http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/17/us/17spill.html?hp

by Shayla Dewan

Published May 16, 2010

NEW ORLEANS, La. — An experimental attempt to stop an oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico experienced some limited success over the weekend, BP announced Sunday afternoon.

Engineers successfully inserted a tube into the damaged riser pipe from which some of the oil is spewing, capturing “some amounts of oil and gas” before the tube was dislodged, the announcement said. The tube was inspected and reinserted, BP said.

“While not collecting all of the leaking oil, this tool is an important step in reducing the amount of oil being released into Gulf waters,” the announcement said. It did not say why the tube had come dislodged or how much oil and gas were taken aboard the Discover Enterprise, the drill ship waiting to separate the oil, gas and water as it is siphoned off. The gas that reached the ship was burned using a flare system on board.

The tube is one of several proposed methods of stanching the flow of at least 210,000 gallons of oil a day into the Gulf, threatening marine life and sensitive wetlands and beaches in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. BP officials have emphasized that none of the techniques has been previously attempted at the depth of this leak, 5,000 feet below the surface.

Efforts to insert the tube, a five-foot section of pipe with a rubber seal designed to keep seawater out, into the broken riser pipe from which the majority of the oil is gushing, began on Friday using robotic submarines.

But the initial attempt to connect the mile-long pipe leading from the drill ship to the tube failed, and the device had to be brought back to the surface for adjustments.

“This is all part of reinventing technology,” said Tom Mueller, a BP spokesman, on Saturday. “It’s not what I’d call a problem — it’s what I’d call learning, reconfiguring, doing it again.”

BP still has an array of untested short-term options for reducing the flow, including a small “top hat” that could be placed over the leak, a “junk shot” that would involve plugging the blowout preventer at the well’s opening with debris like old tires, and a “top kill” that would pump mud and cement into the preventer in an attempt to seal the opening.

The long-term solution, already under way, is to drill two relief wells, a process that will not be completed until August, officials said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/us/16oil.html?hpw
By JUSTIN GILLIS

