The Obama administration is facing internal dissent from its scientists for approving the use of huge quantities of chemical dispersants to tackle the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the Guardian has learned.The US Environmental Protection Agency has come under attack in Congress and from independent scientists for allowing BP to spray almost 2m gallons of the dispersant Corexit on to the slick and, even more controversially, into the leak site 5,000ft below the sea. Now it emerges that EPA’s own experts have been raising similar concerns within the agency.
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Jeff Ruch, the executive director of the whistleblower support group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, said he had heard from five scientists and two other officials who had expressed concerns to their superiors about the use of dispersants.”There was one toxicologist who was very concerned about the underwater application particularly,” he said. “The concern was the agency appeared to be flying blind and not consulting its own specialists and even the literature that was available.”
Veterans of the Exxon Valdez spill questioned the wisdom of trying to break up the oil in the deep water at the same time as trying to skim it on the surface. Other EPA experts raised alarm about the effect of dispersants on seafood.
Ruch said EPA experts were being excluded from decision-making on the spill. “Other than a few people in the united command, there is no involvement from the rest of the agency,” he said. EPA scientists would not go public for fear of retaliation, he added.
Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat who introduced a ban on dispersants pending further testing in an oil spill bill passed by the House of Representatives last week, said the EPA had failed in its duty to protect the environment.
“We are undertaking a huge uncontrolled experiment with the entire Gulf,” he said. “They have fallen down on the job very substantially because they allowed BP to use dispersants. Even when they told BP not to use dispersants they allowed BP to ignore their advice.”
Independent scientists also criticized the EPA for claiming that the combination of oil and dispersants posed no greater danger to marine life on its own.
On Wednesday, a toxicologist from Texas Tech University is scheduled to tell a Senate hearing that the unprecedented use of dispersants “created an eco-toxicological experiment”.
“The bottom line is that a lot of oil is still at sea dispersed in the water column,” said Ron Kendall. “It’s a big ecological question as to how this will ultimately unfold.” Previous studies, including a 400-page study by the National Academy of Sciences, have warned that the combination of oil and dispersants is more toxic than oil on its own, because the chemicals break down cell walls, making organisms more susceptible to oil.
The EPA issued a report on Monday, based on a study of how much of the mixture was needed to kill a species of shrimp and small fish, just two of the 15,000 types of marine life in the Gulf. The EPA test did not address medium- or long-term effects, or reports last week that dispersants were discovered in the larvae of blue crab, entering the food chain.
“It was only one test and it was very crude. We knew going into this and the EPA knew that this mixture is highly toxic to many, many species. There is a whole weight of literature,” said Susan Shaw, the director of the Marine Environmental Research Institute, who has been organizing on the issue. “It is not the whole science. It’s the convenient science.”
Hugh Kaufman, a senior EPA policy analyst, dismissed the tests as little more than a PR stunt. “They are trying to spin this limited piece of information to make it look like dispersants are safe and that the Corexit dispersant is safe.”
EPA did not immediately respond to requests for comment. It is under fire from Congress for allowing BP and the coast guard to ignore its order last May to cut the use of dispersants by 75%. Documents released by the Massachusetts Democrat Ed Markey this week show the EPA allowed spraying of dispersants 74 times over a period of 48 days. At times, the EPA gave advance approval for the use of dispersants for up to a week. The documents also showed the EPA allowed BP to spray 36,000 gallons of Corexit in a single day. The controversy surrounding EPA’s role in the oil spill marks a turning point for the Obama administration, which came to power vowing to repair the frayed relationship between scientists and government under George Bush and promising a new era of transparency.
Nine leading scientists have written a public letter calling on BP and the Obama administration to release all scientific data related to the spill, including wildlife death. “Just as the unprecedented use of dispersants has served to sweep millions of gallons of oil under the rug, we’re concerned the public may not get to see critical scientific data until BP has long since declared its responsibility over,” said Bruce Stein of the National Wildlife Federation.
