http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/05/30/bloomberg1376-L3AKFD0UQVI9-1.DTL

May 31 (Bloomberg) — BP Plc said in permit applications for drilling in the Gulf of Mexico that it was prepared to handle an oil spill more than ten times larger than the one now spewing crude into the waters off the southern United States.

“Proper execution of the procedures detailed in this manual will help to limit environmental and ecological damage to sensitive areas as well as minimizing loss or damage to BP facilities in the event of a petroleum release,” the company said in its oil-spill response plan, filed with the U.S. Minerals Management Service in 2008.

The company listed as its worst-case scenario a blowout in an exploratory well 57 miles west of the disaster, in a valley on the seafloor known as Mississippi Canyon. It’s about 33 miles off the coast of Louisiana. Such a blowout could have spewed 250,000 barrels a day, according to the 582-page plan.

The representations show that BP overestimated its ability to control an oil spill in waters where it’s the biggest player in a Gulf energy extraction industry worth $52 billion a year, said Bob Deans, a spokesman with the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington.

“BP has obviously overpromised and underdelivered,” Deans said. “They told us they had a plan that could deal with the consequences of a worst-case scenario. They don’t.”

The plan was posted on the Minerals Management Service website and was incorporated by reference into BP’s application with the agency for a permit to drill the Macondo well. The company said in that application that a worst-case blowout from that well could spew at most 162,000 barrels a day.

BP’s ‘Plan in Place’

On April 20, a blowout there caused the drilling rig, Deepwater Horizon, to explode and then sink, leaving an open wellhead spewing as much as 19,000 barrels of oil a day into the Gulf waters. The company has failed so far to stop the gusher.

“Clearly we do have an oil-spill response plan in place, it was an integral part of our permitting with the MMS and it was specifically agreed with and approved by the MMS,” BP spokesman David Nicholas said in an e-mailed statement. “It sets out the actions, considerations, plans and steps that will be used in the case of an oil spill, and it is this plan that has been in action in response.”

Every well that a company drills has to be covered by a response plan that includes a worst-case scenario, said Kendra Barkoff, a spokeswoman with the Minerals Management Service.

‘Fundamental Questions’

“The BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill, however, raises several fundamental questions about safety and about industry’s ability to respond to spills,” she said in an e-mailed statement. ” We have launched a full investigation of the oil spill and are in the process of implementing new safety requirements to ensure this doesn’t happen again.”

BP fell 26 pence to 494.8 pence in London trading this morning and has lost 29 percent of its market value since the blast.

BP’s plan says it has contracts with the Marine Spill Response Corp. of Herndon, Virginia, and the National Response Corp. of Great River, New York, to contain and clean up any spills through the use of dispersant chemicals sprayed from airplanes and skimming vessels that would suck up oil-filled water.

The company would also use containment booms to control the spread of oil in the Gulf and work with local environmental groups to clean affected wildlife, according to the plan.

Documents Sought

The House Energy and Commerce Committee, investigating the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, is seeking documents from the clean-up consultants. Chairman Henry Waxman, a California Democrat, and oversight subcommittee Chairman Bart Stupak, a Michigan Democrat, sent letters on May 28 to National Response, a unit of Seacor Holdings Inc., Marine Spill Response, and O’Brien’s Response Management Inc. of Spring, Texas.

Waxman’s committee has reviewed 105,000 documents provided by companies connected with the rig.

BP’s plan says that those companies have enough oil- skimming vessels to remove about 492,000 barrels of oil a day from the water. The companies have the capacity to store 299,000 barrels a day, according to the plan.

BP spokesman John Curry said yesterday that so far, the company, through its contractors, has deployed 91 skimming vessels that have picked up a total of 312,952 barrels of oily water mixture from the spill that has gushed for almost six weeks. “That’s not all oil, it’s oily water,” he said.

A Prolonged Spill

He said the company had spread more than 3 million feet of containment boom, a floating plastic barrier designed to contain the spread of oil and direct it to skimming vessels. The boom was enough to cover about 350 miles of coastline, he said.

BP’s plan foresaw the possibility of a prolonged spill.

“If the spill went unabated, shoreline impact would depend upon existing environmental conditions,” according to the plan.