Published: May 15, 2010

 
Scientists are finding enormous oil plumes in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, including one as large as 10 miles long, 3 miles wide and 300 feet thick in spots. The discovery is fresh evidence that the leak from the broken undersea well could be substantially worse than estimates that the government and BP have given.
“There’s a shocking amount of oil in the deep water, relative to what you see in the surface water,” said Samantha Joye, a researcher at the University of Georgia who is involved in one of the first scientific missions to gather details about what is happening in the gulf. “There’s a tremendous amount of oil in multiple layers, three or four or five layers deep in the water column.”
The plumes are depleting the oxygen dissolved in the gulf, worrying scientists, who fear that the oxygen level could eventually fall so low as to kill off much of the sea life near the plumes.
Dr. Joye said the oxygen had already dropped 30 percent near some of the plumes in the month that the broken oil well had been flowing. “If you keep those kinds of rates up, you could draw the oxygen down to very low levels that are dangerous to animals in a couple of months,” she said Saturday. “That is alarming.”
The plumes were discovered by scientists from several universities working aboard the research vessel Pelican, which sailed from Cocodrie, La., on May 3 and has gathered extensive samples and information about the disaster in the gulf.
Scientists studying video of the gushing oil well have tentatively calculated that it could be flowing at a rate of 25,000 to 80,000 barrels of oil a day. The latter figure would be 3.4 million gallons a day. But the government, working from satellite images of the ocean surface, has calculated a flow rate of only 5,000 barrels a day.
BP has resisted entreaties from scientists that they be allowed to use sophisticated instruments at the ocean floor that would give a far more accurate picture of how much oil is really gushing from the well.
“The answer is no to that,” a BP spokesman, Tom Mueller, said on Saturday. “We’re not going to take any extra efforts now to calculate flow there at this point. It’s not relevant to the response effort, and it might even detract from the response effort.”
The undersea plumes may go a long way toward explaining the discrepancy between the flow estimates, suggesting that much of the oil emerging from the well could be lingering far below the sea surface.
The scientists on the Pelican mission, which is backed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the federal agency that monitors the health of the oceans, are not certain why that would be. They say they suspect the heavy use of chemical dispersants, which BP has injected into the stream of oil emerging from the well, may have broken the oil up into droplets too small to rise rapidly.
BP said Saturday at a briefing in Robert, La., that it had resumed undersea application of dispersants, after winning Environmental Protection Agency approval the day before.
“It appears that the application of the subsea dispersant is actually working,” Doug Suttles, BP’s chief operating officer for exploration and production, said Saturday. “The oil in the immediate vicinity of the well and the ships and rigs working in the area is diminished from previous observations.”
Many scientists had hoped the dispersants would cause oil droplets to spread so widely that they would be less of a problem in any one place. If it turns out that is not happening, the strategy could come under greater scrutiny. Dispersants have never been used in an oil leak of this size a mile under the ocean, and their effects at such depth are largely unknown.
Much about the situation below the water is unclear, and the scientists stressed that their results were preliminary. After the April 20 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon, they altered a previously scheduled research mission to focus on the effects of the leak.
Interviewed on Saturday by satellite phone, one researcher aboard the Pelican, Vernon Asper of the University of Southern Mississippi, said the shallowest oil plume the group had detected was at about 2,300 feet, while the deepest was near the seafloor at about 4,200 feet.
“We’re trying to map them, but it’s a tedious process,” Dr. Asper said. “Right now it looks like the oil is moving southwest, not all that rapidly.”
He said they had taken water samples from areas that oil had not yet reached, and would compare those with later samples to judge the impact on the chemistry and biology of the ocean.
While they have detected the plumes and their effects with several types of instruments, the researchers are still not sure about their density, nor do they have a very good fix on the dimensions.
Given their size, the plumes cannot possibly be made of pure oil, but more likely consist of fine droplets of oil suspended in a far greater quantity of water, Dr. Joye said. She added that in places, at least, the plumes might be the consistency of a thin salad dressing.
Dr. Joye is serving as a coordinator of the mission from her laboratory in Athens, Ga. Researchers from the University of Mississippi and the University of Southern Mississippi are aboard the boat taking samples and running instruments.
Dr. Joye said the findings about declining oxygen levels were especially worrisome, since oxygen is so slow to move from the surface of the ocean to the bottom. She suspects that oil-eating bacteria are consuming the oxygen at a feverish clip as they work to break down the plumes.
While the oxygen depletion so far is not enough to kill off sea life, the possibility looms that oxygen levels could fall so low as to create large dead zones, especially at the seafloor. “That’s the big worry,” said Ray Highsmith, head of the Mississippi center that sponsored the mission, known as the National Institute for Undersea Science and Technology.
The Pelican mission is due to end Sunday, but the scientists are seeking federal support to resume it soon.
“This is a new type of event, and it’s critically important that we really understand it, because of the incredible number of oil platforms not only in the Gulf of Mexico but all over the world now,” Dr. Highsmith said. “We need to know what these events are like, and what their outcomes can be, and what can be done to deal with the next one.”
Shaila Dewan contributed reporting from Robert, La.

A version of this article appeared in print on May 16, 2010, on page A1 of the New York edition.

 Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://news.remedy.org.ua/226d1ce7/
Science News   May 15th, 2010 by admin

During its nine years at sea, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig operated by BP suffered a series of spills, fires – even a high seas collision – because of equipment failure, human error and bad weather. It also drilled the world’s deepest offshore well.

What likely destroyed the rig in a ball of fire last week was a failure – or multiple failures – 5,000 feet below. That’s where drilling equipment met the sea bed in a complicated construction of pipes, concrete and valves that gave way in a manner that no one has yet been able to explain.

But Deepwater Horizon’s lasting legacy will undoubtedly be the environmental damage it caused after it exploded and sank, killing 11 crew and releasing an estimated 210,000 gallons of oil a day into the Gulf of Mexico.

