Category Archives: offshore oil

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

CNN: Empty nets in Louisiana three years after the spill By Matt Smith

Leave a comment

http://www.cnn.com/2013/04/27/us/gulf-disaster-fishing-industry/index.html?hpt=hp_c1

By Matt Smith, CNN
updated 3:43 PM EDT, Mon April 29, 2013

JOHN NOWAK/CNN
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
April 20 marked three years since the Gulf oil disaster erupted
Since the 2010 spill, Louisiana’s statewide oyster catch has dropped by more than 25%
Other seafood catch numbers have rebounded and studies show the catch is safe
But in certain areas, there’s still a pronounced downturn in blue crab, shrimp, oysters

Yscloskey, Louisiana (CNN) — On his dock along the banks of Bayou Yscloskey, Darren Stander makes the pelicans dance.

More than a dozen of the birds have landed or hopped onto the dock, where Stander takes in crabs and oysters from the fishermen who work the bayou and Lake Borgne at its mouth. The pelicans rock back and forth, beaks rising and falling, as he waves a bait fish over their heads.

At least he’s got some company. There’s not much else going on at his dock these days. There used to be two or three people working with him; now he’s alone. The catch that’s coming in is light, particularly for crabs.

“Guys running five or six hundred traps are coming in with two to three boxes, if that,” said Stander, 26.

Out on the water, the chains clatter along the railing of George Barisich’s boat as he and his deckhand haul dredges full of oysters onto the deck. As they sort them, they’re looking for signs of “spat”: the young oysters that latch onto reefs and grow into marketable shellfish.

There’s the occasional spat here; there are also a few dead oysters, which make a hollow sound when tapped with the blunt end of a hatchet.

About two-thirds of U.S. oysters come from the Gulf Coast, the source of about 40% of America’s seafood catch. But in the three years since the drilling rig Deepwater Horizon blew up and sank about 80 miles south of here, fishermen say many of the oyster reefs are still barren, and some other commercial species are harder to find.

“My fellow fishermen who fish crab and who fish fish, they’re feeling the same thing,” Barisich said. “You get a spike in production every now and then, but overall, it’s off. Everybody’s down. Everywhere there was dispersed oil and heavily oiled, the production is down.”

The April 20, 2010, explosion sent 11 men to a watery grave off Louisiana and uncorked an undersea gusher nearly a mile beneath the surface that took three months to cap.

Most of the estimated 200 million gallons of oil that poured into the Gulf of Mexico is believed to have evaporated or been broken down by hydrocarbon-munching microbes, according to government estimates.

The rest washed ashore across 1,100 miles of coastline, from the Louisiana barrier islands west of the Mississippi River to the white sands of the Florida Panhandle. A still-unknown portion settled on the floor of the Gulf and the inlets along its coast.

Tar balls are still turning up on the beaches, and a 2012 hurricane blew seemingly fresh oil ashore in Louisiana.

Well owner BP, which is responsible for the cleanup, says it’s still monitoring 165 miles of shore. The company points to record tourism revenues across the region and strong post-spill seafood catches as evidence the Gulf is rebounding from the spill.

But in the fishing communities of southeastern Louisiana, people say that greasy tide is still eating away at their livelihoods.

“Things’s changing, and we don’t know what’s happening yet,” said oysterman Byron Encalade.

Life before the spill
Before the spill, Encalade and his neighbors in the overwhelmingly African-American community of Pointe a la Hache — about 25 miles south of Yscloskey — earned their living from the state-managed oyster grounds off the East Bank of the Mississippi.

Back then, a boat could head out at dawn and be back at the docks by noon with dozens of 105-pound sacks of oysters.

Now? “Nothing,” says Encalade, president of the Louisiana Oystermen Association.
Louisiana conservation officials have dumped fresh limestone, ground-up shell and crushed concrete on many of the reefs in a bid to foster new growth.

