http://www.huffingtonpost.com/charlie-cray/time-to-drill-down-into-h_b_559091.html
Huffington Post

Charlie Cray
Director of the Center for Corporate Policy
Posted: April 30, 2010 03:58 PM
Time to Drill Down Into Halliburton’s Role in Big Oil Spill

Under pressure from Congress and an inquiring media, Halliburton began a controlled leak of information about its role in the big gulf oil spill today, but things could get quite explosive if they appear to be hiding something.

The WSJ (Russell Gold and Ben Castleman) reported earlier today that Halliburton “didn’t respond” to questions about its role in the spill. That’s odd, given that, as the Journal reported, an independent expert noted that “the initial likely cause of gas coming to the surface had something to do with the cement,” and the fact that Halliburton “was handling the cementing process on the rig.”

Picking up on the report, Congressman Henry Waxman sent a letter to Halliburton asking the company to start talking and handing over any relevant documentation.

Perhaps knowing that it couldn’t hold out much longer, the firm issued a terse statement this afternoon about the “cementing facts regarding rig incident” , which was hardly illuminating.
The gist:
*Halliburton performed a variety of services on the rig, including cementing.
       
*Halliburton had four employees stationed on the rig at the time of the accident. All four were rescued by the Coast Guard.
       
*Halliburton completed the cementing of the final production casing string 20 hours prior to the incident.     
*The company also claims it tested the production casing string.”
*It also stated that “at the time of the incident, well operations had not yet reached the point requiring the placement of the final cement plug which would enable the planned temporary abandonment of the well, consistent with normal oilfield practice.”

Clearly there is going to have to be some careful examination of the cementing operation and related engineering questions. As Gold and Casselman report, the MMS says “cementing was a factor in 18 of 39 well blowouts in the Gulf of Mexico over a 14-year period….the single largest factor, ahead of equipment failure and pipe failure.”

Moreover, cracks in the integrity of the company’s cementing operations have happened before. The Journal reporters say Halliburton was the cementer on a well that suffered a big blowout last August in the Timor Sea, off Australia, where tens of thousands of barrels of oil were released over 10 weeks before it was shut down.

The investigation into that incident “is continuing; Halliburton declined to comment on it.”

It’s starting to look like the only thing Halliburton can cap tightly is its own mouth.
If they don’t start spilling their guts soon, what is already destined to be an ecological disaster will also be a major PR disaster for a company already saddled with the reputation for being a war profiteer.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/26/big-oil-fought-off-new-sa_n_552575.html
Huffington Post

Marcus Baram
Marcus@huffingtonpost.com | HuffPost Reporting

Big Oil Fought Off New Safety Rules Before Rig Explosion
First Posted: 04-26-10 05:00 PM   |   Updated: 04-26-10 11:50 PM
Scroll down to see the proposed safety regulations and BP’s objection
As families mourn the 11 workers thrown overboard in the worst oil rig disaster in decades and as the resulting spill continues to spread through the Gulf of Mexico, new questions are being raised about the training of the drill operators and about the oil company’s commitment to safety.

Deepwater Horizon, the giant technically-advanced rig which exploded on April 20 and sank two days later, is leaking an estimated 42,000 gallons per day through a pipe about 5,000 feet below the surface. The spill has spread across 1,800 square miles — an area larger than Rhode Island — according to satellite images, oozing its way toward the Louisiana coast and posing a threat to wildlife, including a sperm whale spotted in the oil sheen.

The massive $600 million rig, which holds the record for boring the deepest oil and gas well in the world — at 35,050 feet – had passed three recent federal inspections, the most recent on April 1, since it moved to its current location in January. The cause of the explosion has not been determined.

Yet relatives of workers who are presumed dead claim that the oil behemoth BP and rig owner TransOcean violated “numerous statutes and regulations” issued by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the U.S. Coast Guard, according to a lawsuit filed by Natalie Roshto, whose husband Shane, a deck floor hand, was thrown overboard by the force of the explosion and whose body has not yet been located.

Both companies failed to provide a competent crew, failed to properly supervise its employees and failed to provide Rushto with a safe place to work, according to the complaint filed in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana. The lawsuit also names oil-services giant Halliburton as a defendant, claiming that the company “prior to the explosion, was engaged in cementing operations of the well and well cap and, upon information and belief, improperly and negligently performed these duties, which was a cause of the explosion.”
BP and TransOcean have also aggressively opposed new safety regulations proposed last year by a federal agency that oversees offshore drilling — which were prompted by a study that found many accidents in the industry.
There were 41 deaths and 302 injuries out of 1,443 incidents from 2001 to 2007, according to the study conducted by the Minerals and Management Service of the Interior Department. In addition, the agency issued 150 reports over incidents of non-compliant production and drilling operations and determined there was “no discernible improvement by industry over the past 7 years.”

As a result, the agency proposed taking a more proactive stance by requiring operators to have their safety program audited at least once every three years — previously, the industry’s self-managed safety program was voluntary for operators. The agency estimated that the proposed rule, which has yet to take effect, would cost operators about $4.59 million in startup costs and $8 million in annual recurring costs.