Remote-controlled blowout preventers designed to apply brute force to seal off a well should have kicked in. But they failed to activate after the explosion.

Oil services contractor Halliburton Inc. said in a statement Friday that workers had finished cementing the well’s pipes 20 hours before the rig went up in flames. Halliburton is named as a defendant in most of the more than two dozen lawsuits filed by Gulf Coast people and businesses claiming the oil spill could ruin them financially. Without elaborating, one lawsuit filed by an injured technician on the rig claims that Halliburton improperly performed its job in cementing the well, “increasing the pressure at the well and contributing to the fire, explosion and resulting oil spill.”

Before last week’s catastrophe, Deepwater Horizon’s most recent “significant pollution incident” occurred in Nov. 2005, when the rig spilled 212 barrels of an oil-based lubricant due to equipment failure and human error. That spill was probably caused by not screwing the pipe tightly enough and not adequately sealing the well with cement, as well as a possible poor alignment of the rig, according to records maintained by the federal Minerals Management Service.

Scott Bickford, a lawyer for several Deepwater Horizon workers who survived the blast, said he believes a “burp” of natural gas rose to the rig floor and was sucked into machinery, leading to the explosion.

Experts say the number of safety incidents experienced by Deepwater Horizon isn’t unusual for an industry operating in harsh conditions. And it is difficult to draw any connections between those problems and last week’s deadly explosion, they say.

Following that spill, MMS inspectors recommended the company increase the amount of cement it uses during this process and apply more torque when screwing in its pipes.

Because vessels like the Deepwater Horizon operate 24 hours a day, Coast Guard officials said minor equipment problems appear frequently. But if they go unfixed such incidents could mushroom into bigger concerns.

“These are big, floating cities,” said Tyler Priest, a historian of offshore oil and gas exploration. “You’re always going to have minor equipment failure and human error, and of course they’re operating in a hurricane prone environment.”

In June 2003, the rig floated off course in high seas, resulting in the release of 944 barrels of oil. MMS blamed bad weather and poor judgment by the captain. A month later, equipment failure and high currents led to the loss of 74 barrels of oil.

In Feb. 2002, just months after the rig was launched from a South Korean shipyard, it spilled 267 barrels of oil into the Gulf after a hose failed, according to records maintained by the Minerals Management Service.

The Coast Guard, which is supposed to ensure the vessels are seaworthy, keeps its own set of safety records on the Deepwater Horizon.

In January 2005, human error caused another accident. A crane operator forgot he was in the midst of refueling a crane, and 15 gallons of overflowing diesel fuel sparked a fire.

On 18 different occasions during that period the Coast Guard cited the vessel for an “acknowledged pollution source.” No further details about the type of pollution were immediately available.

From 2000 to 2010, the Coast Guard issued six enforcement warnings and handed down one civil penalty and a notice of violation to Deepwater Horizon, agency records show.

Steven Sutton, who oversees offshore drilling inspectors in the Coast Guard’s New Orleans office, said the number of accidents and incidents reported on the Deepwater Horizon didn’t strike him as unusual.

The agency also conducted 16 investigations of incidents involving everything from fires to slip-and-fall accidents.

Guy Cantwell, a spokesman for the rig’s owner Transocean Ltd., said Friday that the Swiss-based company planned to conduct its own investigation of what caused last week’s explosion.

A collision with a towing vessel reported on June 26, 2003 could have created safety problems over the long term if the $95,000 damage to the rig’s hull wasn’t adequately repaired, Sutton said. The collision risked compromising the rig’s watertight integrity or weakening the structure that supports the drilling operation, he said.

Both Deepwater Horizon’s owner Transocean Ltd. and operator BP PLC cited comments made Monday by Lars Herbst, the regional director for the Minerals Management Service, who said the companies had a good history of compliance.

