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Energy & Environment: Regulator hopes Gulf mapping tool can defuse tension between drillers, fishermen

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Nathanial Gronewold, E&E reporter
Published: Thursday, September 5, 2013

HOUSTON — The federal government is racing to roll out a new mapping
tool that it hopes will lead to a truce between offshore drillers and
fishing interests over the spike in rig decommissioning and tear-downs.

The Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement hopes by the end of
this month to have the basic framework for a geographic information
system mapping tool that would be used to track the life span of the
thousands of offshore structures and platforms standing in the Gulf of
Mexico, hundreds of which are slated for removal. But finalizing it
will take many more months or even years and will require the input of
charter fishermen, recreational diving companies, shrimp boat captains
and anyone else who has a stake in the Gulf’s natural resources.

The aim is to defuse the tension between charter fishermen and divers,
who depend on the artificial reef environments created by the rigs for
their livelihood, and the very owners of those offshore structures, who
are legally required to remove them when they are no longer in use. Rig
owners also fear the legal liability they are exposed to should a
defunct rig cause an accident or suffer storm damage.

In an interview, David Smith, a public affairs specialist at BSEE, said
the map that he and his team hope to complete this month will just be a
bare-bones version of the final product. The ultimate aim, he said, is
to develop a tool that enables all interested parties to know ahead of
time when a rig might be coming down and whether that structure would
be a good candidate for the federal Rigs to Reefs program.

BSEE sees Rigs to Reefs as the key to bridging the divide between the
fishermen and offshore oil and gas companies. Charter fishing interests
have been lobbying hard in Congress for a temporary moratorium on rig
decommissioning and removal, something that oil and gas companies and
the decommissioning industry are eager to avoid.

“You have the older platforms that have created this temporary
artificial habitat for fish and other marine life, but they’re also the
ones that are probably going to come out the soonest,” Smith explained.
“What we found is that there needs to be a lot more collaboration in
the planning process for decommissioning.”

Although the platforms, caissons and other offshore structures are the
private property of oil and gas companies, commercial and charter
fishermen insist that their voices should be added to the discussion on
what to do with an aging offshore structure. At the same time they and
some state agencies complain that the Rigs to Reefs program is too slow
and laden with bureaucracy. Six federal agencies have some say in what
happens to a structure resting above an abandoned offshore well.

Capt. Gary Jarvis, former president of the Corpus Christi, Texas-based
Charter Fishermen’s Association (CFA), expressed some skepticism that
BSEE’s planned reforms of Rigs to Reefs will work, but he is satisfied
that at least BSEE is hearing his industry’s concerns.

Still, he and others feel that nearly all offshore structures should be
reefed in place after they are no longer of use to the industry. That
currently happens with only a small fraction of them.

“Ideally for us, we would say reef them right where they’re at,” Jarvis
said. “That would be a good compromise.”

Delicate balancing act

Once the GIS map is in place, Smith said he hopes to organize a cross-
industry commission to help manage it and keep it updated.
Representatives of charter fishing and dive trip operators could
identify which structures are of most value to them, and oil and gas
interests across the table could provide updates on the status of these
structures, notifying whether they plan to tear them down and how
quickly.

Representatives of Gulf state agencies that assume responsibility for
artificial reefs created in Rigs to Reefs would also be at the table to
give guidance on whether these structures can be folded into the
program. Not all are eligible to become artificial reefs.

“We’re trying to develop a GIS map as a planning tool, and then we want
to develop a collaborative planning body that will sort of be an
information repository and facilitate a dialogue,” Smith said.

It’s a delicate balancing act that will attempt, for the first time, to
bring all Gulf of Mexico commercial interests — fishing, recreation,
and oil and gas — together to hash out compromises over their
competing needs.

Though charter fishermen may want to keep all structures in place,
shrimp boat captains by and large would like to see all those defunct
platforms removed to avoid damaging their equipment. Oil and gas firms
are keen to rid themselves of liability for these defunct platforms as
soon as possible. Meanwhile, thousands of workers are employed in the
Gulf Coast region by companies that tear down platforms and salvage the
“idle iron” for scrap metal.

