Category Archives: ocean pollution

fossil fuels, gulf of mexico clean-up, marine pollution, ocean pollution, oil pollution

Fuel Fix: Black Elk Energy: Fatal fire hit finances, production

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http://fuelfix.com/blog/2013/08/16/black-elk-energy-fatal-fire-hit-finances-production/

Posted on August 16, 2013 at 7:30 am by Jennifer A. Dlouhy in Gulf of Mexico, Offshore

Houston-based Black Elk Energy says it is still dealing with financial fallout from last year’s fatal explosion at one of its Gulf of Mexico production platforms, even as federal investigators continue to probe the company’s overall safety.

The company said the accident hurt its financial results, that oil production slowed when the accident led to delays in obtaining permits for ordinary maintenance work and that it spent more than expected for “non-recurring regulatory, legal and platform restoration costs” tied to the incident. Black Elk provided the updates in investor guidance for the second half of 2013.

The company forecast that for July through December of this year, its daily production will average 13,500 to 14,500 barrels of oil equivalent, capital expenditures will be $45 million to $55 million and earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization will be $75 million to $85 million.

Legal fallout: Oil platform owner sued over blast in Gulf

Three people died and several others were injured in the explosion and fire last Nov. 16 at Black Elk’s West Delta 32 production platform 18 miles off the Louisiana coast. The federal Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement still is probing the incident, but the company has said a cutting torch may have ignited flammable vapors on the platform standing in 56 feet of water. Black Elk Energy has promised to release the report from a third-party investigation the company commissioned.

At the safety bureau’s request, Black Elk Energy gave the federal regulators a “performance improvement plan” last December and submitted an analysis of its previous violations in January. Facilities that were not producing at the time of the explosion were forced to stay offline temporarily .

The firm had racked up more than 300 documented mistakes and violations offshore before the fatal fire, and a safety bureau official said Thursday that the rates of those incidents – called incidents of non-compliance – have not declined since.

“We still have a lot of concerns,” the official said, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing.

“Black Elk has met most of the requirements that were stipulated,” the official said, but the company “has not done enough to demonstrate to us that their overall performance is improving to the point we think it should be.”

Related story: Black Elk CEO vows vindication

Regulators have not given Black Elk Energy approval to resume production at its damaged platform, but they allowed repairs to begin in May. Those repairs are complete, the company said in a statement, adding:
“Over the past eight months, Black Elk officials, staff and advisers have worked cooperatively with government officials at the local, state and federal level to provide support for the victims and their families, analyze the underlying causes of the incident and implement policy and procedural improvements to minimize the risk of similar incidents in the future.”

The company otherwise had no response to the comments from the regulatory official.
The Black Elk explosion was the first in a recent spate of accidents in shallow Gulf of Mexico waters that have revived concerns about the risks of oil and gas production close to shore.

Last month, a gas well in the Gulf of Mexico blew out, forcing the evacuation of 44 workers and igniting a fire that raged for nearly two days.

Just weeks before, a briny mix of gas, light condensate and salt water began leaking out of a 40-year-old Energy Resource Technology well while workers were trying to permanently plug it.

Founded in 2007 by a former BP and Amoco executive, Black Elk now holds interests in more than 1,000 wells connected to 176 platforms in the Gulf of Mexico. It has been operating facilities in the Gulf of Mexico since 2010.

Its aggressive acquisition strategy has focused on buying old facilities and reworking offshore wells to eke out more hydrocarbons.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

fossil fuels, fracking, national ocean politics, natural resource management, ocean pollution, oil pollution, tar sands

OpposingViews.com: Big Gas Is Fracking Offshore California Where Even Oil Drilling Is Banned

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http://www.opposingviews.com/i/society/environment/big-gas-fracking-offshore-california-where-even-oil-drilling-banned#

hmmmmmmmmmmmm Who knew? DV

By Sarah Rae Fruchtnicht, Tue, August 06, 2013

Hydraulic fracturing has been occurring off the coast of California for about 15 years, in the same sensitive waters where all new oil leases were banned since the 1969 Union Oil Santa Barbara spill, the third worst spill in American history.

