FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: May 18, 2010

Contact:
David Guest, Earthjustice, (850) 681-0031, ext 103
Robert Wiygul, Waltzer& Wiygul, (228) 990-1228
Joel Waltzer, Waltzer & Wiygul, (504) 430-0844
Cynthia Sarthou, Gulf Restoration Network, (504) 525-1528 ext. 202
Kristina Johnson, Sierra Club, (415) 977-5619

No blowout scenario or oil spill response  produced as required

New Orleans, LA -The Gulf Restoration Network and the Sierra Club filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Minerals Management Service for exempting oil companies drilling in the Gulf of Mexico from disclosing blowout and worst case oil spill scenarios, as well as formulating detailed plans for such. The groups are represented by Earthjustice, an environmental law firm, and the New Orleans law firm of Waltzer & Wiygul.

“I’ve worked for 15 years to protect and restore the beaches, wetlands and wildlife of the Gulf of Mexico,” said Cynthia Sarthou of the Gulf Restoration Network. “We are bracing ourselves against the environmental catastrophe this will bring. BP’s drilling disaster will
likely destroy countless victories we’ve won for a healthy Gulf.”

By law, MMS is required to include blowout and worst case oil spill scenarios before approving exploratory offshore drilling plans. These blowout and worst case scenario disclosures must include the maximum volume of oil, the maximum flow rate, the maximum duration of the blowout, and an estimate of the time it would take to contain the resulting oil spill.

For the BP Deepwater Horizon rig exploration plan, MMS approved the plan without this required step because MMS had issued a notice to oil companies telling them that they didn’t have to comply with those blowout and worst case oil spill rules. Additionally, MMS was required by law to produce an analysis of potential environmental impacts in the event of a blow-out; but failed to take that necessary step as well.

“The basic problem here is that the Minerals Management Service tried to change the law without telling anybody,” said Robert Wiygul, an environmental lawyer involved in the lawsuit. “That’s bad policy, and the BP mess proves it’s a disaster for the environment.”

This legal challenge asks the court to invalidate the MMS practice of sending notices to oil companies informing them that they don’t have to comply with the rules and to order review of existing offshore drilling plans that do not comply with existing rules.

“This case is about lax regulation by the Minerals Management Service” said Earthjustice attorney David Guest.  “It is actually easier to get a permit for an offshore oil well than for a hot dog stand.”

“The MMS failed to protect us from the worst-case scenario of offshore drilling and now we are watching this scenario play out before our eyes,” said Sierra Club executive director Michael Brune. “Response to the blowout has included desperate measures like lighting the sea on fire, pouring potent chemicals into the water, using trash and human hair to prevent the flow of oil, and proposals to dredge the sea and create new barrier islands. If oil companies aren’t capable of responding to a blowout, they shouldn’t be permitted to drill.”

“Our government clearly missed the painful engineering lessons taught by the design failures that caused our levees to collapse in Hurricane Katrina.  When analysis of real data is abandoned in favor of assumption, disaster is sure to follow,”  said Joel Waltzer, a New Orleans lawyer who lost his home to failed floodwalls in Katrina. “Is the bottom of the ocean that different south of Louisiana and Mississippi?”

Special thanks to Richard Charter

New York Times
May 19, 2010

 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/20/science/earth/20noaa.html

By JUSTIN GILLIS
Tensions between the Obama administration and the scientific community over the gulf oil spill are escalating, with prominent oceanographers accusing the government of failing to conduct an adequate scientific analysis of the damage and of allowing BP to obscure the spill’s true scope.

The scientists assert that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and other agencies have been slow to investigate the magnitude of the spill and the damage it is causing in the deep ocean. They are especially concerned about getting a better handle on problems that may be occurring from large plumes of oil droplets that appear to be spreading beneath the ocean surface.

The scientists point out that in the month since the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded, the government has failed to make public a single test result on water from the deep ocean. And the scientists say the administration has been too reluctant to demand an accurate analysis of how many gallons of oil are flowing into the sea from the gushing oil well.