The committee or planning commission that he hopes to form would “take
all of the input from the shrimping community, from the trawlers, from
the fishing and recreational charters, commercial diving community, all
of those different organizations and bring it all together, and then
have regular update meetings and have a place where people can come and
talk about what’s working and what’s not,” Smith said.

Complicating matters further, the science surrounding artificial
reefing is still in its infancy. The ecological benefits of artificial
versus natural reefs is still hotly debated and will be the principal
topic of discussion at the forthcoming Gulf and Caribbean Fisheries
Institute conference in Corpus Christi, Texas, slated for November.

Wes Tunnell, associate director of the Harte Research Institute at
Texas A&M University, Corpus Christi, explained that the current debate
swirls around whether artificial reefs generate new populations of fish
species or simply concentrate existing ones. He said there is evidence
for both.

Gulf of Mexico researchers are also still trying to develop a sound,
standardized technique for studying and monitoring artificial reefs,
counting the populations of fish that call them home and comparing this
data with what researchers collect at natural reef sites. “There’s
never been a really good way to count the fish around these artificial
reefs and have kind of an objective method for doing that,” Tunnell
said.

But there is some general understanding of artificial reefs among the
scientific community. Tunnell indicated that there’s evidence to
suggest that, though natural reefs are more biodiverse, artificial
reefs may actually harbor larger numbers of fish and therefore might be
more productive for fisheries.

Harte and other research centers are willing to aid BSEE’s efforts to
reach a general compromise, but Tunnell said his institute’s position
on the decommissioning and Rigs to Reefs controversy will be strictly
neutral.

“We like to be what we call the honest broker,” he said. “We want to
keep providing the best information until we get to the right
solution.”

Hurricane’s wake

The hurricane seasons of 2005 to 2008 brought this issue to the fore.

Hundreds of platforms were damaged or destroyed by Hurricanes Katrina,
Rita, Gustav and Ike. In investigating the problem, BSEE discovered
that more than half of the damaged structures were in disuse, sitting
abandoned for years. Fixing the damage cost hundreds of millions of
dollars.

The 2010 Macondo well blowout and oil spill delayed action somewhat,
but after the dust settled from that incident, BSEE issued a notice to
oil and gas companies reminding them that they need to demonstrate a
plan for what they intend to do with abandoned platforms within five
years. The options include selling them to other companies, reusing
them for developing new wells, reefing or removal.

Smith is adamant that the Notice to Lessees issued in October 2010 was
not a directive that companies must remove abandoned structures.
Rather, the notice was meant to remind industry of the existing
regulations in place.

Smith estimated that the Gulf is home to nearly 2,900 production
platforms, but he stressed that, of these, 700 to 800 may have to be
dealt with as they near the end of their life spans. And even then the
law doesn’t require that they be removed, only that the owners come up
with a plan for what to do with them next.

Still, many in the industry acted as if the NTL was ordering immediate
compliance.

BSEE estimates that 285 structures were removed from the Gulf in 2011,
up from 153 in 2008. Permit requests for rig decommissionings rose from
254 submitted in 2010 to 319 in 2011. Fishermen and divers grew alarmed
as hundreds of platforms were pulled, mostly from the western Gulf off
the coast of Texas. Structures that they’ve depended on for years
seemingly vanished overnight.

“Especially off South Texas where we are, we’ve just had so few rigs so
when they pulled out 30 or however many there were in our region, the
fishermen and the diving industry, they felt that tremendously,” said
Jennifer Wetz, a researcher at the Harte Institute. “That was huge to
them.”

The Charter Fishermen’s Association and other groups and individual
fishermen responded by getting politically active, pressing their local
members of Congress to get involved. Last year lawmakers proposed the
decommissioning moratorium. Although that effort failed, the speed and
strength with which fishing and diving interests acted got the
attention of offshore oil and gas firms. The dispute was a top item for
discussion among industry representatives at the Decommissioning and
Abandonment Summit held in Houston earlier this year.