The California Coastal Commission wasn’t even aware the offshore fracking was taking place, according to Grist, because it happens three miles off the coast, in federal jurisdiction. California, however, has the right to reject federal permits if water quality is in danger.

Regulators have allowed fracking in the Pacific Ocean to occur at least 12 times since the late 1990s, according to federal documents released by the government to The Associated Press through the Freedom of Information Act. A new fracking project was recently approved.

Gas companies want to frack the Santa Barbara Channel, the same place where the 3 million gallons of crude oil from Union Oil’s Platform A were spilled in 1969. The spill was the worst of its time. Today it is the third worst spill behind BP’s Deepwater Horizon spill in 2010 and the Exxon Valdez Spill in Alaska in 1989. The Santa Barbara spill killed thousands of sea birds, dolphins, elephant seals and sea lions.

DeSmogBlog reported Tuesday that a censored Environmental Protection Agency PowerPoint presentation found a clear link between shale gas fracking and groundwater contamination in Dimock, Pa.

Currently federal regulators allow offshore fracking chemicals to be released into the sea without companies having to file a separate environmental impact report or statement on the possible repercussions.

Fracking an area that includes oil wells adds even more risk. Tulane University petroleum engineering professor Eric Smith said that high pressure fracturing could break the rock seal on old well bore and leak oil into the ocean.

The Coastal Commission plans to grill new offshore drilling projects on details pertaining to fracking now that they know it is occurring in the Pacific. They could require new, separate permits and stricter review processes for new fracking projects.

Sources: Grist, AP

Special thanksto Richard Charter

energy policy, marine mammals, marine pollution, ocean pollution

Hamptonroads.com: Groups say drilling tool will disturb Va. marine life

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http://hamptonroads.com/2013/08/groups-say-drilling-tool-will-disturb-va-marine-life

NORFOLK August 3, 2012

While oil rigs drilling off the coast of Virginia are still a question mark in the near future, local environmental groups will be making noise about the possibility today.

Beginning at noon, members of Oceana and the Sierra Club will blow horns and clang pots and pans at Waterside Festival Marketplace to symbolize the loud noises made by seismic air guns – devices used to identify oil and gas reserves in the ocean.
“The point is to be noisy,” said Eileen Levandoski, assistant director of the Virginia Chapter Sierra Club. But it won’t be a literal simulation. “We’d be too loud,” she said.

Surveyors use seismic air guns to send blasts toward the sea floor and measure their echoes to identify drilling prospects. The industry says the method hasn’t been shown to hurt marine life and is necessary to open drilling. But environmentalists say it could injure animals and disrupt migration and mating patterns.

“The unique part about this technology is that not only is it that first step (toward offshore drilling), but in and of themselves, the air guns are really, really dangerous and destructive,” said Caroline Wood, Virginia organizer for Oceana’s climate and energy campaign.

The U.S. government has estimated that 138,500 whales and dolphins in the Atlantic Ocean will be deafened, injured or killed by the blasts, according to the Virginia Chapter Sierra Club website. The North Atlantic Right Whale – of which only about 500 remain – is among the species at risk. The demonstration, which will be held from noon to 1:30 p.m., is one of many on the East Coast, Wood said, adding that similar demonstrations will take place in Virginia Beach and Alexandria.

Debate over offshore drilling, which is years away even under supporters’ most optimistic scenarios, is coming to a head this year. The U.S. House in June approved a bill to lift a moratorium on drilling in Virginia waters. The federal government will release a report this fall outlining the environmental impact of East Coast drilling.
Offshore drilling has the potential to create 18,000 jobs in Virginia by 2030, according to Nicolette Nye, vice president of communications and external relations of the National Ocean Industries Association.
Locally, drilling faces opposition beyond environmentalists: The Navy has opposed it in the offshore areas it uses, and the federal government has been reluctant to share royalties with coastal states, which local legislators say is key to their support.