“Any prior incidents were investigated,” he said. “Any speculation that they are related to the Deepwater Horizon incident is speculation.”

“The industry is going to learn a lot from this. That’s what happens in these kinds of disaster,” he said, citing the 1988 explosion of the Piper Alpha rig in the North Sea and the 1979 blowout of Mexico’s IXTOC I in the eastern Gulf.

Last week’s blowout was “an aberration in the history of the Gulf for the last 40 years” during which the industry has refined and automated much of the work on the estimated 3,500 rigs currently operating in the Gulf, said Priest, a professor and director of Global Studies at the Bauer College of Business at the University of Houston.

Norway, which has huge oil and gas reserves in the North Sea, requires rigs to have at least two independent systems to trigger the blowout preventer.

Britain overhauled its safety requirements after the North Sea incident, which killed 167 men, and companies have since spent billions upgrading emergency equipment and improving their operating procedures.

Cantwell said the $560 million semi-submersible model has been superseded by a new design capable of drilling 40,000 feet down in water as deep as 12,000 feet.

Deepwater Horizon was considered state-of-the-art when it was built in 2001 by Hyundai Heavy Industries, Cantwell said. Last year, it set a world record for the deepest oil and gas well when it drilled 35,055 feet into the Gulf of Mexico.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

May 15, 2010

Hello all from the Sector Mobile Incident Command,
I am hoping to clarify some concerns related to the Deepwater Horizon well leak incident and how it may impact our beloved Florida Keys.  For those of you who know me understand that my day job is coral reef habitat mapping, monitoring, etc. and that I spend a fair amount of time in the Keys.
My current concern is as the Florida Scientific Support Coordinator for oil spill response and am working in Sector Mobile on these issues.  I am going to stick to the facts based on the current information:

1.       I have placed an image on http://www.truediveteam.org/news.html showing the Loop Current location with the southern extent of the oil derived from MODIS satellite imagery (5/13/10).  The distance is 45 miles.  This had been corroborated by the 0600 NOAA report that states a distance of 40 miles.  This does not specifically address tar balls or sub-surface oil.  However, the level of sub-surface oil is thought to be low as the initial product is ‘sweet Louisiana crude’.

2.       Oil that MAY find its way down the Loop Current (surface) is expected to take a ABOUT a week to reach the Keys.

3.       The oil that MAY reach the Keys will be heavily weathered and expected to be dime to quarter sized tar balls.  I have placed a picture of charred tar balls found two days ago on the east end of Perdido Key, Florida on http://www.truediveteam.org/news.html.  There were a total of 3.

4.       Tar balls have minimum impact on coral reefs.  Physical contact should be minimized as they tend to stay on the surface.  Acute toxic impacts should be minimal because the volatiles/toxins should have been expended off early on.  There is an ongoing debate on long-term effects that are worthy of discussion when we find out the dose and exposure of the oil that reaches the Keys.
I hope that this helps those with questions and I hope that this is not misinterpreted as me saying ‘don’t worry’.  I simply wanted to present facts as they are and let folks draw their own conclusions. As you all know this is a very dynamic incident, and will remain that way until the well head is capped. This is not a oil spill similar to the Exxon Valdez … as it stands now.
Cheers,
Dave
PS-I placed the images on the TRUE Dive Team website in the interest of time.

David Palandro, PhD
Research Scientist
Florida Scientific Support Coordinator for Oil Spill Response
Fish and Wildlife Research Institute
Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission
100 8th Ave SE
St. Petersburg, FL 33701
(727) 896-8626
(727) 492-8849 mobile
(727) 893-1679 fax

http://www.dailycomet.com/article/20100514/ARTICLES/100519536/1292?p=1&tc=pg

by JIM ASH, Gannett

Published: Friday, May 14, 2010 at 12:43 p.m.

Substitute “Ixtoc 1” for “Deepwater Horizon” and “PEMEX” for “BP,” and the world’s largest peacetime oil spill sounds eerily similar to the 2,500 square miles of oil now threatening Florida’s shores.