The chance of oil reaching the shoreline within 30 days was estimated at 3 percent or less for most coastal areas, except Louisiana’s Plaquemines Parish, which the company said had a 21 percent chance of seeing oil onshore within 30 days.

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal said on May 19 that oil was washing ashore in the Plaquemines wetlands.

BP said yesterday that a plan to stop the leak through a strategy of pumping in heavy mud and debris, known as “top kill,” failed. The company now plans to place a cap over the well.

The spill has cost BP a total of $760 million, or about $22 million a day, the company said May 24. BP’s average daily profit last year was $45 million a day, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

 
–With assistance from Joe Carroll in Chicago and Lorraine Woellert in Washington. Editors: Jeffrey Taylor, Larry Liebert

Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/may/31/bp-oil-spill-death-impact 

It could take months or years for the true impact of the spill on surrounding ecosystems to emerge

by David Adam and agencies
guardian.co.uk, Monday 31 May 2010 23.14 BST

The White House says the BP oil spill is probably the greatest environmental disaster the US has faced, but the true impact on surrounding ecosystems could take months or even years to emerge. Experts say the unprecedented depth of the spill, combined with the use of chemicals that broke the oil down before it reached the surface, pose an unknown threat.

Oil floats around a rig at the site of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Photograph: Jae C. Hong/AP

“It’s difficult to marshal resources to do a thorough job of charting what the impacts are,” Jeffrey Short, an environmental chemist who worked on the effects of the Exxon Valdez spill, told Nature magazine. “It’s especially difficult when weird things happen to catch the scientific community bysurprise. That’s clearly the case here.”

Louisiana, the nearest state to the leaking well, some 42 miles offshore, has been the most impacted. The state’s governor, Bobby Jindal, said more than 100 miles of its 400-mile coast had so far been polluted.

State officials have reported sheets of oil soiling wetlands and seeping into marine and bird nurseries, leaving a stain of sticky crude on cane that binds the marshes together. Billy Nungesser, president of Plaquemines parish, said he had seen dying cane and “no life” in parts of Pass-a-Loutre wildlife refuge.

Oil debris, in the form of tar balls and surface sheen, has also been reported ashore in outlying parts of coastal Mississippi and Alabama. Tar balls found on Florida beaches a fortnight ago did not come from the BP spill, tests showed.

A quarter of US waters in the Gulf of Mexico are closed to fishing, hitting the livelihoods of shrimpers, oyster-catchers and charter boat operators. “Every fish and invertebrate contacting the oil is probably dying. I have no doubt about that,” said Prosanta Chakrabarty, a Louisiana State University fish biologist.

In the six weeks since the explosion that killed 11 workers and started the leak, wildlife officials say at least 491 birds, 227 turtles and 27 mammals, including dolphins, have been found dead along the US Gulf coast. Many of these were not related to the spill; only 28 of the dead birds were covered in oil. More marine creatures, including birds and mammals will be affected by surface oil, and scientists are also concerned about possible underwater clouds of dispersed oil.

Researchers say they have found at least two sprawling underwater plumes of what appear to be oil or oil derivatives, each hundreds of metres deep and stretching for miles. A plume reported last week by a team from the University of South Florida was headed toward the continental shelf off the Alabama coastline, waters thick with fish and other marine life.

No major fish kills have yet been reported, but federal officials said the impacts could take years to unfold. “This is just a giant experiment going on and we’re trying to understand scientifically what this means,” said Roger Helm, a senior official with the US Fish and Wildlife Service.

David Hollander, an oceanographer at the University of South Florida who helped discover one of the plumes, said: “It may be due to the application of the dispersants that a portion of the petroleum has extracted itself from the crude and is now incorporated into the waters with solvents and detergents.”

He said there could be knock-on impacts on organisms further up the food chain. “We think there could be both short-term and long-term implications.”

Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://na.oceana.org/en/stopthedrill?key=31485793

http://www.fresnobee.com/2010/05/30/1951665/as-oil-spill-damages-gulf-will.html

As oil spill damages Gulf, will U.S. change energy use?