Still, the environmental groups say they will keep making a clatter.
“We just want to make a lot of noise to get people’s attention,” Wood said.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

energy policy, marine mammals, ocean pollution

Dailypress.com: Big hike in dolphin strandings has experts baffled

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http://www.dailypress.com/news/science/dp-nws-dead-dolphins-20130803,0,7140056.story

Dead and dying dolphins are washing up on Virginia beaches in numbers that are baffling marine stranding experts, who are hustling to determine the extent and pinpoint the cause. Dolphin beachings aren’t unusual in the summer months, and in a typical July the state might get six such reports. But by Thursday the number for this July had soared to 49 – and Mark Swingle with theVirginia Aquarium & Marine Science Center in Virginia Beach said they have no idea why.

“We really don’t know – I wish we did,” said Swingle. The aquarium’s Stranding Response Team has been gathering dolphin remains from throughout the Virginia coast – including two from Buckroe Beach in Hampton on Tuesday and one from Gwynn’s Island in Mathews County on July 26 – for necropsy and tissue testing. He said it could take two to three weeks to get results.

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“In some ways, we’re trying to rush these tests to try and get a handle on what’s happening,” Swingle said. “We know there’s some sort of disease process going on. There’s no evidence on these animals of any sort of any human interactions.”
The number of reported dolphin strandings in Virginia for a typical year is about 64, he said. So far, the state has already seen 88. The unusual hikes were reported to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, which runs a network of stranding teams throughout the country.

So far, the only other state reporting an unusual uptick for July is New Jersey, said Maggie Mooney-Seus, spokeswoman for NOAA Fisheries. Their most recent number for New Jersey strandings is 20, but she said that figure might not reflect new strandings over the last couple of days. The state logged four strandings for July in 2012, and seven in 2011.

So far, she said, New York reported 15 dolphin strandings in July, Maryland seven and Delaware one. New York reported only one stranding July of last year, while Maryland and Delaware reported none. If enough unusually high numbers of strandings come in, she said, NOAA will assemble a team of experts to examine the data and necropsy results and determine if it qualifies as an “unusual mortality event.” The last such event in Hampton Roads occurred in 1987-1988, she said, and involved about 740 animals.

While that number was unusual, she said, dolphin beachings in general are not. “Keep in mind we do have strandings,” Mooney-Seus said. “They do occur regularly along our coasts and are caused by a number of reasons. If it’s a large population and living in close proximity, they’re not unlike deer populations or human populations where they can pass things to each other.”

Dolphin strandings can also be caused by entangling in fishing gear, ingesting plastics, toxic algal blooms or red tides, changes in water temperature and the rare vessel strike, as well as diseases like the distemper-like morbillivirus, which can also affect other marine animals such as seals, said Swingle. The stranding team hasn’t seen an uptick in stranding reports of other animals.

Determining the cause of death in a stranding can be hard, he said, especially if it’s not reported right away.
“The main thing is to call as soon as possible, because the sooner we get to the animals, the better the information we can get from them,” Swingle said. “It’s like the whole ‘CSI’ thing – if you have a fresh body, you can get a tremendous amount of information from it. If it sits in the sun for a day, it gets less valuable in terms of figuring out what’s happening.”
Seismic airguns. Meanwhile, environmentalists worry that even more such strandings could occur if geophysical survey companies are allowed to use seismic airguns to search for deposits of oil and gas buried deep beneath the sea floor, including off the coast of Virginia.

Airguns are typically towed behind ships and emit pulses of compressed air in a shock wave described as 100,000 times more intense than a jet engine. The airguns would boom every 10 seconds, day and night for days or weeks at a time.
To protest the plan, Oceana and the Sierra Club plan to make a big noise outside the Waterside Festival Marketplace in downtown Norfolk beginning at noon Saturday. Demonstrators are expected to use horns, vuvuzelas and the like to draw attention to the damage airguns can inflict on marine life and sensitive habitats.