J. Dale Shively, artificial reef program leader at the Texas Parks and
Wildlife Department, expressed sympathy for the fishing interests but
suggested they should have seen this problem coming. Offshore platforms
are meant to be temporary installations with their owners free to do
with them as they wish, as long as it complies with the law.

“One of the sticking points really is that the public doesn’t accept
that these platforms are private property,” Shively said. “They don’t
belong to the public. They don’t belong to the federal government or
the state. They belong to the oil company.”

CFA member Jarvis, however, argues that these structures become far
more than just a matter for the private owner because they create
valuable fish habitat, an asset that is tightly controlled throughout
the Gulf. Simply removing them when the companies want to would destroy
that habitat and the fish that reside there, an action that would
result in severe consequences for fishing interests but almost none for
oil and gas firms, he said.

“There are all kinds of federal laws and regulations about live coral,
and there’s nothing on those oil rig legs but live coral. They get a
free pass on that,” Jarvis said. “The fishing reefs, also known as oil
rigs, are a valuable asset to the fishery, not only from the
fisherman’s perspective but from the fish perspective too.”

Challenges

Shively agrees with BSEE that the Rigs to Reefs program will be a
central factor to satisfying all sides of the issue, but he complained
that for a while now the program allowed too little flexibility for
state agencies like his to grab structures before they are removed and
recommend them for reefing.

He also echoed Tunnell’s point that the science of artificial reefing
is still being worked out. Texas Parks and Wildlife is relying on
researchers at the Harte Institute; University of Texas, Brownsville;
and Texas A&M University, Galveston, for help in studying Texas’ three
primary artificial reef areas. Getting a fix on the value and proper
management of the Rigs to Reefs program is a never-ending challenge, he
said.

“We don’t ever predict that we’re done,” Shively said. “We put
materials down that are serving as a reef, but the scientific questions
are if you put more material, do you get more fish, or do you at some
point get all this competition and the population decreases because now
you’re bringing in more predators?”

Another challenge is the expense. Shively estimates that a typical
reefing job costs more than $500,000. A near-shore artificial reef he’s
working to put together this month near Corpus Christi using more than
400 concrete pillars will run about $700,000. Another near Matagorda,
spread across 160 acres, will probably cost $1.2 million to complete,
he said.

“Every reefing job is expensive,” Shively said. “We’re hoping to get
some of this Deepwater Horizon money to help with it. It’s in the
plans, but we haven’t gotten official approval yet.”

Though reefing can save an operator potentially millions of dollars,
the time-consuming and cumbersome process — and restrictions on where
and how rigs can be reefed — means that far more concrete and steel
will still be removed than left in the Gulf of Mexico. Last year BSEE
reported that the oil and gas industry requested approval to scrap
about 330 offshore structures. Twenty-seven were recommended for the
Rigs to Reefs program, or about 8 percent of the total. So far this
year the agency has received permit applications to scrap 121 rigs and
to reef 15.

The GIS mapping system that BSEE will try to roll out later this month
will be the beginning of attempts to bring more structure and order to
the Rigs to Reefs program and to provide fishermen and divers with
enough information so that they can know precisely what’s happening
with their favorite reefs. If such a structure is scheduled for
decommissioning, fishing and diving interests would be able to flag it
to state officials or BSEE for possible inclusion in Rigs to Reefs. If
popular structures are deemed unsuitable for reefing, then the divers
and fishers can at least learn of this ahead of time, giving them an
opportunity to seek out replacements to visit to keep their businesses
going.

Smith said he needs the cooperation of all sides to make the experiment
work.

“In order to get the map to work, we have to get all the BSEE data on
it, we need to get all the shrimping data on it, we need to get all the
fishing data on it,” he said. “It would help if the fishing and diving
community could point out those platforms that are really important to
them and make the states aware of those so that the states know where
to look for them.”

Though he thinks it’s been taking BSEE too long to put this mapping
tool together, Smith believes this step will prove to be the easy part
of this entire effort.

“The hard part is coming up with some sort of cooperative agreement or
something for a body to put all this stuff together,” he said. “I’m not
sure exactly how that’s going to happen yet. We’re still working on
that part.”