Posted at 01:00 AM on Sunday, May. 30, 2010

By MARGARET TALEV AND SHASHANK BENGALI – McClatchy Newspapers 

WASHINGTON — The Gulf oil spill has triggered a crisis of confidence, shaking Americans’ views about BP, the oil industry, technology and President Barack Obama and slowing a planned expansion of domestic offshore oil drilling.

Are the worst spill in U.S. history and images of dead birds and toxic syrup lapping at Gulf shores shocking enough to be a tipping point for energy policy and consumer behavior, however?

Will Americans rush to smaller cars or spend more to buy hybrids? Will politicians embrace gas taxes and charges on large carbon polluters or adopt other measures to punish fossil-fuel burning and encourage alternative energy use?

It’s probably too soon to say. Public willingness to change – and the political courage to provoke change – may hinge on how long the spill continues, how the wind blows, how the cleanup goes and the extent of damage to wildlife, seafood, jobs, tourism and real estate.

The debate also comes as the nation is emerging from the worst economic crisis in decades, saddled with debt, trying to wrap up two wars and embarking on an experiment in health care that has left many Americans unsettled and businesses bracing for higher taxes. It also comes as key developing nations, including China and India, rely heavily on oil and coal to drive their expansions.
 
For now, many experts say Americans aren’t ready to change.

“I don’t think it’s a game-changer,” said Antoine Halff, the head of commodities research at Newedge, a New York-based brokerage firm.

“It drives home the risky nature of meeting the demand for oil,” but he predicted perspective largely would be offset by a more powerful reflex: “People like to have their cake and eat it too.”

Even the most cautious analysts expect the crisis to lead Americans to embrace greater government regulation of offshore drilling and perhaps to expedite higher fuel-efficiency standards for cars and trucks.

Advocates of a faster transition from an oil economy to alternative energy are seizing the opportunity to push for as much as they can get.

“Perhaps in the face of this terrible crisis we can find the political will and the political leadership to get it done,” said Kevin Knobloch, the president of the Union of Concerned Scientists. The National Resources Defense Council Action Fund has launched ads in eight states pressuring senators to pursue a “strong clean-energy climate bill.”

The searing images of the spill already are having some impact. In a USA Today/Gallup poll released this week, 55 percent of those polled said environmental protection should be prioritized, even if it meant limiting U.S. energy production.

In the same poll, however, 50 percent said they still supported increased offshore drilling, perhaps realizing the nation depends so heavily on oil that change will be difficult. The lion’s share of the oil used domestically goes to power cars, trucks and airplanes, and alternatives such as hybrid-powered engines remain too expensive and inefficient for most Americans.

“We’ve been through this sort of drill before with the oil embargo back in the 1970s, the various oil price shocks,” said Frank Felder, the director of the Center for Energy, Economic and Environmental Policy at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

“Everyone gets riled up … and then we go back to our ways. The reason we do it is that oil is just very, very useful.”

With the economy recovering gingerly and elections looming in November, politicians aren’t radically changing their rhetoric, either. 

President Barack Obama has said while the Gulf spill should be “a wake-up call” for the need to invest in renewable energy, he continues to support expanded domestic drilling as part of a national security effort to make the country less dependent on foreign oil.

Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., the leading author of the major energy bill the Senate is considering this year, said this week that, “The sooner we can move off fossil fuels and to a new energy paradigm, the better for our nation.” At the same time, he said, “We’re not going to stop drilling in the Gulf. Let’s be realistic.”

“About 30 percent of our transportation fuel comes from the Gulf,” Kerry said. “You think Americans are suddenly going to stop driving to work tomorrow? You think people are going to stop driving trucks to deliver the goods to the department store? It’s not going to happen.”

Some say the challenges are overstated and that Americans can end their oil dependence with a few small lifestyle changes: promoting electric vehicles, investing in light rail, creating pedestrian- and bike-friendly communities and exploiting alternatives such as natural gas.

“Meeting this challenge will not be easy, but nor will it require tremendous sacrifices,” the American Security Project, a nonpartisan research center, and the Sierra Club, a leading environmental group, wrote in a report this week. “There is a powerful economic rationale for taking action now.”   

Sean Kay, a professor and the chairman of the international studies program at Ohio Wesleyan University, said even if the spill made Americans rethink how they used oil, it would take “a sustained campaign” by politicians, lasting years and with far more intensity than on display now, to shift behavior and spending.