“It seems baffling that we don’t know how much oil is being spilled,” Sylvia Earle, a famed oceanographer, said Wednesday on Capitol Hill. “It seems baffling that we don’t know where the oil is in the water column.”

The administration acknowledges that its scientific resources are stretched by the disaster, but contends that it is moving to get better information, including a more complete picture of the underwater plumes.

“We’re in the early stages of doing that, and we do not have a comprehensive understanding as of yet of where that oil is,” Jane Lubchenco, the NOAA administrator, told Congress on Wednesday. “But we are devoting all possible resources to understanding where the oil is and what its impact might be.”

The administration has mounted a huge response to the spill, deploying 1,105 vessels to try to skim oil, burn it and block it from shorelines. As part of the effort, the federal government and the Gulf Coast states have begun an extensive effort to catalog any environmental damage to the coast. The Environmental Protection Agency is releasing results from water sampling near shore. In most places, save for parts of Louisiana, the contamination appears modest so far.

The big scientific question now is what is happening in deeper water. While it is clear that water samples have been taken, the results have not been made public.

Lisa P. Jackson, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, told Congress on Wednesday that she was pressing for the release of additional test results, including some samples taken by boats under contract to BP.

While the total number of boats involved in the response is high, relatively few are involved in scientific assessment of the deep ocean.

Of the 19 research vessels owned by NOAA, 5 are in the Gulf of Mexico and available for work on the spill, Dr. Lubchenco said, counting a newly commissioned boat. The flagship of the NOAA fleet, the research vessel Ronald H. Brown, was off the coast of Africa when the spill occurred on April 20, and according to NOAA tracking logs, it was not redirected until about May 11, three weeks after the disaster began. It is sailing toward the gulf.

At least one vessel under contract to BP has collected samples from deep water, and so have a handful of university ships. NOAA is dropping instruments into the sea that should help give a better picture of conditions.

On May 6, NOAA called attention to its role in financing the work of a small research ship called the Pelican, owned by a university consortium in Louisiana. But when scientists aboard that vessel reported over the weekend that they had discovered large plumes undersea that appeared to be made of oil droplets, NOAA criticized the results as premature and requiring further analysis.

Rick Steiner, a marine biologist and a veteran of the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster, assailed NOAA in an interview, declaring that it had been derelict in analyzing conditions beneath the sea.

Mr. Steiner said the likelihood of extensive undersea plumes of oil droplets should have been anticipated from the moment the spill began, given that such an effect from deepwater blowouts had been predicted in the scientific literature for more than a decade, and confirmed in a test off the coast of Norway. An extensive sampling program to map and characterize those plumes should have been put in place from the first days of the spill, he said.

“A vast ecosystem is being exposed to contaminants right now, and nobody’s watching it,” Mr. Steiner said. “That seems to me like a catastrophic failure on the part of NOAA.”

Mr. Steiner, long critical of offshore drilling, has fought past battles involving NOAA, including one in which he was stripped of a small university grant financed by the agency. He later resigned from the University of Alaska at Anchorage and now consults worldwide on oil-spill prevention and response.

Oceanographers have also criticized the Obama administration over its reluctance to force BP, the oil company responsible for the spill, to permit an accurate calculation of the flow rate from the undersea well. The company has refused to permit scientists to send equipment to the ocean floor that would establish the rate with high accuracy.

Ian MacDonald of Florida State University, an oceanographer who was among the first to question the official estimate of 210,000 gallons a day, said he had come to the conclusion that the oil company was bent on obstructing any accurate calculation. “They want to hide the body,” he said.

Andrew Gowers, a spokesman for BP, said this was not correct. Given the complex operations going on at the sea floor to try to stop the flow, “introducing more equipment into the immediate vicinity would represent an unacceptable risk,” he said.

Thad W. Allen, the Coast Guard admiral in charge of the response to the spill, said Wednesday evening that the government had decided to try to put equipment on the ocean floor to take accurate measurements. A technical team is at work devising a method, he said. “We are shoving pizzas under the door, and they are not coming out until they give us the answer,” he said.