Special thanks to Richard Charter

fossil fuels, gulf of mexico clean-up

Fuelfix.com: Rigs-to-Reefs program making a splash in Texas

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http://fuelfix.com/blog/2013/03/20/rigs-to-reefs-program-making-a-splash-in-texas/?cmpid=eefl

Posted on March 20, 2013 at 2:19 pm by Emily Pickrell

Rigs become artificial reefs in the Gulf of Mexico

One of the big changes to the offshore industry is the diligence with which the federal government is ensuring that abandoned equipment from offshore oil platforms is not left behind.

Fishermen and conservationists have found a different solution for the underwater portions of these old oil and gas rigs – leave them for the fish in the deep blue sea, which, along with coral, turtles and mussels, have developed homes amidst the steel legs of these structures.

After the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded and sank in the 2010 oil spill disaster, the U.S. Interior Department issued an “idle iron” directive requiring the removal of rigs or platforms from non-producing wells.

As companies have begun carrying out the order, however, fishing interests have protested that the structures are critical habitats for Red Snapper and other fish.

Offshore rigs: Dismantling Gulf’s idle iron may be a $3 billion job

The Interior Department has authorized states to provide the “rig-to-reef” disposal option in certain cases, recognizing that the abandoned metal can be “a biologically valuable structure in the marine environment”.

Supporters say the programs in 16 states including Texas save operators money, benefit fishing and don’t harm the environment.

But barely 10 percent of about 800 non-producing Gulf of Mexico platforms have ended up in the program, while more than 200 have been removed each year since 2010, according to the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement.

“The biggest problem we have in the rigs-to-reef program is actually acquiring the donations,” said J. Brooke Shipley-Lozano, chief scientist for the Artificial Reef Program for Texas Parks and Wildlife, who spoke Wednesday at a Houston conference on decommissioning offshore equipment.

After the spill: Offshore enforcement remains murky

Parks and Wildlife has been running its program since 1990 and estimates that companies have saved as much as $400,000 per donated rig.

But several factors determine whether creating a steel reef makes financial sense for a company, including the size of the equipment and how far it has to be moved to reach a designated reef site, said Drew Hunger, the decommissioning manager for Houston-based Apache Corp.

Apache estimates that a rig donation is only economic if the reef site designated by regulators is less than 35 miles away.

The commercial fishing industry, upset about the large number of rigs removed from the Gulf in the last two years, has pushed for a two-year moratorium on platform removals.

Oil and gas operators have resisted delays because the program allows them to avoid liability for the equipment.

But while fishermen are the most interested in the platforms closer to shore, the need for the structures to be completely submerged has meant that only 1 percent of rigs in the program are in water less than 100 feet deep.

Hunger said that companies want to leave as many rigs behind as possible, but that the costs and needed permits do not always make it feasible.

“We haven’t gotten the word out about the cost and the economic limitations on leaving them standing,” he said.

BP Spill, gulf of mexico clean-up, Gulf restoration, marine pollution, oil pollution

New York Times: Facing Fire Over Challenge to Louisiana’s Oil Industry

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Oh yeah, the good ol’ boys are angry now….so what do you think “secured” that gentlemen’s agreement? DV

August 31, 2013

By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON

BATON ROUGE, La. – State Senator Gerald Long of Louisiana calls it “kind of a gentlemen’s agreement.” For the generations since Mr. Long’s third cousin Huey P. Long was the governor, this state has relied on the oil and gas industry for a considerable part of its revenues and for tens of thousands of jobs. In return, the industry has largely found the state an obliging partner and staunch political ally as it has fought off curbs on its business.

Now, however, a panel of state appointees, created after Hurricane Katrina to be largely insulated from politics, showed just how insulated it was by upending the agreement.

In July, the panel, the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority-East, composed primarily of engineers and scientists charged with managing flood control for most of New Orleans and its suburbs, filed a lawsuit against nearly 100 oil and gas companies. The suit argues that these companies unlawfully neglected to fix decades’ worth of damage they caused to the state’s wetlands, thus making flooding from hurricanes more dangerous and flood protection vastly more expensive.

