BP had tried to withhold video showing the true magnitude of the leak.[99] On May 19 BP established a live feed of the oil spill after hearings in Congress accused the company of withholding data from the ocean floor and blocking efforts by independent scientists to come up with estimates for the amount of crude flowing into the Gulf each day.[100][101] On May 20 United States Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar indicated that the U.S. government would verify how much oil has leaked into the Gulf of Mexico.[102] Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson and United States Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano asked for the results of tests looking for traces of oil and dispersant chemicals in the waters of the gulf.[103]

Journalists attempting to document the impact of the oil spill have been repeatedly refused access to public areas by BP and its contractors, local law enforcement, the Coast Guard and government officials.[104][105] Scientists have also complained about prevention of access to information controlled by BP and government sources.[104] Airplanes carrying photojournalists have been prevented from flying over areas of the gulf to document the scope of the disaster.[104] BP states that it has been their policy to allow the media and other parties as much access as possible, however reporters and photographers continue to claim that they have been blocked from covering some aspects of the spill.[104]

[edit]Efforts to stem the flow of oilSee also: Offshore oil spill prevention

The rig's blowout preventer, a fail-safe device fitted at the source of the well and built by Cameron International,[106] did not automatically cut off the oil flow as intended when the explosion occurred. BP attempted to use remotely operated underwater vehicles to close the blowout preventer valves on the well head 5,000 feet (1,500 m) below sea level, a valve-closing procedure taking 24–36 hours.[76][107] BP engineers predicted it would take six attempts to close the valves.[108] As of May 2 they had sent six remotely operated underwater vehicles to close the blowout preventer valves, but all attempts were ultimately unsuccessful.[109] Oil was known to be leaking into the gulf from three different locations. On May 5 BP announced that the smallest of three known leaks had been capped. This did not reduce the amount of oil flowing out, but it did allow the repair group to focus their efforts on the two remaining leaks.[110]

Frustrated with the lack of progress three weeks into the crisis, the U.S. sent in a team of nuclear physicists assembled by President Obama's energy secretary Steven Chu, includingRichard Garwin who designed the first hydrogen bomb and Sandia National Laboratories director Tom Hunter. The team visited BP's main crisis centre in Houston, where they worked with BP scientists to reach an answer.[111] On May 24 BP ruled out conventional explosives, saying that if the company tried blasts to crimp the well and failed, “We would have denied ourselves all other options.”[112]

Federal officials also confirmed neither Energy Secretary Steven Chu nor anyone else ever considered using a nuclear device under the gulf because of both environmental and political risks: doing so would violate the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty signed (but not yet ratified) by the United States.[113] In addition, Admiral Thad Allen was quoted in a May 30 article in the Washington Post as stating, "My view is since we don't know the condition of that well bore or the casings, I would be cautious about putting any kind of kinetic energy on that well head, because what you may do is create open communication between the reservoir and the sea floor."[114] Allen made a similar remark during a C-span interview on May 26, adding that the result could be oil seeping through cracks and through the seafloor, "and then be uncontrolled until the reservoir pressure equalized with the hydrostatic pressure; I think that's a risk that's too great to take a chance on, myself."[115]

[edit]Short-term effortsOil containment dome under construction in Port Fourchon, Louisiana at Wild Well Control on April 26.

BP engineers have attempted a number of techniques to control or stop the oil spill. The first and fastest was to place a 125-tonne (280,000 lb) container dome over the largest of the well leaks and pipe the oil to a storage vessel on the surface.[116] BP deployed the system on May 7–8 but it failed when gas leaking from the pipe combined with cold water to form methane hydrate crystals that blocked up the steel canopy at the top of the dome.[117] The excess buoyancy of the crystals clogged the opening at the top of the dome where the riser was to be connected.

Following the failure, on May 11 a smaller containment dome, dubbed a "top hat", was lowered to the seabed.[118] Like the first containment dome, the dome has been deployed successfully in the past but not at such a depth.[118] The "top hat" dome originally was planned as BP's next attempt to control the spill and there has been no explanation for why BP engineers decided to try the insertion tube first.[117]

On May 14 engineers began the process of positioning a 4-inch (100 mm) wide riser insertion tube tool into the 21-inch (530 mm) wide burst pipe.[117]After three days, BP reported the tube was working.[119] Collection rates varied daily between 1,000 and 5,000 barrels (42,000 and 210,000 US gallons; 160 and 790 cubic metres), the average being 2,000 barrels (84,000 US gallons; 320 cubic metres) a day, as of May 21.[120][121] The collected gas rate ranged between 4 and 17 million cubic feet per day (110×103 and 480×103 m3/d). The gas was flared and oil stored on the board of drillship Discoverer Enterprise.[122] 924,000 US gallons (22,000 barrels) of oil was collected before removal of the tube so shutdown efforts could begin.[123]

BP next tried to shut down the well completely using a technique called "top kill".[124] The process involves pumping heavy drilling fluids through two 3-inch (7.6 cm) lines into the blowout preventer that sits on top of the wellhead. This would first restrict the flow of oil from the well, which then could be sealed permanently with cement.[125] The top kill procedure, approved by the Coast Guard on May 25, commenced on May 26 and, according to BP sources, while failure could be evident in minutes or hours it might take "a day or two" before its success could be determined.[126] On May 27 Admiral Thad Allen indicated that engineers had succeeded in stopping the flow of oil and gas into the Gulf of Mexico. He further stated that the well still had low pressure, but cement would be used to cap the well permanently as soon as the pressure hit zero.[127] However, BP officials said it was not possible to tell how far down the well the mud may have reached and declined to speculate on the odds of actually stopping the flow. "We have some indications of partial bridging which is good news. I think it's probably 48 hours before we have a conclusive view."[128] On May 29 BP announced that the attempt to clog the ruptured oil well with "junk" had failed.[129]

The Q4000 and the Discoverer Enterprise during the failed top kill procedure

After three consecutive failed attempts at the top kill, on May 29 BP moved on to their next contingency option, the Lower Marine Riser Package (LMRP) Cap Containment System. The operational plan first involved cutting and then removing the damaged riser from the top of the failed blowout preventer to leave a cleanly-cut pipe at the top of the BOP's LMRP. The cap is designed to be connected to a riser from theDiscoverer Enterprise drillship and placed over the LMRP with the intention of capturing most of the oil and gas flowing from the well. During the cutting of the pipe, the diamond blade saw became stuck and was later freed, but BP had to use shears instead and the cut is "ragged",[130][131][132][133] meaning the cap would be harder to fit.[84] The cap was finally attached on June 3.[134] By June 7, Adm. Thad Allen estimated that the amount of oil captured had increased to 620,000 US gallons (15,000 bbl) per day.[135] BP's CEO Tony Hayward stated his opinion that the amount captured was "probably the vast majority of the oil."[136] However, the live stream of the oil escaping from the capped pipe did not appear to be substantially reduced and Ira Leifer, a member of the government team that estimated the flow rate, claimed that the well pipe was clearly gushing more oil than before the cutting of the pipe to put the cap in place.[137]

On June 16 oil and gas started to flow through a second containment system connected directly to the blow out preventer that carried oil and gas through a a subsea manifold to the Q4000 service platform operated by Helix Energy Solutions Group. Q4000 has a processing capacity for about 5,000 barrels (210,000 US gallons; 790 cubic metres) of oil per day. Oil and gas is burnt on the board of Q4000 by using a specialized clean-burning system.[138]

As the processing capacity of Discoverer Enterprise (18,000 barrels (760,000 US gallons; 2,900 cubic metres) of oil per day) is not sufficient if the amount of oil collected continues to increase, BP plans for processing also to bring the Transocean drillship Discoverer Clear Leader.[139][140] BP also announced that the company would bring in a floating production, storage and offloading (FPSO) vessel Helix Producer 1 that could then be offloaded with tankers Evi Knutsen, operated by Knutsen O.A.S. Shipping AS, and Juanita, operated byUgland Marine Services, both having storage capacity of 750,000 barrels (32,000,000 US gallons; 119,000 cubic metres).[138] In addition, BP plans to bring the FPSO Seillean, operated by Frontier Drilling, and Sealion Shipping owned well testing vessel Toisa Pisces, that would then be offloaded with a shuttle tanker Loch Rannoch which normally services theSchiehallion oilfield.[138]

BP has a call center with 120 employees listening to suggestions. As of June 19, 70,000 have called and 10,000 emailed.[141]

[edit]Long-term efforts

BP is drilling relief wells into the original well to enable them to block it. Once the relief wells reach the original borehole, the operator will pump drilling fluid into the original well to stop the flow of oil. Transocean's Development Driller III started drilling a first relief well on May 2 and was at 13,978 feet (4,260 m) out of 18,000 feet (5,500 m) as of June 14. GSF Development Driller II also started drilling a second relief on May 16 and was halted at 8,576 feet (2,614 m) out of 18,000 feet (5,500 m) as of June 14 while BP engineers verified the operational status of the second relief well's blowout preventer.[142][143][144][145][146][147] This operation will take two to three months to stop the flow of oil (BP also confirmed in late May that they did not expect the relief well to operate before August 2010)[148] and will cost about $100 million per well.[149][150]

[edit]Containment and cleanupUnited States Environmental Services' workers prepare oil containment booms for deployment.

BP, which was leading the cleanup, initially employed remotely operated underwater vehicles, 700 workers, four airplanes and 32 vessels to contain the oil.[44] After the discovery that the undersea wellhead was leaking, the oil cleanup was hampered by high waves on April 24 and 25.[76] According to Hayward, BP will compensate all those affected by the oil spill saying that "We are taking full responsibility for the spill and we will clean it up and where people can present legitimate claims for damages we will honor them. We are going to be very, very aggressive in all of that."[151] On May 6 BP launched a section on their corporate web site devoted to the daily response efforts.[152]

On April 28 the US military announced it was joining the cleanup operation.[48] Doug Suttles, chief operating officer of BP, welcomed the assistance of the US military.[48] The same day, the US Coast Guard announced plans to corral and burn off up to 1,000 barrels (42,000 US gallons; 160 cubic metres) of oil on the surface each day. It tested how much environmental damage a small, controlled burn of 100 barrels (4,200 US gallons; 16 cubic metres) did to surrounding wetlands, but could not proceed with an open seas burn due to poor conditions.[153][154]By April 29 69 vessels including skimmers, tugs, barges and recovery vessels were active in cleanup activities. On April 30 President Barack Obama announced that he had dispatched the Secretaries of the Department of Interior and Homeland Security, as well as the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency and NOAA to the Gulf Coast to assess the disaster.[155]

Clouds of smoke billow up from controlled burns taking place in the Gulf of Mexico.

In an attempt to minimize impact to sensitive areas in the Mississippi River Delta area more than 100,000 feet (30 km) of containment boomswere deployed along the coast.[150] By the next day, this nearly doubled to 180,000 feet (55 km) of deployed booms, with an additional 300,000 feet (91 km) staged or being deployed.[153][156] On May 2 high winds and rough waves rendered oil-catching booms largely ineffective.[157]

As of April 30, approximately 2,000 people and 79 vessels were involved in the response and BP claimed that more than 6,300,000 US gallons (150,000 barrels; 23,800 cubic metres) of oil-water mix had been recovered.[77] On May 4 the US Coast Guard estimated that 170 vessels, and nearly 7,500 personnel were involved in the cleanup efforts, with an additional 2,000 volunteers assisting.[158] On May 26 all of the commercial fishing boats helping in the clean up and recovery process were ordered ashore. A total of 125 commercial vessels which had been outfitted with equipment for oil recovery operations were recalled after some workers began experiencing health problems.[159]

The type of oil involved is also a major problem. While most of the oil drilled off Louisiana is a lighter crude, because the blown well is deep under the ocean, the gushing oil is a heavier blend which contains asphalt-like substances. According to Ed Overton, who heads a federal chemical hazard assessment team for oil spills, this type of oil emulsifies well, making a "major sticky mess". Once it becomes that kind of mix, it no longer evaporates as quickly as regular oil, does not rinse off as easily, cannot be eaten by microbes as easily, and does not burn as well. "That type of mixture essentially removes all the best oil clean-up weapons", Overton and others said.[160]

On May 21 Plaquemines Parish president Billy Nungesser publicly complained about the federal government's hindrance of local mitigation efforts. State and local officials had proposed building sand berms off the coast to catch the oil before it reached the wetlands, but the emergency permit request had not been answered for over two weeks. The following day Nungesser complained that the plan had been vetoed, while Army Corps of Engineers officials claimed that the request was still under review.[161] Gulf Coast Government officials have released water via the Mississippi River diversions in effort to create an outflow of water that would keep the oil off the coast. The water from these diversions comes from the entireMississippi watershed. Even with this approach, NOAA is predicting a "massive" landfall to the west of the Mississippi River at Port Fourchon.[162]

On May 23 Louisiana Attorney General Buddy Caldwell wrote a letter to Lieutenant General Robert L. Van Antwerp of the US Army Corps of Engineers,[163] stating that Louisiana has the right to dredge sand to build barrier islands to keep the oil spill from its wetlands without the Corps' approval, as the 10th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prevents the federal government from denying a state the right to act in an emergency.[164][165] He also wrote that if the Corps "persists in its illegal and ill-advised efforts" to prevent the state from building the barriers that he would advise Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal to proceed with the plans and challenge the Corps in court.[166]

On June 3 BP said barrier projects ordered by Adm. Thad Allen would cost $360 million.[84]

On June 4 Ecosphere Technologies, a diversified water engineering and environmental services company, deployed a non-chemical water treatment system to assist in the remediation efforts.[167]

On June 16 Great Lakes Dredge and Dock Company under the Shaw Environmental and Infrastructure Group began constructing sand berms off the Louisiana coast to limit the amount of approaching oil in the Gulf of Mexico.[168]

[edit]Dispersants

On May 1 two United States Department of Defense C-130 Hercules aircraft were employed to spray oil dispersant.[169] Corexit EC9500A and Corexit EC9527A are the main oil dispersants being used.[170] These contain propylene glycol, 2-butoxyethanol and dioctyl sodium sulfosuccinate.[171][172] On May 7 Secretary Alan Levine of the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals, Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality Secretary Peggy Hatch, and Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries Secretary Robert Barham sent a letter to BP outlining their concerns related to potential dispersant impact on Louisiana's wildlife and fisheries, environment, aquatic life, and public health. Officials are also requesting BP release information on the effects of the dispersants they are using to combat the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.[173]

A C-130 Hercules drops an oil-dispersing chemical into the Gulf of Mexico.

