http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/12/gulf-oil-spill-could-reac_n_574078.html

by Mark Stevenson  May 12, 2010

MEXICO CITY — Mexican officials fear the Gulf oil spill could reach their coasts if the leak is not stopped by August, when seasonal currents start to reverse and flow south. They also worry about the impact of the upcoming hurricane season.

So far prevailing currents have carried at least 4 million gallons of spilled oil from a damaged BP well toward the north and east, away from Mexico and toward U.S. shores.

But those currents start to shift by August, and by October the prevailing currents have reversed toward Mexico.

Carlos Morales, the head of exploration and production for the state-owned Petroleos Mexicanos oil company, said Wednesday that if efforts to quickly block the leak with new valves or other devices fail, it could take four to five more months to drill another well that would relieve the pressure fueling the leak.

“That is the range we are talking about, from a week or two to four to five months,” Morales said at a news conference.

He added that Mexico has sent several thousand meters (yards) of containment booms to the United States to help fight the spill. He said Mexico has about 120 official vessels in the Gulf that could participate in containment efforts if needed.

Environment Secretary Juan Rafael Elvira Quesada also told local media that officials are concerned the hurricane season – which begins in the Atlantic on June 1 – could potentially stir up or spread the oil slick farther.

Mexico’s government is particularly worried about the potential impact on coastal lagoons along Mexico’s northern Gulf coast.

At least two species of sea turtles could be severely affected, including the endangered Kemp’s Ridley sea turtle, said the head of Mexico’s governmental biodiversity council, Jose Sarukhan.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/14/last-seven-hours-of-data-_n_576096.html

ERICA WERNER | 05/14/10 06:03 PM |

WASHINGTON — Declaring himself as angry as the rest of the nation, President Barack Obama assailed oil drillers and his own administration Friday as he ordered extra scrutiny of drilling permits to head off any repeat of the sickening oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Engineers worked desperately to stop the leak that’s belching out at least 210,000 gallons of crude a day.

As Louisiana wildlife officials reported huge tar balls littering a beach, BP PLC technicians labored to accomplish an engineering feat a mile below the water surface. They were gingerly moving joysticks to guide deep-sea robots and thread a mile-long, 6-inch tube with a rubber stopper into the 21-inch pipe gushing oil from the ocean floor – a task one expert compared to stuffing a cork with a straw through it into a gushing soda bottle.

It’s the latest scheme to stop the flow after all others have failed, more than three weeks since the oil rig explosion that killed 11 workers and set off the disastrous leak.

Obama, whose comments until now have been measured, heatedly condemned a “ridiculous spectacle” of oil executives shifting blame in congressional hearings and denounced a “cozy relationship” between their companies and the federal government.

“I will not tolerate more finger-pointing or irresponsibility,” Obama said in the White House Rose Garden, flanked by members of his Cabinet.

“The system failed, and it failed badly. And for that, there is enough responsibility to go around. And all parties should be willing to accept it,” the president said.

Obama’s tone was a marked departure from the deliberate approach and mild chiding that had characterized his response since the huge rig went up in flames April 20 and later sank 5,000 feet to the ocean floor. Then came the leaking crude, the endangered wildlife, the livelihoods of fishermen at risk.

The magnitude of the disaster has grown clearer by the day and with it the apparent need for a presidential response to choke off any comparison to the Bush administration’s bungled handling of Hurricane Katrina along the Gulf Coast. White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said Obama had been growing increasingly frustrated with the situation, and the congressional hearings hardened that sentiment and prompted the president’s more forceful tone Friday.

Next week administration officials face their own Capitol Hill grillings for the first time since the accident, with Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano appearing before a Senate committee Monday and Salazar testifying on Tuesday.

The Obama administration insists its response has been aggressive since Day One, and Obama sought Friday to leave no doubts. He said he shared the anger and frustration of those affected and would not rest or be satisfied “until the leak is stopped at the source, the oil in the Gulf is contained and cleaned up, and the people of the Gulf are able to go back to their lives and their livelihoods.”