It takes three to five years for a viable reef to develop, so that means Pointe a la Hache could be looking at 2018 — eight years after the spill — before its lifeblood starts pumping again.

“This economy is totally gone in my community,” said Encalade, 59. “There is no economy. The two construction jobs that are going on — the prison and the school — if it weren’t for those, the grocery store would be closing.”

When the catch comes in, everyone wants you to know that it’s safe to eat. Repeated testing has shown that the traces of hydrocarbons that do come up in the shrimp, crab and oysters are far below safety limits for human consumption.

“The monitoring of the seafood supply has been exemplary,” said Steve Murawski, a fisheries biologist at the University of South Florida. “There’s no incidence of people getting sick and no report of any tainted fish reaching the market.”

While much of the Gulf’s seafood industry has rebounded, the hardest-hit communities like Pointe a la Hache, Yscloskey and the inlets in Barataria Bay, west of the Mississippi, have not recovered.

Scientists are still trying to understand what the oil has done to the marshlands of southeastern Louisiana.

Sure, the catch is safe — but that doesn’t mean much when seafood prices are down and fuel costs are up.

“Since the spill, my shrimp production is off between 40 and 60% for the two years that I did work full time,” said Barisich, who has both a shrimp boat and an oyster boat tied up at Yscloskey. “But my price is off another 50%, and my fuel is high: 60 cents a gallon higher than it’s ever been.”

Figures from Louisiana’s Department of Wildlife and Fisheries tell a similar story.

The statewide oyster catch since 2010 is down 27% from the average haul between 2002 and 2009, according to catch statistics from the agency. In the Pontchartrain Basin, where Encalade and Barisich both work, the post-spill average fell to about a third of the pre-spill catch.

Barisich says oysters are barely worth the effort anymore.
Guys running five or six hundred traps are coming in with two to three boxes, if that.
Darren Stander

“On the state ground — on a perfect weather day, keep that in mind — it’s 20 sacks a day,” he said. “Twenty sacks a day at $30 a sack is $600. $300 worth of fuel. $100 worth of other expenses and I pay the deckhand, I got $150 a day on a perfect day. It don’t pay to go out.”
And no boats going out means no fuel being sold at Frank Campo Jr.’s marina, down the bayou from Barisich’s dock.

“If you don’t burn it, I can’t sell it to you,” Campo says. “They’re not doing very well with the crabs, and there’s not a lot of oyster boats going out.”

Demand for the oysters is off, too.

“You used to never ask the dealer if he wanted oysters,” said Campo, whose grandfather started the marina. “You just showed up with them. Now, he’ll call you and tell you if he needs ’em.”

‘Like somebody had poured motor oil all over’
Across the Mississippi from Pointe a la Hache, beyond the West Bank levees, lie some of the waterways that saw the heaviest oiling: Barataria Bay and its smaller inlets, Bay Jimmy and Bay Batiste.

Interactive map of Gulf oil disaster

Louisiana State University entomologist Linda Hooper-Bui tracks the numbers of ants, wasps, spiders and other bugs at 40 sites in the surrounding marshes, 18 of which had seen some degree of oiling.

She is part of a small army of researchers who have been trying to figure out what effect the spill will have on the environment of the Gulf Coast. Since 2010, she’s recorded a sharp decline in several species of insects — particularly spiders, ants, wasps and grasshoppers, which sit roughly in the middle of the food web.

They’re top predators among insects but food for birds and fish.

Hooper-Bui said she expected their numbers to bounce back the following year: “Instead, what we saw was worse.”

Tar balls found washed up on Elmer’s Island, Louisiana, in early March.
JOHN NOWAK/CNN

The reason, she suspects, is that the oil that sank into the bottom of the marsh after the spill hasn’t broken down at the same rate as the crude that floated to the surface.
Instead, it’s in the sediments, still giving off fumes that are killing the insects.

Some napthalenes — crude oil components most commonly known for their use in mothballs — appear to have increased since the spill, she said.

