Oil Spill

[Ddrak]

I'm kinda surprised no one else has mentioned this topic, but I think the gulf spill is going to have huge ramifications on future oil prospecting around the world. Assuming they won't be able to stop the flow until August, the environmental damage to the US is going to be massive and BP certainly isn't going to pay for it to be cleaned up. I hardly think "drill baby, drill" will be a winning political call in 2012 either.

Any thoughts?

Dd

[Partha]

As the late great Freddie Mercury said:

"This is what you wanted? This is what you're gonna get!"

They'll still be chanting in 2012, and about 3 in 10 Americans will be happily chanting along with them.

[Kulaf]

BP will pay one way or another. If they refuse to pay directly the government will establish a tax to create a cleanup superfund.

[Harlowe]

Ddrak, I did bring this up (in another thread) as the big oily pink elephant in the room no one is talking about. Instead we're fixated on something as ridiculous as Sestak. It is absolutely worth it's own thread.

I find the whole thing incredibly depressing because you feel helpless watching the live feed, and then hearing about each failure to stop it. It also makes you angry when you hear the BP CEO say things like the spill is "relatively tiny, compared to the very big ocean", apologizing for the spill then saying he'd "like HIS life back". I mean come the fuck on. But the scary part is the looming "what if" hanging out there, as in what if it can't be fixed? Or what if it takes years to? What is going to happen to the Gulf, the marine life, marshes, wildlife, not to mention the economy of the coastal areas. What if it becomes a virtual dead zone?

I found this on Grist and it's exactly what's been going through my head...

The BP Gulf oil disaster is reaching an interesting phase. People's gut instinct, their first reaction, is to find someone to blame. They blame BP for negligence; the Obama administration for its tepid response; the Bush administration for lax regulatory enforcement. People have been casting about for some way to compartmentalize this thing, some way to cast it as an anomaly, an "accident," the kind of screwup that can be meliorated or avoided in the future.

We are, however, drifting toward a whole different kind of place. Tomorrow BP is attempting the "top kill" maneuver -- pumping mud into the well. If it doesn't work, well ... then what? Junk shot? Top hat? Loony stuff like nukes? Relief wells will take months to drill and no one's sure if they'll work to relieve pressure

It's entirely possible, even likely, that we're going to be stuck helplessly watching as this well spews oil into the Gulf for years. Even if the flow were stopped tomorrow, the damage to marshes, coral, and marine life is done. The Gulf of Mexico will become an ecological and economic dead zone. There's no real way to undo it, no matter who's in charge.

I'm curious to see how the public's mood shifts once it becomes clear that we are powerless in the face of this thing. What if there's just nothing we can do? That's not a feeling to which Americans are accustomed.

Once we know that accidents can be catastrophic and irreversible, it becomes clear that there is no margin of error. We're operating a brittle system, unable to contain failure and unable to recover from it. Consider how deepwater drilling will look in that new light.

The thing is, we're already operating in those circumstances in a thousand different ways -- it's just that the risks and the damages tend to be distributed and obscured from view. They're not thrust in our face like they are in the Gulf. We don't get back the land we destroy by mining. We don't get back the species lost from deforestation and development. We don't get back islands lost to rising seas. We don't get back the coral lost to bleaching or the marine food chains lost to nitrogen runoff. Once we lose the climatic conditions in which our species evolved, we won't get them back either.

We're doing damage as big as the Gulf oil spill every day, and there's no fixing it. Humanity has grown in power, wealth, and appetite to the point that there is no more margin of error anywhere. We're on a knife's edge, facing the very real possibility that for our children, all the world may be one big Gulf of Mexico, inexorably and irreversibly deteriorating.

Perhaps if the public gets a clear taste of this, they'll step back and contemplate whether the kind of energy we use is really as "cheap" as it looks. Maybe they'll stop thinking about how to drill better and start thinking about how to avoid drilling altogether. Because some mistakes just can't be undone.

[Fallakin Kuvari]

Its not like it hasn't happened before.

[Embar Angylwrath]

This may give you some comfort Harlowe...

http://envirowonk.com/content/view/68/1/

The areas the two biggest spills (ocean spills) occured in are incredibly environmentally sensitive, the Persian Gulf and the Caribbean Sea. The areas (most ofthe areas) are recovered. Some, especially marshes, have a ways to go. But they are recovering.