Legal Petition Demands FDA Move beyond Sensory Test to Look at Chemicals
Washington, DC — The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) should test seafood from affected Gulf of Mexico areas for chemicals found in dispersant agents deployed in unprecedented volumes on the BP spill, according to a legal petition filed today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). No federal agency is currently screening seafood for signs of dispersant contamination in tissue, despite mounting concern about the toxicity of these agents and the effects they may have on the Gulf food chain.
In the weeks following the massive Deepwater Horizon oil blowout, the Obama administration approved application of nearly 2 million gallons of chemical oil dispersants to break up oil slicks. In addition to surface spraying, what has been termed a “giant experiment” took place when approximately 763,000 gallons of dispersant were injected a mile underwater at the source of the spill, a technique that has never been used before. At those depths, it is not known how long it will take the dispersants to dissolve. Alarmingly, there is growing evidence that a suspended oil and dispersant mixture is contaminating an estimated 44,000 square miles of ocean and entering the aquatic food chain.
FDA and other federal agencies have made repeated public statements that Gulf seafood is safe while conceding that there is no current testing for the presence of dispersant chemicals and that there is little scientific certainty about the full effects of dispersants on seafood, and in turn, humans.
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The Health Risks of Corexit, the BP Oil Disaster Dispersant
MSNBC video: Nice Going BP! Your Cheap "Sweetheart Deal" Dispersant Corexit Is Making a LOT of people sick. (and I hope they sue your ass off.) The EPA is NOT doing its job in allowing the use of Corexit!
James Carville, rightfully has slammed President Obama for his ‘lackadaisical’ response the the endless catastrophic oil spill that continues day after day, with no ‘answers in sight.’
Good for you James, because I think that is exactly what most Americans are feeling too. How long is this going to allowed to go on, before President Obama plays some hardball with BP? Why hasn’t President Obama instructed the EPA to cancel all contracts with BP, until further notice, and until these ‘ecological terrorists’ pull in their Super Tankers that are simply sitting in there, doing absolutely nothing to come in and clean up this mess?
How long is this going to be allowed to continue? Where in f**k is Obama’s MOP? Did he forget he told the rest of us to pick one up, or does he own one himself?
Carville, the famously outspoken Louisianian who was a chief political aide to Bill and Hillary Clinton, told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Thursday that the administration’s response to the spill has been “lackadaisical” and that Obama was “naive” to trust BP to manage the massive clean-up effort.
“I think they actually believe that BP has some kind of a good motivation here,” he said. “They’re naive! BP is trying to save money, save everything they can… They won’t tell us anything, and oddly enough, the government seems to be going along with it! Somebody has got to, like shake them and say, ‘These people don’t wish you well! They’re going to take you down!’”
Carville also accused the White House of going along with what he called the “let BP handle it” strategy. ”I’m as good a Democrat as most people, and I think this administration has done some good things. They are risking everything by this ‘go along with BP’ strategy they have that seems like, lackadaisical on this, and Doug is right, they seem like they’re inconvenienced by this, this is some giant thing getting in their way and somehow or another, if you let BP handle it, it’ll all go away. It’s not going away. It’s growing out there. It is a disaster of the first magnitude, and they’ve got to go to Plan B.”
Yes, great idea, let’s just let BP handle it, they are now using the ‘Gulf as an experiment by throwing in deadly chemicals’ that may end up killing the entire sea life, birds, fishing industry, human beings, and tourism for decades to come.
How many f**king chances does BP get before President Obama and the EPA ‘get the message’ that these people do not give a rat’s ass as to what they are doing? And it is not like, President Obama does not have the power to demand all cancellation of BP’s contracts until they pull in those Super Tankers (which is exactly what the Saudi’s did in 1993-94 to clean up a similar spill). Why isn’t that technique being employed? Was wasn’t it being employed two weeks ago? Why are ‘deadly untried chemicals being used instead of ecological friendly solutions that have worked in the past, not being used?’ DUH….