“They’re volatile, and they’re toxic,” Hooper-Bui said. “And they’re not just toxic to insects. They’re toxic to fish. They’re toxic to birds. They cause eggshell thinning in birds. We think this is evidence of an emerging problem.”

Hooper-Bui said crickets exposed to the contaminated muck in laboratories die, and when temperatures were increased to those comparable to a summer day, “the crickets die faster.”

By August 2011, the number of grasshoppers had fallen by 70% to 80% in areas that got oiled.

“By 2012, we were unable to find any colonies of ants in the oiled areas,” she said.
Then on August 29, 2012, Hurricane Isaac hit southeastern Louisiana. The slow-moving storm sat over Barataria Bay for more than 60 hours as it crawled onto land.

When Hooper-Bui went back to the marshes after the storm, she had a surprise waiting for her.

“We discovered in Bay Batiste large amounts of what looked like somebody had poured motor oil all over the marsh there,” she said. “About three-quarters of the perimeter of northern Bay Batiste was covered in this oil.”

The chemical fingerprint of the oil matched the oil from the ruptured BP well, Hooper-Bui said. Other scientists confirmed that Isaac kicked up tar balls from the spill as far east as the Alabama-Florida state line, more than 100 miles from where the storm made its initial landfall.

Far from the shoreline, patches of oil fell to the bottom of the Gulf in a mix of sediment, dead plankton and hydrocarbons dubbed “marine snow.” It fouled corals near the wellhead, and it’s still sitting there.

There’s something about this stuff, the carbon in these layers, that’s not degrading.
Samantha Joye, oceanographer

“If you took a picture of a core (sample) that was collected today and took a picture of a core that was taken in September 2010, they look the same,” University of Georgia oceanographer Samantha Joye said.

“What’s really strange to me is, the material is not degrading,” Joye added. “There’s something about this stuff, the carbon in these layers, that’s not degrading.”

Normally, microbes go to work on free-floating hydrocarbons almost immediately, digesting the compounds. The controversial large-scale use of chemical dispersants was supposed to accelerate that process by breaking up the oil into smaller droplets that could be more easily consumed.

But that’s not happening to this layer, Joye said, and the reason is unclear.
“The first thing everyone asks is, ‘Do you think it’s dispersants?’ And I can honestly tell you, we don’t know,” she said.

During the spill, scientists warned that fish eggs and larvae, shrimp, coral and oysters were potentially most at risk from the use of dispersants. The Environmental Protection Agency later reported that testing found the combination of oil and dispersants to be no more toxic than the oil alone.

But that’s no comfort to Encalade, who could watch planes spray dispersant on the slick from the marina where he keeps his two boats.

“We know from history, whenever you put soap in the water around camps and stuff like that, oysters don’t reproduce,” he said. “And we’ve heard BP say over and over again, ‘Oh, it’s like detergent.’ That’s the worst thing in the world you can do to an oyster.”

The impact of these dispersants on marine life is still an open question, and it’s something that’s under review by scientists involved in the Natural Resource Damage Assessment, the federally run, BP-funded effort to figure out what the spill did to the Gulf Coast.
That assessment could take several years.

As scientists sort out the data, the Gulf fishing communities from Louisiana to Florida are still dealing with the impact of the spill. When you look at the entire expanse of the ocean, there isn’t a huge amount of oil, explained Ian MacDonald, an oceanographer at Florida State University.

“You have to look hard to find any oil at all,” he said.

But where the oil has been found, MacDonald said, the damage is “intense and widespread.”

There is some good news: Some studies indicate that commercial fish species in different parts of the Gulf escaped the worst. Recent research at Alabama’s Dauphin Island Sea Lab found that young shrimp and blue crabs off Bayou La Batre, the state’s major seafood port, showed no sign of decline since the spill.