Kay said expanding alternative energy was essential, not just for national security but also for preserving U.S. dominance, but Americans still considered the short-term costs more important than the long-term benefits.

“A press conference on a Thursday afternoon probably isn’t going to do the trick,” Kay said. “The actual movement and action on these things would cause near-term economic dislocation.”

“It begs the question: At what cost to American competitiveness?” said John Hofmeister, a former president of Shell Oil who’s founded an advocacy group, Citizens for Affordable Energy, and written a book called “Why We Hate the Oil Companies.”

“I understand the environmentalists’ issue with hydrocarbons. I don’t like hydrocarbons any more than they do, but the reality is we’re living off hydrocarbons,” Hofmeister said. “It would take us at least 50 years to get to where the environmentalists want to get, but they want to get there a lot faster.”

He said America was well on its way to developing alternative energy sources and didn’t need the BP spill to get people interested. The question, he thinks, is how quickly it’s practical to shift without hurting the economy and outpacing science.

In the interim, Hofmeister supports more domestic oil and gas exploration in shallow offshore areas or on federal land.

One pet cause he hopes will get more attention is moving away from the internal combustion engine.

“Let’s use batteries, let’s use hydrogen fuel technology for mobility,” he said. He notes moves by Germany and Japan in this direction. Even so, he said, “It would take 25 years to cycle away from the internal combustion engine if we start now.”

The pace of change that environmentalists and scientists want seems, for now, to be distant and extremely expensive.

According to PFC Energy, a consulting firm to energy companies, shifting 10 percent of U.S. electricity sources to wind power would require wind farms covering an area the size of South Dakota; shifting 10 percent to solar would require an investment of $16 trillion.

“I’m not trying to trivialize things,” said J. Robinson West, the firm’s founder. “It’s just the scale and cost are staggering.”

The “low-hanging fruit,” as West put it, is legislation requiring automobiles to become more fuel-efficient, which the Obama administration has slowly been trying to advance.

“I haven’t seen a vast movement in the last 20 years for everybody saying, ‘I want to buy this small car because I’m worried about national security,'” said James Sweeney, a management science and engineering professor who heads Stanford University’s Precourt Energy Efficiency Center. “They may be willing to say, ‘I’d like more fuel efficiency standards.'”

The 1989 Exxon Valdez spill didn’t stop Americans from driving, Sweeney pointed out, but it did force oil companies to adopt double-hulled tankers. In the same way, many experts said, the Gulf spill probably will lead to tougher government regulations on offshore drilling. That could cause production delays and raise costs to consumers, but even some limited-government advocates seem to agree now that that’s a worthy tradeoff.

“If the result of this is to determine a set of practices to make drilling much safer,” said Halff, the commodities researcher, “that would be a positive outcome.”
(Renee Schoof contributed to this article.) Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/05/31/gulf.oil.spill.developments

Latest oil spill developments

By the CNN Wire Staff
May 31, 2010 2:28 a.m. EDT
STORY HIGHLIGHTS

(CNN) — Here are the latest developments involving the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico:

NEW:

Fisherman John Wutsell, Jr., has filed a temporary restraining order in federal court against oil company BP asking it to refrain from “altering, testing or destroying clothing or any other evidence or potential evidence” when workers, involved in the cleanup efforts, become ill. Graham MacEwen, a spokesman for BP, said he could not comment on the restraining order, or on allegations that BP confiscated clothing.

BP reported problems controlling the undersea well at the heart of the spill and won a delay in testing a critical piece of equipment in March, according to documents released Sunday. The company won a postponement from the New Orleans, Louisiana, district manager for the U.S. Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service, the documents show.
The New York Times reported Sunday that BP documents indicated the company had “serious problems and safety concerns” with the rig’s well casing and blowout preventer for months. Rep. Ed Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat who

leads an Energy and Commerce subcommittee, said he has seen documents that confirm the Times report.

PREVIOUSLY REPORTED:

The cleanup

BP’s CEO said he’s sorry for the oil spill and the “massive disruption” it has caused the Gulf Coast. He also said the company is trying to contain the spill offshore.