Federal law allows agencies to suspend or bar from government contracts companies that engage in fraudulent, reckless or criminal conduct. The sanctions can be applied to a single facility or an entire corporation. Government agencies have the power to forbid a company to collect any benefit from the federal government in the forms of contracts, land leases, drilling rights, or loans. The most serious, sweeping kind of suspension is called “discretionary debarment” and it is applied to an entire company. If this were imposed on BP, it would cancel not only the company’s contracts to sell fuel to the military but prohibit BP from leasing or renewing drilling leases on federal land. In the worst cast, it could also lead to the cancellation of BP’s existing federal leases, worth billions of dollars.
Over the past 10 years, BP has paid tens of millions of dollars in fines and been implicated in four separate instances of criminal misconduct that could have prompted this far more serious action. Until now, the company’s executives and their lawyers have fended off such a penalty by promising that BP would change its ways. That strategy may no longer work. In the past decade environmental accidents at BP facilities have killed at least 26 workers, led to the largest oil spill on Alaska’s North Slope and now sullied some of the country’s best coastal habitat, along with fishing and tourism economies along the Gulf. Meunier said that when a business with a record of problems like BP’s has to justify its actions and corporate management decisions to the EPA “it’s going to get very dicey for the company.” ”How many times can a debarring official grant a resolution to an agreement if it looks like no matter how many times they agree to fix something it keeps manifesting itself as a problem?” he said.
Days ago, in an unannounced move, the EPA suspended negotiations with the petroleum giant over whether it would be barred from federal contracts because of the environmental crimes it committed before the spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Officials said they are putting the talks on hold until they learn more about the British company’s responsibility for the plume of oil that is spreading across the Gulf. The EPA said in a statement that, according to its regulations, it can consider banning BP from future contracts after weighing “the frequency and pattern of the incidents, corporate attitude both before and after the incidents, changes in policies, procedures, and practices.”
So the EPA are ‘putting the talks on hold’…..well, ain’t that peculiar? Wouldn’t have anything to do with the fact that BP is the largest supplier to our Military would it? Wouldn’t have anything to do with the fact that the EPA ‘regulators’ are just as much in bed with the Oil industry as the Wall Street ‘regulators’ are in bed with Wall Street?
As I stated earlier, the ‘chemicals that are now being used in the Gulf’ are deadly, and untried chemicals that may have consequences that could kill the entire Gulf region and the sea and wild life, that so many revere and depend on for their economy.
No one dares asked the obvious question, that I believe many of us are thinking. Is BP purposely destroying the Gulf? Yes, I know I am speculating, but that still does not answer the other vital questions, such as why BP has not brought in their Super Tankers, that have been used throughout history to clean up other similar oil spills, and are now using ‘toxic chemicals’ that may kill humans, wild life, the fishing industry, and thereby leaving the Gulf, only good for one thing:
THE DRILLING OF MORE OIL IN PERPETUITY. God forbid we should question or state the obvious that is staring us right in the face.
Oh No, BP wouldn’t do that…..they ‘love America’ and they are really working hard to solve the problem. Oh No…..Obama is just ‘giving them a chance to clean in up’…Oh No….James Carville is not a ‘real Democrat’ and is just a ‘Clinton Person’….Oh No, the EPA is just ‘waiting’ to put their ‘Contracts on Hold’ until BP can prove that they really are ‘honest businessmen’ who just had ‘another accident’…..
God………………..wake up people…and smell the f**king chemicals and coffee and see what is happening here.