But that’s no consolation for Donny Waters, a Pensacola, Florida, fisherman who has been involved with efforts to rebuild the red snapper populations off the Florida panhandle.
“I’m still catching fish. I’m not saying everything’s dead,” Waters said. “But it’s taking me longer to catch my fish. I’m not seeing the snappers farther around reefs, whether they’re natural or artificial. I’m not seeing the reefs repopulate nearly as fast since the oil spill.”

‘BP has retired me’
Like many in the trade, Encalade and the other guys on his dock in Pointe a la Hache can spin epic tales. But these days, they’re not about the catch. More often, they’re about the red tape and low-ball offers they’ve had to deal with in the compensation process set up after the spill — a process they say is stacked in favor of big operators.

“I got guys been fishing out here all their life. They’ve got trip tickets, more than you can imagine,” Encalade said, referring to the slips that document a boat’s daily catch. “You know what they come back and tell a man his whole life is worth? $40,000.”

The oil, the catch and the money: All converge at the big federal courthouse on Poydras Street in New Orleans, where squadrons of lawyers have massed for what promises to be a protracted brawl to figure out how much BP will end up paying for the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

BP says it has shelled out $32 billion for the disaster, including $14 billion for cleanup. It’s also spent $300 million on everything from testing seafood to its ad campaign that encourages people to come back to the Gulf, and it pledged $500 million for research into the environmental effects of the disaster.

The company has paid to help replace oyster reefs in Mississippi and Louisiana and rebuild sand dunes and sea turtle habitats in Alabama and northwest Florida. In addition to monitoring part of the Gulf coastline, BP spokesman Scott Dean said, the company has planted new grass in the Louisiana marshes, where the losses sped up erosion already blamed for the loss of an area the size of Manhattan every year.

But of about 13,000 holes drilled into the beaches and marshes in search of settled oil, Dean said, only 3% have found enough to require cleanup, he said.

“The vast majority of the work has been done,” Dean said. But when previously undiscovered oil from the Deepwater Horizon blowout does turn up, “We take responsibility for the cleanup,” he said.

Last year, the company agreed to pay $7.8 billion to individuals and businesses who filed economic, property and health claims. But in March, the company asked a judge to halt those payments, arguing that it was facing hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars in payouts for “fictitious losses.”

It’s also pleaded guilty to manslaughter charges and fined $4 billion in the deaths of the 11 men killed aboard the rig and been temporarily barred from getting new federal contracts.

Now BP is back in court, battling to avoid a finding of gross negligence that would sock it with penalties up to $4,300 per barrel under the Clean Water Act — another $17 billion-plus by the federal government’s estimate of the spill. BP says that figure is at least 20% too high.

The plaintiffs include the federal government, the states affected by the disaster and people like Encalade and Barisich, who have rejected previous settlement offers from BP.
Freddie Duplessis, whose boat is tied up next to Encalade’s, settled with the company. He said he received about $250,000 from BP after the spill, including money the company paid to hire his boat for the cleanup effort. That’s about what he says he would have made in six months of fishing before the spill, before expenses.

I got guys been fishing out here all their life. You know what they come back and tell a man his whole life is worth? $40,000.
Pointe a la Hache oysterman Byron Encalade

“I’ve been all right. I’ve been paying my bills, but what I’m gonna do now?” asked Duplessis, 54. “You’re still gonna have bills. Everything I’ve got is mine, but I’ve got to maintain it.”

But proving just how much damage can be blamed on the oil spill will be a difficult task in the courtroom. That’s where the Natural Resource Damage Assessment, launched after the disaster and partly paid for by BP, comes in. And right now, the studies that make up that assessment are closely held, ready to be played like a hole card in poker.

“There’s a substantial amount of fisheries work that’s not actually going to see the light of day until after the court case is resolved,” USF’s Murawski said.

The region’s seafood landings largely returned to normal in 2011, after the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration closed most of the Gulf to fishing during the blowout, NOAA data show. And BP notes that across the four states that saw the most impact — Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida — shrimp and finfish catches were up in 2012 compared with the average haul between 2007 and 2009.

