Kansas City Star
May 20, 2010

 http://www.kansascity.com/2010/05/20/1959836/low-oil-spill-estimate-could-save.html

By MARISA TAYLOR, RENEE SCHOOF AND ERIKA BOLSTAD
McClatchy Newspapers

BP’s estimate that only 5,000 barrels of oil are leaking daily from a well in the Gulf of Mexico, which the Obama administration hasn’t disputed, could save the company millions of dollars in damages when the financial impact of the spill is resolved in court, legal experts say.

A month after a surge of gas from the undersea well engulfed the Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling rig in flames and triggered the massive leak that now threatens sea life, fisheries and tourist centers in five Gulf Coast states, neither BP nor the federal government has tried to measure at the source the amount of crude pouring into the water.

BP and the Obama administration have said they don’t want to take the measurements for fear of interfering with efforts to stop the leaks.

That decision, however, runs counter to BP’s own regional plan for dealing with offshore leaks. “In the event of a significant release of oil,” the 583-page plan says on Page 2, “an accurate estimation of the spill’s total volume … is essential in providing preliminary data to plan and initiate cleanup operations.”

Legal experts said that not having a credible official estimate of the leak’s size provides another benefit for BP: The amount of oil spilled is certain to be key evidence in the court battles that are likely to result from the disaster. The size of the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska, for example, was a significant factor that the jury considered when it assessed damages against Exxon.

“If they put off measuring, then it’s going to be a battle of dueling experts after the fact trying to extrapolate how much spilled after it has all sunk or has been carried away,” said Lloyd Benton Miller, one of the lead plaintiffs’ lawyers in the Exxon Valdez spill litigation. “The ability to measure how much oil was released will be impossible.”

“It’s always a bottom-line issue,” said Marilyn Heiman, a former Clinton administration Interior Department official who now heads the Arctic Program for the Pew Environment Group. “Any company wouldn’t have an interest in having this kind of measurement if they can help it.”

The size of the spill has become a high stakes political controversy that’s put the Obama administration and the oil company on the defensive. In congressional testimony Wednesday, an engineering professor from Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., said that based on videos released Tuesday he estimated that the well was spewing at 95,000 barrels of oil, or 4 million gallons, a day into the gulf.

The Obama administration Thursday demanded that BP publicly release all information related to the disaster.

BP officials had pledged in congressional testimony to keep the public and government officials informed, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson said in a letter to BP chief executive officer Tony Hayward.

“Those efforts, to date, have fallen short in both their scope and effectiveness,” they wrote.

That letter came after members of Congress made similar demands of BP, leading to the release Tuesday of the new videos. One showed oil still billowing from one underwater pipe, despite an insertion tube BP now says is capturing 5,000 barrels of crude a day – its entire initial estimate of the spill. The other showed a previously unseen leak spewing clouds of crude from just above the well’s dysfunctional blowout preventer.

The EPA on Thursday ordered BP to switch to a less toxic version of the chemical mix it’s using to disperse the oil. The EPA also for the first time posted on its website BP’s test data of the dispersant’s use in deep water. Those orders came days after McClatchy Newspapers reported doubts about the dispersant’s safety and members of Congress made a similar demand.

Scientists and environmentalists praised the government for demanding that more information be made public.

“This is exactly the role the government needs to be playing – they need to be overseeing BP’s actions to assure that health and natural resources are protected, as much as possible, and that information is available to the public,” said Gina Solomon, a senior scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council.

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration head Jane Lubchenco told reporters on Thursday that a team of government scientists was assembled this week, a month after the spill began, to try to come up with a better estimate of the leak’s volume.

She said the 5,000-barrel estimate was based on visual observations on the surface. “As the spill increased in size and began to break up it was no longer possible to use that effort, which is why we have shifted to using multiple paths to try to get at better estimates,” she said.

Scientists have the instruments and the knowledge needed to figure out the flow rate, and several have complained publicly that they were turned down when they offered to help, as McClatchy reported Tuesday.

“The decision was made that the first priority had to be to stop the flow,” Lubchenco said. Robotic vehicles were being used for that purpose and there was limited space for more of them to operate there at the same time, she said.
John Curry, a BP spokesman, said he hadn’t seen the letter from Napolitano and Jackson and couldn’t comment specifically, but added: “We’re just trying to provide the information people are asking for at the same time we are trying to position a lot more resources to stop the flow of oil.”

