http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/26/AR2010052603800.html

By Karen Tumulty
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, May 26, 2010; 4:26 PM

As his administration comes under increasing criticism for its handling of the spreading environmental catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico, President Obama will hold a White House news conference Thursday, his first since February, in an attempt to retake command of the message. He’ll do so as the crisis reaches yet another moment of high risk, both in the Gulf and in Washington.

At the scene of the oil spill, the oil firm BP — attempting the latest of inventive but thus far ineffective maneuvers to stop the gusher that has been spewing from the gulf floor for five weeks — has begun to pour 50,000 barrels of dense mud into the well. The exercise, known as a “top kill,” has effectively stopped other spills in the past but has never been tried at the mile-down depth of this one.

Meanwhile, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar is scheduled to deliver the results of a review demanded by Obama that gives an accounting of the federal government’s policies with regard to energy exploration on the outer continental shelf, including whether there are adequate safeguards with respect to regulations and inspections. Obama is expected to announce a series of new policies in response.

The news conference will also come on the day before the president travels to the gulf to inspect the scene and also to send a message of engagement. With reporters having their first opportunity to put a full range of questions to Obama about the spill and his administration’s handling of it, here are five that should be asked:

1. In explaining and defending your decision in March to open up additional offshore areas to drilling, you argued that improvements in technology have made drilling significantly less risky. Just 18 days before the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, you said: “It turns out, by the way, that oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills. They are technologically very advanced.” What kind of assurances were you given that this was the case and by whom? What do you think of those assumptions now?

2. BP is now in the position of making many of the key decisions on how to deal with it — a situation that is drawing growing criticism. White House officials note the administration is following a process established under the 1990 Oil Spill Act, which was passed in response to the Exxon Valdez incident; they also concede that the government, effectively, has no choice but to let BP take the lead because it lacks the equipment and expertise to do the job. In at least one instance in which the federal government has attempted to overrule BP, which was over its use of dispersant chemicals that the Environmental Protection Agency says are too toxic, the company has not complied. What do you say to those who say too much control has been ceded to BP? And what kind of changes, if any, should be made in the process for dealing with future oil spills?

3. Salazar has pledged reform of the Minerals Management Service, the agency responsible for offshore drilling, which is now recognized as having been too compliant with the wishes of the oil industry. But his proposals — for instance, splitting the agency into separate leasing, revenue collection and oversight — have dealt largely with the organizaton of the MMS. If the problem is, as you have said, a cozy culture in the agency, is it enough simply to redraw the organization chart? How can you quickly change a culture that has taken decades to develop?

4. On May 6, Salazar announced a moratorium on the issuance of final permits for “new offshore drilling activity.” Critics such as the Center for Biological Diversity note, however, that this policy has never been put into writing, and that its definition “has become steadily narrower as the Interior Department changes it to exclude whatever drilling permits MMS issues on any given day.” And the New York Times has reported that since the April 20 explosion on the rig, waivers have continued to be granted for drilling projects. What, exactly, does this moratorium cover?
5. Should anyone in the government be fired as the result of this disaster?

Washington Post staff writer Juliet Eilperin contributed to this report.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

Alaska Dispatch
May 26, 2010

 http://www.alaskadispatch.com/dispatches/energy/5464-crews-check-risk-after-pump-station-oil-spill

Joshua Saul | May 26, 2010
 
Alyeska Pipeline Service Co. photo
 http://www.alaskadispatch.com/images/media/photos/news/energy/oil-spill-pump-station-9-05-26-10.jpg
Several thousand barrels of crude have spilled into a containment area
at Pump Station 9 near Delta Junction.

While small amounts of oil kept leaking from the top of a damaged oil tank along the trans-Alaska oil pipeline Wednesday, workers examined the tank’s integrity and began estimating when the pump station could be powered back up.

The oil began spilling Tuesday morning from an oil tank at Pump Station 9 near Delta Junction, about a hundred miles south of Fairbanks. Alyeska Pipeline Service Co., which operates the line on behalf of BP and four other oil companies, said several thousand barrels have spilled into a containment area.

