http://www.canadianbusiness.com/article/66077–chevron-offshore-rig-near-nigeria-s-oil-rich-delta-catches-fire-search-for-workers-ongoing

By Yinka Ibukun, The Associated Press | January 16, 2012

LAGOS, Nigeria – An offshore rig exploring possible deep-water oil and gas fields off Nigeria’s coast for Chevron Corp. caught fire Monday, and the oil company said officials were still trying to account for all those working there.

Chevron said it was still investigating the fire, which occurred near its North Apoi oil platform, and which forced it to shut down.

“We immediately flew out people to the nearby North Apoi platform, and have been helping those needing any medical assistance,” Chevron spokesman Scott Walker said in a statement.

Chevron did not immediately say what caused the fire. However, Nigeria’s government believes a “gas kick” – a major build up of gas pressure from drilling – was responsible, said Levi Ajuonoma, a spokesman for the state-run Nigerian National Petroleum Corp.
Chevron and other foreign oil companies in Nigeria pump crude oil in partnership with the state-run company.

Nnimmo Bassey, who runs an environmental watchdog group in Nigeria, said he had received reports from locals nearby that the fire was an industrial incident.

“Workers were trying to contain the gas pressure and they didn’t succeed,” Bassey said.
The rig is run on Chevron’s behalf by contractor FODE Drilling Co., Walker said. Officials with FODE, which has offices in London and Jenkintown, Pennsylvania, could not be immediately reached for comment Monday.

Nigeria is the fifth-largest crude oil exporter to the U.S. It produces about 2.4 million barrels of crude oil a day. However, more than 50 years of oil production has seen environmental damage through delta’s maze of muddy creeks and mangroves.

Chevron, based in San Ramon, California, produced an average of 524,000 barrels of crude oil a day from Nigeria in 2010. The company has exploration rights to about 2.2 million acres across Nigeria’s delta and offshore.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/africa/chevron-offshore-rig-near-nigerias-oil-rich-delta-catches-fire-search-for-workers-ongoing/2012/01/16/gIQAbdq02P_story.html

Washington Post

Chevron: Offshore rig near Nigeria’s oil-rich delta catches fire; search for workers ongoing

By Associated Press,
LAGOS, Nigeria – An offshore rig exploring possible deep-water oil and gas fields off Nigeria’s coast for Chevron Corp. caught fire Monday, and the oil company said officials were still trying to account for all those working there.

Chevron said it was still investigating the fire, which occurred near its North Apoi oil platform, and which forced it to shut down.

“We immediately flew out people to the nearby North Apoi platform, and have been helping those needing any medical assistance,” Chevron spokesman Scott Walker said in a statement.

Chevron did not immediately say what caused the fire. However, Nigeria’s government believes a “gas kick” – a major build up of gas pressure from drilling – was responsible, said Levi Ajuonoma, a spokesman for the state-run Nigerian National Petroleum Corp.
Chevron and other foreign oil companies in Nigeria pump crude oil in partnership with the state-run company.

Nnimmo Bassey, who runs an environmental watchdog group in Nigeria, said he had received reports from locals nearby that the fire was an industrial incident.
“Workers were trying to contain the gas pressure and they didn’t succeed,” Bassey said.
The rig is run on Chevron’s behalf by contractor FODE Drilling Co., Walker said. Officials with FODE, which has offices in London and Jenkintown, Pennsylvania, could not be immediately reached for comment Monday.

Nigeria is the fifth-largest crude oil exporter to the U.S. It produces about 2.4 million barrels of crude oil a day. However, more than 50 years of oil production has seen environmental damage through delta’s maze of muddy creeks and mangroves.

Chevron, based in San Ramon, California, produced an average of 524,000 barrels of crude oil a day from Nigeria in 2010. The company has exploration rights to about 2.2 million acres across Nigeria’s delta and offshore.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://www.tampabay.com/news/environment/wildlife/usf-study-finds-more-sick-fish-in-oil-spill-area-than-rest-of-gulf-of/1210495

By Craig Pittman, Times Staff Writer
In Print: Saturday, January 14, 2012

A USF survey of the Gulf of Mexico last summer found more sick fish in the area of the 2010 oil spill than in other areas. The dots show areas where fish with skin lesions were found.
[Source: Steve Murawski , USF. Graphic by DARLA CAMERON | Times]
A government-funded survey of the entire Gulf of Mexico last summer found more sick fish in the area of the 2010 oil spill than anywhere else, according to the top University of South Florida scientist in charge of the project.

“The area that has the highest frequency of fish diseases is the area where the oil spill was,” said Steve Murawski, an oceanographer who previously served as the chief fisheries scientist of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration.

