http://www.chipleypaper.com/news/settled-7766-most-spilled.html
I agree with Professor Chanton that it will be impossible for BP to restore the damage it has done to the benthic communities of the Gulf. DV
Holmes County Times Advertiser: Professor believes most spilled oil settled on ocean floor
November 26, 2010 8:42 AM
SARAH OWEN, Florida Freedom Newswire
PANAMA CITY – The oil is still there, sitting at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico and causing damage to the environment, a Florida State University professor who studies greenhouse gases, oceans and energy said Tuesday.
Professor Jeff Chanton compared natural oil seepage in the Gulf of Mexico to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. About 1,000 natural ocean-floor leaks combine to trickle about 400,000 barrels of oil into the Gulf each year, Chanton said, but scientists estimate as many as 60,000 barrels of oil poured into the Gulf each day of the spill.
“While natural seepage is a normal process, what happened this summer was totally overwhelming,” Chanton said.
The professor said he thinks most of that Deepwater Horizon oil – as much as 70 percent to 79 percent of it -sank to the ocean floor, where it remains, sucking up oxygen and inhibiting life.
He and his colleagues are working to determine how that layer of sludge might affect the Gulf and how long it might take for the ecosystem to recover.
“But this is going to be a really hard thing to measure,” he said. “It’s likely that there will be this small, incremental degradation, but it occurs on such a slow scale, and human lives are so short, that people won’t notice it. It’s going to be anecdotal – people will say, ‘Oh, the fishing’s not as good as it used to be.’ ”
Scientists will need money to conduct that research, he added. He’s hoping some money BP is expected to pay in fines will be tucked away in a trust fund for long-term studies.
“The law says BP has to restore things to the way they were, but we don’t even really know how things were,” Chanton added. “It’ll probably be 10 years before we really know the effects.”
Dave Lobell, a self-employed engineer, said he sat in on the lecture to pick up professional development hours and also because he was interested in the topic.
“It was very informative,” Lobell said, although he added that he thought Chanton’s political views were evident in the lecture and that he didn’t necessarily agree with the professor. Besides talking about the oil spill, Chanton also discussed global warming and his opposition to offshore drilling.
_______________________
http://www.pe.com/localnews/opinion/editorials/stories/PE_OpEd_Opinion_D_op_26_ed_bpspill.369705c.html
Press Enterprise
Southern California
Opinion/Editorial
Gulf-spill lessons
10:00 PM PST on Thursday, November 25, 2010
The Press-Enterprise
Oil companies and the federal government need a better approach to oil-drilling disasters than improvising after the fact. The Gulf of Mexico oil leak shows that both the industry and government need to do a better job of planning, and put more money and effort into devising better ways to clean up oil spills.
The lack of readiness is evident in the findings of two reports, released this week, from the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling. President Barack Obama established the panel in May to examine the Deepwater Horizon incident. That offshore well exploded in April, killing 11 people, and spewed oil into the Gulf of Mexico for five months. One report addressed the efforts to stop the leak, while the other assessed cleanup methods.
The reports portray a response to the disaster hindered by an absence of planning for such an event, and cleanup technology that had made only marginal advances since the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill off Alaska. The Deepwater Horizon leak spurred some quick advances in cleanup methods — but only because a catastrophe had already happened.
One of the reports notes that oil companies spend almost no money on researching and developing new ways to scour the ocean after a spill, despite earning billions in profits each year. Over the past two decades, the companies did put some funding behind nonprofit oil spill removal organizations, but those groups focus on cleanup, not research into new technology.
The federal government, likewise, devoted little money to oil spill research over the past two decades. A 1990 law, enacted after the Alaska spill, authorizes up to $28 million a year in such funding, but federal agencies, including the Coast Guard and the Minerals Management Service, have never spent even half that amount in any one year. Nor do federal deficits explain the reluctance to spend: The money comes from a tax on oil production earmarked specifically for cleanup activities.
Oil companies argue that funding research into better ways of preventing leaks is more cost-effective. But while prevention is a crucial safeguard, accidents do happen, as the Deepwater Horizon incident demonstrated. And the aftermath of a spill is the wrong time to start considering more efficient methods to recover leaking oil.
The reports suggest that the federal government should encourage more spending on cleanup research. Steps such as increasing the cap on oil companies’ liability for cleanup costs or offering tax credits for research, for example, could spur development of new technology. The report recommends that the government beef up its research efforts into new cleanup methods, as well.
Federal agencies should also require oil drillers to produce a detailed plan for responding to well blowouts, to show the companies are prepared to deal with such disasters. That step should have been standard long before now, but federal regulators have a history of deferring to the oil industry on safety matters.
The Deepwater Horizon blowout caught the industry and the government off balance and unready. Both failed to learn from the Exxon Valdez disaster two decades earlier — and neither should repeat that mistake this time.
Special thanks to Richard Charter