British Petroleum (BP) has even refused to use their own oil tankers, lying in the Gulf, to suck up most of the runaway oil, and possibly salvage it for sale later, as was done after a Saudi spill in the ’90′s. That method was so successful, it vacuumed up about 85 percent of that renegade oil. Nick Pozzi, a former oil pipeline engineering and operations project manager is puzzled why BP did not salvage perfectly good crude oil for later sale, and to thereby protect marine and wildlife. What Mr. Pozzi does not know is the oil companies are owned by the world’s only legal counterfeiters the International Monetary/Banking Cartel – who can “print” all the money they want, so making money on Gulf oil was not important to them. Killing the Gulf of Mexico is, apparently, important to them, for their own cryptic and esoteric reasons.
If the Cartel had wanted to save marine life, any oil they had not vacuumed up could have been mulched with any number of non-toxic materials, such as “Oil Sponge,” a name trademarked by Phase III, Inc. Rated as the “best performing” absorbent by the US Army Corp of Engineers, Oil Sponge is 100% organic, and is made from renewable resources. Oil Sponge is built using a microbial and nutrient package, capable of transforming oil hydrocarbons into a safe bi-product of carbon dioxide and water. But, the governmental bureaucrats of the Obama administration, and the Cartel’s oil executives, had no interest in using an environmentally friendly product to clean up what is the greatest man-made environmental disaster of all time they seemed intent on making this unbelievable cataclysm far, far worse, and one that could never be cleaned up. It cannot yet be proven that the Monetary Cartel purposely blew up their own wellhead, but the crimes they have committed in their so-called “clean-up” efforts are well documented, in spite of no corporate media outrage. After the Exxon Valdez incident of March 1989, Mycelx of Georgia developed what looks like a paper towel to soak up to 50 times its weight in oil. And while this product is used from the Middle East to Europe to Canada it was of no interest to the parties Obama charged with cleaning up the Gulf of the floating oil those very same parties caused. Then there is the Aerohaz product manufactured by Sustainable Technologies, Inc. that encapsulates environmental contaminants, making crude oil and other oil like substances easy to retrieve.
Instead of using safe, non-toxic ways to gather up the rogue oil gushing from their incompetence, or planned cataclysm, the private Cartel is using an extremely toxic chemical dispersant, with the approval of the Obama administration. Alan Levine, the head of Louisiana’s Department of Health and Hospitals, said: “We don’t have any data or evidence behind the use of these chemicals in the water. We’re now basically using one of the richest ecosystems in the world as a laboratory.” As reported in Britain’s Telegraph, Louisiana state Secretary of the Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, Robert Barham reported: “We’re very disappointed in their [EPA and oil company executives] approach. The federal procedures call for a consensus between federal authorities, the responsible party and the states involved. When we met and expressed our concerns [over the use of dispersants], apparently they decided to go without us.” And go they did. Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency allowed BP to turn our Gulf of Mexico into a toxic testing ground, instead of removing the crude oil.
So BP is being allowed to use unknown chemicals in one of the richest ecosystems in the world as a laboratory, instead of using tried and true other methods, including pulling in their own Super Tankers to suck up and save some of that oil, which should have occurred in week one of this on going event. Where are the Super Oil Tankers? Nowhere to be found.
Strange that ‘Our really ‘best friends, the Saudi Royal Family’ knew exactly what to do in this same situation, which BP is not only ignoring, but so is out MSM, and the EPA, and President Obama:
JON KING: Well, we went down to the BP headquarters in Houma, Louisiana, and we didn’t have an appointment so they wouldn’t let us in. Then I called the president of BP and I talked to his secretary and she put me in touch with somebody, but the somebody she put me in touch with didn’t know who we should talk to. Nick contacted a gentleman that he used to work with at BP, and he threatened to sue Nick for not going through channels. And I said, “Great. I’d love BP to sue us for trying to help them. That would be wonderful.”