The reaction was swift. Gov. Bobby Jindal, a Republican, immediately called the suit “nothing but a windfall for a handful of trial lawyers,” prompting local activists to highlight the $1 million he has received in donations from oil and gas interests. But at public meetings here and down on the bayou, the board has faced the displeasure of public officials largely alone.
At the meetings, the governor’s senior coastal adviser, Garret Graves, has strongly criticized the board as jeopardizing the broad coalition assembled to address coastal issues and needlessly complicating the state’s own efforts to find money for remediation. Other officials at public meetings have taken turns disparaging the board for seeking to penalize companies for activities decades old and, perhaps more than anything, acting without broad collaboration or political consent.

“You are not a state unto yourself,” State Senator Robert Adley said at a crowded legislative hearing, a rare occurrence in August. John M. Barry, a historian and writer who is the vice president of the flood panel, chalked the reaction up to politics, referring to an old saying that the flag of Texaco should fly atop the Louisiana Capitol.

It is true, at least, that the oil and gas industry’s connection with Louisiana runs deep. Industry executives – like Mr. Adley, who has run two different oil- and gas-related companies – sit in the Legislature, and former politicians lobby on the industry’s behalf. Several years ago, eight of the 16 judges on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, based in New Orleans, recused themselves because of perceived conflicts in a case involving the energy industry. But the connection goes beyond politics, into the state’s identity and culture. In 2010, many residents of south Louisiana were as outraged at the federal government for its moratorium on offshore drilling as they were at BP for its Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

The industry – which has shifted away from conventional drilling to refining, fracking and petrochemical manufacturing – paid Louisiana $1.5 billion last year in royalties and taxes. Industry analyses say it accounts for, directly and indirectly, around 16 percent of the state’s work force.

While the energy industry has its complications, says Senator Long, a Republican, the arrangement on the whole has been a net positive for the state.

Other officials put it more strongly. “We’ve had a $10 million surplus every year I’ve been president of Plaquemines Parish because of oil and gas,” Billy Nungesser, who himself ran a $20 million business providing services to offshore rigs and platforms, said at one public meeting. “We can’t keep picking their pockets.”

But studies of the state’s catastrophic land loss in the past century – the disappearance of nearly 2,000 square miles of marsh serving as a crucial buffer against hurricanes – show that decades of oil and gas activity has come at a steep price. Dams and federally built levees holding back the replenishing sediment of the Mississippi River are main culprits in the land loss, but there is widespread agreement that the 10,000 miles of pipelines and canals cut into the marsh by oil companies are to blame as well. One widely cited study concludes that oil and gas activity accounts for 36 percent of the total loss.

No one anticipated a clash over these issues when civic activists and Chamber of Commerce groups urged an overhaul of New Orleans’s patronage-riddled levee boards in the months after Hurricane Katrina. These efforts, over staunch opposition, led to laws and amendments creating a regional flood protection authority with east and west branches. More critically, the laws established a less political appointment process, putting a premium on technical expertise. “It became a symbol of Louisiana willing to change its ways,” said Robert Scott, the president of the Public Affairs Research Council of Louisiana, a good-government group.

Six years later, the experts in the east branch did something no one would have foreseen here. They voted unanimously to file the lawsuit against oil and gas companies. Citing regulations and permits requiring companies to restore what they had disrupted, the suit argues that the wetlands crisis is at least related to unlawful neglect.

Mr. Graves does not dispute that damage was caused by industry, but does deny that opposition to the suit is about politics. He said the state had worked for years to build a broad coalition, including environmentalists and representatives from oil companies, to finance and implement a $50 billion coastal master plan.

“There’s a bigger strategy that they’ve come in and really screwed up,” he said. Mr. Graves said the state was focused on three areas: attaining penalties and legal remedies from the BP spill, pushing legislation that would bring Louisiana a substantial share of offshore drilling royalties currently going into the federal treasury and battling with the Army Corps of Engineers over its management of the Mississippi River.