Ixtoc I was an exploratory rig leased by the Mexican national oil company from a firm tied to a then-sitting Texas governor. After it blew out on June 3, 1979, it took nine months to drill a relief well to cap it. By then, 140 million gallons of crude were sloshing around the Bay of Campeche and beyond.

The spill eventually coated 200 miles of Texas beaches.

“We had a good idea of the prevailing winds and we predicted that it would hit us in two months,” said Wes Tunnell, associate director of Texas A&M University’s Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies in Corpus Christi. “Sure enough, it showed up 60 days later, almost to the day.”

Tunnell, a marine biologist who was earning his doctorate at the time, was a scientific coordinator for the Ixtoc event.

Deepwater Horizon may stir a collective memory of the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska’s Prince William Sound, but there’s no comparison, Tunnell said. The Exxon Valdez was a tanker and had a finite amount of cargo, eventually releasing 10.8 million gallons.

No one can predict how much oil Deepwater Horizon will spew before BP is able to shut it down. Company officials say a relief well could be completed in two months.

The good news is that the Gulf of Mexico has more natural protections than the frigid Alaskan waters, Tunnell said.

The sun and warm water will help evaporate and break up the spill, he said.

A long history of naturally occurring oil seeps in the western Gulf of Mexico will act like a giant vaccine, promoting the growth of marine organisms that break down the oil, Tunnell said.

“Studies have shown that the natural seeps are equivalent to the release of about two supertankers a year,” he said. “What that does is establish a huge population of bio-organisms.”

The Texas response strategy for Ixtoc was to use barrier islands as a first line of defense, and booms and skimmers for the bays and estuaries behind them, Tunnell said. Estuaries are critical, he said, because that’s where 90 percent of all marine species in the Gulf of Mexico spend a portion of their lives.

“It’s a lot easier to clean it up off the sand,” Tunnell said.

Tunnell claims the cleanup was a success, although tourism on South Padre Island was wiped out for months. Residents and businesses sued, claiming $300 million in damages.

Six to seven years after the spill, researchers had trouble finding evidence of it, Tunnell said. Practically no telltale signs exist two decades later although island residents say submerged tar mats the consistency of asphalt are occasionally exposed in heavy storms.

Quenton Dokken, executive director of the Texas-based Gulf of Mexico Foundation, is careful not to minimize the potential devastation from the Deepwater Horizon spill. But he urged Floridians not to lose perspective. Natural seeps have been occurring for thousands of years in the gulf and the body of water survives.

“This is going to have impact, there is no question about it,” he said. “But in the grand scheme of things, both geographically and across time, this is a relatively small spill,” he said.

The Gulf of Mexico Foundation is supported by some of the world’s largest oil companies. Dokken describes the foundation as a vehicle for giving environmental scientists a seat at the table to push for safer offshore drilling.

Much of the blame for Ixtoc, Dokken said, belonged to platform operators who didn’t shut down after they lost the circulation of vital drilling muds that cool and lubricate the drill.

Still, Dokken acknowledged that the industry needs to come up with better technology for automatic shutoff valves.

“You have to stop this stuff before it gets to the beach,” he said.

Paul Johnson, policy director for the Florida-based environmental group Reef Relief, isn’t as optimistic.

Johnson was a senior adviser to former Florida Gov. Bob Martinez when the Exxon Valdez ran aground, and he was part of a team that Martinez sent to inspect the damage.

Johnson remembers conditions so primitive immediately after the spill that local fishing captains were felling giant trees to serve as temporary booms.

If the Deepwater Horizon spill hits Florida shores, gets swept by the loop current across the already stressed corals in the Florida Keys, or into the estuaries around the Ten Thousand Islands in southwest Florida, the disaster will be long remembered, Johnson said.

“Our way of life on the coast will change,” Johnson said. “It will be one of those events by which most people mark their lives, like major hurricanes.”