NICK POZZI: Keep in mind that what supertankers typically do is they sit in the middle of the ocean waiting for all the traders to come up with the right price. When they feel that the price is right, the tankers that are full, they take off, and they can be anywhere in the world in a few days. Right now there are probably 25 supertankers, waiting for orders, full of oil. So all they got to do is come to Texas, in the Gulf, unload the oil, and then turn around and suck up all this other stuff and pump it onto shore into on-shore storage. It’s not rocket science. It’s so simple. It’s a Robinson Crusoe fix, but it works. This past Monday, Pozzi and King spoke with Captain Ed Stanton, who is commanding the United States Coast Guard for much of the affected coastline. Stanton requested a quick proposal in writing, and said he would “take it up the chain of command.” Below is the proposal, to which Pozzi and King are still awaiting a response.
Here is the letter, which is ‘public domain’ so the diarist is printing it in total:
Dear Captain Stanton,
Per your request this morning, this is to confirm our conversation with yourself, Mr. Nick Pozzi, and I.
My colleague, Nick Pozzi, has worked for over 40 years in the energy industry the majority with Saudi Aramco in the Middle East. During that time, Nick’s team was part of the first responders that successfully cleaned similar sized spills of sweet and sour crude with the best technology available from the late 1980′s thru the 1990′s when he retired.
The primary equipment that was used to remove the crude from the Arabian Gulf was Super Tankers. The Super Tankers were used to store everything, run thru on-shore three-phase separators and sent to on-shore tank farms for additional clean up using centrifuges. The more the oil spreads the more tankers will be needed. Nick would be willing to provide a conceptual non-technical drawing to visualize this process.
This process not only cleaned up the ocean but it saved the local environment, minimized shoreline damage, and recovered approximately 85% of the crude oil. (Nick may be required to get permission from Saudi Aramco thru the Houston, Texas office in Sugar Land to provide you with any further details as to what information he is allowed to disclose to you regarding the various projects that he worked on.)
Nick does not know what the appropriate channels are to effectuate this process but feels, if asked, the Saudi Government may be willing to assist as he believes, that with the right calls, tankers could be on the scene in 2 days.
Please feel free to call Nick or I, if you need any additional information or have any questions.
Sincerely,
Jon King Nick Pozzi
UPDATED (11:47 A.M.): After our initial conversations earlier this week, John Hofmeister talked about the Saudi spill and potential supertanker fix for the Gulf this morning on the Today show….
Repeat people: These are two guys, Jon King, Nick Pozzi, with 40 years in the business of cleaning up these kinds of catastrophic spills:
if asked, the Saudi Government may be willing to assist as he believes, that with the right calls, tankers could be on the scene in 2 days.
Why the f**k isn’t the EPA, President Obama, or anyone from BP calling these guys, or even bringing in their own Super Tankers?
Why are they being allowed to use one of the most significant and pristine ecological systems using untried and destructive chemicals that appear to be for one reason only:
TO DESTROY THE ENTIRE GULF REGION.
If you have any answers to these questions, I sure would like to hear them, because as far as I’m concerned, I’m with James Carville all the way on this one:
There is absolutely no excuse what so ever for the EPA not to immediately do what they are ‘empowered to do’ based on the record of BP, and based on the fact, that now, BP is out of control and cannot be trusted, and indeed, are using ‘toxic chemicals’ and are not calling in their Super Tankers, and using the other non-toxic methods used in this endless catastrophe.
Again, the EPA has this power:
Federal law allows agencies to suspend or bar from government contracts companies that engage in fraudulent, reckless or criminal conduct. The sanctions can be applied to a single facility or an entire corporation. Government agencies have the power to forbid a company to collect any benefit from the federal government in the forms of contracts, land leases, drilling rights, or loans. The most serious, sweeping kind of suspension is called “discretionary debarment” and it is applied to an entire company. If this were imposed on BP, it would cancel not only the company’s contracts to sell fuel to the military but prohibit BP from leasing or renewing drilling leases on federal land. In the worst cast, it could also lead to the cancellation of BP’s existing federal leases, worth billions of dollars.
Only, spare me the ‘conspiracy theory sh*t’ ok? There are proven other means of dealing with these kinds of problems, and I have noted them in my diary.
Why are these methods, not being used is the subject of this debate.