The Environmental Protection Agency approved the injection of dispersants directly at the leak site, to break up the oil before it reaches the surface, after three underwater tests.[174] Corexit EC9500A and EC9527A are neither the least toxic, nor the most effective, among the dispersants approved by the Environmental Protection Agency,[175] and they are banned from use on oil spills in the United Kingdom.[176]Twelve other products received better toxicity and effectiveness ratings,[177] but BP says it chose to use Corexit because it was available the week of the rig explosion.[175] Critics contend that the major oil companies stockpile Corexit because of their close business relationship with its manufacturer Nalco.[175][178] By May 20, BP had applied 600,000 US gallons (2,300,000 l) of Corexit on the surface and 55,000 US gallons (210,000 l) underwater.[179]

Independent scientists have suggested that the underwater injection of Corexit into the leak might be responsible for the plumes of oil discovered below the surface.[177] However, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration administrator Jane Lubchenco said that there was no information supporting this conclusion, and indicated further testing would be needed to ascertain the cause of the undersea oil clouds.[177]

On May 19 the Environmental Protection Agency gave BP 24 hours to choose less toxic alternatives to Corexit. The alternative(s) had to be selected from the list of Environmental Protection Agency-approved dispersants on the National Contingency Plan Product Schedule with application beginning within 72 hours of Environmental Protection Agency approval of their choices, or provide a "detailed description of the alternative dispersants investigated, and the reason they believe those products did not meet the required standards."[180][181] On May 20 US Polychemical Corporation reportedly received an order from BP for Dispersit SPC 1000, a dispersant it manufactures. US Polychemical stated it was able to produce 20,000 US gallons (76,000 l) a day in the first few days and increasing up to 60,000 US gallons (230,000 L) a day thereafter.[182] BP spokesman Scott Dean said May 20 that BP had responded to the Environmental Protection Agency directive with a letter "that outlines our findings that none of the alternative products on the Environmental Protection Agency 's National Contingency Plan Product Schedule list meets all three criteria specified in yesterday's directive for availability, toxicity and effectiveness."[183] BP has so far refused to offer an acceptable "detailed description of the alternatives investigated and the reason they believe those products did not meet the required standards" on a public Web site, as called for in a letter sent on May 20 by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa P. Jackson to BP CEO Tony Hayward, claiming such full disclosure would compromise its confidential business information.[184][185] In a press conference on May 24, EPA administrator Lisa P. Jackson said the 700,000 US gallons (2,600,000 l) of dispersants already used was "approaching a world record" and that “dissatisfied with BP’s response” she was ordering the EPA to conduct their own evaluation of alternatives to Corexit, while ordering BP to take “immediate steps to scale back the use of dispersants.”[186][187][188]

The EPA released further data on the chemical composition of Corexit, including 2-butoxyethanol, identified as a causal agent in the health problems experienced by cleanup workers after the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill.[189] Nalco has added a webpage to their site titled, Nalco Releases Additional Technical Information About COREXIT. They claim that COREXIT 9500 "is a simple blend of six well-established, safe ingredients that biodegrade, do not bioaccumulate and are commonly found in popular household products". They state, "The COREXIT products do not contain carcinogens or reproductive toxins. All the ingredients have been extensively studied for many years and have been determined safe and effective by the EPA".[190]

[edit]Additional technologies for cleanup

BP has ordered 32 machines from Ocean Therapy Solutions following owner Kevin Costner's testimony before the United States Congress. The machines separate oil and water, and each machine can extract up to 2,000 barrels of oil per day from the Gulf.[191][192] BP spokesman Bill Salvin confirmed the company has contracted with Costner and Ocean Therapy Solutions to use the machines.[191]

BP agreed to use the technology after testing machines during the past week.[193] "We are very pleased with the results and today we have placed a significant order with OTS (Costner's Ocean Therapy Solutions) and will be working with them to rapidly manufacture and deploy 32 of their machines," said Doug Suttles, BP's chief operating officer.[194]

[edit]ConsequencesSee also: Global industry and economic impact of the Deepwater Horizon disaster[edit]Ecology This section may contain previously unpublished synthesis of published material that conveys ideas not attributable to the original sources. See the talk page for details. (June 2010) Heavily oiled Brown Pelicans wait to be cleaned of Gulf spill crude.

In their environmental analysis of the proposed well BP stated that in the unlikely event of an accidental spill "water quality would be temporarily affected by the decomposed components and small droplets", but that "currents and microbial degradation would remove the oil from the water column or dilute the constituents to the background level". They saw "no adverse activities to fisheries" and no danger to endangered or threatened marine mammals and no adverse impact to birds.[47]

The spill threatens environmental disaster due to factors such as petroleum toxicity and oxygen depletion.[195] More than 400 species live in the islands and marshlands at risk, including the endangered Kemp's Ridley turtle. In the national refuges most at risk, about 34,000 birds have been counted, including gulls, pelicans, roseate spoonbills, egrets, terns, and blue herons.[77] A comprehensive inventory of offshore species in the Gulf of Mexico completed in 2009 counted 15,700 species of sea life, with those in the area of the oil spill numbering 8,332 plant and animal species, including more than 1,200 fish, 200 bird, 1,400 mollusk, 1,500 crustacean, 4 sea turtle, and 29 marine mammal species[196][197] As of June 15, there had been 1152 dead animals found in the spill zone including 770 dead birds, 341 sea turtles, and 41 dolphins and other mammals, with some reports of dolphins being spotted running low on food, and 'acting drunk' apparently from effects of the spill[198]. There may be other dead animals that go unfound. According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, it has not yet been determined if these animals were killed by the oil.[199]Samantha Joye of the University of Georgia indicated that the oil could harm fish directly, and microbes used to consume the oil would also add to the reduction of oxygen in the water, with effects being felt higher up the food chain.[119] According to Joye, it could take the ecosystem years and possibly decades to recover from such an infusion of oil and gas.[200]Oceanographer Ian MacDonald believes the natural gas dissolving below the surface has the potential to reduce the Gulf oxygen levels and carry forth huge amounts of benzene and other toxic compounds.[72] On May 18 BP CEO Tony Hayward insisted the environmental impact of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico would be "very, very modest".[201] Harry Roberts, a professor of Coastal Studies at Louisiana State University has told Bloomberg in early June 2001 that a hypothetical total of 4 million barrels of oil released would be enough to "wipe out marine life deep at sea near the leak and elsewhere in the Gulf" as well as "along hundreds of miles of coastline," while Mak Saito, an Associate Scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts indicated that such an amount of oil "may alter the chemistry of the sea, with unforeseeable results."[202]

It is possible the Gulf Stream sea currents may spread the oil into the Atlantic Ocean.[203] If oil follows the Loop Current to the East Coast of the United States, it could impact wildlife even without the oil reaching the beaches. Duke University marine biologist Larry Crowder said threatened loggerhead turtles on Carolina beaches could swim out into contaminated waters. Sea birds, mammals, and dolphins could also be affected. Ninety percent of North Carolina's commercially valuable sea life spawn off the coast and could be contaminated if oil reaches the area. Douglas Rader, a scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund, said prey could be negatively affected as well. Steve Ross of UNC-Wilmington said coral reefs off the East Coast could be smothered by too much oil.[204] Eight U.S. national parks are threatened by the spill,[205] with oil washing up on the beaches of Gulf Islands National Seashorebeginning on June 1.[206] Damage to the ocean floor is as yet unknown, and marine life between the ocean floor and the surface could be affected.[97] Adm Thad Allen, coordinator of the clean-up operation, has said it would take "a couple of months" to clear the oil slick from the surface of the Gulf, but "long-term issues of restoring environments and habitats will be years".[207] Many other oil spills, including spills in environments similar to the US Gulf coast, continue to cause great environmental damage for years, or even decades.[208]

[edit]Fisheries and tourismAs of June 2, 2010, the area closed to fishing encompassed 88,522 square miles (229,270 km2), or about 37% of Gulf of Mexico federal waters.

In BP's Initial Exploration Plan, dated March 10, 2009, they said that "it is unlikely that an accidental spill would occur" and "no adverse activities are anticipated" to fisheries or fish habitat.[47] On April 29, 2010, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal declared a state of emergency in the state after weather forecasts predicted the oil slick would reach the Louisiana coast.[209] An emergency shrimping season was opened on April 29 so that a catch could be brought in before the oil advanced too far.[210] By April 30 the Coast Guard received reports that oil had begun washing up to wildlife refuges and seafood grounds on the Louisiana Gulf Coast.[211] On May 22 The Louisiana Seafood Promotion and Marketing Board stated said 60 to 70 percent of oyster and blue crab harvesting areas and 70 to 80 percent of fin-fisheries remained open.[212]The Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals closed an additional ten oyster beds on May 23, just south of Lafayette, Louisiana, citing confirmed reports of oil along the state's western coast.[213]

On May 2 the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration closed commercial and recreational fishing in affected federal waters between the mouth of the Mississippi River and Pensacola Bay. The closure initially incorporated 6,814 square miles (17,650 km2).[214][215] By June 2 the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had increased the area under closure thirteen times in a month, finally encompassing 88,522 square miles (229,270 km2).[216][217] On May 24 the federal government declared a fisheries disaster for the states of Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana.[218] Initial cost estimates to the fishing industry were $2.5 billion.[211]

Although many people cancelled their vacations at first, hotels close to the coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama reported dramatic increases in business from 2009 during the first half of May 2010. On May 25 BP gave Florida $25 million to promote its beaches, which the oil had not reached, and the company planned $15 million each for Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi. The Bay Area Tourist Development Council bought digital billboards showing recent photos from the beaches as far north as Nashville, Tennessee and Atlanta. Along with these and other assurances that the beaches are so far unaffected, hotels have cut rates and offered deals such as free golf. Also, cancellation policies have changed, and refunds have been promised to those where oil arrives. However, 2009 was a slow year, and those working to deal with the spill have rented rooms in the area. Revenues remain below 2009 levels due to the special deals.[219] By June many people were cancelling vacations while they could do so, fearing the arrival of oil on the beaches.[94] University of Central Florida economist Abraham Pizam said the oil slick may become "the worst disaster in the history of Florida tourism."[220] Initial cost estimates were that the impact on tourism along Florida's Paradise Coast could be $3 billion.[211]

[edit]Other economic consequences

On June 14 BP reported that its own expenditures on the oil spill had reached $1.6 billion, which includes the costs of the spill response, containment, relief well drilling, grants to U.S. Gulf states, claims paid and federal costs.[221] The United States Oil Pollution Act of 1990 limits BP's liability for non-cleanup costs to $75 million unless gross negligence is proven.[222]BP has said it would pay for all cleanup and remediation regardless of the statutory liability cap. Nevertheless, some Democratic lawmakers are seeking to pass legislation that would increase the liability limit to $10 billion.[223] Analysts for Swiss Re have estimated that the total insured losses from the accident could reach $3.5 billion. According to UBS, final losses could be $12 billion.[224] According to Willis Group Holdings, total losses could amount to $30 billion, of which estimated total claims to the market from the disaster, including control of well, re-drilling, third-party liability and seepage and pollution costs, could exceed $1.2 billion.[225] As of June BP's stock had lost more than 40% of its value compared to the period before the accident, equivalent to $80 billion in market capitalization.[226] BP is reportedly vulnerable to a corporate takeover as a result of the fall of its stock value and potential for continuing decline.[226]

Local officials in Louisiana have expressed concern that the offshore drilling moratorium imposed in response to the spill will further harm the economies of coastal communities.[227]The oil industry employs about 58,000 Louisiana residents and has created another 260,000 oil-related jobs, accounting for about 17 percent of all Louisiana jobs.[227]