Curry offered no new estimate of how much oil is flowing from the leaks, but acknowledged that capturing 5,000 barrels of oil a day in the insertion tube is evidence that the official 5,000-barrel per leak estimate is low.

“We’ve said at best it’s a highly imprecise estimate,” Curry said.

Curry said he knew of no efforts by BP to use its robotic equipment on the sea floor to measure the flow, but said that the efforts were entirely focused on containing the spill.

BP agreed Thursday to allow the posting of a live feed of the video of the oil spill, which lawmakers said would help scientists arrive at independent estimates of the spill.

“I’m sitting here looking at it right now, and it ain’t 5,000 barrels a day. I’ll guarantee it,” said Bob Cavnar, a Houston engineer and blogger who’s been involved in oil and gas exploration and production.

“In Houston, there’s about 125,000, 150,000 engineers,” he said. “And all the engineers can calculate what the flow is.”

The feed eventually was overwhelmed by the number of people trying to view it and was removed from congressional websites.

Calling the disaster site a “crime scene,” Larry Schweiger, the president of the National Wildlife Federation, accused BP of a cover-up.

“BP cannot be left in charge of assessing the damage or controlling the data from their spill,” Schweiger said. “The public deserves sound science, not sound bites from BP’s CEO.”

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs denied that the government was trying to cover up the size of the spill.

“The best and brightest minds in all of this government, and in the scientific community and in the world of commerce are focused on this problem. Everything that can be done is being done,” he said.

Sens. Bill Nelson of Florida and Barbara Boxer of California, both Democrats, called on the Justice Department to investigate BP’s drilling permits to determine whether the company had misled the government by claiming it had the technology needed to handle a big spill.

Since the spill, BP has announced five different approaches to sealing the leak. Three of those have been at least partially used: a 78-ton containment dome that failed; a small “top hat” dome that was placed on the seafloor May 11 but hasn’t been used, and the insertion tube now siphoning a fraction of the spill. Of the two others, the “junk shot,” which would fire shredded tires and debris into the damaged blowout preventer, is rarely mentioned, and the “top kill,” which would force mud into the blowout preventer, may be tried this weekend.

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration head Jane Lubchenco told reporters on Thursday that a team of government scientists was assembled this week, a month after the spill began, to try to come up with a better estimate of the leak’s volume.

She said the 5,000-barrel estimate was based on visual observations on the surface. “As the spill increased in size and began to break up it was no longer possible to use that effort, which is why we have shifted to using multiple paths to try to get at better estimates,” she said.

Scientists have the instruments and the knowledge needed to figure out the flow rate, and several have complained publicly that they were turned down when they offered to help, as McClatchy reported Tuesday.

“The decision was made that the first priority had to be to stop the flow,” Lubchenco said. Robotic vehicles were being used for that purpose and there was limited space for more of them to operate there at the same time, she said.

 
(Margaret Talev and David Lightman contributed to this article.)

http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/todays-paper/cleanup+unlikely+coast/3049464/story.html
Montreal Gazette 
Drilling under way; Spill redress ‘difficult,’ Chevron said in 2005
 
BY ANDREW MAYEDA, CANWEST NEWS SERVICE MAY 20, 2010
 
 
Chevron Canada warned regulators five years ago it would be unable to clean up the vast majority of any big oil spill at a rig off the coast of Newfoundland that is poised to set a record for the deepest offshore oil well drilled in Canada.

Chevron began exploratory drilling this month in the Orphan Basin, about 430 kilometres northeast of St. John’s. The project is known as Lona O-55. At 2,600 metres below sea level, it is considerably deeper than the existing White Rose, Terra Nova and Hibernia rigs off the Newfoundland coast. Those three rigs are the only active offshore projects in Canada.

The well at BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico is about 1,500 metres deep.
The unprecedented nature of the Lona O-55 project has raised concerns among environmentalists and industry observers about how Chevron would respond were the well to blow out, as it did in the Deepwater Horizon case.

An environmental assessment commissioned by Chevron and its partners in 2005 estimated there is only a 0.0086 per cent probability of an “extremely large” oil spill of more than 150,000 barrels. The probability of a “very large” spill, defined as greater than 10,000 barrels, was pegged at 0.026 per cent.

There is considerable dispute over the size of the Gulf Coast spill, but U.S. government officials believe it is leaking at a rate of 5,000 barrels a day, meaning it is approaching 150,000 barrels. The Chevron report notes that, before the Gulf Coast disaster, there were only five extremely large spills in offshore drilling history.