Thanks.
Comment by Evans Liberal Politics owner Paul Evans: This is a valuable contribution. I do wish Badabing had made up his mind whether BP is itself perpetrating a full blown conspiracy or not. He says “spare me the conspiracy theory” and at the same time accuses or asks the question: did BP do this on purpose? That would constitute a conspiracy I do believe. Nonetheless this is such a strong effort that Evans Liberal Politics just had to put it out there for you!
So far, BP has told federal agencies that it has applied more than 400,000 gallons of a dispersant sold under the trade name Corexit and manufactured by Nalco Co., a company that was once part of Exxon Mobil Corp. and whose current leadership includes executives at both BP and Exxon. And another 805,000 gallons of Corexit are on order, the company said, with the possibility that hundreds of thousands of more gallons may be needed if the well continues spewing oil for weeks or months.
But according to EPA data, Corexit ranks far above dispersants made by competitors in toxicity and far below them in effectiveness in handling southern Louisiana crude.
Of 18 dispersants whose use EPA has approved, 12 were found to be more effective on southern Louisiana crude than Corexit, EPA data show. Two of the 12 were found to be 100 percent effective on Gulf of Mexico crude, while the two Corexit products rated 56 percent and 63 percent effective, respectively. The toxicity of the 12 was shown to be either comparable to the Corexit line or, in some cases, 10 or 20 times less, according to EPA.
BP “shares close ties” with Nalco. A BP board member who served as an executive at the company for 43 years also sits on Nalco’s board, and critics suggest there may be a conflict of interest in BP’s choice of Corexit. “It’s a chemical that the oil industry makes to sell to itself, basically,” said Defenders of Wildlife’s Richard Charter. ….
Louisiana officials have accused BP of turning the Gulf of Mexico into a toxic testing-ground after winning permission for experimental chemical methods of fighting the oil slick.
State officials are angry that federal regulators gave the company permission to try out new chemical techniques to break up and hold back the growing tide of oil.
Despite registering concerns about the potential implications for the environment, marine life and human health, Governor Bobby Jindal’s administration was cut out of deliberations over the use of dispersants that break up the oil, as the Environmental Protection Agency granted BP permission to release large quantities underwater.
“We don’t have any data or evidence behind the use of these chemicals in the water. We’re now basically using one of the richest ecosysystems in the world as a laboratory,” complained Alan Levine, the head of Louisiana’s Department of Health and Hospitals.
Tony Hayward, BP’s chief executive officer, told WAFB Channel 9 news station that the chemical has undergone “lots of testing” and is biodegradable. “We believe it’s a very effective way of containing this spill until such time as we can eliminate the leak,” he added.
But Robert Barham, the state’s Secretary of the Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, stated that it has not been used at such depths before – BP’s leak stems from a pipe one mile below the surface – and that its potential impact and consequences are unknown. This includes how it travels through the water over time.
“We’re very disappointed in their approach,” he said of BP and the EPA. “The federal procedures call for a consensus between federal authorities, the responsible party and the states involved. When we met and expressed our concerns, apparently they decided to go without us.”
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Efforts to minimize the flow of oil from the ruptured well are continuing today. Technicians stationed on ships anchored above the leaking pipeline – which was sheared off when the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded and sank on April 20 – have been attempting to insert a second, smaller pipe into the break to divert the flow to tankers on the surface. Over the coming days, they also plan to perform a “junk shot”, a procedure in which debris including shredded tires and broken golf balls will be fired into the well at high pressure to create a plug.
The oil industry is facing a growing backlash over the crisis, with President Barack Obama publicly criticizing executives on Friday for creating a “ridiculous spectacle” at congressional hearings into the incident. Officials from BP, which leased the rig, Transocean, which owned it, and Halliburton, which was assisting operations to complete the well when tragedy struck, were guilty of “falling over each other to point the finger of blame at somebody else”, he said.