“You have to strategize, prioritize and sequence,” he said in an e-mail. Asked if the state’s strategy could conceivably involve litigation against energy companies for historical wetlands damage, Mr. Graves said that was “not our plan A, B, C, D or X.”
Mr. Barry said he fully supported holding the federal government accountable. But the cost of coastal protection is enormous and growing, he said, and he cannot see any way this lawsuit would interfere with these other efforts.

“All we’re trying to do is have a court decide whether we’re right or not, that they broke the law,” he said. “And if they broke the law, they need to fix the part of the problem that they created. It is so simple.”
For now, the suit’s chief obstacles may be political rather than legal.

The terms of four of the nine authority members are either expired or in limbo. And lawmakers are already planning to pass legislation next year to block the suit, possibly by taking away some of the authority’s powers.

“We’ll definitely do some legislation to try to decapitate this thing,” said State Senator Norby Chabert, a Republican.
State Representative Sam Jones, a Democrat, was on the same page.

“This House will probably not be punitive to the oil companies because, look, they’ve brought us thousands of jobs,” he said.
But the scope of opposition is unclear, as many politicians have remained conspicuously quiet. And in recent years, efforts by oil and gas interests to fight in the Legislature a wave of lawsuits by private landowners have met with significant resistance. Among residents along the coast, the crisis of the wetlands has complicated what were once straightforward arrangements.

“We need the gas and oil, but it’s clearly evident that there’s lasting damage in the marshes from the canals that they dug,” said Dave Cvitanovich, a lifelong oysterman. He spoke of the jobs the industry brought, but also of the broad stretches of water where there was land not that long ago.

On the lawsuit, he was still undecided. “It was a gutsy move, to say the least,” he said.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

BP Spill, gulf of mexico clean-up, Gulf restoration

E&E: Council unanimously OKs restoration plan

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Annie Snider, E&E reporter
Published: Thursday, August 29, 2013

The federal-state panel tasked with overseeing the spending of potentially billions of dollars in fines related to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill yesterday unanimously approved its initial plan for restoring the Gulf ecosystem and economy.

The plan sets overarching restoration goals for the region, broadly lays out how the council will evaluate and fund projects and describes how it will consider states’ plans for spending their share of the money. Under the RESTORE Act, passed by Congress last year, 80 percent of Clean Water Act civil fines from the spill will be sent to the Gulf through the Gulf Coast Restoration Trust Fund. The council, made up of federal and state officials, oversees 60 percent of the dollars in the fund.

Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker, who serves as chairwoman of the Restore Council, said the panel plans to begin selecting and funding projects within the next 12 months. Environmental groups, however, have pointed out that the plan approved yesterday does not lay out details on how those projects would be selected (Greenwire, Aug. 27). The panel has been considering options for improving public participation as the process moves forward, potentially by creating a structure like a citizens advisory council.

In her first public appearance with the council, Pritzker, who took the helm of Commerce in late June, was careful to note that “restoring the natural ecosystem and restoring the economy are interconnected goals,” in prepared remarks.

“If we continue to work in a collaborative spirit, I’m confident that we can implement the RESTORE Act in a way that reinvigorates economies, creates jobs and rebuilds our environment for generations to come,” she said. “In short, we can help ensure the long-term health, prosperity and resilience of the entire Gulf region.”

She also said overdue regulations from the Treasury Department that will spell out how money sent through the Restore Council can be spent are expected to be released in draft form “very soon.” The council has said it has not been able to move forward with a required list of projects approved for funding and a 10-year spending plan in part because of the lack of those regulations.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) hosted the meeting, which took place in New Orleans. He noted that his state has committed to spending the entirety of the fine money that it receives on ecosystem restoration projects.

“We must see a swift flow of RESTORE Act funds without red tape so we can continue responding to the compounding damages caused by the BP oil spill here in Louisiana and across the entire Gulf Coast,” he said.