A team of oil spill experts were on standby in the United Arab Emirates, ready to help in the Gulf of Mexico cleanup efforts if called to do so, said Craig Buckingham of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company.
Sen. Mary Landrieu, a Democrat from Louisiana, said Saturday night that BP should immediately invest $1 billion to protect marshes, wetlands and estuaries.
An independent contractor supplying workers to clean up an oil spill on the Gulf Coast denied that his company sent more workers to Grand Isle, Louisiana, on Friday just because Obama was going to visit that site. Donald Nalty of Environmental Safety and Health, hired by BP to supply clean-up workers, said, “I had no idea about the president” and that his company decided several days before it knew of Obama’s visit that it would send 400 workers to Grand Isle on Friday.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said that Bob Abbey would become acting director of the troubled Minerals Management Service even as he retains his role as director of the federal Bureau of Land Management. Salazar said previous director Elizabeth Birnbaum resigned, but two sources said she was fired. Abbey will begin to manage the reorganization of the Minerals and Management Service into three separate agencies. Salazar has unveiled plans to divide the agency’s energy development, enforcement and revenue collection divisions, saying they have “conflicting missions.”

Obama said the spill had sparked the “largest cleanup effort in U.S. history.”

The oil spill

The Obama administration questioned BP’s estimate of the oil spill rate, noting the company has a financial interest in the numbers. “They will pay a penalty based on the number of barrels per day,” Carol Browner, Obama’s assistant on energy and climate change, said.

BP Managing Director Robert Dudley said Sunday that after failing to plug the Gulf of Mexico oil leak, the next step is try to reduce the amount of oil spilling into the ocean while drilling a relief well intended to halt the leak by August.

Dudley said that oil would continue to flow “for a while” from the leaking well, and the company would strengthen efforts to

keep it from reaching Gulf beaches.

Browner said the oil spill is “probably the biggest environmental disaster we’ve ever faced in this country.”

BP’s “top kill” attempt to stop the flow of oil from a ruptured well in the Gulf of Mexico failed, the company’s chief operating officer said Saturday.

The next option will be to place a custom-built cap known as the “lower marine riser package cap” over the leak, Doug Suttles said. BP crews were working Saturday to ready the materials for that option, he said.

Subsea dispersants will be used in the next attempt to stop flow from breached well, the Coast Guard said. “The real solution, the end state, is a relief well,” Coast Guard Rear Adm. Mary Landry said.

Obama ordered Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson and NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco to return to the Gulf of Mexico as part of the federal response to the oil spill.

The spill is the largest in U.S. history. Government scientists said Thursday that as many as 19,000 barrels (798,000 gallons) of oil were spewing into the ocean every day, making this disaster perhaps twice the size of the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill.

Health problems

At least two more oil spill cleanup workers have been hospitalized after feeling ill on the job, according to local shrimpers who are assisting in the recovery effort along the Gulf Coast. The workers complained of nausea, headaches and dizziness after low-flying planes applied chemical dispersants within one mile of operating cleanup vessels.
Some people involved in cleaning up the oil spill “clearly” have become sick, but the reasons are not yet clear, Suttles said earlier Saturday.

Seven oil spill recovery workers who were hospitalized in New Orleans, Louisiana, after complaining of feeling ill were properly trained and had protective gear on, according to the federal on-scene coordinator for the oil spill response effort.

Landry said workers were treated for several symptoms, including headaches, nausea, vomiting and shortness of breath. Safety officials from the Coast Guard, BP and the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration have responded.
BP said it has provided spill recovery workers with protective equipment, such as suits, steel-toed boots, gloves, hard hats and safety glasses. In addition, BP said, workers are conducting about 250 air-quality tests a day. They also are testing workers for exposure to irritants and other substances that could be harmful, BP said.
Economy

The commercial and recreational fishing closure is now 60,683 square miles, which is about 25 percent of the Gulf of Mexico exclusive economic zone, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The closure went into effect at 6 p.m. ET Friday.

Images from the massive BP oil spill have prompted tourists to go to other destinations this Memorial Day weekend.

Hotels in Florida, Alabama and Mississippi are using everything from “beach cams” and money-back guarantees to constant updates on their websites to get the word out that their beaches are clean and open for business.