However, the report also concedes that, were a large spill to occur on the rough seas off Newfoundland, the company would be hard pressed to clean it up.

“Physical recovery of spilled oil off the coast of Newfoundland will be extremely difficult and inefficient for large blowout spills,” the report states.” First, the generally rough sea conditions mean that containment and recovery techniques are frequently not effective. Second, the wide slicks that result from subsea blowouts mean that only a portion of the slick can be intercepted.”

The Chevron report estimates that only two to 12 per cent of an offshore spill could be retrieved under “typical wind and wave conditions.”

Stephen Hazell, a lawyer with environmental-law organization Ecojustice, said big offshore projects such as the Lona O-55 should be subject to tougher reviews.
Last week, the Newfoundland government appointed a marine safety and environmental management expert to review the province’s prevention and response plans.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

This makes me so angry; our government is joining BP in leading this greatest of environmental mishaps with further incompetence and lies…..DV

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/18/gulf-oil-spill-government_n_580815.html 

First Posted: 05-18-10 06:14 PM   |   Updated: 05-20-10 09:15 AM
SEE UPDATE BELOW

The Obama administration is actively trying to dismiss media reports that vast plumes of oil lurk beneath the surface of the Gulf of Mexico, unmeasured and uncharted.

But the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, whose job it is to assess and track the damage being caused by the BP oil spill that began four weeks ago, is only monitoring what’s visible — the slick on the Gulf’s surface — and currently does not have a single research vessel taking measurements below.

The one ship associated with NOAA that had been doing such research is back in Pascagoula, Miss., having completed a week-long cruise during which scientists taking underwater samples found signs of just the kind of plume that environmentalists fear could have devastating effects on sea life of all shapes and sizes.

Meanwhile, the commander of the NOAA vessel that the White House on Friday claimed in a press release “is now providing information for oil spill related research” told HuffPost on Tuesday that he’s actually far away, doing something else entirely.

“We are in the Western Gulf doing plankton research,” said Commander Dave Score, reached by satellite phone on his research vessel, the Gordon Gunter. “So I really don’t know. I’m just on orders.”

Indeed, you can track the Gordon Gunter right here.

Two other NOAA research vessels are also in the area, but not monitoring the spill: The Thomas Jefferson, which has spent the last five days in Galveston, Texas; and the Oregon II, which has been under repair in Pascagoula for almost six months.
NOAA director Jane Lubchenco on Monday decried media reports about plumes of underwater oil as “misleading, premature and, in some cases, inaccurate.” (See the Huffington Post and New York Times coverage.)

Lubchenco implicitly criticized scientists on the Pelican, a research vessel operated by the NOAA-affiliated National Institute for Undersea Science and Technology (NIUST), for being hasty in its pronouncements to the media.

“No definitive conclusions have been reached by this research team about the composition of the undersea layers they discovered,” Lubchenco said in her statement. “Characterization of these layers will require analysis of samples and calibration of key instruments. The hypothesis that the layers consist of oil remains to be verified.”

NIUST, while partially funded by NOAA, is a cooperative venture with the University of Mississippi and the University of Southern Mississippi. And it was the Pelican crew’s idea — not NOAA’s — to start taking underwater measurements, although NOAA was perfectly happy to take credit for it, initially.

NOAA officials did not respond to repeated questions from the Huffington Post on Tuesday, and therefore did not explain how they could possibly assess or track underwater oil without having any vessels out taking measurements. Nor did they explain how the Gordon Gunter showed up in an administration press release.

Doug Helton, the emergency response coordinator in Seattle who is NOAA’s trajectory expert, answered his phone but wouldn’t say much. “It’s still a pretty dynamic situation as to what’s in the field today, as opposed to yesterday,” he hedged, before saying he would call back after getting clearance from NOAA’s public affairs office. There was no call back.

“The fact that NOAA has missed the ball catastrophically on the tracking and effects monitoring of this spill is inexcusable,” said Rick Steiner, a University of Alaska marine conservationist who recently spent more than a week on the Gulf Coast advising Greenpeace. “They need 20 research ships on this, yesterday.”

Steiner explained: “This is probably turning out to be the largest oil spill in U.S. history and the most unique oil spill in world history,” on account of it occurring not on or near the surface, but nearly a mile below.

“They should have had a preexisting rapid response plan,” he told HuffPost. “They should have had vessels of opportunity — shrimp vessels, any vessel that can deploy a water-column sampling device — pre-contracted, on a list, to be called up in an event that this happened. And they blew it. And it’s been going on for a month now, and all that information has been lost.”