Scientists have long theorized that a shallow spill and a spill in the deep ocean  this one is a mile down  would behave quite differently. A 2003 report by the National Research Council predicted that the oil in a deepwater blowout could break into fine droplets, forming plumes of oil mixed with water that would not quickly rise to the surface.

That prediction appeared to be confirmed Saturday when the researchers aboard the Pelican reported that they had detected immense plumes that they believed were made of oil particles. The results were not final, and came as a surprise to the government. They raise a major concern, that sea life in concentrated areas could be exposed to a heavy load of toxic materials as the plumes drift through the sea.

Under scrutiny from NOAA, the researchers have retreated to their laboratories to finish their analysis.

In an interview, Dr. Lubchenco said she was mobilizing every possible NOAA asset to get a more accurate picture of the environmental damage, and was even in the process of hiring fishing vessels to do some scientific work.

“Our intention is to deploy every single thing we’ve got,” Dr. Lubchenco said. “If it’s not in the region, we’re bringing it there.”
Robert Gebeloff, Andrew W. Lehren, Campbell Robertson and Matthew L. Wald contributed reporting.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-05-19/republicans-put-taxpayers-on-hook-for-oil-damage-obama-says.html
Business Week May 19, 2010, 12:04 AM EDT

By James Rowley and Jeff Plungis

May 19 (Bloomberg) — Senate Republicans threaten to leave taxpayers “on the hook” for damages from the BP Plc spill in the Gulf of Mexico by blocking legislation to raise the liability limit, President Barack Obama said.

“This maneuver threatens to leave taxpayers, rather than the oil companies, on the hook for future disasters like the BP oil spill,” Obama said yesterday in a statement. “I urge the Senate Republicans to stop playing special-interest politics and join in a bipartisan effort to protect taxpayers and demand accountability from the oil companies.”

A Democratic bid to pass a bill raising liability to $10 billion from $75 million was blocked yesterday by Republican Senator Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma. Inhofe said a higher limit would make it impossible for independent producers to drill in the Gulf, where they account for 63 percent of natural-gas production and 36 percent of oil pumped from wells.

“Big Oil would love to have these caps there so they can shut out all the independents,” Inhofe said.

The legislation would apply retroactively to companies, such as BP and Transocean Ltd., in the April 20 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform. The rig sank two days later about 40 miles (64 kilometers) off Louisiana’s coast, triggering a spill that threatens the Gulf Coast with oil.

Obama plans to consult with Congress on setting an appropriate level to cap economic damages in spills, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said yesterday at a Senate Environment and Public Works Committee hearing.

BP Pledge

BP has pledged to compensate for losses even if costs exceed the $75 million limit without seeking aid from taxpayers, Salazar said, citing the company’s response to a May 14 letter he sent with Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano.

“In our view, that liability limitation doesn’t apply to BP because they have affirmatively stated that they will pay for all damages,” Salazar told Inhofe during the hearing.
Salazar in a separate appearance told the Senate Energy Committee that U.S. drilling companies are resisting efforts by the administration to beef up oversight of offshore oil and natural-gas operations on federal leases.

An overhaul at the Minerals Management Service, which oversees platforms such as the Deepwater Horizon, “raised the ire” of companies, Salazar said in remarks at the energy panel’s hearing. Lawmakers have said the MMS failed to ensure that BP and other drillers were operating under proper safety guidelines.

‘Impediments, Roadblocks’

“In the past 16 months, our efforts at reform have been characterized as impediments and roadblocks to the development of our domestic oil and gas resources,” Salazar said.

Obama has vowed to end the “cozy relationship” between companies and regulators. The administration is splitting MMS to separate inspection and safety enforcement from leasing and royalty collection. The agency generates about $13 billion a year for the U.S. by partnering with companies to develop oil and gas, trailing only the Internal Revenue Service in revenue.

Obama is planning to create a commission to investigate the accident, similar to presidential probes of the 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear accident and the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. The president has suspended issuing offshore drilling permits for 30 days.

“There’s plenty of responsibility to go around,” Salazar said. “That responsibility, I will say, starts first with the Department of Interior and the Minerals Management Service. We need to clean up that house.”