Decrying the “cosy relationship” between the oil industry and the federal body that regulates it, the Minerals Management Service, he vowed changes to a regime under which drilling permits were “too often issued based on little more than assurances of safety from the oil companies.”
Environmentalists accused the president of acknowledging his administration’s errors too late, accusing the Department of the Interior of having turned the Gulf of Mexico into a “sacrifice area” where Big Oil’s profits won priority over marine protection laws.
More than 100 seismic surveys and 300 drilling permits have been issued under Interior Secretary Ken Salazar’s watch without the prior environmental consideration that is required under the Marine Mammal Protection Act and the Endangered Species Act, according to the Centre for Biological Diversity. The legislation protects marine life such as whales and dolphins by making it inherent on oil companies to prove that they have taken measures to minimize the environmental impact of drilling and other activities.
“The Department of the Interior is well aware of its obligations under the law,” said Miyoko, the Centre’s ocean’s director, “as well of the harm to endangered whales that can occur from oil industry operations, yet it has simply decided it cannot be bothered. You or I have to follow the law, but Interior Secretary Salazar seems to think that he and the oil companies he is supposedly overseeing do not.”
Mr Sakashita added: “Under Salazar’s watch, the Department of the Interior has treated the Gulf of mexico as a sacrifice area where laws are ignored and wildlife protection takes a back seat to oil company profits.”
Mr Salazar will appear before a hearing on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, to face his first grilling since the crisis began.
The House Committee on Oversight and Government reform has also announced that it is opening an investigation into potential oversight lapses at the Minerals Management Service.
Meanwhile questions remained as to how much oil is really spilling into the sea, with a number of scientists and expert analysts stating that the official figure of approximately 5,000 barrels a day (210,000 gallons) is a gross underestimate. Some believe that it could be 10 times that figure, though none have been granted access to the site to take official readings and there has been scepticism over BP’s claims not to know.
John Amos of Skytruth, an environmental monitoring group, said: “There are instruments and technologies available to measure this kind of flow on the sea floor.”
He added: “On satellite imagery day in and day out we continue to see an oil slick that’s several thousand square miles in size out there and the good news is that it hasn’t made serious landfall yet. That may be partly down to the response but also down to wind and current conditions. There’s an element of luck in there. But I’m not sure how much longer we can get lucky.”
2 scientists say oil is nearing a far-reaching current
WASHINGTON — Scientists warned yesterday that oil from the spill in the Gulf of Mexico is moving rapidly toward a current that could carry it into the Florida Keys and the Atlantic Ocean, threatening coral reefs and hundreds of miles of additional shoreline.
Government officials insisted that the oil had not yet entered the gulf’s so-called loop current and said they are continuing to monitor the movement of the spill closely. But two independent scientists, analyzing ocean current and satellite data, said the oil is in an eddy that is quickly being drawn into the current, portending a much wider spread of the hazardous slick.
ROBERT, La. – Scientists have found huge plumes of oil lurking under the surface of the water in the Gulf of Mexico, as BP hit a snag in its latest effort to slow down the oil blasting out of a broken undersea pipe.
At least 210,000 gallons of oil a day has gushed into the Gulf of Mexico since an oil rig exploded April 20 and sank two days later. Eleven people were killed in the blast.
BP PLC is trying to use a mile-long pipe to capture the oil flowing into the Gulf, but engineers on Saturday failed to connect two pieces of equipment a mile below the water’s surface. BP PLC chief operating officer Doug Suttles said one piece of equipment, called the framework, had to be brought to the surface and adjusted to fit with the long tube that connects to a tanker above.
In the first progress in containing the oil gushing from a blown-out well at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, BP engineers on Sunday inserted a tube into a leaking pipe and began siphoning some of the oil to a drilling rig at the surface.
The deep-sea plumbing did not do anything to close the well, and a substantial amount of oil continues to leak at the bottom of the gulf, but the day’s efforts were a rare bulletin of good news about 3 1/2 weeks into the crisis.