That doesn’t necessarily mean the red snapper and other fish with nasty skin lesions were victims of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, he said. That same area has lots of oil rigs, leaky pipelines and even natural oil vents in the sea floor that could be the source of any contamination that has affected the fish.
“Even if the disease is from oil,” he said, “it’s another step to show it’s from the oil spill.”

But the USF findings, announced at a scientific conference this month, have been hailed as a big step forward by researchers from other institutions pursuing similar studies.

“We still are seeing sick fish offshore and the USF survey confirmed our findings of 2 to 5 percent of red snapper being affected,” James Cowan, an oceanography professor at Louisiana State University, said in an email to the Tampa Bay Times.

In addition, Cowan said, laboratory studies of those sick fish “are beginning to trickle out that show that chronic exposure to oil and dispersant causes everything from impacts to the genome to compromised immune systems.

Similar findings Š are being found in shrimps and crabs in the same locations.”

While Murawski is cautious about saying there’s a connection, Cowan, who has been studying fish in the gulf for 25 years, said, “I absolutely believe these things are connected to the spill.”

There are signs the lesions may be spreading. According to Will Patterson of the University of South Alabama, “they’re now showing up in fish being caught in the surf here in Alabama.” Patterson said he plans to do some scientific sampling of the surf fish this coming week.

The USF scientists plan a second survey of the gulf next month, and also plan to check whether the sick fish they have caught suffer from immune system and fertility problems. Their goal, according to Ernst Peebles, another USF scientist working on the study, is to be able to report something definite by April 20, the second anniversary of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion.

One problem with the USF study, though, is that nobody made a similar gulf-wide survey of fish health prior to the disaster, Peebles and Murawski said. Without a baseline study, it’s hard to say what’s normal.

They have found more sick fish than what they would expect based on previous studies, Peebles said, but the earlier studies took place in colder waters.

However, what started the investigation were reports from longtime commercial fishermen that they were pulling in fish with skin problems like they’d never seen before.

The Deepwater Horizon rig explosion killed 11 workers. Two days later oil began spewing from a pipe a mile beneath the surface, and BP and its partners were not able to stop it until July.

Before BP could cap the well, 5 million barrels of oil gushed into the gulf. The company sprayed 1.8 million gallons of chemical dispersant to prevent it from reaching shore, but 2.5 million pounds of it washed up on Florida’s beaches and in its marshes. Cleanup crews are still picking up tar balls from the beaches of Alabama and Mississippi.

In late 2010 and early 2011, fishermen working the area the spill had covered reported finding red snapper and sheepshead with lesions, fin rot and parasite infections. On some of them, the lesions had eaten a hole straight through to the muscle tissue.

A few fishermen brought their suspect catch to scientists. When the scientists cut them open, they found the fish also had enlarged livers, gallbladders, and bile ducts – indications their immune systems may have been compromised by oil.

So last summer, with funding from NOAA and cooperation from the state’s marine science laboratory in St. Petersburg, the USF scientists chartered fishing boats from Madeira Beach and Panama City and set out to cover the entire gulf. They dropped their lines about 600 feet deep – the spill began at 5,400 feet – and caught about 4,000 fish.

Southern Offshore Fisheries Association president Bob Spaeth helped set up the voyage, and wasn’t surprised by its results.

His big worry is not that a percentage of the fish got sick, he said, but that the size of the fish population may have been reduced. That could lead federal regulators to reduce how many fish they’re allowed to catch. “If you reduce our quota,” he said, “we’ll be out of business.”

In the meantime, there have been other signs something unusual might be going on in the northern part of the gulf. More than 600 dolphins have stranded along the gulf beaches over the past two years, which in some areas is 10 times more than normal, according to NOAA scientist Erin Fougeres. So far 10 have tested positive for a bacterial infection called Brucella, which the scientists believe may be a sign that the oil spill harmed the dolphins’ immune system.

The USF survey included some disquieting results for Florida anglers who think they don’t have to worry about the northern gulf where the spill occurred. Peebles’ lab examined the ear bones of the fish caught in the gulf, because those bones contain clues to the fish’s life.

“I see fish caught off this coast,” Peebles said, “who spent the early part of their lives up there.”

Craig Pittman can be reached at craig@tampabay.com.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=122736&org=NSF&from=news

Press Release 12-005

Scientists document how geology, biology worked together after oil disaster

January 9, 2012

When scientist David Valentine and colleagues published results of a study in early 2011 reporting that bacterial blooms had consumed almost all the deepwater methane plumes after the 2010 Gulf of Mexico Deepwater Horizon oil spill, some were skeptical.

How, they asked the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB) geochemist, could almost all the gas emitted disappear?