Still there is a lot of unknowns about this particular spill. Its in such deep water, and dispersants applied there have their own set of issues, that no one can know for sure if this spill is going to just terribly bad, or environmentally cataclysmic. I do think the author of your quoted portion of your post is a little over the top though. Especially when he turns his talk of the spill to an admonishment on energy consumption, which I think is his/her real thrust.

Regardless, deepwater off-shore drilling is now a dead issue for America for some time to come. And probably all off-shore drilling for that matter. I know many of you complain about the 24/7 news cycle, but I think we'd all agree that it seems to be a good thing right now.

[Ddrak]

I think people saying that "this has all happened before" are pretty misguided. This hasn't happened before. Not in a deep water well that is proving basically impossible to shut off in any short time period. The scary part isn't the oil on the water, it's the underwater plumes that can't be measured. From my severely uneducated point of view, there's a lot of noise about BP's flow estimates being on the woefully slow side and those seem to have a decent amount of credibility behind them.

This really has the potential to destroy not only the environment but whole sections of the gulf economy and BP sure as hell isn't going to pay up for that without a long and protracted battle that will eventually cross national boundaries (they are a UK based company, remember). It has an even bigger effect of driving the long-term price of oil up as it not only becomes more difficult to get drilling permits but the US will back off any sort of drilling in sensitive areas for a long while to come.

It's over the top to say that the relief wells won't work and "oil will spill for years". The relief wells will reduce the pressure to the point that the currently failing methods will work. What is an issue is the effects of the oil and deep water dispersants are completely unknown and modelling is not really that reliable (yet). I don't think you can draw serious parallels between shallow water spills and this one.

Dd

[Embar Angylwrath]

The effect of that much oil that deep, coupled with dispersants, is indeed the unknown. Both the other spills were, as you said, shallow water spills. Most of the oil in those spills stayed on or near the surface until they made landfall, evaporated, biodegraded or formed other compounds (like the tar).

There are so many unknowns at this point. Not the least is the ecology of the mid- to deep water column. Current thinking is that most of the biological activity in an oceanic water column happens in the upper part of the water column, the part that has access to solar light. That's where all the primary production occurs (phytoplankton). So large plumes beneath this zone may not be as bad plumes in that zone. Or they may be worse, for reasons we don't understand. The Gulf is a huge body of water, its over 600 quadrillion gallons. Dispersing that oil more evenly in the water column rather than having it set on top of the water surface, may (or may not) be better for the overall health of the Gulf, at least as it relates to the biozones. I can say this with relative certainty... food in the water column generally moves down. That is, once it escapes the phototropic zones, it becomes less and less likely that the energy in that food web makes it back up to the surface. essentially, what doesn't make it out of the ocean in a bird's stomach or fisherman's net, ends up on the bottom of the ocean eventually. (with the obvious exception of anadromous fish which fertilize a lot of riparian habitat when they migrate up fresh water streams to spawn).

My personal opinion, and it may turn out to be wrong, is that oil that remains below 1000 feet or so will have little observable impact on the phototropic zones, where most of the fishing, oysters, shrimping etc, takes place. Conversely, I think that plumes that extend within the 1000 foot level to the surface are more damaging than having that oil sit on the surface and wash ashore. As much as I'm horrifed by this spill, the scientist in me sees an incredible opportunity to understand the food web dynamics within pelagic and benthic models, and how they relate to estuarine and shallow water food web dynamics.

[Torakus]

I think people saying that "this has all happened before" are pretty misguided. This hasn't happened before. Not in a deep water well that is proving basically impossible to shut off in any short time period. The scary part isn't the oil on the water, it's the underwater plumes that can't be measured. From my severely uneducated point of view, there's a lot of noise about BP's flow estimates being on the woefully slow side and those seem to have a decent amount of credibility behind them.

This really has the potential to destroy not only the environment but whole sections of the gulf economy and BP sure as hell isn't going to pay up for that without a long and protracted battle that will eventually cross national boundaries (they are a UK based company, remember). It has an even bigger effect of driving the long-term price of oil up as it not only becomes more difficult to get drilling permits but the US will back off any sort of drilling in sensitive areas for a long while to come.