Alyeska spokesperson Michele Egan said they’re not used to actually seeing the crude.

“It’s very unusual for us, but it’s completely contained,” she said.

No oil was flowing through the line Wednesday afternoon. Risk assessment crews from Alyeska are looking at the station and at Tank 190, according to Tom DeRuyter, an on-scene coordinator for the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation. One team completed a risk assessment on the station’s communication system, which caused the spill when it failed to shut off the oil flowing from the main pipeline back into the tank. The oil spilled out of the tank through vapor vents, and the tank was damaged near its top when the oil overflowed.

DeRuyter said two other risk assessment teams were working Wednesday: One was looking at reenergizing the pump station, and the other was examining the structural integrity of Tank 190.

Egan said while Pump Station 9 is shut down, North Slope producers are only pumping 16 percent of their normal output. There are tanks on the North Slope that can store the oil that would normally be flowing through the line, Egan said, and they have about 48 hours’ worth of capacity.

DeRuyter described the process Alyeska use to clean out their containment area: “They’ll be draining out the oil that’s in the secondary containment through the dewatering system. They’re going to hook into that and pull the oil out, and then they’ll need to go in and remove the oiled gravel that’s in there.”

DeRuyter said he hasn’t yet seen any startup plan for getting oil flowing again.

“From what I understand, there is still a light weeping of oil coming out of the vents,” he said.

Pump Station 9 provides the pressure that pushes crude over the Alaska Range and through Thompson Pass and complete its journey to Valdez, according to the agency that regulates the pipeline.

Contact Joshua Saul at jsaul@alaskadispatch.com.  Special thanks to Richard Charter

May 24, 2010

 http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2011938864_oilcement24.htm

By Kevin Spear
The Orlando Sentinel

ORLANDO, Fla. ⤔ Oil company BP used a cheaper, quicker but potentially less dependable method to complete the drilling of the Deepwater Horizon well, according to several experts and documents.

“There are clear alternatives to the methods BP used that most engineers in the drilling business would consider much more reliable and safer,” said F.E. Beck, a Texas A&M University petroleum-engineering professor who testified recently before a Senate committee investigating BP’s blown-out well in the Gulf of Mexico.

He and other petroleum and drilling engineers who reviewed a log of the Deepwater Horizon’s activities described BP’s choice of well design as one in which the final phase called for a 13,293-foot length of permanent pipe, called “casing,” to be locked in place with a single injection of cement that often can turn out to be problematic.

A different approach more commonly used in the hazardous geology of the Gulf involves installing a section of what the industry calls a “liner,” then locking both the liner and a length of casing in place with one or, often, two cement jobs that are less prone to failure.

The BP well “is not a design we would use,” said one veteran deep-water engineer who would comment only if not identified because of his high-profile company’s prohibition on speaking publicly about the April 20 explosion aboard the Deepwater Horizon or the oil spill that started when the drilling rig sank two days later.

He estimated that the liner design, used nearly all the time by his company, is more reliable and safer than a casing design by a factor of “tenfold.”

But that engineer and several others said that had BP used a liner and casing, it would have taken nearly a week longer for the company to finish the well ⤔ with rig costs running at $533,000 a day and additional personnel and equipment costs that might have run the tab up to $1 million daily.

BP PLC spokesman Toby Odone in Houston said the London-based company chooses between the casing and liner methods on a “well-by-well basis” and that the casing-only method is “not uncommon.”

Investigators and Congress already have homed in on a series of suspected instances of recklessness or poor maintenance aboard the Deepwater Horizon ⤔ looking, for example, at why the well’s blowout preventer failed. Those instances, taken together, may have weakened the rig’s defenses and fueled the rig explosion, which killed 11 workers and caused the biggest offshore-drilling spill in U.S. history.