BP has announced that it is setting up a new unit to oversee management of the oil spill and its aftermath, which will be headed by former TNK-BP chief executive Robert Dudley.[139]

[edit]LitigationMain article: Deepwater Horizon litigation

By May 26 over 130 lawsuits relating to the spill had been filed[224] against one or more of BP, Transocean, Cameron International, and Halliburton Energy Services,[228] although it is considered likely by observers that these will be combined into one court as a multidistrict litigation.[228] By June 17 over 220 lawsuits were filed against BP alone.[229] Because the spill has been largely lingering offshore, the plaintiffs who can claim damages so far are mostly out-of-work fishermen and tourist resorts that are receiving cancellations.[230] The oil company says 23,000 individual claims have already been filed, of which 9,000 have so far been settled.[224] BP and Transocean want the cases to be heard in Houston, seen as friendly to the oil business. Plaintiffs have variously requested the case be heard in Louisiana, Mississippi or Florida.[230] Five New Orleans judges have recused themselves from hearing oil spill cases because of stock ownership in companies involved or other conflicts of interest.[231] BP has retained law firm Kirkland & Ellis to defend most of the lawsuits arising from the oil spill.[232]

[edit]Health consequences

As of May 29, ten oil spill clean-up workers had been admitted to West Jefferson Medical Center in Marrero, Louisiana. All but two had been hospitalized suffering from symptoms emergency room doctors thought were caused by dehydration. At a press briefing about the May 26th medical evacuation of seven crewmembers from Vessels of Opportunity working in the Breton Sound area, Coast Guard Captain Meredith Austin, Unified Command Deputy Incident Commander in Houma, LA, said that air monitoring done in advance of beginning work showed no volatile organic compounds above limits of concern. No respiratory protection was issued, said Austin “because air ratings were taken and there were no values found to be at an unsafe level, prior to us sending them in there.”[233] Crude oil contains a mixture of volatile hydrocarbon compounds, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons that typically include benzene, toluene, and xylene, which are known carcinogens. Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAH) have caused tumors in laboratory animals when they breathed these substances. Symptoms of exposure to these petroleum compounds include dizziness, headaches, nausea, and rapid heart beat. Kerosene (a component of the dispersants being used in the Gulf) exposure causes similar symptoms.[234]

On June 15 Marylee Orr, Executive Director for Louisiana Environmental Action Network (LEAN),[235] said on MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann that people along the Gulf Coast are getting very sick, with symptoms of dizziness, vomiting, nausea, headaches, and chest pains, not only from the first responders to the crisis, but residents living along the coast as well. LEAN has been distributing protective gear to the first responders, however LEAN's director reported that BP has threatened to fire their workers if they use them.[236] By June 13, 109 oil spill exposure-related cases had been reported to the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals (DHH)[237] since the crisis began. Seventy-four of those cases involved workers in the oil spill clean-up efforts, while thirty-five were reported by the general public.[238]

[edit]U.S. and Canadian offshore drilling policyMain article: United States offshore drilling debate

Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar stated that the disaster would have huge ramifications for energy development in the oceans all around the world.[154] Salazar ordered immediate inspections of all deep-water operations in the Gulf of Mexico. An Outer Continental Shelf safety review board within the Department of the Interior will provide recommendations for conducting drilling activities in the Gulf.[149]

On April 28 the National Energy Board of Canada, which regulates offshore drilling in the Canadian Arctic and along the British Columbia Coast, issued a letter to oil companies asking them to explain their argument against safety rules which require same-season relief wells.[239] Five days later, the Canadian Minister of the Environment Jim Prentice said the government would not approve a decision to relax safety or environment regulations for large energy projects.[240] On May 3 Governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger withdrew his support for a proposed plan to allow expanded offshore drilling projects in California.[241][242]

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), offshore drilling, just in the Gulf of Mexico, accounts for 23.5% of U.S. oil production.[243] The chief argument in the U.S. offshore drilling debate has been to make the United States less dependent on imported oil.[244][245] American dependence on imports grew from 24% in 1970[246] to 66% in 2008.[247]

[edit]Spill response fund

On June 16, after meeting with President Obama, BP executives agreed to create a $20 billion spill response fund.[138][248][249] BP has said it will pay $3 billion in third quarter of 2010 and $2 billion in fourth quarter into the fund followed by a payment of $1.25 billion per quarter until it reaches $20 billion. In the interim, BP posts its US assets worth $20 billion as bond. The amount of this fund is not a cap on BP's liabilities. For the fund's payments, BP will cut its capital spending budget, sell $10 billion in assets, and drop its dividend.[138][250] The fund will be administered by Kenneth Feinberg.[138][248][249] According to BP's officials the fund can be used for natural resource damages, state and local response costs and individual compensation but cannot be used for fines or penalties.[138] In addition, BP has agreed to allocate $100 million for payments to offshore oil workers who are unemployed due to the six-month moratorium on drilling in the deep-water Gulf of Mexico.[138]

[edit]Reactions[edit]U.S. governmentObama speaking in the Oval Office about the spill.

On April 30 President Barack Obama issued an order for the federal government to hold issuing new offshore drilling leases until a thorough review determines whether more safety systems are needed[251] and authorized SWAT teams to investigate 29 oil rigs in the Gulf in an effort to determine the cause of the disaster.[252] On May 11 Department of the Interior released a press release, announcing that the inspection of deepwater drilling rigs in the Gulf of Mexico found no major violations.[253] On June 9 the FAA issued a no-fly zone over the Gulf of Mexico oil spill and the affected area, effective until further notice.[254] According to the New York Times, the Department of Homeland Security is denying media access to the area.[255]

The Obama administration sent a $69 million bill to BP for the U.S. government's clean up effort. The bill was also sent to Transocean, Andarko, Moex Offshore and QBE Underwriting.[256] On June 15 President Obama made his first speech from the Oval Office, addressing the BP oil spill crisis, saying, "This oil spill is the worst environmental disaster America has ever faced... Make no mistake: we will fight this spill with everything we've got for as long as it takes. We will make BP pay for the damage their company has caused. And we will do whatever's necessary to help the Gulf Coast and its people recover from this tragedy."[257]

[edit]International governments

As of May 6, the United Nations and fourteen countries offered their assistance, but the U.S. government refused the offer, with a State Department email to reporters stating "there is no need right now that the U.S. cannot meet." The countries offering help were Canada, Croatia, France, Germany, Iran, Ireland, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, Romania, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.[258][259] On June 14 it was reported that State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said the U.S. has received 21 aid offers from 17 countries and four international groups. "We are maintaining contact with these countries, we are grateful for the offers, and we will take them up on these offers."[260] That same day the U.K. Secretary of State for the Department of Energy and Climate Change, Chris Huhne, made a formal statement to the House of Commons in London about the implications of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill for the U.K. In it he expressed the U.K. Government’s sympathy to those affected by this crisis. He further said that the priority must be to address the environmental consequences of the spill, and that the U.K. Government will remain focused on practical measures that can help to achieve this, including offering the U.S. dispersant chemicals.[261]

[edit]BP public relations

Initially BP downplayed the incident; CEO Tony Hayward called the amount of oil and dispersant "relatively tiny" in comparison with the "very big ocean."[262] Hayward also initially stated that the environmental impact of the Gulf spill would likely be "very very modest."[263] Later, he said that the spill was a disruption to Gulf Coast residents and himself adding, “You know, I’d like my life back.” He later apologized for his statements.[264] BP’s chief operating officer Doug Suttles contradicted the underwater plume discussion noting, "It may be down to how you define what a plume is here… The oil that has been found is in very minute quantities." [265] On June 16 BP Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg, speaking to reporters after meeting with President Obama at the White House said, "I hear comments sometimes that large oil companies are greedy companies who don't care. But that is not the case in BP. We care about the small people."[266]

Google search result for "oil spill" showing sponsored link by BP, followed by link to news for oil spill

On May 30 BP hired Anne Kolton, former head of public affairs at the U.S. Department of Energy and former spokesperson for Dick Cheney, as head of U.S. media relations.[267][268] BP established a new division, headed by board member and managing director Bob Dudley to handle the company's response.[269] On June 4 BP began running TV ads featuring CEO Tony Hayward as he apologized for the disaster, adding "We will make this right."[270] The company also ran print ads in newspapers including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal,USA Today and The Washington Post.[270] According to Jon Bond, co-founder of the Kirshenbaum Bond Senecal agency, the cost for the BP public relations campaign was about $50 million.[270] BP spokesperson Toby Odone told ABC News that BP had successfully bid for several search terms related to the oil spill on Google and other search engines so that the first sponsored search result links directly to the company's website. This is "a great PR strategy" commented Kevin Ryan, CEO of an internet communications firm, and one not used before by other firms facing similar public relations "nightmares," adding that research suggests most people cannot distinguish between sponsored links and actual news sites.[271][272]

[edit]Public reactionPublic protest in New Orleans following the oil spill.

There has been a great deal of criticism of BP both in the US and worldwide for its role in the oil spill. By June 5, a Facebook page called "Boycott BP" had obtained 384,000 fans and generated media stories[273][274] and by June 14 "Boycott BP" had nearly doubled its fan base to more than 610,000 members. The Public Citizen consumer advocacy group has had more than 15,500 people sign an online petition pledging not to buy any BP products for three months.[275] Across the US, thousands of people participated in dozens of protests at BP gas stations and other locations.[276][277][278] Alternative metal band Korn is boycotting the use of BP fuel in their tour bus for all upcoming tour dates, and also encouraged the other bands to do the same.[279][280] Korn eventually got the entire 2010 Mayhem Festival to join the boycott, and several other recording artists including Lady Gaga, Creed, Disturbed and Rise Against among others.[281] While BP does not own any gas stations in the US, it does sell gasoline to BP, ARCO and other gas stations in the US and internationally.[282] In late May, Greenpeace activists in London scaled BP's company headquarters in St. James's Square and unfurled mock BP logo banners imprinted with oil stains reading "british polluters".[283]

[edit]Public opinion

Regarding the handling of the situation, according to a USA Today-Gallup poll conducted in late May, 53 percent of Americans rated President Obama's performance as poor or very poor, while 43 percent rated it as good or very good.[284] Approximately 60 percent said the federal government had done a poor or very poor job, while 35 percent rated the government's performance as good or very good.[284] A CBS News poll also conducted in late May likewise found a negative evaluation of Obama, with 45 percent disapproving of his performance, 35 percent approving, and 20 percent undecided.[284] 73 percent in the Gallup poll describing BP's response as poor or very poor, while 24 percent said it had been good or very good.[284] In the CBS survey, 70 percent disapproved of BP's response, with only 18 percent approving and 12 percent undecided.[284] An opinion poll conducted by Washington Post-ABC News in early June found that nearly three-fourths of Americans considered the spill a major environmental disaster.[285] Of those polled, 81 percent viewed the BP response negatively and 69 percent viewed the federal government response negatively.[285] Sixty-four percent of those polled expressed support for criminal prosecution of BP.[285]

[edit]Charity

More than $4 million has been donated to offset economic and environmental damage. Almost half of that amount has been from oil companies. BP America made a $1 million donation to Second Harvest Food as requests for food assistance have increased as a result of the spill.[286]

[edit]Investigations

On April 22 the United States Coast Guard and the Minerals Management Service launched an investigation of the possible causes of the explosion.[27] On May 11 the Obama administration requested the National Academy of Engineering conduct an independent technical investigation to determine the root causes of the disaster so that corrective steps could be taken to address the mechanical failures underlying the accident.[287] The United States House Committee on Energy and Commerce asked Halliburton to brief it as well as provide any documents it might have related to its work on the Macondo well.[149]

Attention has focused on the cementing procedure and the blowout preventer, which failed to fully engage.[288] A number of significant problems have been identified with the blowout preventer: There was a leak in the hydraulic system that provides power to the shear rams. The underwater control panel had been disconnected from the bore ram, and instead connected to a test hydraulic ram. The blowout preventer schematic drawings, provided by Transocean to BP, do not correspond to the structure that is on the ocean bottom. The shear rams are not designed to function on the joints where the drill pipes are screwed together or on tools that are passed through the blowout preventer during well construction. The explosion may have severed the communication line between the rig and the sub-surface blowout preventer control unit such that the blowout preventer would have never received the instruction to engage. Before the backup dead man's switch could engage, communications, power and hydraulic lines must all be severed, but it is possible hydraulic lines were intact after the explosion. Of the two control pods for the deadman switch, the one that has been inspected so far had a dead battery.[289]

Just hours before the explosion, a BP representative overruled Transocean employees and insisted on displacing protective drilling mud with seawater.[290] One of the BP representatives on the board responsible for making the final decision, Robert Kaluza, refused to testify on the Fifth Amendment grounds that he might incriminate himself; Donald Vidrine, another BP representative, cited medical reasons for his inability to testify, as did James Mansfield, Transocean's assistant marine engineer on board.[291][292][293]

On May 22 President Obama announced that he had issued Executive Order 13543 establishing the bipartisan National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling, with former Florida Governor and Senator Bob Graham and former Environmental Protection Agency Administrator William K. Reilly serving as co-chairs. The purpose of the commission is to "consider the root causes of the disaster and offer options on safety and environmental precautions."[294][295]

On June 1 U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announced that he has opened a criminal investigation of the BP oil spill. "There are a wide range of possible violations, and we will closely examine the actions of those involved in this spill," Holder said.[296]

The House Energy and Commerce Committee is investigating the incident. In a statement made in June they noted that in a number of cases leading up to the explosion, BP appears to have chosen riskier procedures to save time or money, sometimes against the advice of its staff or contractors.[297]

Rolling Stone and Newsweek magazines have suggested that corner cutting by BP and lax oversight by the government may have led to the disaster.[298][299]

In a June 18 statement, Jim Hackett, the CEO of Anadarko Petroleum Corp., owner of one-fourth of the Deepwater Horizon well, said research "indicates BP operated unsafely and failed to monitor and react to several critical warning signs during the drilling. ... BP's behavior and actions likely represent gross negligence or willful misconduct."[45] BP responded strongly disagreeing with the Anadarko statement, and said that, despite being contractually liable for sharing clean-up costs, Anadarko is "refusing to accept responsibility for oil spill removal costs and damages".[300]

[edit]See also United States portal Environment portal

• Timeline of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill
• List of industrial disasters
• List of oil spills
• Largest oil spills
• Exxon Valdez oil spill (1989)
• Ixtoc I oil spill (1979)
• Piper Alpha (1988)
• Offshore oil and gas in the US Gulf of Mexico
• Oil Pollution Act of 1990
• Unified Command (Deepwater Horizon oil spill)

[edit]

The Big Picture: Why Is It So Hard to Stop the Oil Gusher, and Why Was Such Extreme Deepwater Drilling Allowed in the First Place?