An environmental impact statement released last year by the U.S. Department of the Interior estimated 138,500 whales and dolphins could be injured, deafened or possibly killed by the blasts over an eight-year period. “It’s loud, booming, and it disrupts their activity,” said Eileen Levandoski, assistant director of the Virginia chapter of the Sierra Club. “They depend on hearing to find their food. They can’t communicate with each other and they get lost. When you have a compromised animal with a bacteria or virus, they’re already weakened. You’re adding insult to injury.”

Swingle said seismic airguns have been used in other parts of the world, and “what those impacts may or may not be is open for question.” “Certainly anything that’s dangerous for marine mammals would be concerning,” he added.

President Barack Obama announced in March he was reversing a ban he’d placed on oil lease sales off most of the country’s coasts after the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon drill rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 workers and spilling nearly 5 million barrels of oil. Obama’s reversal re-opened the door to potential oil and natural gas exploration and drilling along the Atlantic coast, the eastern portion of the Gulf and part of Alaska.

Oceana and the Sierra Club want the Administration to reject proposals that include airgun use, and phase them out of U.S. waters. But if seismic testing is to occur, it should be done using the least harmful technology, with defined “no activity zones” to protect vulnerable marine habitats and species.

To report a stranding
If you see a beached dolphin or other marine animal, call the Stranding Response Program hotline 24/7 at 757-385-7575.

energy policy, fossil fuels, fracking, national ocean politics, natural resource management, ocean pollution, offshore oil, oil pollution, tar sands

Mint Press News: Revelation: Feds OK’d Offshore Drilling Without Full Environmental Review

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Revelation: Feds OK’d Offshore Drilling Without Full Environmental Review

By Trisha Marczak | July 31, 2013

surfers oil rig
Surfers enjoy the waves near a conventional offshore oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico. These rigs could soon be joined by offshore fracking operations. In fact, in California, it turns out they already exist. (Photo/berardo62 via Flickr)

Environmental advocates are crying foul after the discovery that oil companies are using the controversial process known as fracking to extract oil off the coast of California, warning that the West Coast operations could become the norm from the Arctic to the Gulf of Mexico.

According to documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the news organization Truthout, two fracking operations have been ongoing in the Santa Barbara Channel since 2009 without the environmental review normally required under federal regulations.

The same discovery was made by the Environmental Defense Center, which indicated that its research confirmed that Venoco Inc. conducted an offshore fracking operation in 2009. According to the center, no public disclosure was made before the fracking began.

“It’s completely illegal for the agency to approve fracking in the outer continental shelf without conducting a complete environmental impact statement,” Center for Biological Diversity Senior Counsel Kassie Siegel told Truthout.

The offshore fracking operations were approved by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement as a regular oil drilling operation.

According to documents obtained by Truthout, oil companies Venoco and Dcor LLC modified drilling permits already in place to pave the way for the fracking operations.
An email obtained by Truthout indicates the federal government knew the companies were fracking. In an email sent on behalf of the bureau’s chief of staff, Thomas Lillie, to a fellow employee, he posed the question: “Has there been an EIS (Environmental Impact Statement) to assess the environmental consequences of fracking on the OCS? How can we begin to review permit requests without that?”

That’s the question environmental organizations are asking, too.

“Venoco’s fracking operation was allowed under existing authorizations, and no further environmental analysis or public disclosure was made prior to the operation, despite the fact that offshore oil development raises its own host of environmental issues,” the Environmental Defense Center states on its website.

Those environmental issues, including groundwater contamination and propensity for spills, are still being debated as onshore fracking spreads in California and around the nation. There are also issues relating to the wells’ location near seismic faults.

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management justified its endorsement of fracking operations using the argument that updated permits were approved after all new threats were assessed. But according to the Center for Biological Diversity, that doesn’t do the trick, either scientifically or technically.

