Mother Jones: Dispersants’ Toxic Legacy
– By Kate Sheppard
| Fri Nov. 12, 2010 3:00 AM PST
In the weeks after BP’s massive oil spill in the Gulf, a number of environmental groups and scientists began raising concerns about the huge volume of chemical dispersants the company was spreading in the water. These chemicals are used to break the oil into smaller globs, which causes them to sink and supposedly biodegrade faster.
The BP disaster shed light on how little oversight there is of these chemicals, and how little is known about their long-term impacts. The Environmental Protection Agency pledged to investigate, and released its own studies in June and July that found that the dispersants were no more toxic than the oil. (By the time EPA weighed in, 1.84 million gallons of Corexit, BP’s dispersant of choice, had already been dumped in the Gulf.)
Now Peter Hodson, an aquatic toxicologist from Queen’s University in Ontario, says that the EPA’s conclusions might not be exactly true; the dispersed oil does have a more toxic effect, since toxic components like polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) are spread around more widely in the water. Nature reports on his presentation at a Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry in Portland, Oregon earlier this week:
The problem, explains Hodson, is that the dispersed cloud of microscopic oil droplets allows the PAHs to contaminate a volume of water 100-1,000 times greater than if the oil were confined to a floating surface slick. This hugely increases the exposure of wildlife to the dispersed oil. “EPA was presenting only part of the risk equation,” he told the meeting. “They’re trying to sugar-coat the message. In trying to understand the risks of dispersed oil, we need to understand exposure.”
Hodson’s research suggests that fish embryos, still in their eggs, are extremely sensitive to dispersed oil. “Exposures as brief as an hour can have a negative effect on embryonic fish,” he says. That, combined with the fact that for any some species, large numbers of fish can spawn at about the same time of year, means that an entire hatch could be decimated by a plume of contaminated water: “You could have a very large portion of the fish stock affected.”
Hodson also noted that, even when dispersed, the oil takes weeks to break down. Another panelist remarked that the toxic components of the oil can also last longer than the non-toxic components, further complicating the impacts. I think it’s safe to say that the full environmental impact of both the spill and the chemicals used to disperse it will take some time to fully understand.
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and back in October:
Mother Jones
Dispersant Maker Ups Lobbying Spending
– By Kate Sheppard
| Thu Oct. 28, 2010 2:00 AM PDT
One thing BP’s oil spill laid bare both how little data the government has on dispersants, which were used in unprecedented volumes in the Gulf, how poorly regulated these chemicals are. Since the disaster, several bills have been floated to tighten rules on the use of the chemicals, and the Environmental Protection Agency has signaled that it plans to take a closer look at how dispersants would be used in future spills. It’s probably little surprise, then, that the company that manufactured BP’s brand of choice, Corexit, has been beefing up its lobbying presence in Washington.
Nalco, the Illinois-based chemical company that produces Corexit, spent $90,000 on federal lobbying in the third quarter of 2010, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, bring its 2010 total so far up to $350,000. That brings the company’s total since the BP spill to $290,000-far more than the company has spent in the past decade. Nalco’s 2009 lobbying tab was just $90,000. The company spent no money on lobbying in 2008.
Of course, there’s more attention being paid this year to the dispersant products Nalco sells. A draft report from the National Oil Spill Commission found that the government’s lack of planning for dispersant use “handicapped” the response effort. I recently wrote about the much-needed overhaul of chemical policy, and both EPA and Congress have signaled that policy changes are coming. There have been multiple lawsuits over dispersants, most recently one from shrimpers and environmental groups calling for the EPA to stop further use of the chemicals until evaluation is completed.
The government’s lax oversight of dispersants facilitated BP’s unprecedented use of the chemicals in the Gulf. Over the course of the spill, 1.84 million gallons of Corexit was sprayed on the surface and injected at the spill site-despite the fact that the short-and long-term effects of the chemicals are poorly understood.