Blue crab was off about 1%. And while oysters regionwide remained 17% below 2007-09 figures, the company says that the flooding that hit the region in 2011 has been blamed for some of that downturn, again by dumping more fresh water into the coastal estuaries.

But Gulf-wide, shrimp landings in 2011 and 2012 were about 15% below the 2000-09 average, according to figures compiled by Mississippi State University’s Coastal Research and Extension Center.

And in Louisiana, there’s still a pronounced downturn.

State data show that blue crab landings are off an average of 18%, and brown shrimp — the season for which the industry is now gearing up — is down 39% compared with the 2002-09 catch.

In Yscloskey, Barisich said three bayou fishermen took settlements from BP, sold their leases and walked away from the docks. As for him, at 56, he’s trying to adapt.

He’s studying for a license that will allow him to take passengers out on shrimp trawls — a kind of working vacation for tourists with a taste for the job he learned from his father.
“I can’t do what I have for the last two years,” he said.

And in Pointe a la Hache, Encalade got heartbreaking news in early April.

The public reefs in nearby Black Bay, one of the post-spill reconstruction projects, had been closed after spat turned up to protect the larvae. But the spat died, and the reefs were being reopened to allow the few remaining mature oysters to be harvested.

“All the little oysters have died, and the big oysters, you can’t make a dollar with them,” Encalade said. “BP has retired me out of the oyster business.”

Special thanks to Richard Charter

fossil fuels, marine pollution, national ocean politics, natural resource management, ocean pollution, offshore oil

Common Dreams: ‘People’s History’ of Gulf Oil Disaster Reveals Deadly Truth Behind Dispersant Corexit; Sign petition to end use of Corexit

Leave a comment

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/04/19-4

I encourage everyone to sign this petition now! Read the full report and sign the petition at: http://www.whistleblower.org/program-areas/public-health/corexit DeeVon

Published on Friday, April 19, 2013 by Common Dreams

Report released on eve of Deepwater Horizon anniversary tells of BP lies and government collusion in oil ‘clean-up’
– Jacob Chamberlain, staff writer

A dispersant plane passed over an oil skimmer in the Gulf of Mexico ten days after Deepwater Horizon explosion (Patrick Semansky / AP)

Not only is the chemical dispersant that was used to “clean up” the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster of 2010 extremely dangerous, it was knowingly used to make the gushing oil merely “appear invisible” all the while exacerbating levels of toxicity in the Gulf waters, according to a report released Friday, the eve of the third anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, by the Government Accountability Project.

According to the report, Deadly Dispersants in the Gulf: Are Public Health and Environmental Tragedies the New Norm for Oil Spill Cleanups?, Corexit-the dispersant chemical dumped into the Gulf of Mexico by oil giant BP and the U.S. government in the spill’s aftermath-was widely applied “because it caused the false impression that the oil disappeared.”

“This report is a people’s history to rebut a false advertising blitz by BP, enabled by government collusion.”
-Tom Devine
Government Accountability Project

As GAP states: “In reality, the oil/Corexit mixture became less visible, yet much more toxic than the oil alone. Nonetheless, indications are that both BP and the government were pleased with what Corexit accomplished.”

The Corexit/oil combination is highly toxic and will continue to cause “devastating long-term effects on human health and the Gulf of Mexico ecosystem” for a long time into the future, the report warns.

GAP spent 20 months collecting evidence from “over two dozen employee and citizen whistleblowers who experienced the cleanup’s effects firsthand,” and from extensive Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.

“This report is a people’s history to rebut a false advertising blitz by BP, enabled by government collusion,” stated GAP Legal Director Tom Devine, co-author of the report. “Gulf workers and residents who are still suffering deserve justice, and the public deserves the truth.”