Hunting for enormously rich deposits of oil and natural gas in deep-water regions of the Gulf of Mexico entails some of the most formidable drilling in the world. And BP’s ill-fated Macondo exploratory well had more than its share of trouble and warning signs, according to the rig’s activity log, or “well ticket.”

Drilling began on Oct. 7, 2009, in water 4,992 feet deep and nearly 50 miles southeast of the tip of the Mississippi River Delta.

The first 4,023 feet of drilling was done by the rig Marianas, owned by Switzerland-based Transocean. That rig was damaged by Hurricane Ida a month later and was towed to a shipyard. Transocean’s Deepwater Horizon, fresh from drilling a record-deep well elsewhere in the Gulf, took over by early February.

The Deepwater Horizon, weighing about as much as the 900-foot-long Titanic and considered one of the most capable drilling rigs in the world, almost immediately encountered some of the problems for which the Gulf is known.

Beneath the Gulf’s seafloor is a mush of sand, shale and salt in formations that are geologically young, unsettled and fragile. Coupled with that are layers of sand that hold crude oil and natural gas under high pressure.

While boring into Earth’s crust, a rig pumps a chemical slurry called “mud” down the center of the drill pipe. The mud exits through the drill bit in a blast that washes cuttings out of the freshly cut hole and back up to the rig.

Mud also serves as a kind of liquid plug that can hold pressurized reservoirs of natural gas and crude oil within their formations.

If oil and gas show alarming signs of wanting to “kick” up and out of the well, as they did twice on Deepwater Horizon ⤔ once temporarily and later catastrophically ⤔ drillers can call for heavier mud.

In many of the world’s petroleum regions, heavier mud will counteract the threat of a blowout. In the Gulf, however, it can and often does make matters worse.

The classic and potentially perilous duel for drillers in the Gulf is to maintain a mud weight that keeps pressurized gas and oil underground but doesn’t crack open fragile formations.

According to the Deepwater Horizon’s well ticket, that struggle defined almost every foot of progress made by the rig ⤔ until the Gulf’s geology finally won.

In late February, the rig was losing mud in a weak formation, according to the well ticket. Among the variety of tricks drillers have at their disposal when that happens, the most reliable is to continually reinforce a well with permanent sections of casing or with liner and cement. Deepwater Horizon did that nine times.

In early March, the rig experienced a double dose of trouble, according to the well ticket: The pressure of the underground petroleum temporarily overwhelmed the mud, triggering alarms on the Deepwater Horizon. At nearly the same time, the rig’s drill pipe and drill bit became stuck in the well.

Just one of those occurrences would amount to a bad day.

Deepwater Horizon recovered, but only after losing hundreds of feet of drilling pipe ⤔ likely at an equipment cost of several million dollars ⤔ and losing nearly two weeks of rig time.

After rig workers ran the final section of casing into the well, they opted to fix it in place with cement modified to have foamlike consistency. That makes the cement lighter and less likely to fracture or break weak formations and, as can happen with overly heavy mud, drain away into underground voids.

At that point, said the big-oil engineer who reviewed the ticket, rig workers must have been “jumping for joy” at having completed a stubborn well and discovering petroleum. Based on the array of measuring instruments lowered into the well ⤔ and detailed by the well ticket ⤔ the rig most likely had made a significant discovery.

But among the several possible errors and failures involving the Deepwater Horizon well, that final cement job is widely suspected of having broken down, allowing oil and gas to erupt up into the rig. That is what apparently occurred as rig workers were pumping out the well’s costly and reusable mud ⤔ the liquid plug ⤔ and replacing it with seawater.

The well ticket’s last entry states: “10:00 PM 4-20-10, EXPLOSION & FIRE.”

Engineers interviewed by The Orlando Sentinel said it’s common knowledge among drillers operating in the Gulf of Mexico that final cement jobs rarely are perfect and often badly flawed. That’s a key reason, they said, why many of them rely on a liner to complete a well: It offers more options for injecting, testing and repairing cement, and so is more effective at keeping petroleum under control.