Oil Collecting

The well is leaking an estimated 5,000 barrels of oil a day, according to BP, the U.S. Coast Guard and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. BP yesterday said it doubled the amount of oil it’s able to collect from the leak using a mile-long pipeline connecting the well to a ship on the surface.

Regulators have authorized BP to employ a technique that uses chemicals under water to disperse oil near the seabed, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson told the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. The dispersants are toxic and must be monitored, she said.

“Dispersants are generally less toxic than the oils they break down,” Jackson said. “However, the long-term effects of dispersants on aquatic life are unknown.”

‘Scot Free’

Florida Democratic Senator Bill Nelson said “there is no logic” to the Republican opposition on the liability limit because it suggests that a small oil company that causes a big disaster should get off “scot-free.”

“The Republican opposition will collapse because they simply cannot stand there with a straight face and support the oil industry and say the taxpayers going to have to pay for all these economic devastations,” Nelson told reporters.
The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration had confirmed that some of the oil slick is now in the loop current that flows around the edges of the Gulf, “and professors at the University of South Florida are telling us it will be in the Keys in five days,” Nelson said.

–With assistance from Julianna Goldman and Jim Efstathiou Jr. in Washington. Editors: Steve Geimann, Larry Liebert
To contact the reporters on this story: James Rowley in Washington at jarowley@bloomberg.net; Jeff Plungis in Washington at jplungis@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Mike Tackett at mtackett@bloomberg.net; Larry Liebert at lliebert@bloomberg.net. Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://www.vcstar.com/news/2010/may/18/state-lands-commissions-reaffirms-opposition-to/
Ventura County Star
By Timm Herdt
Posted May 18, 2010 at 6:56 p.m.
SACRAMENTO – Delivering what could be the knockout punch to a Texas-based oil company’s plans to drill for oil in state waters off Santa Barbara County, the State Lands Commission on Tuesday said the proposal remains fatally flawed.

The Plains Exploration and Production Co. and its environmental supporters in Santa Barbara had hoped that a revised agreement, under which the company pledges a long-term cessation of all oil activities in the area in exchange for short-term permission to tap into state reserves, would lead state regulators to remove their opposition.

But in a memo to commissioners on Tuesday, Executive Director Paul Thayer concluded, “The new agreement does not cure the factors that led the commission to determine the proposed leases were not in the best interests of the state.”

That opinion, coming on the heels of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s decision earlier this month to abandon his support for the Tranquillon Ridge project, makes it unlikely the company will ask the commission to reconsider its January 2009 decision to reject the project.

“I really think this is the final nail,” said Susan Jordan, founder of the nonprofit Coastal Protection Network and a leading opponent of the plan. “Given the staff’s very thorough analysis, I don’t know how PXP moves forward at this point.”

Last month the Santa Barbara-based Environmental Defense Center released its revised agreement with PXP in the hope it would satisfactorily address concerns previously expressed by the commission.

EDC attorney Linda Krop said she was disappointed with Thayer’s analysis.
“We responded to specific complaints,” she said. “Now they say that’s not good enough.”

A key point of contention is whether the federal Minerals Management Service – the agency now under intense national scrutiny in the wake of the ongoing Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico – would be obliged to accept a decision by PXP to walk away from its federal oil leases as it promises to do under the agreement.

Krop said that after discussions with MMS officials she determined the federal government’s only recourse if it felt PXP prematurely abandoned a lease would be to impose fines to recapture any lost royalty payments.

“The MMS confirmed to us that PXP has the right to relinquish its lease at any time,” she said. “They cannot force them to continue to drill. If they decide there are still recoverable reserves, their remedy would be monetary.”

The Lands Commission memo, however, said federal regulations allow the MMS to take more severe steps. “Money damages may not be sufficient for the service, as it sees energy supply as an important aspect of offshore oil development,” the memo says.

In an interview, Thayer said it would not be possible for the federal government to commit in advance to accept the drilling end dates called for in the agreement.

“When she says she has a definitive answer from MMS, I disagree with that,” Thayer said, referring to Krop’s assurances.

“The fundamental problem is that the unbound partner to the agreement is the MMS. The federal government controls those leases.”