In new results published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Valentine; Igor Mezic, a mechanical engineer at UCSB; and coauthors report that they used an innovative computer model to demonstrate the respective roles of underwater topography, currents and bacteria in the Gulf of Mexico.

This confluence led to the disappearance of methane and other chemicals that spewed from the well after it erupted on April 20, 2010.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) funded the research.

“As scientists continue to peel apart the layers of the Deepwater Horizon microbial story,” said Don Rice, director of NSF’s chemical oceanography program, “we’re learning a great deal about how the ocean’s biogeochemical system interacts with petroleum–every day, everywhere, twenty-four/seven. ”

The results are an extension of a 2011 study, also funded by NSF, in which Valentine and other researchers explained the role of bacteria in consuming more than 200,000 metric tons of dissolved methane.

“It seemed that we were putting together a lot of pieces,” Valentine said. “We would go out, take some samples, and study what was happening in those samples, both during and after the spill.

“There was a transition of the microorganisms and a transition of the biodegradation, and it became clear that we needed to incorporate the movement of the water.”

The scientists believed that there was an important component of the physics of the water motion–of where the water went.

Valentine turned to Mezic, who had published results in 2011 forecasting where the oil slick would spread.

“Our work was on the side of: here’s where the oil leaked and here’s where it went,” Mezic said. “We agreed that it would be beautiful if we could put a detailed hydrodynamic model together with a detailed bacterial model.”

The resulting computer model has data on the chemical composition of hydrocarbons flowing into the Gulf of Mexico, and is seeded with 52 types of bacteria that consumed the hydrocarbons.

The physical characteristics were based on the U.S. Navy’s model of the gulf’s ocean currents and on observations of water movements immediately after the spill and for several months after it ended.

The scientists then sought the help of Mezic’s former colleagues–engineers at the University of Rijeka in Croatia.

“We needed somebody to build the software,” Mezic said. “It was a big task, a mad rush, but they did it.

“The power behind this is a tour de force. A typical study of this kind would take a year, at least. We found a way that led us to answers in three or four months.”

The model revealed that one of the key factors in the disappearance of the hydrocarbon plumes was the physical structure of the Gulf of Mexico.
“It’s the geography of the gulf,” Valentine said. “It’s almost like a box canyon. As you go northward, it comes to a head.

“As a result, it’s not a river down there; it’s more of a bay. And the spill happened in a fairly enclosed area, particularly at the depths where hydrocarbons were dissolving.”

When the hydrocarbons were released from the well, bacteria bloomed. In other locations outside the gulf, those blooms would be swept away by prevailing ocean currents.

But in the Gulf of Mexico, they swirled around as if they were in a washing machine, and often circled back over the leaking well, sometimes two or three times.

“What we see is that some of the water that already had been exposed to hydrocarbons at the well and had experienced bacterial blooms, then came back over the well,” Valentine said.

“So these waters already had a bacterial community in them, then they got a second input of hydrocarbons.”

As the water came back over, he explained, the organisms that had already bloomed and eaten their preferred hydrocarbons immediately attacked and went after certain compounds.

Then they were fed a new influx of hydrocarbons.

“When you have these developed communities coming back over the wellhead, they consume the hydrocarbons much more quickly,” Valentine said, “and the bacterial composition and hydrocarbon composition behaves differently. It changes at a different rate than when the waters were first exposed.”

The model allowed the scientists to test this hypothesis and to look at some of the factors that had been measured: oxygen deficits and microbial community structure.

“What we found was very good agreement between the two,” Valentine said.
“We have about a 70 percent success rate of hitting where those oxygen declines were. It means that not only is the physics model doing a good job of moving the water in the right place, but also that the biology and chemistry results are doing a good job, because you need those to get the oxygen declines. It’s really a holistic view of what’s going on.”

There are valuable lessons to be learned from the study, the scientists believe.

“It tells us that the motion of the water is an important component in determining how rapidly different hydrocarbons are broken down,” Valentine said. “It gives us concepts that we can now apply to other situations, if we understand the physics.”

Mezic said that this should be a wake-up call for anyone thinking of drilling for oil.

“The general perspective is that we need to pay more attention to where the currents are flowing around the places where we have spills,” he said.
“We don’t have models for most of those. Why not mandate a model?

“This one worked–three-quarters of the predictions were correct. For almost everything, you can build a model. You build an airplane, you have a model. But you can drill without having a model. It’s possible we can predict this. That’s what a model is for.”

The U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. Office of Naval Research also supported the research.

In addition to Valentine and Mezic, co-authors of the paper are Senka Macesic, Nelida Crnjaric-Zic, and Stefan Ivic, of the University of Rijeka in Croatia; Patrick J. Hogan of the Naval Research Laboratory; Sophie Loire of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at UCSB; and Vladimir A. Fonoberov of Aimdyn, Inc. of Santa Barbara.