It's over the top to say that the relief wells won't work and "oil will spill for years". The relief wells will reduce the pressure to the point that the currently failing methods will work. What is an issue is the effects of the oil and deep water dispersants are completely unknown and modelling is not really that reliable (yet). I don't think you can draw serious parallels between shallow water spills and this one.

Dd

I disagree. Go back and watch that Rachel Maddow clip. From the cause, the operator, the failed solutions and the unmeasurable plumes, this has happened before (Ixtoc). In this case the location in the Gulf itself, and the resulting temperature difference, will have more impact on the ultimate damage to the environment and rate of recovery, than the depth of the discharge.

I agree that the effects of releasing dispersants in deep water are unknown. And I find it extremely scary that the manufacturers are allowed to keep the actual chemistry of the dispersant from public disclosure as proprietary information. I sure hope that EPA directs renewed EAs and EISs for the use of chemical dispersant after this is all over.

Tora

[Embar Angylwrath]

I disagree Tora.

One can't compartmentalize a dynamic system like the Gulf to just two parameters... depth and temperature. In a water system like the Gulf there are many inter-related and complex relationships. Some that come to mind which might have an effect on oil dispersion, or are affceted by the dispersion of the flow are: variations in temperature throughout the water column, surface evaporation, effects of salinity on oil chemistry, seabed morphology, currents, life cycles of life forms, tidal influence, avian migration patterns and their effect on remote ecosystems, fish and mammalian migration patterns and their effect on remote ecosystems, estuarine ecology, primary production impedement, aerobic bacterial activity, anerobic bacterial activity... the list goes on and on.

I will say this... the closer this spill goes to affecting primary and secondary food-web production, the larger the biological effect. the closer one gets to sustained interruption of primary producers in the food web, the worse it will be up the web. Affect habitat and reproductive ability of those organsims at the base of the web, the worse it will be at the center.

And humans are at the center. We harvest from all points in the web, from algal and krill, to mid point like shrimp, squid and oysters, to apex predators like tuna and sharks. We have no idea what this will do to the food web. But we are certainly going to find out.

[Ddrak]

Go back and watch that Rachel Maddow clip.

I did. Perhaps you didn't?

Ixtoc was in 200 feet of water. Deepwater Horizon is in 5000 feet of water.
Ixtoc was much further from the coast and nowhere near a river delta.
Ixtoc released 3 million barrels in 9 months. Deepwater Horizon has already released about that much if you take the mean of the estimates so far, and has at least as much as that to go before relief wells make a difference.
Ixtoc's spill covered 1100 square miles. Deepwater Horizon is already between 2500 and 9000 square miles.
Ixtoc released oil mostly northward away from the nearby shore and spread it widely over Texas. Deepwater Horizon is also travelling northward directly into the coastline.

Maddow is a worthless hack trying to make a story of bullshit. Anyone capable of even minor research can show significant differences between the spills that show Deepwater Horizon a much more problematic spill than Ixtoc ever was.

Dd

[Lurker]

Maddow is a worthless hack trying to make a story of bullshit. Anyone capable of even minor research can show significant differences between the spills that show Deepwater Horizon a much more problematic spill than Ixtoc ever was.

Not sure why you are attacking Maddow. That segment was excellent and her point wasn't that the 1979 spill was worse. Her point was that a similar leak happened in 1979 (and other than the depth the leak is similar) and the same methods were used to try to stop it.

The only method that worked then and will work now is a relief well. And that's why other countries mandate relief wells at the time of original construction of the main well. That we learned nothing in 30 years, while other countries clearly did, is unforgivable and it needs to change.

[Ddrak]

Not sure why you are attacking Maddow. That segment was excellent and her point wasn't that the 1979 spill was worse. Her point was that a similar leak happened in 1979 (and other than the depth the leak is similar) and the same methods were used to try to stop it.

The only method that worked then and will work now is a relief well. And that's why other countries mandate relief wells at the time of original construction of the main well. That we learned nothing in 30 years, while other countries clearly did, is unforgivable and it needs to change.

She irritates me, especially when she screws up one side of her face and makes it look like she's having a stroke.