Thayer said that although PXP pledges under the agreement to abandon three platforms and ask the owners to take them down, the incentive to keep them in place would be strong because there are an estimated 150 million barrels in unleased federal reserves that could be accessed in the future by slant-drilling from those platforms.

Alaska Dispatch
May 18, 2010

 http://www.alaskadispatch.com/voices/tundra-talk/5381-offshore-oil-industry-in-gulf-of-mexico-needs-citizen-oversight

Commentary by  Mark Swanson | May 18, 2010

Alaskans who were here for the Exxon Valdez oil spill of 1989 are surely dismayed by recent events in the Gulf of Mexico.

There, as in Prince William Sound, the oil industry and its government regulators promised Americans the chance of disaster was negligible. They promised that, if there was a spill, they could clean it up with a minimum of harm.

Once again, they were wrong on both counts.

Once again, a beautiful body of water has been fouled by a catastrophic oil spill, damaging the natural and human environments.

Once again, government and industry have shown themselves incapable of fast, effective response. Nearly a month has passed since BP’s Deepwater Horizon drilling rig blew up and killed 11 workers. Despite the valiant efforts of tens of thousands of responders, the leak has not been stopped, nor have the millions of gallons of oil spewed out been effectively cleaned up. Some has been skimmed off or burned, but, clearly, the majority of it is still in the water, in either raw or dispersed form.

While Alaskans should be dismayed by this sorry spectacle, they shouldn’t be surprised. We’ve come to expect the worst when it comes to effective regulation of big business by government. That certainly seems to have been the case in the Gulf, where the oil industry and its regulators appear to have learned almost nothing about the need for prevention and preparedness from the disaster in Prince William Sound 21 years ago.

In the Sound itself, though, the picture is different. There, the lessons of the Exxon Valdez are still in active effect today.

In the Sound, prevention is still a high priority. Single-hull oil tankers like the Exxon Valdez no longer operate there. Every loaded oil tanker is escorted by two powerful rescue tugs in case of emergency. In addition, a radar system near Bligh Reef detects icebergs like those that played a role in the Exxon Valdez grounding.

Response also remains a high priority. The oil industry must be ready to clean up 300,000 barrels of oil within 72 hours. A major part of the system for doing so is Alaska’s commercial fishermen. Alyeska Pipeline, in charge of the first 72 hours of response to tanker spills in the Sound, keeps over 300 fishing vessels under contract for oil-spill response; some are required to be ready to respond within six hours of notification.

Why are the lessons of the Exxon Valdez still actively debated and enforced in Prince William Sound?

When Congress passed the Oil Pollution Act of 1990, it identified complacency as a cause of the Exxon spill. “One way to combat this complacency,” Congress declared, “is to involve local citizens in the process of preparing, adopting, and revising oil spill contingency plans.”

As in Alaska, the oil industry in the Gulf of Mexico comprises a large segment of the region’s economy, employment, and tax base. That dependency creates some reluctance to compel costly safeguards or business-impeding environmental controls.

Citizen oversight operates on a basic moral imperative: Those with the most to lose from pollution must have a voice in decisions that put their livelihoods and communities at risk. In Prince William Sound, the citizen voice has been crucial in numerous safety improvements since the Exxon spill, from double-hull requirements to the adoption of high-performance escort tugs to the development of iceberg detection technology, and even elimination of the release of toxic benzene vapors when tankers load oil.

The legislation sure to grow out of the Gulf spill will likely address the need for better regulation of offshore oil development and perhaps raise liability limits on oil spillers.

We think Congress should also consider making citizen oversight a key part of the system to ensure nothing like BP’s Gulf spill happens again.

Citizen oversight isn’t good just for the environment — it’s also good for the affected industry, because it helps the industry get things right the first time.

And that’s absolutely crucial in preventing catastrophes like the Exxon and BP oil spills.

Mark Swanson is executive director of the
Prince William Sound Regional Citizens’ Advisory Council.’

.The views expressed are the writer’s own and are not endorsed by Alaska Dispatch.

Special thanks to Richard Charter