There are three major U.S. cementing companies: Halliburton, Schlumberger and BJ Services. Cementing typically is performed by such rig contractors as part of a broad range of drilling services.

Halliburton, which had the Deepwater Horizon job, mixes in nitrogen to make its slurry more elastic. The nitrogen also helps create a lightweight cement that resembles a gray, foamy mousse and bonds better to the casing.

Cement contractors work closely with oil and gas companies, and the oil and gas companies have the final say on the formulas.

Halliburton says it has used such a mix on scores of wells and told a congressional committee that the cementing on the Deepwater Horizon job was successful.

Information from The Associated Press is included in this report.  Special thanks to Richard Charter

 
May 26, 2010
 
Dear Friends of Florida’s Waters,
 
For more than a month now, we have all eagerly watched our news outlets for some shred of good news regarding the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.  That good news has not materialized.  As we watch the image on TV or the internet of the millions of gallons of oil spewing into our beautiful Gulf waters, our hearts get heavier and heavier with grief and a sense of helplessness.  We are activists and helplessness is a feeling that doesn’t sit well in our hearts.
 
I have been watching and hoping to see aggressive preventive and protective measures put into place by local, state and national governments.  Some efforts are reported and some are obvious, but a full-scale, high-tech, top-shelf plan is not evident and apparently doesn’t exist.  Our Attorney General has put former Attorney General Jim Smith in a leadership role for guiding the state’s legal position.  Mr. Smith has been a registered lobbyist for BP in the recent past and clearly has a conflict of interest and has also never demonstrated any strong interest in protecting Florida’s natural resources. 
 
At DEP, Secretary Mike Sole is obviously in charge.  We know, without any doubt, that Mr. Sole has absolutely no interest in protecting Florida’s environment.  He proves that daily through his policy decisions and agency actions.  Mr. Sole has proven time and time again that his first and only allegiance is to politically powerful polluters that he has the ability to protect from us – the taxpayers and citizens of Florida who care about our resources.  In my opinion, Florida could not have a less reliable person in charge of coordinating an oil protection plan for Florida’s waters.
 
Many of you have called and emailed me to ask what I would recommend to help with this unprecedented disaster.  I’ve thought long and hard about what would be our best action, together as the Clean Water Network of Florida.  After discussing this with a number of scientists and my attorneys, we have decided that it is not good advice to encourage anyone to get personally in contact with the oil when it enters our waters.  It is toxic and hazardous to your health.  Why should you endanger your health when it is BP’s responsibility to hire professional, trained, well-supplied workers to deal with this problem?  I hope you will reconsider if you are thinking of doing anything that will put you in contact with the oil.
 
There is something you can do, however, and the Clean Water Network of Florida is happy to report that our board member and attorney Steven A. Medina has put together a citizen’s toolkit to help you have an effective voice in how Florida addresses the spill.  The toolkit provides a fill in the blank verified complaint that you can use to send a strong message to Mike Sole at DEP.  I served my complaint in person on Thursday when I was at the DEP building for the ERC meeting.  (That was the day Sole’s staff got the ERC to approve a 50 to 60 million gallon per day discharge to the Gulf of Mexico from the Buckeye Florida pulp mill and also to approve a new water classification/designated use for polluted waters that are unswimmable and barely fishable).  I hope that you will join me in filling it out, getting it notarized, and sending it to DEP.
 
 
The links to the toolkit can be found on the CWN-FL website:
 
The link to the Gulf of Mexico page is:
http://www.cleanwaternetwork-fl.org/issues_gulfmexico.php

The links to the documents themselves are:
http://www.cleanwaternetwork-fl.org/content/issues/Medina-Oil-Spill-WhitePaper-05062010.pdf
http://www.cleanwaternetwork-fl.org/content/issues/Medina-Oil-Spill-Grassroots-Kit-1-3.pdf
http://www.cleanwaternetwork-fl.org/content/issues/Medina-Oil-Spill-Grassroots-Kit-4.pdf
 
 
This complaint does not mean you have sued DEP.  It is a required first step before you can file suit against the agency.  I’m hoping that it won’t be necessary to ever file suit and that our state will get serious about making BP provide the required resources to protect our state waters before the oil gets to our shores.  I’m hoping that immediate economic assistance will be provided to all businesses and individuals who are being financially impacted by the oil spill.  BP should be doing anything and everything needed by the people of Florida to deal with the impacts of this spill. 
 