 

The government failed to properly ensure that BP used adequate safety measures, BP and their contractors were criminally negligent for the oil spill, and BP has tried to cover up the problem. See this.

But why hasn't BP stopped the leak?

Some people assume that BP hasn't stopped the oil leak because it's people are wholly incompetent.

Others have asked whether BP's $75 million liability cap is motivating it to stall by taking half-hearted measures until it's relief well drilling is complete.

But there is another possible explanation: the geology - as well the deepwater pressures - at the drilling site makes stopping the leak more difficult than we realize.

Does the Geology of the Spill Zone Make It Harder to Stop the Oil Spill?

We can't understand the big picture behind the Gulf oil spill unless we know the underwater geology of the seabed and the underlying rocks.

For example, if there is solid rock beneath the leaking pipes, with channels leading to various underground chambers, then it might be possible to seal the leaking risers and blowout preventer, with the oil flowing somewhere harmless under the floor of the ocean.

On the other hand, if there are hundreds of feet of sand or mud beneath the leaking pipes, then sealing the spill zone might not work, as the high-pressure oil flow (more than 2,000 pounds per square inch) might just shoot out into the water somewhere else.

We don't know the geology under the spill site. BP has never publicly released geological cross-sections of the seabed and underlying rock. BP's Initial Exploration Plan refers to "structure contour maps" and "geological cross sections", but all detailed geological information, maps and drawings have been designated "proprietary information" by BP, and have been kept under wraps.

However, Roger Anderson and Albert Boulanger of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory describe the basic geology of the oil-rich region of the Gulf:

 

Production in the deepwater province is centered in turbidite sands recently deposited from the Mississippi delta. Even more prolific rates have been recorded in the carbonates of Mexico, with the Golden Lane and Campeche reporting 100,000 barrel per day production from single wells. However, most of the deep and ultra-deepwater Gulf of Mexico is covered by the Sigsbee salt sheet that forms a large, near-surface “moonscape” culminating at the edge of the continental slope in an 800 meter high escarpment.

***

Salt is the dominant structural element of the ultra-deepwater Gulf of Mexico petroleum system. Large horizontal salt sheets, driven by the huge Plio-Pleistocene to Oligocene sediment dump of the Mississippi, Rio Grande and other Gulf Coast Rivers, dominate the slope to the Sigsbee escarpment. Salt movement is recorded by large, stepped, counter-regional growth faults and down-to-the-basin fault systems soling into evacuated salt surfaces. Horizontal velocities of salt movement to the south are in the several cm/year range, making this supposedly passive margin as tectonically active as most plate boundaries.

***

Porosities over 30 percent and permeabilities greater than one darcy in deepwater turbidite reservoirs have been commonly cited. Compaction and diagenesis of deepwater reservoir sands are minimal because of relatively recent and rapid sedimentation. Sands at almost 20,000 feet in the auger field (Garden Banks 426) still retain a porosity of 26% and a permeability of almost 350mdarcies. Pliocene and Pleistocene turbidite sands in the Green Canyon 205 field have reported porosities ranging from 28 to 32% with permeabilities between 400 mdarcies and 3 darcies. Connectivity in sheet sands and amalgamated sheet and channel sands is high for deepwater turbidite reservoirs and recovery efficiencies are in the 40-60% range.

 

See also this.

The BP oil spill leak is occurring in Block 252 of the "Macondo" Prospect in the Mississippi Canyon Area of the Gulf. The Mississippi Canyon Area is very typical of the Gulf oil region.

If the geology at Block 252 is like that described by Anderson and Boulanger for the Gulf oil region as a whole, then it might be difficult to stop the oil gusher without completing relief wells (which will take a couple of months). Again, if there are salt layers right under the sea floor, high porosity near the surface or salt movement, then sealing the leak by plugging the risers and blowout preventer might not work. The oil pressure is coming up at such high pressures that sealing the leaking equipment at the level of the seabed might just mean the oil will flow out somewhere else nearby.

The government must publicly release details of the geology under the spill site. The American people - and people in Mexico, Cuba and other countries which might be affected by the spill - have a right to know what we're dealing with.

Until it does so, people will not have be understand what is going on. And failing to release such information may prevent creative scientists from around the world from coming up with a workable solution.

Moreover, as the first draft of Anderson and Boulanger's paper - released in 2001 - noted:

 

No means currently exists to produce oil and gas to market from such water depths!

 

(exclamation point is Anderson and Boulanger's). In other words, the technology to drill in such deepwater conditions in the Gulf has only been developed after 2001.

While BP, its subcontractors, and the government were all negligent with regard to the Deepwater Horizon operation, it must be remembered that drilling at such depths is new technology, operating in largely uncharted conditions. As such, the dangers of deepwater drilling in general should not be underestimated. The geology of the oil-rich region in the Gulf - as well as the deep, high-pressure conditions - makes drilling difficult, and containing oil spills challenging.

Oil Is Considered A National Security Issue

So why are oil companies being allowed to drill so deeply under the Gulf in the first place? In other words, why has the government been so supportive of deepwater drilling in the Gulf?

The answer - as Anderson and Boulanger note - is that there is a tremendous amount of more oil deep under the Gulf, and that the United States government considers oil drilling in the deep waters of the Gulf as a national security priority:

The oil and gas industry and the United States government both face tremendous challenges to explore discover, appraise, develop, and exploit vast new hydrocarbon reserves in waters deeper than 6000 feet in the ultra-deepwater of the Gulf of Mexico. Yet these new reserves of hydrocarbons are needed to offset the economically detrimental, long-term decline in production from within the borders of the United States

***

If successfully developed, the new play concept would fill an essential gap in the overall strategic defenses of the United States by decreasing the gap that results in the nation's dependence on foreign oil and gas reserves in this volatile and hostile, post 9/11 world. However, the successful production of oil and gas from this new carbonate play concept requires much more cost-efficient evaluation and appraisal technologies than exist today to economically conduct exploration, appraisal, and development activities. These new technologies must be developed before production can be practical in the ultra-deepwater operating environment.... The Ultra-Deepwater and Unconventional Gas Trust Fund of the DOE has as its mission to cut costs and time-to-market not incrementally, but radically, so that the United States can optimally utilize these strategic hydrocarbon reserves. The DOE, with extensive industry,academic and non-governmental assistance, developed an Offshore Technology Roadmap ...,

***

The U. S. Energy Bill of 2002 has allocated significant resources to fund innovative industry, academic, and national laboratory research initiatives to develop the new technologies necessary to explore and produce these new ultra-deepwater reserves economically. The purpose is not only to impact the national defense, but also to regain our international technological leadership in the deepwater, recently lost to the Brazilians, Norwegians, and Europeans.

***

Congress, never a big friend to energy interests, has acted to create the Ultra-deepwater Trust Fund that would add an astounding $200 billion by 2017, if successful at developing the new production technologies required.

So the Department of Energy and Congress have committed to development of the deepwater Gulf oil reserves in the name of national security. This also helps explain why Obama has been pro-drilling in the Gulf.

But let's take a step back and ask why the government considers oil a national security priority in the first place.

Well, as professor of national security affairs at the Naval War College Mackubin T. Owenswrites:

 

The concern of these lawmakers [regarding the BP oil spill] is understandable, but lest they overreact, they need to place their valid concerns within the broader context of the nation’s economic health and energy security.

***

Americans currently consume about 22 million barrels of oil daily, of which about two-thirds is imported. The Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration (EIA) expects imports to reach 70% by 2025. This means we send billions of dollars abroad in payment for foreign oil. This makes little sense when, according to the U.S. Minerals Management Service (MMS), there are vast reserves of oil and gas beneath Federal lands and coastal waters. And it is likely that even these estimates are low. For instance, in 1987, MMS estimated that there were 9 billion barrels of oil in the Gulf of Mexico. By 2007, once drilling had begun in deeper waters, MMS had revised its estimate upward to 45 billion.

In addition, the U.S. military is the largest consumer of oil in the world. And the government is eager to ensure that the military maintains access to oil.

As NPR reported in 2007:

 

All the U.S. tanks, planes and ships guzzle 340,000 barrels of oil a day, making the American military the single-largest purchaser and consumer of oil in the world.

If the Defense Department were a country, it would rank about 38th in the world for oil consumption, right behind the Philippines.

As Reuters pointed out in 2008:

U.S. military fuel consumption dwarfs energy demand in many countries around the world, adding up to nearly double the fuel use in Ireland and 20 times more than that of Iceland, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

And as I summarized last year:

Sara Flounders writes:

By every measure, the Pentagon is the largest institutional user of petroleum products and energy in general. Yet the Pentagon has a blanket exemption in all international climate agreements.

***

The Feb. 17, 2007, Energy Bulletin detailed the oil consumption just for the Pentagon's aircraft, ships, ground vehicles and facilities that made it the single-largest oil consumer in the world.

***

Even according to rankings in the 2006 CIA World Factbook, only 35 countries (out of 210 in the world) consume more oil per day than the Pentagon.

***

As I pointed out out last week:

Professor Michael Klare noted in 2007:

Sixteen gallons of oil. That's how much the average American soldier in Iraq and Afghanistan consumes on a daily basis -- either directly, through the use of Humvees, tanks, trucks, and helicopters, or indirectly, by calling in air strikes. Multiply this figure by 162,000 soldiers in Iraq, 24,000 in Afghanistan, and 30,000 in the surrounding region (including sailors aboard U.S. warships in the Persian Gulf) and you arrive at approximately3.5 million gallons of oil: the daily petroleum tab for U.S. combat operations in the Middle East war zone.
And in 2008, Oil Change International released a report showing that [b]etween March 2003 and October 2007 the US military in Iraq purchased more than 4 billion gallons of fuel from the Defense Energy Support Center, the agency responsible for procuring and supplying petroleum products to the Department of Defense.
Indeed, Alan Greenspan, John McCain, George W. Bush, Sarah Palin, a high-level National Security Council officer and others all say that the Iraq war was really about oil.

Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz says that the Iraq war alone will cost $3-5 trillion dollars.

And economist Anita Dancs writes:

Each year, our military devotes substantial resources to securing access to and safeguarding the transportation of oil and other energy sources. I estimate that we will pay $90 billion this year to secure oil. If spending on the Iraq War is included, the total rises to $166 billion.

Are you starting to get the picture?

In addition, experts say that the Iraq war has increased the threat of terrorism. See this,this, this, this, this, this and this.

Personally, I strongly believe that it is vital for our national security - and our economy - to switch from dependence on oil to a basket of alternative energies. As I pointed out Friday:

It's not just the one BP oil rig. For example, since the Deepwater Horizon oil drilling rig exploded on April 20th, the Obama administration has granted oil and gas companies at least 27 exemptions from doing in-depth environmental studies of oil exploration and production in the Gulf of Mexico. Then there are the 12 new oil and gas drilling rigs launched in the U.S. this week.

And a whistleblower who survived the Gulf oil explosion claims in a lawsuit that BP's operations at another oil platform risk another catastrophic accident that could "dwarf" the Gulf oil spill, partly because BP never even reviewed critical engineering designs for the operation. And see this.

***

And the Department of Defense also apparently has some issues with extensive off-shore drilling for security reasons.

Many still believe that alternative energy is an expensive, unrealistic pipe dream.

But that is no longer necessarily true, especially when the externalities of environmental and military costs are taken into account.