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http://motherjones.com/environment/2010/09/bp-ocean-dispersant-corexit
Mother Jones
BP’s Bad Breakup:
How Toxic Is Corexit?
Why BP doesn’t have to tell the EPA-or the public-what’s in its dispersants.
– By Kate Sheppard
September/October 2010 Issue
WHEN THE DEEPWATER Horizon rig exploded, BP was presented with a stark choice: Let the oil float to the surface, reach the shore, and allow the world to see the full scope of the damage; or hit as much of the oil as possible with toxic substances called dispersants to break it up into trillions of tiny droplets, keeping some of it from reaching the surface and making landfall-but also potentially killing more sea life than the oil might have destroyed by itself. The company chose the latter. By late July, it had applied a record 1.8 million gallons of dispersants, spraying them on the sea’s surface and injecting them directly at the well site, a technique never tried before.
Why, you might ask, was BP able to pump the Gulf full of chemicals that have never been tested for their human and environmental safety? The answer lies, in part, in the Toxic Substances Control Act, the 34-year-old law that governs the use of tens of thousands of hazardous chemicals. Under the act, companies don’t have to prove that substances they release into the air or water are safe-or in most cases even reveal what’s in their products.
In the case of dispersants, companies must ask the EPA for permission to use specific products-but the only basis for approval is whether those products are effective at breaking up oil. Companies are required to test the short-term toxicity of the dispersant and the oil-dispersant mixture on shrimp and fish, but those results have no bearing on approval, and there’s no requirement to assess the long-term impact. In fact, it’s the EPA that must prove an “unreasonable risk” if it wants companies to disclose what is in the dispersant-hard to do when the agency, you know, doesn’t know what’s in it.
BP’s chemical cocktails of choice were Corexit 9527A and 9500A, both made by Illinois-based Nalco. The manufacturer insists that the products are no more dangerous than common household cleaners such as dish soap-little consolation given that many of the chemicals in those cleaners haven’t been tested for safety, either. EPA administrator Lisa Jackson acknowledged that the impacts of using dispersants underwater and in large volume are largely unknown-“I’m amazed by how little science there is on the issue,” she told senators in May. Two days later, Jackson directed BP to switch to less-toxic dispersants, but BP said it hadn’t found the alternatives suitable and continued to use Corexit. The EPA also asked for the company’s study of alternatives; BP turned over a set of heavily redacted documents (PDF). Under pressure, Nalco eventually coughed up a list of Corexit ingredients-one of them is 2-butoxyethanol, a chemical that can cause liver and kidney damage and other health problems-but refused for some time to provide the exact formula; meanwhile, the EPA said it was barred from publishing its own studies on the ingredients because, according to a spokeswoman, that might be “confidential business information” that could lead to criminal prosecution.
One Corexit ingredient is 2-butoxyethanol, a chemical that can cause liver and kidney damage.
The upshot: BP was allowed to keep dumping the chemicals. “We live in a world where we’re making tough decisions based on little science,” Jackson told reporters (PDF) on May 24. The EPA and the Coast Guard did ask BP to “scale back” use of Corexit, but as it turned out, the Coast Guard’s on-scene coordinator approved almost every single request from BP to use more dispersants.
In the end, says Richard Denison, senior scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund, the problem with Corexit is bound up in the larger failure of chemical oversight: “We have a chemical policy that essentially has required very little testing and very little evidence of safety for pretty much all chemicals on the market, and that covers dispersants.” Legislation to reform the Toxic Substances Control Act-requiring mandatory ingredient disclosure and safety testing for some 84,000 chemicals whose risks have not been assessed anywhere-has been stalled in Congress for years. For now, the EPA has finally begun testing Corexit for toxicity. But that, notes Gina Solomon, senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, is “a little bit like closing the barn door after the horse is gone.”
Kate Sheppard covers energy and environmental politics in Mother Jones’ Washington bureau. For more of her stories, click here. She Tweets here. Get Kate Sheppard’s RSS feed.
Special thanks to Richard Charter