Venoco, however, claims it does. Its website illustrates the company as one “concerned about the environment.”

“We operate in areas with extensive environmental regulations such as in and around the Santa Barbara Channel as well as in prime agricultural areas such as the Sacramento Basin,” the company’s site states.

California landlocked fracking questioned
California sits atop the Monterey shale formation, estimated to hold a potential 15 billion barrels of crude oil, representing the largest reserve in the nation.

In April, the federal Bureau of Land Management lost a lawsuit filed by the Sierra Club over the issuing of leases to oil companies to drill in the Monterey shale. The Sierra Club successfully argued that leases were improperly given to the oil companies without the proper environmental reviews.

In all, roughly 17,000 acres of land in the Monterey shale formation was leased by the federal government to oil companies.

This is, essentially, the beef environmental organizations have with the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.

According to a bureau fact sheet obtained by Truthout, the agency has allowed fracking to occur 11 times in the last 25 years. However, a spokesperson for the bureau told Truthout the exact number of fracking operations is not known, as it would require combing through years of files.

The offshore fracking is similar to the process used on land to drum up oil locked in shale – a combination of water, chemicals and silica sand is shot into the earth to break up and extract hidden oil.

In the sea, it’s no different, although the process doesn’t require as much water or silica sand, otherwise known as frac sand. According to Truthout, offshore fracking uses 7 percent of the frac sand and 2 percent of the combined water and chemicals used in onshore fracking wells.

On land and sea
The offshore fracking discovery comes at a time when the safety of onshore fracking is being debated in the U.S. The Environmental Protection Agency has yet to release its study on the impact of fracking – recently announcing it would be delayed until 2016.
In the meantime, the effect on groundwater supplies is being monitored by people on both sides of the debate.

A study released by the University of Texas this month indicates water supplies surrounding fracking wells had elevated and toxic levels of arsenic, strontium and selenium, all associated with the fracking process.

The study assessed water samples taken from 100 private wells, 91 of which were within 3 miles of drilling sites.

The University of Texas study echoed one released this year by Duke University that found fracking operations were linked to groundwater contamination.

The study looked at roughly 140 water samples from Pennsylvania’s Marcellus shale formation and discovered methane levels were 23 times more prevalent in homes less than a mile from a fracking well.

The University of Texas study comes after the National Energy Technology Laboratory, or NETL, released a report indicating groundwater supplies near a Pennsylvania fracking site did not show any signs of contamination. However, the report was only preliminary, and the laboratory intends to release its full report in 2014.

“NETL has been conducting a study to monitor for any signs of groundwater contamination as a result of hydraulic fracturing operations at a site on the Marcellus Shale formation in Pennsylvania,” NETL said in a statement following the preliminary report release. “We are still in the early stages of collecting, analyzing, and validating data from this site. While nothing of concern has been found thus far, the results are far too preliminary to make any firm claims. We expect a final report on the results by the end of the calendar year.”

On top of issues associated with groundwater contamination, fracking has raised questions associated with wastewater disposal and spills.

This month, Exxon Mobil was fined $100,000 for a fracking wastewater spill that contaminated the Susquehanna River in 2010. The EPA discovered water tested near the spill included elevated levels of chlorides, strontium and barium, chemicals also found in the company’s wastewater storage tanks.

Within three months, two major fracking fluid spills occurred at fracking well sites operated by Carrizo Oil and Gas. In May, a fracking well sent 9,000 gallons of fracking fluid onto nearby property in Pennsylvania. In March, a fracking well sent 227,000 gallons of fracking fluid into another Pennsylvania community.

These are the types of incidents environmental advocates are worried about, especially when there’s now a possibility such spills could occur in the ocean. While the offshore fracking process requires less fracking fluid, the possibility for detection and cleanup is in question, particularly when most people aren’t aware that offshore fracking is taking place.

Special thanks to Richard Charter