But existing national policy is to do whatever is necessary - drilling deep under the Gulf and launching our military abroad - to secure oil. Until we change our national security and energy policies, future mishaps - environmental, military and economic - may frequently occur.

John Francis: Walking Away From OilWhen an oil spill coated birds in San Francisco Bay 40 years ago, he quit driving. Then he quit speaking. Madeline Ostrander asked him what he learned in that process that can help us deal with the BP oil spill.Document Actions

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by Madeline Ostranderposted May 28, 2010

 

NASA's Terra satellite captured a visible satellite image of the Gulf oil spill on May 17, 2010. The oil slick appears as a dull gray on the water's surface and stretches south from the Mississippi Delta with what looks like a tail.

Photo courtesy NASA Goddard / Rob Gutro

When the Gulf oil disaster first hit the headlines, John Francis got a series of calls and messages from friends across the country offering condolences and apologies. Francis isn’t from the Gulf but he has spent years trying to answer the question that now looms large in public debate—what does it mean to end our addiction to oil?

It took an oil spill and a tragedy to get Francis to radically change his life. Francis grew up in a working-class African-American family in Philadelphia and moved to California as an adult. He was in his early 20s in 1971, when he witnessed the aftermath of a collision between two oil tankers in San Francisco Bay. The resulting spill coated shores from Berkeley to Marin with oil and killed thousands of birds and fish. That event and the death of a friend a year later profoundly shook Francis. He gave up driving and riding in motorized vehicles for 22 years.

One day, as an experiment, he stopped speaking and realized that the experience opened up deeper modes of communication with others. “From this new place [of silence] lessons come,” he writes in his memoir,Planetwalker. “The first is that most of my adult life I have not been listening fully.” He spent the next 17 years in silence, began a pilgrimage on foot across the country, pursued a Ph.D. in environmental studies in Wisconsin at one of the nation’s foremost graduate programs, and became an expert on oil regulations. He taught courses at the University of Wisconsin—Madison without speaking and took an oil regulations policy job with the U.S. Coast Guard without driving.

The journey has made Francis into a kind of moral, spiritual, and symbolic leader for the environmental movement. He considers himself to be living proof of the idea that a single person and simple actions can reach millions. He has since resumed driving, riding, and speaking, but continues to promote environmental education, walking, and personal empowerment, especially among children, youth, and college students, and through lectures across the country.

I caught up with Francis at a green building conference in Seattle. I wanted to find out what his life might teach us about how to confront a disaster like the BP spill in the Gulf.

John Francis delivers a TED Talk telling the story of his life.

Photo by TED.

Madeline Ostrander: What was it about the spill in San Francisco Bay that affected you so powerfully that you decided to stop talking and riding in cars?

 

John Francis: A number of my students are always asking, "How do I know what is going to be my issue, my moment to make a decision?"

For me, it started with the wildlife—I could see that birds were dying. In my childhood, I used to save young birds that had fallen out of their nests. Once I went to save a bird, but before I could, a car ran over it. I cried for weeks.

The spill in San Francisco Bay made me cry. It made me cry in a painful way. There are tragedies you can move away from and you don't have to confront them. If you’re reading about an oil spill in the newspaper, you can just turn the page. But you couldn't get away from the effects of the spill. I could see that birds were dying. And the olfactory impact—the smell—was just huge.

I tell my students, "If you are moved to such a degree that you feel the pain, and that you can feel the tears running down your face, then you're looking at an opportunity to make a change, to make a difference in the world.”

Each of us has to have that moment when we know that we have to do something.I said, "What I want to do is not ride in cars." My girlfriend said, "Yeah, but we don't have any money." That's usually what happens—you start thinking about practical realities—money, job. Those thoughts can dissuade you from making that decision at that moment.

It took a friend's death to convince me that we only have right now—this moment. He died in a boating accident. He was about the same age as I was. He was a deputy sheriff, was married, and had a beautiful family and a house. He was living this dream, and all of the sudden he was just gone. It was irrevocable. He doesn't get to come back and say, "Oh, there’s something I wanted to do."

What I wanted to do was get out of my car and walk. I went on a walk with my girlfriend to commemorate and celebrate his life—20 miles to hear some music. On my way back I realized that there's no guarantee that tomorrow is going to come or that we're going to get it together. I told my girlfriend, "I’m already walking. I'm just going to keep walking."

Madeline: In your book, you describe how that walk led you to give up driving altogether. You write, "I just didn't want to come back and fall into the same old way of living a life." In your case, you witnessed these events that shook you enough to change your life dramatically. What do you think it will take for people in this country to change their ways of living? We all have lifestyles that contribute to climate change, our oil economy, and environmental problems.

John: In 1969, there was another spill in California—the Santa Barbara blowout [when an undersea rig exploded]. It was 200,000 gallons of oil. That spill galvanized a lot of people to start the environmental movement in the United States. People made some really significant changes just to get a day recognized for the environment—Earth Day.

It was a spill and someone’s death that prompted me to change. And it was me just being stubborn, even when I thought, "God, I don't know if I can really make a difference."

It's going to take something like that to happen for each of us: Each of us has to have that moment when we know that we have to do something. It might not happen to the whole country all at once—but enough people making those changes will make a difference.

As I walked across the country and studied environment and started speaking again, I realized that sustainability starts with the way we treat each other. And I believe that the way that we treat each other manifests in the physical environment around us. Our relationships are the first opportunity to treat the environment in a positive, sustainable way. We can't oppress one another; we can't kill each other for resources; we can't use each other for our own gain. We need to look at each other. We all use oil. We all have some responsibility. That's a good thing because if we have some responsibility, we all have some power.

Each of us has to have that moment when we know that we have to do something.

I have to say if somebody had told me years ago that I could make a difference by getting out of my car and walking, I would have thought maybe they were not right on the beam. At first, I thought I might have a peaceful life playing the banjo and living in a cabin. But after more than 20 years of walking, I walk to the other side of the country, and the next thing I know, I'm a Ph.D., helping to write the oil pollution regulations for the United States. And I could not have seen that!

Madeline: How has the spill in the Gulf affected you?

John: Well, right away, when there's any spill in the United States or anywhere in the country or in the world that gets into the media, people start writing me. Sending me emails and calling me to say, "John, we're so sorry."

I am affected by this spill, even though I don't own any stock in BP, and I haven't lost any loved ones. People are going to hurt from this spill. People are going to feel pain. In that pain, however, there’s an opportunityfor us to change and look at what it is that's going on. In that clarity, or moment of obligation, we can understand who we are and make that commitment to change. Some people have already started car-free, motor-free, engine-free lifestyles. And I hear from them. Even though we may not all give up driving and riding in cars, we can look for the hidden costs and redefine our energy policies. The hidden cost of our petrochemical economy is huge and devastating to the rest of the planet. People die so we can drive in our cars. That's a cost that we think we don't have to pay financially. But we do pay the price—because it manifests in the physical environment around us.

Madeline: Many of us—when we're looking at what's happening in the Gulf or thinking about the enormity of climate change—experience grief or despair. How have you learned to confront those feelings in yourself?

John: I talk to you. And I write articles and a blog. I talk to the media. And I talk to the people around me. I'm not the expert. I can tell you my life and my journey. I think we need to understand the connectivity that all of us have with each other. Each of us is not here doing this alone. It's all of us. We’re part of each other's journeys as well.

Madeline Ostrander interviewed John Francis for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Madeline is senior editor for YES! Magazine.

Interested?

• All Hands on Deck: What can you do to respond to the Gulf oil spill?
• The Greatest Danger: In the face of global warming it is hard to escape a sense of outrage, fear, and despair. Joanna Macy says that speaking the truth of our anguish for the world brings down the walls between us, drawing us into deep solidarity.
• Planetwalker: John Francis walks the earth.

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Business and NGOs

Reaching for a longer spoonThe disaster in the Gulf of Mexico is straining ties between companies and activists

Jun 3rd 2010 | NEW YORK | From The Economist print edition

IT IS not just Barack Obama and Tony Hayward, BP’s boss, who are under fire because of the environmental catastrophe unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico. In the decade or so since BP acknowledged the need to slow climate change and signalled its commitment to investing in cleaner sources of energy with the slogan “Beyond Petroleum”, many environmental activists and NGOs have laid down their placards and helped the firm execute its green strategies. They are now facing intense criticism of that collaboration from their own supporters, who say the oil spill has left BP’s (always contentious) green claims “Beyond Parody” and the company “Beyond the Pale”.

The website of one such NGO, the Nature Conservancy, has been bombarded with complaints from donors horrified by the discovery (although it had never hidden the fact) that over the years it had received around $10m in gifts of cash and land from BP, and had even given the oil giant a seat on its “International Leadership Council”. Another, Conservation International, has accepted over $2m from BP, advised the firm on its oil extraction methods, and from 2000 to 2006 included on its board John Browne, BP’s boss at the time and the moving force behind the firm’s conversion to greenery. The Environmental Defense Fund, another big NGO, had helped BP develop its internal carbon-trading system, and more recently campaigned alongside it for a law to cap America’s emissions of greenhouse gases through the US Climate Action Partnership (USCAP), an alliance of NGOs and big businesses. Other prominent NGO members of USCAP include the Nature Conservancy, the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the World Resources Institute.

The scrutiny of these ties to BP is intensifying the perennial debate about how long a spoon NGOs should use when supping with corporate devils. The failure of governments to make progress on a new climate deal in Copenhagen last December had already prompted some debate among activists about whether a more confrontational style of campaigning was needed to stir the world from its torpor.

The renewed debate comes when relations between business and NGOs (environmental and otherwise) are closer than ever before. In 1990, when Environmental Defense announced an agreement to help McDonald’s reduce the environmental impact of its packaging, there was shock and dismay from activists and business alike. Environmental Defense was accused of selling out, while the fast-food retailer, which had previously had a reputation for hostility to green causes, was chided by some of its peers for allowing tree-huggers into the boardroom. “At the time, it was heresy to say that companies and NGOs could work together; now it is dogma, at least for the Fortune 500,” says Gwen Ruta, who oversees Environmental Defense’s corporate partnerships. Its current collaborators include such frequent targets of activists’ ire as Wal-Mart, a giant retailer with no time for unions, and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR), a private-equity firm often depicted as a financial predator.

The spill seems certain to prompt NGOs to review their ties to business. Lenny Mendonca of McKinsey, one of the authors of a new report, “Shaping the Future: Solving Social Problems through Business Strategy”, sees a “risk of heading into a vicious circle of antagonism.” But he believes that would be a mistake.

The report, published by a group called the Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy, whose members include dozens of corporate bigwigs, argues that various factors will encourage firms to embrace worthy causes more warmly in future: the likelihood of government action on climate change, the growing importance of a firm’s reputation when it comes to recruiting and the emphasis that the governments of booming emerging markets place on good corporate citizenship. All this, the report optimistically argues, could drive a “self-reinforcing state of trustworthy, pro-social corporate behaviour that simultaneously delivers bottom-line results and community benefits.”

Collaboration between business and NGOs, if well designed, can certainly yield significant mutual benefit. This week Environmental Defense and KKR reported that the first two years of their partnership, which aims to cut costs in KKR’s portfolio of companies through energy efficiency and other green measures, had already generated savings of $160m. The same approach has now been adopted by at least one of KKR’s rivals, the Carlyle Group.

The efforts of McDonald’s to address NGOs’ concerns, starting with its partnership with Environmental Defense, have been “as important to the company’s success as the Happy Meal”, says Walter Massey, a director who chairs the firm’s committee on corporate social responsibility. He was particularly delighted by a partnership with Greenpeace to exclude soyabeans grown on deforested land in the Amazon from the company’s supply chain, which “led to the Greenpeace campaign director issuing a statement congratulating McDonald’s for pushing ‘a multimillion-dollar industry towards a more sustainable future’.”

For several years Mr Massey has also been on the board of BP, which he believes benefited from its work with NGOs after a deadly accident at a refinery in Texas in 2002. “The company’s reservoir of goodwill, built up over years of committed corporate stewardship, was of critical aid in helping us to weather the storm,” he said in March. The latest crisis suggests that the reservoir is not bottomless, however.

BP’s travails (see article) illustrate the limits of enthusiastic corporate citizenship. However much BP works with NGOs, it will find it impossible to move beyond petroleum, with all its attendant environmental problems. Likewise, PepsiCo will struggle to live up to the spirit of its pledge to promote healthier living while the bulk of its profits comes from fattening drinks and snacks.

Partnerships that address NGOs’ misgivings about a firm’s supply chain are likely to prove much more successful. That has certainly been the case at Wal-Mart, which has demanded higher environmental standards from its suppliers, to widespread acclaim. Efforts by firms such as Coca-Cola to work with NGOs to conserve water and increase access to it in the developing world have promise since they should make it easier for the firm to secure a reliable supply of the main ingredient of its drinks.

The spill also highlights the question of whether NGOs should accept money for the advice they give to companies. For organisations such as the Nature Conservancy, which protects ecologically sensitive spots by buying them or persuading others to set them aside, businesses are a big source of income. But partnerships with grubby firms risk turning off its million-odd individual donors.