I disagree on the worth of the segment. The similarities of the leak are pretty superficial and the depth and position in the Gulf make a massive difference to the impact. Maddow's point that "this has all happened before" wasn't really accurate at all in my opinion and makes people complacent in the fact that Ixtoc wasn't really that big in terms of an ecological mess, unlike DWH which is looking more and more to be a god-awful mess that is going to eclipse Exxon-Valdez very quickly. It's big enough that it could literally destroy BP if the US government wanted to (though the economic implications of that are pretty severe).

It's like the Iranians nuking Tel Aviv and saying "it's all happened before, look at Hiroshima".

Dd

[Fallakin Kuvari]

She laid out a good example of them trying all the same stuff to stop the leak at Ixtoc that didn't work in 200 feet of water. If it didn't work in 200 feet of water, they expect it to work in 5000 feet why?

[Embar Angylwrath]

She laid out a good example of them trying all the same stuff to stop the leak at Ixtoc that didn't work in 200 feet of water. If it didn't work in 200 feet of water, they expect it to work in 5000 feet why?

That's a misconstruence Fall. They don't know if it will work or not, but given no other alternative, they have to try something. Would you rather BP toss up its hands and say "Sorry, what we want to try didnt work in Ixtoc, so no bother trying it here. We're just going to let the baby belch oil until until she stops"?

Now, with that out of the way, you're also forgetting there's been a sizable time lapse between Ixtoc and DWH. Namely, advances in deep water ROVs. In 200 feet of water, you can use divers, who have their own limitations. ROVs can stay on the job 24/7. There have also been incredible advances in computing power, and engineering (hence the fact BP is even able to drill at that depth... years ago it was almst impossible to do it)

Now, I'm not sure Dd is right either. He's making a prediction about how this spill is worse than Ixtoc. But no one can make that kind of blanket statement because we've never experienced an oil spill like this, with so much oil so deep in the water column. There just isn't a model that can predict what's going to happen, because the Gulf is a very dyanmic water system. And I bet there's only a few people on the face of the earth that have done serious research in this area. If they have, they are remaining remarkably silent right now.

Oil is an issue only when it enters the bioactive part of the ecosystem (it was fine when it was under ground, right?). Much of the ocean is a relative desert when it comes to life. Most oceanic life (90% or greater) is concentrated in the photic zone (the part of the ocean that receives visible sunlight), with a much smaller amount on the ocean floor around thermal vents. The photic zone is dependent on water turbidity, and can range from just a few feet to about 600 feet. As I stated in a previous post, disruption of the primary producers (phytoplankton) and and food animals (zooplankton, small fish, crustaceans, bivalves) will have the most damaging effect on the food web. If they collapse, the entire web collapses. Upper predators (shark, tuna, marlin, grouper, barracuda, pinnipeds, all cetaceans and all seabirds) will see their populations crash. So keeping the oil out of the photic zone should reduce the damage on 90% of the ecosystem, right?

But...

There are many marine animals that commute between the photic zone and benthic regions. Squid are a good example. Many species of squid retreat to deep water during the day, beneath the photic zone, and rise at night to feed. (And be fed upon). If they move through a submerged and dispersed oil plume, will they die? Or if they don't die, will the marine creatures that feed on them die? That's a big unknown. and the effects are unknown as well.

In a former life I studied marine biology. I've been out of that for a long time. But from what I understand about marine food-web dynamics, the effects of the spill will be reduced in proportion to the amount of oil that stays out of the photic zone.

Also... the richness of life on the Gulf coast may be it's blessing in disguise. The vast surface area of a delta ecosystem means the amount of oil can be spread out. Its not like the Valdez, with oil washing up on rocks. This is oil washing up on plant stems, fine grains of sand, etc. When the news reports say that oil is washnig up on 150 miles of coastline, they mean 150 miles of coastline "as the crow flies". But its really washing up on hundreds of thousands of miles of surface area, which is exactly what will help biodegrade this spill. Marshland and estuarine ecology are about the most energetic systems in the world, especially if the ecology gets a boost from atmospheric temperature.

If those dispersants help slow the oil's migration to the surface, I think they will help the overall situation. Even though they may create apoxic zones (which only last until the current moves that water out of the area, and the Gulf has a pretty good current moving through it), its still better than it hittng the photic zone. The longer those plumes stay in the aphotic zone, the better.