-NSF-

Media Contacts
Cheryl Dybas, NSF (703) 292-7734 cdybas@nsf.gov
George Foulsham, UCSB (805) 893-3071 george.foulsham@ia.ucsb.edu
The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent federal agency that supports fundamental research and education across all fields of science and engineering. In fiscal year (FY) 2011, its budget is about $6.9 billion. NSF funds reach all 50 states through grants to nearly 2,000 universities and institutions. Each year, NSF receives over 45,000 competitive requests for funding, and makes over 11,500 new funding awards. NSF also awards over $400 million in professional and service contracts yearly.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D9S5NL4G0.htm

By PETER ORSI

HAVANA
A U.S. inspection of a Chinese-made oil rig due to begin drilling in waters off Cuba has determined that it meets international safety norms, the American government said Monday.

A statement issued by the U.S. Department of the Interior said members of its Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement and the U.S. Coast Guard completed its review of the Scarabeo-9 rig on Monday in Trinidad.

The inspection covered everything from the platform’s drilling equipment and safety systems to generators and the blowout preventer.

“U.S. personnel found the vessel to generally comply with existing international and U.S. standards by which (Spanish oil company) Repsol has pledged to abide,” the safety bureau said in a statement.

Plans to drill for oil off Cuba have raised concerns from some environmentalists and U.S. politicians who fear a repeat of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster, which killed 11 workers and spilled more than 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

Repsol YPF, which holds the rights to an exploration block off Cuba covering more than 1,700 square miles (nearly 4,500 square kilometers), has repeatedly said the Scarabeo-9 meets U.S. specifications and technical requirements. Havana officials say it boasts the safest, most modern technology available.

The safety bureau added that neither it nor the Coast Guard have any authority over the Cuba operation, and noted that the review “does not confer any form of certification or endorsement under U.S. or international law.”

It also said U.S. authorities are stepping up local spill-preparedness efforts and coordinating with other countries in the region.

“In anticipation of an increase in drilling activities in the Caribbean Basin and Gulf of Mexico, the United States is participating in multilateral discussions with the Bahamas, Cuba, Jamaica and Mexico on a broad range of issues including, drilling safety, ocean modeling, and oil spill preparedness and response,” the statement said.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18563_162-57352556/ohios-new-earthquakes-may-be-man-made/?tag=cbsnewsSectionContent.0

January 4, 2012
By Michelle Miller

(CBS News) Northeastern Ohio has been rattled by close to a dozen earthquakes since last spring. It’s not an area that is known for them.

Now, CBS News correspondent Michelle Miller reports that an expert on quakes says he believes they may have been man-made.

John Armbruster is a seismologist at Columbia University. Before March, there had never been a recorded earthquake in Youngstown, Ohio. Since then, there’s been 11.

Residents call the new phenomenon “an experience.”

The new earthquakes caused Ohio state officials to ask Armbruster to investigate.

“These earthquakes were sitting there waiting to happen. We have triggered these earthquakes,” Armbuster said.

Armbruster believes the trigger was a Youngstown well that disposes of contaminated water trucked in from elsewhere in Pennsylvania and beyond. The water is a byproduct of oil and natural gas extraction, called “fracking.”

The disposal well pumps thousands of gallons of the waste into rock a mile or more below. Armbruster says the fluid may have made its way into an earthquake fault line.

“Pumping the fluid into the fault encourages the fault to slip,” Armbruster said.

Armbruster added that seismic readings allowed him to pinpoint the epicenter of a quake near the Youngstown well.

“It was about a kilometer from the bottom of the disposal well,” Armbruster said.
Drilling companies and some scientists are skeptical. 177 similar wells in Ohio have operated without incident, and the technique has been used since the 1930s at more than 100,000 wells across the nation.

“It’s happened with regulatory certainty, regulatory excellence, and it’s the best way to take care of this waste stream,” said Tom Stewart with the Ohio Oil and Gas Association.

Clusters of small earthquakes near wells in Oklahoma, Texas and Arkansas have also drawn scrutiny.

“First of all, the location of the earthquakes is quite close to the wells. Secondly, the timing of the waste water injection also coincides with the earthquakes,” said Art McGarr with the U.S. Geological Survey. Arkansas has suspended new wells near a fault line after 1,000 minor quakes were recorded. As for Ohio, officials say they’ll keep the Youngstown, Ohio, well closed until they can be certain of the risks.
© 2012 CBS Interactive Inc.. All Rights Reserved.

Special thanks to Richard Charter