Campaigning NGOs, which rely on a reputation for righteousness, are particularly at risk. The website of Greenpeace, whose activists like to chain themselves to things, is full of reminders that it never accepts money from companies. Similarly, there has been relatively little criticism of Environmental Defense because, from its first dealings with McDonald’s, it has never accepted any corporate dollars. Ironically, this policy had prompted grumbles from some big individual donors, who asked why firms as rich as Wal-Mart and KKR should be the ultimate recipients of their charity.

The spill has presumably squelched such talk. Firms on the lookout for ways to improve their image and NGOs hoping to bring about meaningful change seem like natural partners. Most of the time the benefits of co-operation outweigh the risks. But whenever money changes hands, suspicions are bound to arise. The NGOs which accepted BP’s largesse presumably now wish that they had brought a longer spoon to the feast.

Lessons Left Unlearnt From 2003 Gulf of Mexico Near-Spill

Posted by JoulesBurn on June 4, 2010 - 7:30am
Topic: Environment/Sustainability
Tags: bp, gulf of mexico, gulf of mexico oil spill, original, thunder horse, transocean [list all tags]

In May 2003, the Transocean drillship Discoverer Enterprise, under contract from BP, was getting ready to pull out of a nearly-completed development well for the Thunderhorse project in the Gulf of Mexico, about 40 miles south of the current (2010) spill at the Macondo prospect. For some reason, the ship was dragged off its position such that the riser reaching down 6000 feet to the well at the seafloor was snapped off in two places. In this case, a blind-shear ram blow out preventer (BOP) did its job, sealing off the well below and preventing what could have been the largest U.S. oil spill. As it was, the only thing spilled was the drilling mud remaining in the various riser pieces dangling from the ship, buried in mud, or stuck vertically into the seafloor. After rehabilitating the well and then taking stock of the fact that the unthinkable could have happened, BP and Transocean apparently decided not to think about it too much more.

But after reading through some MMS reports, it seems that near-misses happen a lot. Oops.

Don't Push That Button!

Drilling a well in thousands of feet of water from surface vessel is tricky business, and accidents do happen. For a good survey of the various ways in which blowouts can occur, see this rather extensive report. Also, the US Minerals Management Service (MMS), which oversees oil and gas extraction in the northern Gulf of Mexico, makes available on its web site reports of assorted accidents. A number of cases involve the riser becoming disconnected from the wellhead and spilling drilling mud into the water. It can be necessary to do this intentionally, or as part of an automated sequence, if the drillship cannot maintain its position directly above the well within some tolerance due to weather or strong currents. For example, here is one incident from 2005:

On July 5, 2005, an unplanned riser disconnect was initiated on the Ensco 7500 semi-submersible rig, which had been engaged in exploratory drilling activities, because of unfavorable sea and wind conditions associated with an approaching tropical depression. While the riser volume was being displaced with seawater in preparation for the disconnect operation, the rig was no longer able to maintain station adequately enough to complete the operation. As a result, the riser was disconnected from the Lower Marine Riser Package (LMRP), at which time 710 barrels of synthetic-based mud was released from the riser into the GOM. At the time of the disconnect, there were no open hole hydrocarbons exposed below the casing depth.

Here is a case where the disconnect became necessary due to bad data:

On December 2, 2007 at approximately 1300 hours with well completion operations in process, the Dynamic Positioning Operator (DPO) was performing a routine preventive maintenance procedure for the Dynamic Positioning (DP) system when the riser Emergency Disconnect Sequence (EDS) was activated. The disconnect was below the Lower Marine Riser Package (LMRP) where it connects to the BOP stack on top of the wellhead and resulted in the discharge of approximately 550 barrels of Sodium Bromide brine into GOM waters.

For this procedure, DP functional control was transferred from the primary console to the secondary console and the primary console was subsequently shut down. DP functional control using the secondary console was observed to be normal. The primary console was restarted approximately three minutes later and the data backup function was initiated by the DPO. This function transfers control data from the online master console, at this time the secondary console, to other DP consoles to ensure correct synchronization between all consoles. The data transfer from secondary console to primary console was completed but some of the data transferred was corrupted and the DPO did not observe this. Functional control was then transferred from the secondary console to the primary console. The DPO recognized there was a discrepancy for the rig position shown on the both the primary and secondary consoles.

In an attempt to correct the error, the DPO performed a second Initialize Backup function from the now master console, the primary console. This caused corrupt data to be transferred back to secondary consolewhich now gave both the primary console and secondary console corrupt control data. The DPO, along with the Captain, observed the difference between the primary and secondary consoles and began trying to identify the fault. This was done by changing position references, transferring control capability between the control consoles, and enabling/disabling different position reference sensors. This resulted in another position reference sensor inadvertently becoming the master reference sensor and reset the apparent rig position such that the rig began to move further away from location when the DP system was trying to correct the rig position by moving the rig back on location.

This led the DP system to chase after an erroneous position causing the rig to move outside its watch circle and exceed the riser angle limit, thus leading to the initiation of the EDS by the DP system which took approximately 58 seconds to complete. The process was initiated at the Driller Control Panel after confirmation was given by the DPO. The ROV was launched to inspect the wellhead, subsea tree, and BOP stack. The rig was moved to a safe location for the DP system to be analyzed and corrected.

This sequence of events is rather comical. But better still are the cases due directly to human error (although other humans contributed with poor design). Here is one:

Investigation of Riser Disconnect and Blowout, Mississippi Canyon Block 538, OCS-G 16614 Well #2, February 28, 2000

The Ocean Concord was in the process of running a liner on drill pipe when the lower marine riser package (LMRP) was inadvertently disconnected from the blowout preventer (BOP) stack. The disconnect resulted in the discharge to the sea of approximately 806 barrels of synthetic mud from the riser and 150 barrels of synthetic mud and 150-200 barrels of crude oil from the wellbore.

Some findings:

• The SSE [Subsea Engineer] was installing the panel guards on the Riser Connector function button on the remote panel at 1410 hours on February 28, 2000.
• The remote panel cover was open and the face of the panel was pulled out at the time of the incident.
• The SSE inadvertently contacted the LMRP disconnect button while he was drilling mounting holes in the BOP panel.
• The SSE was unaware of the LMRP disconnection until he heard the alarms sounding, indicating low accumulator pressure.
• The SSE stated during the Diamond SIR meeting that he did not follow any lockout/tagout procedures to de-energize the BOP control panel prior to working on the panel.
• The light bulbs for the LMRP latch/unlatch functions were burned out at the time of the panel modifications.

The following information was provided to the panel by Diamond from their post-accident SIR meeting:

• The SSE stated that he did not realize it was possible to lock out the remote panel until after the incident.
• The SSE had never been to well-control training. He had worked for another contractor as a roughneck and had recently trained with both subsea engineers on the Concord. The SSE stated that additional training may have helped him prevent this incident. The OIM stated that this was the SSE’s second hitch on his own on the Concord.
• The SSE stated that he knew that if the riser unlatched that there would be a loss of mud from the riser, but he did not know that the well would flow. The SSE also stated that he did not consider "any such risk prior to the job" of installing the panel guards.

Here is yet another problem involving a Sea Surface Engineer pushing buttons by mistake. It can be found in the MMS reports here. The incident date was January 19, 2000.

The rig's subsea engineer was function testing the blind shear rams. The weekly function test was performed from the remote blowout preventer (BOP) panel in the offshore installation manager's office.  Instead of testing the blind shear rams, the engineer inadvertently pushed the LMRP button on the panel which unintentionally activated and disconnected the lower marine riser package (LMRP).  The control panel buttons for the lower marine riser package (LMRP) did not have enough security to prevent activating the wrong function.  It was determined that 2,400 barrels of 60% synthetic-based drilling mud (SBM) leaked into the Gulf of Mexico.  It is estimated that the lost SBM contained approximately 1,440 barrels of synthetic base oil.

Based on the block (822), this would be an early well in the Thunderhorse field. However, the first well in that block wasn't completed until 10 months later, based on the development history of the field.

Thunder Horse 2 was drilled in Block 822. It reached its total depth of 29,060ft in November 2000. The well was drilled by the Discoverer Enterprise in 6,300ft of water, 1.5 miles south-east of the discovery well. It encountered 675ft net of pay in three primary intervals.

The discovery well Thunderhorse 1 was completed in 1999 in a different block, leading to the strong probability that this well is indeed Thunderhorse 2 -- and that it took another ten months to finish. This document seems to confirm this identification (see Appendix Table H-2), indicating the drilling started in December 1999. In any case, it brings us back to the broken riser incident we started with as the drillship involved above was also the Transocean Discoverer Enterprise. BP's currently underperforming Thunderhorse endeavor seems to have had a storied beginning as well.

Failure to Disconnect

Here is a brief MMS report on the riser break incident:

The spill occurred at Mississippi Canyon (MC) 778, latitude 28.19 degrees N. and longitude 88.49 degrees W. It occurred as the Discoverer Enterprise was pulling out of the wellhole with bottom location at MC 822. At the time of the incident, conditions were 2-3 ft seas with a 1.9 knot current. The drilling vessel was in the process of pulling of of the hole when it experienced wave action heaving and jarring. The riser parted in two places at approximately 3,200 ft an 5,087 ft. water depths. There was a release of 2,450 barrels of 58% Accolade synthetic-based drilling mud (SBM). It is estimated that the lost SBM contained approximately 1,421 barrels of Accolade synthetic base oil .

I found more details, also apparently from MMS, here.

While drilling in approximately 6,000 feet of water, a drillship recently experienced a catastrophic failure of the marine riser. The drillship was equipped with a dual derrick, and dual activity was being conducted at the time of the incident. On the forward rotary, where the marine riser was installed, the rig crew was in the process of pulling out of the hole from total depth. On the aft rotary, the rig crew was in the process of running 20-inch casing for an adjacent well. The failure of the flanged marine riser occurred when drillpipe had been pulled a couple hundred feet off-bottom. At that time, the rig experienced a heave motion followed by a strong jarring action. The ROV, which had been launched to observe the running of the 20-inch casing, was dispatched to examine the marine riser.

When the ROV reached approximately 3,200 feet of water, it was determined that the riser had separated between riser joint 39 and 40 and was unloading the synthetic-based mud that was in use at the time. The drillpipe was observed to be intact at this depth. As the ROV traced the drillpipe deeper, it was found penetrating the lower section of buoyant riser that was free-standing from the seafloor to approximately 1,000 feet from the mudline. The remainder of the riser was found scattered on the seafloor surrounding the wellhead and BOP stack.

As the ROV scanned the BOP stack, it was determined that the riser was cleanly parted about one foot above the lower marine riser package. There was no flow observed from the well. When the riser parted, the "dead man" system activated, and all fail safe valves, casing shear rams, and lower blind shear rams were closed. The drillpipe was successfully sheared by this activation. At a later point, the ROV used a hot stab to activate a second set of upper blind shear rams to provide another barrier on the wellbore. Although the well control equipment functioned as designed, the parting of the marine riser resulted in a release of an undetermined amount of synthetic based mud.

The subject accident is currently under investigation by MMS. Upon its completion, the investigation report, as well as a possible follow-up Safety Alert, will be made available to the public. Your attention is directed to our conditions of approval for Applications for Permit to Drill involving the use of subsea BOP stacks. The approval outlines our requirements for the shut-in capability of the well in the event of an unplanned disconnect of the lower marine riser package or the parting of the marine riser. It should be noted again that, in this incident, the "deadman" system functioned properly and prevented the release of well bore fluids into the water column.

Shown below is a comparison of the Lower Marine Riser Package (LMRP) for the 2003 Thunderhorse well (with the riser "parted") with that for the 2010 BP Macondo well after the bent riser was cut off with a saw. In the case of the former, the LMRP was disconnected from the BOP using the hot stab panel. For the Macondo well, this must not have been possible, since the "Containment Cap" to collect the oil was apparently designed to be sealed around the existing LMRP.

Left: LMRP for BP Thunderhorse, 2003. Right: LMRP for BP Macondo, 2010 The Afterspill, and What Could Have Been

The final MMS report on this incident was rather inconclusive as to why the riser was ripped apart.

Fate and Effects of a Spill of Synthetic-Based Drilling Fluid at Mississippi Canyon Block 778

In particular, the Loop Current in the Gulf of Mexico was exonerated:

The Loop Current did not directly affect the MC 778 drill site on May 21, 2003. Currents were weak in the upper 1,100 m (3,609 ft). Current speeds below 1,100 m (3,609 ft) are not known because measurements taken by the operator and made available to MMS did not extend from 1,100 m (3,609 ft) to the seafloor at 1,841 m (6,040 ft).

However, one report on this incident, excerpted in the TAMU spreadsheet, reads as follows:

At the time of the incident, conditions were 2-3 ft seas with a 1.9 knot current.  The drilling vessel was in the process of pulling of of the hole when it experienced wave action heaving and jarring. The riser parted in two places at approximately 3,200 ft an 5,087 ft. water depths. 

What differentiates this incident (along with many other cases of riser separation) from the 2010 Macondo spill is that the BOPs did what they are supposed to in 2003. Most importantly, the blind-shear BOP engaged, cutting through the drillstring and closing off the well.