On Sunday, a four-inch-wide pipe was inserted into the broken section known as the riser, from which the majority of the oil has been leaking. If it works, the inserted pipe could keep a substantial amount of the oil out of the sea by siphoning it up a mile-long pipe to the Discoverer Enterprise drillship and then to nearby barges.
“So far it’s working extremely well,” said Kent Wells, senior vice president for exploration and production at BP.
But the race against time continued. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration warned over the weekend that plumes of oil already spilled and suspended beneath the water surface might, as soon as Tuesday night, start to get picked up by the powerful “loop current.” The current could carry the oil to the Florida Keys and beyond, scientists fear.
Moreover, BP said that to completely stop the oil from flowing into the gulf, it would have to plug the damaged well at the top. The company said it will try to do this in the next 10 days or wait weeks for a relief well to be complete.
Wells called the insertion tube, which functions like a straw, a “positive step forward.” He said the company has been able to flare, or burn, some of the natural gas at the surface, an indication that the insertion pipe is working.
After BP’s CEO Tony Hayward told a British reporter “It’s a relatively small leak compared to the volume of water in the gulf” and “Come on, this is America, there will be frivolous lawsuits.”.
Yeah, cause what’s a few hundred million gallons of oil in the gulf? It’s like saying, “So there is some urine in your tea, it’s still tea! Drink up!
Saturday the White House warned BP that it expects the oil giant to pay all damages associated with the disastrous oil leak into the Gulf of Mexico, even if the costs exceed the $75 million liability cap under federal law. BP responded Sunday saying its public statements are “absolutely consistent” with the Administration’s request.
When you hear dueling public statements like these, watch your wallets. You can safely assume BP’s lawyers are already at work to ensure that the firm pays not a cent more than $75 million — not to taxpayers bearing cleanup costs, not to consumers whose gas bills will rise, not to businesses along the coasts that will lose a fortune. And BP won’t pay more unless or until there’s a law requiring it to.
BP has been making public statements about its supposed corporate social responsibility for as many years as it’s behaved irresponsibly.
As BP believes it has finally made progress plugging the massive oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, it has managed to prevent much of the oil already released from washing onshore by using huge quantities of oil dispersants. BP rounded up a “third of the world’s available supply of dispersants” and has been deploying them aggressively. But Greenwire reports that the chemical BP is using is more toxic and perhaps even less effective than other available dispersents:
So far, BP has told federal agencies that it has applied more than 400,000 gallons of a dispersant sold under the trade name Corexit and manufactured by Nalco Co., a company that was once part of Exxon Mobil Corp. and whose current leadership includes executives at both BP and Exxon. And another 805,000 gallons of Corexit are on order, the company said, with the possibility that hundreds of thousands of more gallons may be needed if the well continues spewing oil for weeks or months.
But according to EPA data, Corexit ranks far above dispersants made by competitors in toxicity and far below them in effectiveness in handling southern Louisiana crude.
Of 18 dispersants whose use EPA has approved, 12 were found to be more effective on southern Louisiana crude than Corexit, EPA data show. Two of the 12 were found to be 100 percent effective on Gulf of Mexico crude, while the two Corexit products rated 56 percent and 63 percent effective, respectively. The toxicity of the 12 was shown to be either comparable to the Corexit line or, in some cases, 10 or 20 times less, according to EPA.
BP “shares close ties” with Nalco. A BP board member who served as an executive at the company for 43 years also sits on Nalco’s board, and critics suggest there may be a conflict of interest in BP’s choice of Corexit. “It’s a chemical that the oil industry makes to sell to itself, basically,” said Defenders of Wildlife’s Richard Charter. ….
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![[A plane releases chemical dispersant over the Gulf oil spill. Photograph: Reuters]](http://www.commondreams.org/files/article_images/A-plane-releases-chemical.jpg "A-plane-releases-chemical.jpg")