Jindal noted that the spill made marshes more vulnerable to erosion, turning around progress that Louisiana had been making in combating land loss.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

BP Spill, fossil fuels, gulf of mexico clean-up, Gulf restoration, ocean pollution, offshore oil, oil pollution

New York Times: Gulf Spill Sampling Questioned

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I’m with Rikki Ott….the seafood and water quality in the Gulf was worse than reported by official agencies and that is no surprise to anyone paying attention. DV

U.S. Coast Guard, via Reuters

BP spill
Fireboat crews battling a blaze at the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico, off Louisiana, on April 21, 2010, a day after the rig exploded, killing 11 workers and resulting in the blowout of an exploratory well owned by BP. Ultimately, roughly 200 million gallons of crude oil gushed into the gulf.

By HENRY FOUNTAIN
Published: August 19, 2013

An analysis of water, sediment and seafood samples taken in 2010 during and after the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has found higher contamination levels in some cases than previous studies by federal agencies did, casting doubt on some of the earlier sampling methods.

The lead author, Paul W. Sammarco of the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium, said that dispersants used to break up the oil might have affected some of the samples. He said that the greater contamination called into question the timing of decisions by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to reopen gulf fisheries after the spill and that “it might be time to review the techniques that are used to determine” such reopenings.

Eleven workers died and roughly 200 million gallons of crude oil gushed into the gulf after a blowout at an exploratory well owned by BP caused the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig to explode on April 20, 2010. Nearly two million gallons of Corexit, a dispersant, were sprayed on the surface or injected into the oil plume near the wellhead.

In all, more than 88,000 square miles of federal waters were closed to commercial and recreational fishing. Some areas were reopened before the well was capped three months after the blowout; the last areas were reopened a year after the disaster.

Like other studies after the spill, the new analysis, published last week in the journal Marine Pollution Bulletin, found that components of oil were distributed along the Gulf Coast as far west as Galveston, Tex. — about 300 miles from the well site — and southeast to the Florida Keys.

But the study found higher levels of many oil-related compounds than earlier studies by NOAA scientists and others, particularly in seawater and sediment. The compounds studied included polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, some of which are classified as probably carcinogenic, and volatile organic compounds, which can affect the immune and nervous systems.

“When the numbers first started coming in, I thought these looked awfully high,” Dr. Sammarco said, referring to the data he analyzed, which came from samples that he and other researchers had collected. Then he looked at the NOAA data. “Their numbers were very low,” he said, “I thought what is going on here? It didn’t make sense.”

Dr. Sammarco said that a particular sampling method used in some earlier studies might have led to lower readings. That method uses a device called a Niskin bottle, which takes a sample from a specific point in the water. Because of the widespread use of dispersants during the spill — which raised separate concerns about toxicity — the oil, broken into droplets, may have remained in patches in the water rather than dispersing uniformly.

“Sampling a patchy environment, you may not necessarily hit the patches,” he said.

The plastic that the bottles are made from also attracts oily compounds, potentially removing them from any water sample and leading to lower readings of contaminants, Dr. Sammarco said.

Riki Ott, an independent marine toxicologist who has studied effects of the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska as well as the BP spill, said she was “totally shocked” when she read the high numbers in Dr. Sammarco’s study.

“To see NOAA doing this, that’s inexcusable,” Dr. Ott said, referring to the use of Niskin bottles. “It has been known since Exxon Valdez that this spotty sampling does not work.”

A spokesman for NOAA said the agency would not comment because it was involved in a legal review known as a Natural Resource Damage Assessment to determine how much BP must pay for restoration work. But BP, in a statement, noted that tests on seafood by NOAA and other agencies consistently found levels of contaminants 100 to 1,000 times lower than safety thresholds set by the federal Food and Drug Administration.

Dr. Sammarco suggested that more continuous monitoring of oil spills should be undertaken before fisheries are reopened. “It’s a good idea to follow these things long term, to make sure the runway is clear so people are safe and the food is safe,” he said.

Julia M. Gohlke, a researcher at the University of Alabama at Birmingham who conducted an independent review of seafood safety after the spill, said that while decisions to reopen fisheries are currently based on fish samples only, “it seems like it would definitely be important to keep looking at water samples as well.”