 

Shear blades to cut through the DP and seal the well (Varco )

 

What if this hadn't happened? BP definitely thought about this, and worked with the NOAA Office of Response and Restoration to consider the potential impact.

The top connector of the BOP was damaged, with one joint leaning against the BOP, dangerously close to the control lines ....

Loss of well containment would result in more oil spilled in a week than occurred during the whole of the T/V Exxon's Valdez oil spill.

From: COMBINING MODELING WITH RESPONSE IN POTENTIAL DEEP WELL BLOWOUT: LESSONS LEARNED FROM THUNDER HORSE

NOAA performed modeling to gauge the consequences of such a large spill in deepwater, but many unknown parameters prevented definitive conclusions. Indeed, the realization of the scenario with the Macondo spill has provided many surprises with regards to the fate of the oil and gas.

Heck of a Job, BP

Other paperwork which emanated from the near-spill seems less contemplative, but rather more inwardly focused on what went right in a corporate sense. First, we have an article in the Society of Professional Engineers (SPE) journal, which is available in this preview:

Thunder Horse Drilling-Riser Break—The Road to Recovery

Here are the "Major Learnings":

• Show Leadership Commitment.
• Implement Project-Management Practices Quickly.
• Secure the Right External Technical Expertise.
• Get the Right Support Staff.
• Get People in the Right Places.
• Plan How To Communicate Internally and Externally.

Also, BP funded a study by the School of Psychology at the University of Aberdeen, King’s College, Aberdeen, Scotland.

Following the initial message from the rig to the Operations Manager, an Incident Management Team (IMT) was assembled in the Houston office. The IMT immediately began to assess the situation, take steps to give instructions to the rig to assess and control damage, and to plan a longer-term response. The IMT was faced with a challenging situation, one which had never been experienced before especially in such depths of water. Fortunately neither injuries, nor environmental leakage had occurred. A number of separate sub-teams were established and tasked with dealing with issues such as Operations, Riser recovery, Blow Out Preventer (BOP) operability, Well integrity, Well re-entry, and Relief well planning. The task for the IMT was to assess and respond to any potential threat to people, wildlife or the environment, to secure the remaining riser section, to recover scattered riser pieces (on the sea bed), and eventually to re-attach the pipes connecting the rig to the well-head. After a period of 68 days, with a financial cost of $100,000 per day, the rig was re-attached to the well head and the well was stabilised without any leakages to the environment

From: INCIDENT COMMAND SKILLS IN THE MANAGEMENT OF AN OIL INDUSTRY DRILLING INCIDENT

The Missing Memo

While such self-reflection is useful, recent events suggest that something is missing. The difference between a cost of $6.8 million plus 68 days delay, and a cost of untold $billions plus environmental disaster, was the last line of defense, the blowout preventer. In the 2003 spill, and in many similar cases, the fact that the blind-shear BOP functioned as intended is not a sign that the system worked, for a truly fail-safe system would be where the last line of defense from disaster is never reached. MMS did note the alarming trend in this 2005 memo:

Human Engineering Factors Result in Increasing Number of Riser Disconnects

A significant number of accidental riser disconnects have been experienced in deepwater operations during the last five years. Each event had the potential for causing serious well-control issues.

So here we are five years later, and we finally hit paydirt with a failed BOP and a spill for real. We can ponder about what would have transpired if the oversized wire cutters would have worked on the Deepwater Horizon, stopping the Macondo spill before it started. A few internal studies by those involved. Another MMS report of a drilling mud leaking from a severed riser. Louisiana fishermen still working.

Snip.

If climate change worries you most, then you cannot be happy to learn thatoil from Alberta tar sands is about to supply the biggest chunk of US oil imports. Indeed, if peak oil concerns you most, or if the future of the US economy concerns you most, you cannot be happy to hear this news either.

For you economists, oil from Alberta is not cheap. It must reflect the massive amount of engineering required to establish a tar sands mining operation, and, the energy cost of cooking oily dirt to extract oil.

For peak oil folks, that the world must turn to tar sands is just one more confirmation that the cheap conventional crude is now in decline. So what to do? First, let’s take a look at North America oil supply over the past 20 years. This is the oil produced by Canada, the US and Mexico (click to enlarge):

Here in United States we like to outsource the extraction of our oil supply to anyone but ourselves. We don’t particularly want to see the results of our own demand for liquid fuels, the pull from our 300 million vehicles and our four million miles of highways. We’d prefer that someone else–preferably far away–despoil their own landscape. And we’ve done quite a good job over the past several decades to make sure that’s happened, as the amount of oil we’ve had to import from the Mideast, from Africa, from Mexico and Canada has skyrocketed. This background is helpful in framing the BP well blowout in 5000 feet of Gulf deepwater. The reality of our oil demand has now touched home. In fact, it’s washing up on our coastline.

In the previous world of Ricardian Comparative Advantage, the decline of North American oil supply didn’t matter so much. But now that oil is no longer a cheap widget that can be efficiently sourced globally, regional and domestic supplies have started to matter. Whether or not you agree with solutions like the Pickens Plan (opens to video page at the recent Milken conference), you at least have to give Mr Pickens credit for identifying the problem: a very nasty mechanism, if you will, of increased capital outflows for increasingly expensive global oil is now at work like a buzz saw on the US economy. And it’s only going to get worse from here.

If the solution to a problem is unsufficiently scaled to the size of the problem, then at best we can say it’s a token solution. And token solutions are what the US has been trying out for 40 years, on the matter of energy. 8 billion for High Speed Rail? Sorry, but the restoration of rail in this country is an 800 billion dollar project and that would be just for the first wave. Adoption of electric vehicles, as part of some cultural need to maintain US car culture? Sure, at realistic adoption rates you might be running mostly on EVs in 150-200 years. Switch the powergrid to 100% renewable resources like Wind and Solar in ten years? Not likely. But maybe if you are willing to withdraw the entirety of US armed services from overseas, devote the entire military budget for 10 years, and match that workforce with highly skilled workers from the private sector, then maybe you can make a dent by 2020.

When a politician tells you they want to solve for climate change while investing heavily in automobiles and highways, rest assured that is decidedly unserious. When former politicians claim you can have an all renewable powergrid in ten years, that is not helping anyone. When academics tell you that we can be operating in an all renewable world by 2030, but have nothing in their model to account for the energy needed to build that new world, that is simply not good enough. Nota bene: nearly all energy transition plans and especially plans to transition to alternative energy depend on economic growth. All those models assume there will be a sufficient inventory of growth that can be redirected to a different energy architecture. As you contemplate this, also realize that to construct a lower carbon-emitting future poses a question: what is the energy source that will be used, to conduct energy transition?

Perhaps a glance back up at the chart of North American oil supply will help clarify the problem. The United States occupies an enormous swath of the continent, and has added most of its current built environment during the fossil fuel era. The country was built on coal and oil.

Indeed, it’s still running on coal and oil. And the intractability of this infrastructure is why energy transition is so hard. It is unserious therefore to say that it will be easy or quick to start running it on different energy sources. And I would suggest that anyone who makes that claim, or naively supports those who do, should be disqualified from the conversation.

If you want political traction on climate change or peak oil issues–which are both problems of energy transition—then only an accurate confrontation with scale and time will suffice to make contact with the problem.

About the author: Gregor MacdonaldGregor Macdonald is an oil analyst and energy sector investor, who also focuses on the coming transition to alternatives. He has spent this decade researching and investing in the energy sector. While his focus remains on global fossil fuel supply, he has developed several models for transition... More

THE explosion that claimed 11 lives and sent the Deepwater Horizon, a billion-dollar oil rig, to the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, was bad enough. But for the inhabitants of America’s Gulf coast, for BP, the huge British firm that owns the well, and for the oil industry as a whole, the bad news is flowing as relentlessly as the oil gushing from ruptured pipes a mile below the waves (see article). Efforts to close an emergency shut-off valve have failed. BP is trying to drop huge domes over the leaks and siphon off the oil they collect. But if that fails, it could be months before a second well is completed, reducing the pressure in the first and thus stemming the flow.

Some two weeks after the initial accident, oil has begun to wash up on the frail marshes and rich oyster beds that line Louisiana’s shores. Pictures of basted seabirds and gasping turtles have engulfed the media. Commercial fishing has been suspended in the vicinity of the spill. There is talk that the slick could wash up on Florida’s west coast, smothering the lucrative local tourism industry, or even leach into the Atlantic and up America’s eastern seaboard, abetted by the Gulf Stream.

Investors, foreseeing vast bills for cleaning and compensation, have wiped some $30 billion off BP’s value. Other firms involved, including Anadarko, one of BP’s partners in the ill-fated well, Transocean, which was in charge of the drilling, Halliburton, which fitted the cement cap that was supposed to have sealed the well, and Cameron, which made the failed backup system, have also been walloped. Congress has summoned executives from these firms for pillorying. Moves are afoot to lift the cap on oil firms’ liability for the economic damage done by oil spills from $75m to $10 billion (they are already on the hook for unlimited clean-up costs).

Related items

• The Gulf of Mexico oil spill: Black storm risingMay 6th 2010
• Lexington: The politics of disasterMay 6th 2010
• Schumpeter: In the black stuffMay 6th 2010

The oil industry’s hope that more American waters would be opened to drilling is receding as fast as the slick advances. Barack Obama, who had briefly supported the idea, has put all drilling on hold while the causes of the disaster are investigated. The governors of Florida and California have retracted their support too. “Why”, asks California’s Arnold Schwarzenegger, “would we want to take on that kind of risk?”

Slick salesmen

Because that is where the oil is, oilmen retort. The Gulf of Mexico accounts for almost a third of America’s oil production and the lion’s share of new discoveries. Most dry land has been picked over, and better technology allows exploration in ever deeper waters. Elsewhere too, Western oil firms are being forced offshore as nationalist governments curtail their involvement in big, easily tapped fields on land. The Gulf of Mexico and the waters off Africa and Brazil are among the most enticing prospects to which they still have access. If Americans do not want to hand even more money and clout to the likes of Iran, Russia and Venezuela, the argument runs, they should not curb offshore drilling. Even if they do, rising oil powers such as Angola and Brazil are not going to follow suit.

Moreover, in America at least, oil firms have been reasonable stewards of the seas. Before Deepwater Horizon foundered there had not been a big leak from an offshore oil well for 40 years. Average annual spills from underwater pipelines declined from 2.5m gallons in 1980-84 to just 12,000 gallons in 2000-04, according to the Congressional Research Service. America’s National Research Council reckons that offshore drilling accounts for 1% of the oil floating in the country’s waters, and tankers and pipelines only a further 4%, compared with 33% from other shipping and 62% from natural seepage (though the industry’s spills are more concentrated, and so more harmful). As the fleet of 200 ships battling the slick shows, oil firms have elaborate plans to mop up leaks.

In this instance the oil spilled is quite volatile, so much of it should disperse or evaporate before reaching the coast, where it will do the most damage. The warmth of the air and water in the Gulf should also help. Since the well is 40 miles offshore and the weather has been relatively clement, there has been time to test dispersal techniques and prepare coastal defences.

Rigged result

For all these reasons, the long-term repercussions of the spill may not be so grave. BP, its subcontractors, federal and state governments, environmental activists, injured businesses and their insurers will all spend decades suing one another. The Supreme Court, after all, took almost 20 years to settle the punitive damages arising from theExxon Valdez spill off Alaska in 1989. But Exxon’s share price quickly recovered from that accident (followed, more slowly, by the local environment); it went on to become the world’s biggest listed firm. BP, which made profits of $5.6 billion in the first quarter of this year, will not be crippled by the spill (see Schumpeter), even if its costs run into billions.

Congress will stiffen oversight of offshore drilling and boost the penalties for lapses. Fewer states will open their waters to oilmen—although the governor of Virginia, for one, says he is still willing. But there will not, sadly, be any more comprehensive effort to account for the noxious side-effects of oil.

For spills are hardly the most baleful consequence of America’s oil addiction: global warming and the funding of foreign despots surely come higher up the list. Perversely, this spill is likely to set back efforts to get a bill on climate change through Congress, and to increase the flow of dollars to despots (see Lexington). However you measure the full cost of a gallon of gas, pollution and all, Americans are nowhere close to paying it. Indeed, their whole energy industry—from subsidies for corn ethanol to limited liability for nuclear power—is a slick of preferences and restrictions, without peer. The tinkering that will follow this spill will merely further complicate it.

Offshore drilling seems like a sensible way to obtain a very handy product. Extra safeguards may be needed. But if the politicians are really as committed to “cleaning up” the energy industry as they now claim, far more could be achieved by reducing the subsidies and introducing a carbon tax. That may seem a long way from the calamity in the Gulf; but in the long run those other murky waters also need to be cleaned up.