“The price for making the spill appear invisible has been deadly,” he said. “It is time to stop covering up the truth about the deadly effects of the chemical cover-up Corexit.”
“Taken together, the documents and the witnesses’ testimony belie repeated corporate and government rhetoric that Corexit is not dangerous. Worse than this, evidence suggests that the cleanup effort has been more destructive to human health and the environment than the spill itself,” the group stated Friday.

The report includes first hand accounts from cleanup workers, divers, local doctors, and residents.

The findings also include “higher than normal frequency of seafood mutations,” and “pockets of ‘dead’ ocean areas where life was previously abundant.”
“Through their testimony and emerging science, the truth about the spill response’s toxic legacy is beginning to surface as the third anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon explosion approaches,” GAP stated.

Below is a small selection of some of the voices included in the report:
As an environmental scientist, I look at the way the government and BP are handling, describing and discussing the spill Š [T]he government did not account for the increased toxicity of the combined oil and Corexit.
– Scott Porter, Diver, Marine Biologist
[W]hen a BP representative came up on the speedboat and asked if we need anything, I again explained my concerns about breathing in the Corexit and asked him for a respirator Š He explained ‘If you wear a respirator, it is bringing attention to yourself because no one else is wearing respirators, and you can get fired for that.’
– Jorey Danos, Cleanup Worker
What brought all of these individuals into the same pool was the fact that their symptoms were almost identical, and were different from anything that I had ever observed in my 40 plus years as a physician Š However, until people are educated about the symptoms associated with exposure to toxic waste from the spill, we cannot assume they will make the connection. I continue to witness this disconnect and these symptoms on a daily basis.
– Dr. Michael Robichaux, Physician
They hired people from all over who didn’t know about the conditions and real safety hazards, but you did what you had to do; you had to take the job and deal with it because you didn’t have money to go home Š There was a safety culture of, ‘hush hush, it didn’t happen.’
– Anonymous Cleanup Worker
EPA and BP knew of the health impacts associated with [Corexit and oil] Š The issue was responding to an oil spill of this magnitude, with unprecedented quantities of Corexit, including novel subsurface application. Gulf coastal communities, and individuals who consume gulf seafood or recreate in the gulf, are the guinea pigs left to deal with the consequences and will be feeling the full effect in years to come.
– Dr. Wilma Subra, Chemist, MacArthur Genius Award Recipient

Special thanks to Richard Charter

fossil fuels, marine pollution, ocean pollution, offshore oil

Care2.com: 10 Oil Spills in a Single Month That Have Been Covered Up

Leave a comment

by Kevin Mathews
April 15, 2013
6:00 am

As politicians take steps to advance the Keystone Pipeline project, oil spills and accidents continue to occur throughout North America. In the past month alone, there have been well over a dozen harmful oil incidents.

While a recent devastating pipeline burst in Arkansas has attracted a moderate amount of attention, most such accidents are swept under the rug. Claims that pipelines are highly safe and rarely malfunction are false, and there is a lack of evidence to prove them. Just because most pipeline incidents receive minimal media attention doesn’t make them any less true.

Here are 10 oil leaks from the past month that have been mostly covered up by the corporate media:

1. For the fourth time in just two years, a leak was found in Canada’s Norman Wells pipeline on March 19. In total, the pipeline has leaked 1 million liters of oil. Although the pipeline has been patched up each time, the fact that it keeps breaking has locals calling the repairs “a quick fix.”

2. Almost 1,000 barrels of crude oil leaked from Shell’s West Columbia pipeline near Houston, Texas. The massive spill was found on March 29, but not before over 50 barrels worth ran into nearby Vince Bayou.

3. A leak in a gas treatment plant’s pipeline in Parachute, Colorado continues to contaminate the local water supply over a month after it was discovered. As a result, harmful toxins have been found in Parachute Creek, which flows directly into the Colorado River. An estimated 30 million people live downstream of the leak and rely on the water supply. State law limits the maximum fine for “environmental mishaps” to just $10,000 total.

4. On March 31, the Lansing Board of Water and Light found that 3,000 gallons of oil leaked into the Grand River. Cleanup of the spill took nearly two weeks.