There are many lawsuits being filed in anticipation of damages that will be suffered both by businesses and individuals.  We are not interested in assessing the damages right now.  We want to prevent them.
 
I am asking you to do a few things as soon as possible to make our campaign to protect Florida from this disaster a success:
 
1) Please read the toolkit materials on our website and think through them carefully.  If you would like to do as I have done and send FDEP a verified complaint (30-day notice letter), then please follow your heart and take appropriate action.  You are not filing a lawsuit, but you are letting FDEP know that this is one of your options if they do not get serious about protecting our waters from the oil.
 
2)  If you choose not to send the notice letter then please write your own letter to FDEP and express your thoughts in that way.
 
3)  Whether or not you use our toolkit or write your own letter, please pass this campaign information on to everyone you know in Florida and encourage them to consider being a part of this statewide movement.
 
4)  If you have a website for your organization, please post a link to our campaign materials on the CWN-FL website.
 
5)  Make sure that your local government knows about the campaign and pass on the link to our materials.  We are encouraging local governments that are dissatisfied with the resources available to them for armoring their shorelines to join us in this proactive effort.
 
6)  Make a generous, special donation today to CWN-FL’s Fortress Florida Oil Disaster Fund by sending a check to the Clean Water Network of Florida, PO Box 254, Tallahassee, FL 32302.  Our legal team is working to keep the pressure on Florida officials in order to get the best possible protection for our state waters.  Remember the only rights you have are the ones you can enforce.  Your support of CWN-FL’s citizen enforcement campaign, Fortress Florida, will strengthen the only statewide effort to hold the state and BP accountable.
 
We are working on a list of pro-bono attorneys who are willing to represent citizens who want to take the next step in filing suit against the FDEP if that becomes necessary.  We hope that the Governor’s office and FDEP will make every effort to protect our waters from the oil and citizen suits will not become necessary.  You will be kept informed about everything that we learn and what we do along the way.  Please watch out website for updates in addition to email alerts that we will send to you.
 
Thank you in advance for reading this long email and for the time and attention that you devote to this matter.  Together we CAN have an impact and get better protection for our state and its amazing resources.
 
Your friend and fellow Floridian,
Linda L. Young, director

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/26/us/politics/26birnbaum.html 

May 25, 2010

By GARDINER HARRIS

WASHINGTON — She is the oil spill’s invisible woman.

When the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded last month, S. Elizabeth Birnbaum, director of the federal agency charged with ensuring the safety and environmental security of offshore oil rigs, stayed in Washington while others in the Interior Department rushed to the Gulf of Mexico to assess the situation.

When Ms. Birnbaum testified in Congressional hearings last week, her boss, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, lavished praise on others who testified while largely ignoring her. And a day later, when he announced a plan to revamp the agency, it was one that would eliminate her job.
 

S. Elizabeth Birnbaum has faced criticism as director of the Minerals Management Service.Ms. Birnbaum, a Harvard-educated lawyer who has moved among staff jobs on Capitol Hill, the Interior Department and environmental organizations for 23 years, is described as smart, tenacious, persistent and tough by more than a dozen former colleagues and friends.

But even among those who describe themselves as her friends, there is uncertainty about whether she is up to the task of remaking the Minerals Management Service, an agency widely recognized as one of the most dysfunctional in government.

Agency scientists and other employees complained that since taking the post in July, Ms. Birnbaum has done almost nothing to fix problems that have plagued the minerals agency for over a decade. She rarely visited the agency’s far-flung offices, so few staff members have ever seen her. The same agency managers who during the Bush administration ignored or suppressed scientists’ concerns about the safety and environmental risks of some off-shore drilling plans are still there doing the same things, they said.