Steiner gave credit to the scientists on the Pelican, but noted that at most they had sampled less than 1 percent of the affected waters. “The Pelican happened to drop some of their sampling devices into a plume and found it, but there have to be plumes elsewhere, and the biological implication are vast.”

NOAA officials “haven’t picked it up because they haven’t looked in the right places,” he said. “There have to be dozens of these massive plumes of toxic Deepwater Horizon oil, and they haven’t set out to delineate them in any shape or form.”

Frank Muller-Karger, an oceanography professor at the University of South Florida who will be testifying before the House Energy Committee on Wednesday, said that testing for oil beneath the surface should be a top priority.

“I think that should be one of our biggest concerns, getting the technology and the research to try to understand how big this amorphous mass of water is, and how it moves,” he said.

“It’s like an iceberg. Most of it is below the surface. And we just have no instruments below the surface that can help us monitor the size, the concentration and the movement.”

Muller-Karger said there are all sorts of implements that researchers should be deploying, including optical sensors and current meters. “I think that now people are really scrambling to get some vessels out there,” said Muller-Karger. “I think we’re going to need a fleet of research vessels.”

In addition to measuring the amount of oil, researchers need to study the effect on fish larvae and bacteria, he said. “Very big fish and very prized fish are moving in to spawn — it’s a critical time of the year,” he told HuffPost. “Larvae from the fish may end up eating droplets of oil.

On Tuesday, Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla,) released four new videos showing oil billowing out of the Deepwater Horizon blowout site.

Steiner said NOAA is not only failing to fully measure the impact of the spill, but, he said, “if they rationally want to close and open fisheries, then they need to know where this stuff is going.”

As it happens, NOAA announced Tuesday that it is doubling its Gulf fishing ban to encompass 19 percent of the federal waters.

But Steiner said it is quite possible, for instance, that some plumes are being carried by a slow deepwater southwest, toward the coast of Texas. More oil than is already visible could be entering the Loop Current, which could carry it past the Florida Keys and up the Atlantic coast.

“And truly, they really need 20 or 30 vessels out there yesterday,” Steiner said. “And I think they know that. And so all the spin — that they have this under control, that there’s no oil under the surface to worry about — they’re wrong, and they know it.”

UPDATE:

The New York Times on Thursday reported that boats under contract to BP have taken some underwater samples, and top ocean scientists are complaining that the government has failed to make public a single test result:

Tensions between the Obama administration and the scientific community over the gulf oil spill are escalating, with prominent oceanographers accusing the government of failing to conduct an adequate scientific analysis of the damage and of allowing BP to obscure the spill’s true scope….
The administration acknowledges that its scientific resources are stretched by the disaster, but contends that it is moving to get better information, including a more complete picture of the underwater plumes.

“We’re in the early stages of doing that, and we do not have a comprehensive understanding as of yet of where that oil is,” Jane Lubchenco, the NOAA administrator, told Congress on Wednesday. “But we are devoting all possible resources to understanding where the oil is and what its impact might be.”

And according to the Times, it’s not just independent scientists who are pressing for more information — it’s also other branches of the federal government:

Lisa P. Jackson, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, told Congress on Wednesday that she was pressing for the release of additional test results, including some samples taken by boats under contract to BP.

 

 Memorandum
DATE:      May 19, 2010
TO:           Interested Media
FROM:     ESF14 Public Information: (850) 921- 0217
RE:           Tar Balls Collected from Fort Zachary Taylor State Park Not Related to Deepwater Horizon Incident.
 
On Monday, May 17 the US Coast Guard obtained the tar balls found in the Keys and sent the tar balls for analysis to determine if they are related to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.  On Wednesday, May 19, the Coast Guard received a report that stated the tar balls collected from Fort Zachary Taylor State Park are not related to the Deepwater Horizon incident. To view the United States Coast Guard’s press release, visit www.deepwaterhorizonresponse.com/go/doc/586/554303/
 
In 2008 and 2009 there were 667 and 681 reports respectively of oil and petroleum incidents along Florida’s waterways and beaches so these types of occurrences are not as unusual as one might think. Specifically in the Florida Keys (Monroe County) there were 53 incidents in 2008 and 72 incidents in 2009 of oil and petroleum products being reported in their coastal waters.
 
For more information regarding Florida’s response to the Deepwater Horizon incident, please visit www.deepwaterhorizonflorida.com
 
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