5. A March 18 pipeline crack leaked 21,000 gallons of fuel into the wetlands of Utah’s Willard Bay State Park. Some of the missing oil is still not accounted for, and the park will remained closed through Memorial Day.

6. A Canadian Pacific Railway train carrying fuel to Chicago derailed, spilling 15,000 gallons of oil in Minnesota on March 27. According to officials, the cold weather made cleanup efforts particularly difficult.

7. Repsol, a Spanish oil company, had its second oil spill in about a year in North Slope, Alaska. Though nearly 7,000 gallons sprayed on to the nearby terrain on April 9, an oil commissioner seemed unimpressed. “It wasn’t a big event. They had a hose rupture. How many times have you watered your garden and had a leak in your hose?”

8. On April 4, an S&S Energy oil and gas well in Damascus, Ohio exploded. A representative for the firefighters who came to put out the blaze said that this type of accident “is not unusual.”

9. A natural gas explosion occurred at a plant in Langston, Oklahoma on April 4. While no one was hurt, the gas line had to entirely burn off before firefighters could put out the resulting inferno.

10. After already demonstrating a spotty safety record, Suncor Energy acknowledged that 225 barrels of oil leaked in Port Moody, British Columbia on April 7, with a small portion of the fuel making its way to the water in the Burrard Inlet. Though Suncor managed to keep the accident a secret for four days, the incident was eventually exposed.

Unfortunately, oil spills are not isolated incidents as the corporations and mainstream media would like you to believe. If these 10 leaks aren’t enough to convince you of the Keystone Pipeline’s potential dangers, just wait until next month.

Read more: http://www.care2.com/causes/10-oil-spills-in-a-single-month-that-have-been-covered-up.html#ixzz2QquSwndy

offshore oil

Sun Sentinel: Companies abandon search for oil in Cuba’s deep waters

Leave a comment

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/fl-cuban-oil-drilling-retreat-20130414,0,5594782.story

Threat to Florida’s environment reduced as drillers look elsewhere

By William E. Gibson, Washington Bureau
9:20 p.m. EDT, April 14, 2013
WASHINGTON – After spending nearly $700 million during a decade, energy companies from around the world have all but abandoned their search for oil in deep waters off the north coast of Cuba near Florida, a blow to the Castro regime but a relief to environmentalists worried about a major oil spill.

Decisions by Spain-based Repsol and other companies to drill elsewhere greatly reduce the chances that a giant slick along the Cuban coast would ride ocean currents to South Florida, threatening its beaches, inlets, mangroves, reefs and multibillion-dollar tourism industry.

The Coast Guard remains prepared to contain, skim, burn or disperse a potential slick. And Cuban officials still yearn for a lucrative strike that would prop up its economy. A Russian company, Zarubezhneft, is drilling an exploratory well in shallower waters hugging the Cuban shoreline south of the Bahamas.

But though some oil has been found offshore, exploratory drilling in deep waters near currents that rush toward Florida has failed to reveal big deposits that would be commercially viable to extract, discouraging companies from pouring more money into the search.

“Those companies are saying, ‘We cannot spend any more capital on this high-risk exploration. We’d rather go to Brazil; we’d rather go to Angola; we’d rather go to other places in the world where the technological and geological challenges are less,'” said Jorge Piñon, an oil-industry analyst at the University of Texas who consults with U.S. and Cuban officials as well as energy companies.

“I don’t foresee any time in the future exploration in Cuba’s deep-water north coast. It is, for all practical purposes, over.”

Despite these frustrations, Cuba’s need for oil wealth and energy independence has only intensified.

Venezuela – which holds a presidential election Sunday – may quit sending $3.5 billion worth of oil to Cuba each year under a barter arrangement initiated by the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, an ally of Fidel and Raúl Castro.