How much of that was her fault? “The problems at M.M.S. didn’t originate with President Obama or President Bush, but at some point when you’re the administration you end up taking ownership of them,” said Frederick Hill, a spokesman for Representative Darrell E. Issa, Republican of California, who has criticized the Obama administration’s response to the BP spill.

Ms. Birnbaum declined to comment for this article.

At a hearing of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee last week, she sat at the witness table next to Jane Lubchenco, the administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who wore a canary yellow suit and her invariably sunny disposition. By contrast, Ms. Birnbaum wore a gray blouse and a grim demeanor and spoke in a low monotone.

In her testimony, Ms. Birnbaum expressed regrets about the loss of life and damage to the environment from the disaster.

“Many of M.M.S.’s employees have worked their entire careers in an effort to prevent this kind of thing from happening, and we will not rest until we determine the causes,” she said. She said that the administration had “taken every step to improve ethics at M.M.S.” and to end the cozy relationship between the industry and agency, “although I have to say that I believe that almost all of M.M.S.’s 1,700 employees are, in fact, ethical.”

Ms. Birnbaum was largely spared the kind of tough questioning that committee members directed earlier against BP executives. Indeed, one congressman apologized for ignoring her. But Representative Gene Taylor, Democrat of Mississippi, asked her about reports of shoddy maintenance on the Deepwater rig. “Because it doesn’t sound to me, if that is true, that you folks were doing your job,” Mr. Taylor said.

She responded that she could not address those issues because they were the subject of an investigation. “There are a lot of rumors going on,” said Ms. Birnbaum, who is scheduled to face Congressional questioners again Wednesday at a hearing of House Natural Resources Committee.
Before she took the job at the minerals agency , Ms. Birnbaum, 52, had virtually no experience with the oil and gas industry, but that was seen as a plus, according to a top Interior Department official. She worked at the Interior Department in the last year two years of the Clinton administration on natural resource issues, leaving as an associate solicitor in 2001 to become a top lawyer and advocate for American Rivers, a conservation organization.

Ms. Birnbaum had never supervised more than a few dozen people, and the problems at the agency were daunting. A legal mistake that occurred during the Clinton administration and was ignored through much of the Bush administration may end up costing the federal government $10 billion in lost royalties owed by oil and gas companies from leases in the Gulf of Mexico. Investigations found that some employees at the minerals service literally got into bed with oil industry representatives, accepted lavish gifts from them and allowed companies to fill out their own inspection reports.

Those who know Ms. Birnbaum said they were puzzled that she failed to make a public push to fix these problems.

“We sent her a couple of letters and basically got nonresponses,” said Paula Dinerstein, senior counsel for the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, who knew Ms. Birnbaum before she was appointed. “We were disappointed that she wasn’t going in and trying to right the wrongs of the past.”

Agency employees have echoed this view, saying Ms. Birnbaum has done virtually nothing to address the problems.

Mr. Salazar has now announced a plan to split the minerals agency into three far-smaller parts. Whether Ms. Birnbaum would lead any of these three entities is still uncertain, but her role clearly will diminish. Even friends acknowledged that the BP spill has tarnished her reputation, saying that being connected with the spill in any way would look bad on anyone’s résumé.

But Jamie Fleet, who succeeded Ms. Birnbaum as staff director at the House Administration Committee, said Ms. Birnbaum never worried about getting credit or deflecting blame.

During preparations for President Obama’s inauguration, which the committee coordinated, Ms. Birnbaum slept in her office for several nights to make sure that every detail was handled, Mr. Fleet recalled. “I guarantee you that she is working around the clock right now,” he said. “This isn’t a cocktail party bureaucrat. This is someone you want on your team when disaster strikes.”

Luke Sharrett/The New York Times

S. Elizabeth Birnbaum has faced criticism as director of the Minerals Management Service.

Special thanks to Richard Charter