Obama announced that the Interior Department would review whether the Minerals Management Service is following all environmental laws before issuing permits for offshore oil and gas development. BP’s drilling operation at Deepwater Horizon received a “categorical exclusion,” which allows for expedited oil and gas drilling without the detailed environmental review that normally is required.

“It seems as if permits were too often issued based on little more than assurances of safety from the oil companies,” Obama said.

Echoing President Ronald Reagan’s comment on nuclear arms agreements with Moscow, he said, “To borrow an old phrase, we will trust but we will verify.”

Obama already had announced a 30-day review of safety procedures on oil rigs and at wells before any additional oil leases could be granted. And earlier in the week Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced plans to split the much-criticized Minerals Management Service into two agencies, one that would be charged with inspecting oil rigs, investigating oil companies and enforcing safety regulations, while the other would oversee leases for drilling and collection of billions of dollars in royalties. Salazar has said the plan will ensure there is no conflict, “real or perceived,” regarding the agency’s functions.

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform announced Friday it is opening an investigation into potential oversight lapses at the Minerals Management Service.

Obama decried what he called “a cozy relationship between the oil companies and the federal agency that permits them to drill.” But the president, who’s announced a limited expansion of offshore drilling that’s now on hold, didn’t back down from his support for domestic oil drilling, saying it “continues to be one part of an overall energy strategy.”

“But it’s absolutely essential that, going forward, we put in place every necessary safeguard and protection,” he said.

This week executives from three oil companies – BP PLC, which was drilling the well, Transocean, which owned the rig, and Halliburton, which was doing cement work to cap the well – testified on Capitol Hill, each trying to blame the other for what may have caused the disaster. Obama decried that scene.

“I did not appreciate what I considered to be a ridiculous spectacle during the congressional hearings into this matter. You had executives of BP and Transocean and Halliburton falling over each other to point the finger of blame at somebody else,” the president said.

“The American people could not have been impressed with that display, and I certainly wasn’t.”

BP hadn’t publicly discussed the latest maneuver to stop the leak until the past few days, and went ahead with it only after X-raying the well pipe to make sure it would hold up with the stopper inside, spokesman David Nicholas said. Technicians also had to check for any debris inside that may have been keeping the oil at bay – dislodging it threatened to amplify the geyser.

Philip Johnson, the petroleum engineering professor at the University of Alabama who made the soda bottle-and-cork comparison, said the idea was that a cork stopper by itself would probably be blown off, but a straw would lower the pressure on the cork, allowing the soda (or oil) to pass into another container – in this case a tanker at the surface.

BP has refused to estimate how much of the leak could be siphoned off through the skinny pipe, though Johnson said it could be a significant amount.

If it works, it would mark the first time since the rig exploded that BP has controlled any part of the rogue well. How much oil is actually leaking has become a matter of debate, and Obama said Friday that it was uncertain but that the federal government’s response was always geared toward a catastrophic event.

___

Associated Press writers Matthew Daly and Frederic J. Frommer in Washington and Jeffrey Collins in Robert, La., contributed to this report.

What scientists know about how oil spills affect the environment is drawn from a range of past events, no two of which have been alike. Because the blowout occurred 5,000 feet below below the water surface, the Gulf oil spill is unchartered territory.

In trying to assess the potential effect of oil on the Gulf Coast wetlands, a 1969 spill in Massachusetts’ Buzzards Bay might offer close – if still imperfect – parallels, say Dr. McDowell and Woods Hole colleague Christopher Reddy.

It opens a window on the biological processes that over time help ease the effects of the spill. But it also highlights the long-term effects that can remain after much of the surface evidence has vanished.

The spill involved the barge Florida, which ran aground, dumping 175,000 gallons of diesel fuel. The first organisms to recolonize the area were “opportunistic species” such as carbon-loving worms and microbes, McDowell says. As they ate up their carbon-rich food source – in effect cleansing the harbor of much of the hydrocarbons – they died off, making way for species that normally inhabited the harbor and its marshland to return.