The Economist Newspaper | Leaders

The Crisis Comes Ashore
by Al Gore

The continuing undersea gusher of oil 50 miles off the shores of Louisiana is not the only source of dangerous uncontrolled pollution spewing into the environment. Worldwide, the amount of man-made CO2 being spilled every three seconds into the thin shell of atmosphere surrounding the planet equals the highest current estimate of the amount of oil spilling from the Macondo well every day. Indeed, the average American coal-fired power generating plant gushes more than three times as much global-warming pollution into the atmosphere each day—and there are over 1,400 of them.

Just as the oil companies told us that deep-water drilling was safe, they tell us that it’s perfectly all right to dump 90 million tons of CO2 into the air of the world every 24 hours. Even as the oil spill continues to grow—even as BP warns that the flow could increase multi-fold, to 60,000 barrels per day, and that it may continue for months—the head of the American Petroleum Institute, Jack Gerard, says, "Nothing has changed. When we get back to the politics of energy, oil and natural gas are essential to the economy and our way of life." His reaction reminds me of the day Elvis Presley died. Upon hearing the tragic news, Presley’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker, said, “This changes nothing.”

However, both the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the CO2 spill into the global atmosphere are causing profound and harmful changes—directly and indirectly. The oil is having a direct impact on fish, shellfish, turtles, seabirds, coral reefs, marshes, and the entire web of life in the Gulf Coast. The indirect effects include the loss of jobs in the fishing and tourism industries; the destruction of the health, vitality, and rich culture of communities in the region; imminent bankruptcies; vast environmental damage expected to persist for decades; and the disruption of seafood markets nationwide.

And, of course, the consequences of our ravenous consumption of oil are even larger. Starting 40 years ago, when America's domestic oil production peaked, our dependence on foreign oil has steadily grown. We are now draining our economy of several hundred billion dollars a year in order to purchase foreign oil in a global market dominated by the huge reserves owned by sovereign states in the Persian Gulf. This enormous and increasing transfer of wealth contributes heavily to our trade and current-account deficits, and enriches regimes in the most unstable region of the world, helping to finance both terrorism and Iran’s relentless effort to build a nuclear arsenal.

The profound risk to our national and economic security posed by the prospect of the world’s sudden loss of access to Persian Gulf oil contributed greatly to the strategic miscalculations and public deceptions that led to our costly invasion of Iraq, including the reckless diversion of military and intelligence assets from Afghanistan before our mission there was accomplished. I am far from the only one who believes that it is not too much of a stretch to link the ongoing wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and northwestern Pakistan—and even last week’s attempted bombing in Times Square—to a long chain of events triggered in part by our decision to allow ourselves to become so dependent on foreign oil.

Here at home, the illusion that we can meaningfully reduce our dependence on foreign oil by taking extraordinary risks to develop deep reserves in the Outer Continental Shelf is illuminated by the illustration below. The addition to oil company profits may be significant, but the benefits to our national security are trivial. Meanwhile, our increasing appetite for coal is also creating environmental and human catastrophes. The obscene practice known as “mountaintop mining,” for instance, is not only defacing the landscape of Appalachia but also destroying streams throughout the region and poisoning the drinking water of many communities.

The huge oil slick originating on the deep sea-bed beneath the Gulf of Mexico is here seen from space by a NASA satellite in mid-May 2010, turning to enter the turbulent  "loop current" that would bring it up the coast of Florida and beyond. Three quarters of the US seafood industry and numerous special sites of scientific interest are already threatened with devastation, in what fossil fuel corporations have hitherto defined as "externality" of "energy production". More objective experts have called it an "accident waiting to happen" at the expense of wildlife, fisheries, taxpayers and one of the world's great ecosystems.- Ed.

The direct consequences of burning these vast and ever-growing amounts of oil and coal are a buildup of heat in the atmosphere worldwide and the increased acidity of the oceans. (Although the world has yet to focus on ocean acidification, the problem is terrifying. Thirty million of the 90 million tons of CO2 being spilled each day end up in the oceans as carbonic acid, changing the pH level by more than at any time in the last many millions of years, thus inflicting every form of life in the ocean that makes a shell or a reef with a kind of osteoporosis—interfering with their ability to transform calcium carbonate into the hard structures upon which their life depends—that threatens the survival of many species of zooplankton at the base of the ocean food chain.)

But rising global temperatures and increasing acidification in the ocean are only the beginning. These processes have triggered a cascading set of other impacts, which include:

* The melting of virtually all of the mountain glaciers in the world—already well underway—threatening the supplies of fresh water for drinking and agriculture in many parts of the world. 
  
* The prospective disappearance of the North Polar Ice Cap, which for most of the last three million years has covered an area roughly the size of the continental United States. Approximately 25 percent–30 percent of this ice cap (measured by the area that it used to cover) has disappeared in the last 30 years during summer. The thickness of the remaining ice has also sharply diminished. 
  
* The melting of the two largest masses of ice on the planet—on top of Greenland and Antarctica (especially West Antarctica, where the bottom of the ice rests under the sea atop submerged islands) is already accelerating far beyond earlier estimates—threatening catastrophic increases in sea level worldwide. 
  
* As the seas rise more rapidly, many millions of climate refugees will be forced to flee from areas they have long called home. Indeed, thousands have already been forced to move from low-lying island nations. The government of the Maldives has included a new line item in this year’s budget for a fund to buy a new country. That option will not be available to Bangladesh. 
  
* Deeper and longer droughts in mid-continent regions, as soil moisture evaporates more rapidly with higher temperatures. 
  
* More and larger forest fires as drier vegetation becomes kindling for lightning—which, according to researchers at the University of Tel Aviv, is also predicted to increase at the rate of 10 percent with each additional degree of temperature. 
  
* The migration of tropical diseases to temperate latitudes, as new ecological niches invite the intrusion of viruses and bacteria and the mosquitoes, ticks, and other “vectors” that carry these diseases. This process is also already underway. 
  
* An accelerated extinction rate which, according to E. O. Wilson and other biologists, threatens to reach levels not seen since the dinosaurs were wiped out 65 million years ago. 
  
* The increased destructive power of tropical storms coming off the ocean (hurricanes, cyclones, and typhoons—all different names for the same phenomenon). Though the number of these storms is not predicted to increase, their destructive power is—due to increases in wind speeds and moisture content. 
  
* Increased large downpours of both rain and snow—with a steady shift from snow to rain—resulting in an increased frequency of large floods on every continent. 

This last phenomenon—long understood by scientists to be one of the most confidently predictable consequences of global warming—hit home for many of my neighbors last week when Nashville, the city where I live, suffered what the Army Corps of Engineers described as “a 1,000 year rain event” that caused horrendous flooding, mostly in neighborhoods that had no flood insurance—because homeowners there had been assured that they lived well outside the historic flood plain. The tragic loss of many lives was accompanied by the ruination of thousands of homes and property damages that Mayor Karl Dean estimated at one and a half billion dollars.
 

Scientists are always careful in the way they describe the cause-and-effect relationship between global warming and such events: It is a mistake, they say, to attribute any single extreme weather event only to global warming, because there is large natural variability in weather—but the odds of extremely large downpours, scientists repeatedly insist, are steadily increasing with global warming, and such events are predicted to become far more common with each passing decade because when water evaporates from the warmer oceans, warmer air holds more of it. Average humidity worldwide has already increased by 4 percent since 1970, and each additional degree Fahrenheit increases it by another 3 percent-4 percent. The range of increases in global average temperature during this century is estimated at between 2? Fahrenheit to 11.5? Fahrenheit. The high end of this range would be utterly catastrophic, threatening the survival of civilization as we know it.

Even now, the hydrological cycle of the entire globe is being radically altered. The timing and predictability of rainfall is changing in ways that are already beginning to disrupt agriculture—particularly subsistence agriculture in developing countries. Crop failures and food insecurity are increasing ominously in many regions where farmers are no longer able to rely on the clockwork intervals of rainy seasons and dry seasons they learned from previous generations. The record snowfalls last winter in the northeastern United States also fit into the same pattern. Indeed, the Northeast has long been included among the regions of the world predicted to experience the most dramatic increases in precipitation. Bizarre changes in precipitation patterns are now being observed in many regions throughout the world. Last month, British scientists working near the North Pole were astonished by an unprecedented April rainfall. David Phillips, a senior climatologist in Canada, described the event as “bizarre,” adding, “This is up there among fish falling from the sky or Niagara Falls running dry.”

Temperatures inside the Arctic Circle are increasing far more rapidly than in the rest of the world because the progressive melting of ice and snow leads to a radical change in the amount of heat absorbed by the surface of the uncovered tundra and Arctic Ocean. Incoming solar radiation is no longer reflected by the ice and snow. Arctic researchers from the University of Washington have documented the beginning of significant releases of methane caused by the rapid thawing of permafrost in Alaska and Siberia.

One important difference between the oil spill and the CO2 spill is that petroleum is visible on the surface of the sea and carries a distinctive odor now filling the nostrils of people on shore. Carbon dioxide, on the other hand, is invisible, odorless, tasteless, and has no price tag. It is all too easily put “out of sight and out of mind.” Because the impacts of global warming are distributed globally, they often masquerade as an abstraction. And because the length of time between causes and consequences is longer than we are used to dealing with, we are vulnerable to the illusion that we have the luxury of time before we begin to respond.

But neither assumption is correct. Most of the heat trapped by greenhouse gases is stored in the oceans and reemerges over time into the atmosphere. As a result, we are capable-–through inaction—of making truly disastrous consequences inevitable long before the worst impacts are manifested. Our perception of the dangers of the climate crisis therefore relies on our ability to understand and trust the conclusions reached by the most elaborate and impressive scientific assessment in the history of our civilization. In other words, rather than relying on visceral responses, we have to draw upon our capacity for reasoning, communicating clearly with one another, forming a global consensus on the basis of science, and making a choice in favor of preventive action on a global scale.

During the last 22 years, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has produced four massive studies warning the world of the looming catastrophe that is being caused by the massive dumping of global-warming pollution into the atmosphere. Unfortunately, this process has been vulnerable to disruption and paralysis by a cynical and lavishly funded disinformation campaign. A number of large carbon polluters, whose business plans rely on their continued ability to freely dump their gaseous waste products into the global atmospheric commons—as if it is an open sewer—have chosen to pursue a determined and highly organized campaign aimed at undermining public confidence in the accuracy and integrity of the global scientific community. They have attacked the scientific community by financing pseudo-studies aimed at creating public doubt about peer-reviewed science. They have also manipulated the political and regulatory process with outsized campaign contributions and legions of lobbyists (there are now four anti-climate lobbyists for every single member of the House and Senate).

This epic public contest between the broad public interest and a small but powerful special interest has taken place during a time when American democracy has grown sclerotic. The role of money in our politics has exploded to a dangerous level. Our democratic conversation is now dominated by expensive 30-second television commercials, which consume two-thirds of the campaign budgets of candidates in both political parties. The only reliable source of such large sums of campaign cash is business lobbies. Most members of the House and Senate facing competitive election contests are forced to spend several hours each day asking special interests for money to finance their campaigns. Instead of participating in committee hearings, floor debates, and Burkean reflection on the impact of the questions being considered, they spend their time as supplicants. Though many struggle to resist the influence their donors intend to have on their decision-making process, all too frequently human nature takes its course.
 

Their constituents now spend an average of five hours per day watching television—which is, of course, why campaigns in both political parties spend most of their money on TV advertising. Viewers also absorb political messages from the same special interests that are wining and dining and contributing to their elected officials. The largest carbon polluters have, for the last 17 years, sought to manipulate public opinion with a massive and continuing propaganda campaign, using TV advertisements and all other forms of mass persuasion. It is a game plan spelled out in one of their internal documents, which was leaked to an enterprising reporter, that stated: “reposition global warming as theory rather than fact.” In other words, they have mimicked the strategy pioneered by the tobacco industry, which undermined the scientific consensus linking the smoking of cigarettes with diseases of the lung and heart—successfully delaying appropriate health measures for almost 40 years after the landmark surgeon general’s report of 1964.

Meanwhile, many other countries—including China—have developed national strategies for leading the historic shift from oil and coal to renewable forms of energy, higher levels of efficiency, smart grids and fast trains, sustainable agriculture and forestry.

Here in the United States, the House of Representatives has passed a meaningful plan to move America in the same direction and reestablish our capacity to provide leadership in the world community on the most important issue facing the world today. The Senate, however, has struggled for the last 17 months to find enough votes to take up its own version of the same legislative plan. The unpleasant reality now spilling onto the shores of the Gulf Coast is creating public outrage and may also be generating a new opportunity to pass legislation, just as the oil spill 20 years ago from the Exxon Valdez created public momentum sufficient to overcome the anti-environment special interests. There is new hope that by the time the gusher from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico is capped, so will carbon emissions from the burning of oil and coal.
 

It is understandable that the administration will be focused on the immediate crisis in the Gulf of Mexico. But this is a consciousness-shifting event. It is one of those clarifying moments that brings a rare opportunity to take the longer view. Unless we change our present course soon, the future of human civilization will be in dire jeopardy. Just as we feel a sense of urgency in demanding that this ongoing oil spill be stopped, we should feel an even greater sense of urgency in demanding that the much larger and more dangerous ongoing emissions of global warming pollution must also be stopped to make the world safe from the climate crisis that is building all around us.