Venezuela has been sending oil to Cuba at favorable prices, with part of the cost paid through low-interest loans and the rest offset by services from Cuban doctors, teachers and advisers – a sweet deal for the Castro regime that meets the island’s energy needs and fuels its struggling economy.

But Venezuelan opposition leader Henrique Capriles, a presidential candidate, has told voters that if he is elected “not another drop of oil will go toward financing the government of the Castros.” And even if Capriles loses to acting President Nicolas Maduro, Venezuela may be unable to sustain its generosity.

“How much longer can Venezuela provide billions of dollars in aid and petroleum?” said U.S. Rep. Kathy Castor, D-Tampa, who met with energy officials in Havana earlier this month. “They [Cuban officials] know that is staring them in the face.

“They were upfront that they have not been successful to date,” she said. “But they do have other foreign investors – the Russians, the Brazilians, Angola – and they intend to proceed.”

Castor and other Floridians fear the consequences of a potential offshore oil spill, especially if a giant slick gets caught in ocean currents that feed into the powerful Gulf Stream, which could drag it north along the Florida coast and to the Carolinas.

Florida leaders for years have fended off oil drilling within 125 miles of Florida’s Gulf Coast for fear a spill would damage the environment and the state’s $65 billion tourism industry.

Those fears were heightened when the Deepwater Horizon spill in 2010 spewed 210 million gallons of oil into the Gulf, ruining that summer’s tourist and fishing season along the Florida Panhandle and polluting coastal waters in ways that are still being measured.

In the aftermath, drilling north of Cuba just 70 miles from Florida set off new alarms and prompted the Coast Guard to devise contingency plans to fend off a potential slick.
The Coast Guard today is breathing a little easier but remains on guard.

“The ocean currents [near the Russian drilling site] are much more favorable in terms of a U.S. landing of a potential oil spill, but clearly there’s still risk,” said Coast Guard Capt. John Slaughter, who oversees oil-spill response plans in South Florida. “Even if the currents don’t bring it here, you still may have strong winds from the east pushing the oil closer to our shores.

“Economically for the state of Florida, if [a spill] were to happen, even if nothing reaches the shore, people are going to get agitated. ‘Should I still come to Florida on vacation if there’s an oil spill in the Florida Straits?’ We would be very aggressive to ensure that nothing happens.”

Repsol, a Spanish company, had been looking for oil off the shores of Cuba for more than a decade, hoping for a big strike that could generate billions of dollars of profit. The company brought a gigantic self-propelled floating rig – the Scarabeo 9 – all the way from Singapore to drill an exploratory well in ultradeep waters of more than 5,000 feet north of Havana in January 2012.

The well produced signs of oil. But by May 2012, the company concluded it wasn’t enough to justify the cost and difficulty of extraction through a complex and porous underwater rock structure. Now Repsol is closing its Cuban offices and moving elsewhere.

“We have taken a decision not to carry out any further exploration in Cuba after the last well we did in 2012,” said Repsol spokesman Kristian Rix. He would not elaborate.

Petronas, a Malaysian company, and PDVSA of Venezuela have dug exploratory wells at other deep-water sites off the Cuban coast during the past year and came to the same conclusion.

The Russian drilling still underway is in shallower waters – about 1,200 feet – along the Cuban coast near Cayo Coco, farther from Florida than the deep-water sites and farther from the Gulf Stream.

“Arguably it’s in a more environmentally sensitive area along the Cuban coastline,” said Daniel Whittle, Cuba program director for the Environmental Defense Fund. “But from the U.S. point of view, it poses less danger.”

Piñon, who estimates that energy companies have spent a total of nearly $700 million during a decade exploring deep-water sites, predicted that other companies with less capital will be discouraged from making further attempts.

“This is a high-risk business. Folks in the street rarely hear about all the dry holes. It’s nothing out of the ordinary,” he said. “Everyone had high expectations because there was supposed to be oil off the north coast of Cuba, and look what happened: nothing.”

Special thanks to Richard Charter.