Still, she says, it took about a decade before researchers began to see the kinds of organisms in the harbor one would have seen prior to the spill, such as fiddler crabs. Dr. Reddy has continued to take samples from the marsh, and some 40 years later, oil remains trapped in the sediment three to eight inches below the surface. And it has changed little chemically since its arrival.

“If you stick a shovel into the ground and lift it, you will smell diesel fuel,” he says. “And when you analyze it, it doesn’t look like it’s been significantly changed chemically. And the fiddler crabs, mussels, and marsh grasses are not as healthy” as they are at pristine sites.

Yet above ground, he adds, the marsh looks to have recovered to the point where it could grace a tourist’s postcard.

Another nearby site affected by a spill in 1974 and still under study has not fared as well. In many places, the marsh grass still hasn’t returned. And when a research team looked at aerial photos of the site taken before the spill, the researchers found evidence of post-spill erosion in areas that received the most oil. The oil worked its way into the soil, killing off marsh grasses that would have stemmed the erosion.

Reddy cautions that the impact of oil spills depends a great deal on location and dose. Differences in air and ocean temperatures can play a significant role in the pace at which biological processes can begin to blunt the effects of oil.

Research efforts such as this represent a cautionary tale of another sort, according to Joanna Burger, a Rutgers University ecologist. Beware of the small numbers, as in: Only 20 percent of the wetlands have been affected.

“The problem is it’s always the 20 percent of the marsh that’s on the edge, in the intertidal zone,” she says. “That’s the most productive zone in terms of invertebrates and small fishes. And it’s where the herons and egrets feed. You might have destroyed only 20 percent of the marsh, but you might have destroyed 90 percent of the animal production.”

The point is not lost on Louisiana’s Fischer: “As we lose the coastal edge, we are losing the productivity of the area. Throughout history we have had various types of small tragedies such as freezes and pollutants, but we’ve never experienced a large case of oil intrusion into the estuarine areas. What would happen? I don’t have the answer.”

http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/05/13/1628453/congress-wants-to-know-why-mms.html
Miami Herald   Friday, 05.14.10 
Congress wants to know why MMS aborted tougher drilling rules
BY ERIKA BOLSTAD, LESLEY CLARK AND DAN CHANG
MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS
WASHINGTON – Engineers launched their latest effort to curb the crude oil gushing from a busted underwater well in the Gulf of Mexico Thursday as lawmakers on Capitol Hill wrangled over the liability limits for oil companies and continued to probe the mishaps and regulatory failures that caused the mammoth spill.

The Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service, which regulates oilrigs, came under more scrutiny as congressional investigators scheduled hearings to find out why the federal agency never completed rules that would have required additional controls on blowout preventers – the safety equipment that failed to stop the spill.

Staffers from the House of Representatives Natural Resources Committee, who traveled to Louisiana this week to sit in on the U.S. Coast Guard-led inquiry into the April 20 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil drilling rig, said they learned from the testimony of Mike Saucier, an MMS regional supervisor for field operations, that new rules had been proposed.

Saucier said the agency prepared but never completed regulations in 2001, the first year of George W. Bush’s presidency, that would have required secondary control systems for blowout preventers.

“As far as I know, they’re still at headquarters,” Saucier said.

The devices have been at the heart of the inquiry into what caused the explosion that killed 11 and continues to spew oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

The House committee also will be examining the agency’s ties to the oil industry and whether a cozy relationship kept it from enacting tougher regulations. McClatchy reported last week that nearly 100 standards set by the American Petroleum Institute are included in the MMS’ offshore operating regulations.

The chairman of the committee, Rep. Nick Rahall, D-W Va., asked the MMS on Thursday to provide all documents related to regulations that it proposed but never finalized. He also asked the agency to turn over inspection reports from the oilrig, and a list that details potential noncompliance with MMS regulations.

Meanwhile, efforts on Capitol Hill to raise the liability cap for oil companies from
$75 million to $10 billion ran into a roadblock when Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, objected to the proposal.

Murkowski said she supports lifting the cap, but contended the $10 billion figure would prevent smaller, independent companies from drilling on the Outer Continental Shelf.

Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., mocked the idea of independent companies as “mom and pop” oil companies and questioned why smaller companies shouldn’t be held responsible in the event of a catastrophe.

“Ten billion dollars is a drop in the bucket,” Menendez said, noting that BP, the owner of the runaway well, posted profits of more than $5 billion for the first quarter of 2010.

Menendez said that he and other lawmakers plan to try to push the bill again.
“We’re going to see who stands with the average citizen, community, fishermen and others and who stands with Big Oil,” he said.

Six West Coast senators and Florida representative also introduced separate bills that together would have the effect of banning offshore drilling permanently.
The legislation by U.S. Rep. Corrine Brown, D-Fla., would permanently prohibit offshore drilling on the outer Continental Shelf of the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico. The bill by Democratic Sens. Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein of California, Jeff Merkley and Ron Wyden of Oregon and Maria Cantwell and Patty Murray of Washington would permanently ban oil and gas drilling off the California, Oregon and Washington coasts.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/headline/biz/7004396.html
Houston Chronicle  By JENNIFER A. DLOUHY
May 13, 2010, 9:34PM
WASHINGTON – Senators from California, Oregon and Washington united Thursday behind a plan to ban new offshore drilling along the Pacific Coast in response to the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

Their push, which joins a similar House effort with the backing of 20 Democrats, could gain traction in Congress as public outrage grows about the April 20 explosion on an offshore drilling rig near Louisiana that left 11 workers dead and unleashed an oil spill that threatens the Gulf Coast.

The Pacific Coast senators were unified to “make sure that there will never be offshore oil and gas drilling off the West Coast of our nation,” said Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif. “We know this can happen again,” Boxer said, while gesturing to a poster-size photo of boats spraying water on the flame-engulfed Deepwater Horizon rig.

Boxer’s bill would bar the federal government from issuing any leases for exploration, development or production of oil or natural gas in any area off the West Coast.

The measure would apply only to new leases in federal waters. It would not bar oil companies from expanding drilling on current leases and it would not apply to drilling decisions within state waters, which typically extend three miles out from the shore.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., linked the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico to the 1969 blowout of a well near Santa Barbara, which triggered a nationwide backlash against offshore drilling. That was “a seminal moment for us,” Feinstein said. And now, “the BP disaster has shown that . . . there is no guarantee whatsoever that this will not happen again.”

President Barack Obama announced plans in March to expand offshore drilling in new areas of the Atlantic and Arctic oceans, as well as the eastern Gulf of Mexico. Although he specifically ruled out new federal drilling leases off the Pacific Coast and in some areas near Alaska, nothing in federal law limits exploration in the region.

That’s because Congress allowed a decades-old statutory moratorium on new drilling off the Atlantic and Pacific shores to expire in 2008, amid soaring oil prices. A statutory ban on drilling near the Florida Gulf Coast is set to expire in 2022.

Right now, the only safeguard is Obama’s assurance that new federal drilling will be barred in the Pacific, Boxer said. “There is no permanent protection,” she said.

The West Coast lawmakers – including Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., and Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore. – said they would try to advance the legislation as part of any energy bill that moves through the Senate. One prime candidate: a climate change and energy measure that was unveiled Wednesday.

But that climate measure would only give states the power to bar drilling 75 miles off their shores – farther than the typical three-mile barrier, but still far less than the unlimited, permanent ban the West Coast senators seek.

Any change to the climate change bill’s offshore drilling proposals threatens to undermine the entire measure, which already faces long odds in the Senate.

Drilling advocates in Congress have warned that any move to shut off offshore production could jeopardize the U.S. economy and heighten the nation’s reliance on foreign sources of oil.

“We do not want to have people have to import more and more foreign oil,” said Rep. Joe Barton, R-Ennis. “Whether we like it or not, the only real place to find significant additional oil deposits in meaningful quantities is in the outer continental shelf.”
Nationwide, support for offshore drilling still remains strong, despite the Gulf spill. Six in 10 Americans back expanded ocean drilling, according to an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll released Wednesday.

Special thanks to Richard Charter