[Lurker]

They don't know if it will work or not, but given no other alternative, they have to try something. Would you rather BP toss up its hands and say "Sorry, what we want to try didnt work in Ixtoc, so no bother trying it here. We're just going to let the baby belch oil until until she stops"?

As I said here, the point of the segment was that we learned nothing in 30 years. We could have adopted some common sense regulations that would have prevented a repeat of this type of leak, things that other countries mandate but we don't because our regulatory agency was too compromised and tied to industry. We need to learn that lesson this time.

[Fallakin Kuvari]

She laid out a good example of them trying all the same stuff to stop the leak at Ixtoc that didn't work in 200 feet of water. If it didn't work in 200 feet of water, they expect it to work in 5000 feet why?

That's a misconstruence Fall. They don't know if it will work or not, but given no other alternative, they have to try something. Would you rather BP toss up its hands and say "Sorry, what we want to try didnt work in Ixtoc, so no bother trying it here. We're just going to let the baby belch oil until until she stops"?

I would rather them have paid attention to the warning signs or drilled a relief well when they were drilling the main well. If we're gonna do this exploratory drilling, we should at least do it right.

Didn't Saddam cause massive Oil spills in the First Gulf War that spread into the Persian Gulf (something like 462 Million gallons)?

[Embar Angylwrath]

Iraqi forces did cause a massive spill, but it was all surface spill. They just opened up the taps on the wells and walked away. And I'm sure we all wish things were done differently BEFORE the spill. And maybe we'll do things differently in the future, like as Lurker has suggested, drill relief wells before you start pumping, or some other precaution. I'm pretty sure that they'll be those types of reforms... if we ever allow deep water drilling again off our coasts.

What I'm hoping will come from this is push towards alternative energy. We need to wean ourselves from oil. Once we're energy independent, we won't give a rat's ass about the mideast, and they can go back to killing one another like they've been doing for the past 4000 years. It will probably become China's problem, or Russia's, whose growing oil needs may eclipse our own. But at least we'd be out of it.

[Ddrak]

She laid out a good example of them trying all the same stuff to stop the leak at Ixtoc that didn't work in 200 feet of water. If it didn't work in 200 feet of water, they expect it to work in 5000 feet why?

Because it did? They got the cap on and are slowly ramping it up to capture most of it. I'm pretty happy about that news.

In any case you have to try. You start the relief well and then try anything and everything you can to stem the leak before the relief well actually fixes the problem properly.

Now, I'm not sure Dd is right either. He's making a prediction about how this spill is worse than Ixtoc. But no one can make that kind of blanket statement because we've never experienced an oil spill like this, with so much oil so deep in the water column.

Fair comment. I'm just going on reports of the effects spill so far. Ixtoc actually didn't cause that much damage (mainly because currents washed the bulk of the oil north to the US instead of south to the local shore), so I'd say it's not really a big gamble to say DWH is much more serious.

What I'm hoping will come from this is push towards alternative energy. We need to wean ourselves from oil. Once we're energy independent, we won't give a rat's ass about the mideast, and they can go back to killing one another like they've been doing for the past 4000 years. It will probably become China's problem, or Russia's, whose growing oil needs may eclipse our own. But at least we'd be out of it.

I'd kinda hope that if any nation develops an economically rational alternative energy source (say, fusion) they'd be sharing it. Not sharing something as critical as that makes for wars.

As soon as the mideast isn't economically interesting, they'll likely stop fighting as they'll lose the influx of cash and petty dictators driven by that cash.

Dd

[Fallakin Kuvari]

She laid out a good example of them trying all the same stuff to stop the leak at Ixtoc that didn't work in 200 feet of water. If it didn't work in 200 feet of water, they expect it to work in 5000 feet why?

Because it did? They got the cap on and are slowly ramping it up to capture most of it. I'm pretty happy about that news.

In any case you have to try. You start the relief well and then try anything and everything you can to stem the leak before the relief well actually fixes the problem properly.

I believe the thing they did that actually worked was modified version of something they had already tried and they were lucky enough to get it to work.

I'm pretty happy they got the leak slowed/stopped as well, I just don't think its going to have as major an effect on the environment as everyone else does (except for the marshes, those are going to be messed up likely for decades).