In Louisiana, hotels catering to sport fishermen are seeing a falloff in bookings, but that’s been offset by the masses of recovery workers, BP employees and journalists who have poured into the area.

Oil prices rose Friday for the third day in a row, as traders anticipate that a six-month moratorium on new offshore drilling permits and other responses to the spill could mean supply decreases in the long term.

Prior to the scrapping of the “top kill” effort, BP said Friday its costs have totaled $930 million to date. That includes expenditures on the spill response, containment, relief well drilling, grants to the Gulf States, claims paid and federal costs. 

http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/05/31/gulf.oil.spill/index.html?hpt=T1On heels of failure, BP vows to start again — soon

By the CNN Wire Staff
May 31, 2010 6:54 a.m. EDT
STORY HIGHLIGHTS

New attempt to stop gushing oil could start early this week
Method involves cutting lower marine riser package and lowering cap
BP’s CEO apologizes for “disruption,” says BP is boosting effort to contain oil
Spill is in its 42nd day
(CNN) — BP could try to cap a massive oil gusher again early this week in an attempt to solve what the Obama administration has called “probably the biggest environmental disaster we’ve ever faced in this country.”

As the oil spill entered its 42nd day Monday, efforts to clean up coastal areas and develop a new plan of attack continued.

All previous attempts at containing the crude gushing from BP’s undersea well have failed, including a “top kill” approach that many had pinned their hopes on.

BP said Sunday that it would strengthen its efforts to stop the flow and protect the coastline.

“As far as I’m concerned, a cup of oil on the beach is a failure,” BP CEO Tony Hayward told reporters in Venice, Louisiana.

Hayward said he was sorry for the spill and the “massive disruption” it has caused the Gulf Coast.

“There’s no one who wants this over more than I do. I would like my life back,” Hayward told reporters. But he said the company has about 30 aircraft searching for signs of oil and has moved more than 300 people to offshore “floatels” to speed up its response time.

Up to 19,000 barrels (798,000 gallons) of oil a day have been spewing out of a BP-owned undersea well since the late April sinking of the drill rig Deepwater Horizon. BP, rig owner Transocean Ltd. and oilfield services company Halliburton have blamed each other for the disaster, which left 11 workers dead, but BP is responsible for cleanup under federal law.
“We’re disappointed the oil is going to flow for a while, and we’re going to redouble our efforts to keep it off the beaches,” BP Managing Director Robert Dudley said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

The most recent setback was the failure of the so-called “top kill” method of pumping mud to plug the leak.

Dudley said the next effort will involve placing a custom-built cap to fit over a piece of equipment called the “lower marine riser package.” The process will involve cutting the riser package to create a clean surface to cap, Dudley said, and warm water will be circulated around the cap to prevent the freezing that hindered a previous dome-cap effort.
If successful, the procedure will allow BP to collect most — but not all — of the oil spewing from the well. The long-term solution is the drilling of a relief well that will be in place by August.

“If we can contain the flow of the well between now and August and keep it out of the ocean, that’s also a good outcome as well,” Dudley said. “And then, if we can shut it off completely with a relief well, that’s not a bad outcome compared to where we are today.”
On Sunday, the Obama Administration questioned BP’s oil spill numbers.

On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Carol Browner, Obama’s assistant on energy and climate change, said BP may have had an ulterior motive for underestimating the amount of oil leaking.

“BP has a financial interest in these numbers. They will pay a penalty based on the number of barrels per day,” she said.

BP had originally said about 5,000 barrels of oil per day were leaking.

The latest estimate, Browner said, is between 12,000 and 19,000 barrels per day.

“This is probably the biggest environmental disaster we’ve ever faced in this country,” she said.

More oil is leaking into the Gulf of Mexico than any other spill in U.S. history, including the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska, according to the government.

Many systems are in place to manage and decrease the amount of oil coming on shore, Browner said.

Controlled burns of oil have been effective so far, she said, though they have been limited due to weather conditions.

As a consequence of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, all deepwater operations in the gulf have been shut down for now, including operating wells, Browner said.

“At the end of the day we will make the right decisions ensuring that our environment is protected,” she said.

Special thanks to Richard Charter