The industry has launched a coordinated campaign to attack those regulations, with over 100 letters objecting to the regulations — in a September 14, 2009 letter to MMS, BP vice president for Gulf of Mexico production, Richard Morrison, wrote that “we are not supportive of the extensive, prescriptive regulations as proposed in this rule,” arguing that the voluntary programs “have been and continue to be very successful,” along with a list of very specific objections to the wording of the proposed regulations.

The next day, the American Petroleum Institute and the Offshore Operators Committee, in a joint letter to MMS, emphasized their preference for voluntary programs with “enough flexibility to suit the corporate culture of each company.” Both trade groups also claimed that the industry’s safety and environmental record has improved, citing MMS data to show that the number of lost workdays fell “from a 3.39 rate in 1996 to 0.64 in 2008, a reduction of over 80%.”

The Offshore Operators Committee also submitted to MMS a September 2, 2009 PowerPoint presentation asking in bold letters, “What Do HURRICANES and New Rules Have in Common?” against a backdrop of hurricane activity in the Gulf of Mexico. On the next page, the answer appears: “Both are disruptive to Operations And are costly to Recover From”.

The presentation also included the following statements:

“We are disappointed…
* MMS fails to understand that as operators, we can place expectations on contractors, but we cannot do the planning for them
* MMS adds a lot of prescriptive record keeping and documentation that does
nothing to keep people safe”

In addition, TransOcean accountant George Frazer, without identifying his affiliation with the company, submitted a public comment on the proposed regulations stating, “I strongly disagree that a mandated program as proposed is needed,” arguing that the proposed action “is a major paperwork-intensive, rulemaking that will significantly impact our business, both operationally and financially,” calling it an “unnecessary burden.”

“It does appear to be have been an orchestrated effort among most of major oil companies and drilling operators,” says Defenders of Wildlife senior policy adviser Richard Charter.
“This event has called attention to fact that there is a long-standing safety problem in offshore industry,” he says, noting that he gets phone calls from whistleblowers working on rigs who complain about the work conditions and the environmental damage caused by such operations.”

Brian Beckom, a personal-injury attorney who has sued TransOcean several times on behalf of workers, says that “the industry preaches safety, that’s what comes out of their corporate mouths, but I know for a fact that is not always the way things go,” though he concedes that the company is better than most in the industry, especially some of the smaller “fly-by-night operators”. With newer expensive rigs — BP was paying $500,000 a day to use Deepwater Horizon — Beckom says “there is tremendous pressure to put production first” and safety issues fall by the wayside.

Industry officials seem to be aware of safety concerns — in the minutes of a July 2009 meeting of the Health Safety Environment Committee of the International Association of Drilling Contractors trade group, one section is titled, “Stuck on the Plateau.” At the meeting, members discussed the difficulty of lowering the number of safety incidents, how to “rock over from the incident plateau” especially in light of a shrinking workforce.

In the current case, the spill’s damage has been exacerbated by the depth of the drilling, causing the oil to spread across a wider area and impeding clean-up efforts. On Monday morning, response teams failed to seal off the wellhead with a remote vehicle about a mile under the surface of the water — an effort akin to “putting a lid on a peanut jar from thousands of feet away,” explains Charter.

That threatens to make the spill the most damaging since the Exxon Valdez accident off the coast of Alaska in 1989. It is already the worst oil rig disaster since a blowout on the Union Oil platform off the coast of California in 1969 — the public outrage over that 11-day oil spill helped spawn the modern environmental movement.

BP and TransOcean did not return calls for comment. Halliburton could not be reached for comment on Monday night.

Here is the proposed rule from the Interior Department’s MMS:

MMS-2008-OMM-0003-0001-1

Here is the letter from BP objecting to the proposed rule:

MMS-2008-OMM-0003-0011.1

special thanks to Richard Charter

Per AP:
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5g5gnWbqZ9SqBHvSYqJeE2AT5KebwD9FD308O0
Oil from massive Gulf spill reaching La. coast

By CAIN BURDEAU and HOLBROOK MOHR (AP) – 15 minutes ago

MOUTH OF THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER – Faint fingers of oily sheen have reached the mouth of Mississippi River, the vanguard of a massive spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

The slick is making its way toward a delicate environment of birds, marine life and some of the nation’s richest seafood grounds.

By sunset Thursday, the oil had creeped into South Pass of the river and was lapping at the shoreline in long, thin lines.

Booms in place to protect grasslands and sandy beaches are being over topped by 5-foot waves of oily water in choppy seas.

In the distance, the lights of the fleet of boats working to keep more of the crude oil away from the coast were outlined in the dying twilight.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP’s earlier story is below.

VENICE, La. (AP) – An oil spill that threatened to eclipse even the Exxon Valdez disaster spread out of control and drifted inexorably toward the Gulf Coast on Thursday as fishermen rushed to scoop up shrimp and crews spread floating barriers around marshes.

The spill was both bigger and closer than imagined – five times larger than first estimated, with the leading edge just three miles from the Louisiana shore. Authorities said it could reach the Mississippi River delta by Thursday night.

“It is of grave concern,” David Kennedy of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told The Associated Press. “I am frightened. This is a very, very big thing. And the efforts that are going to be required to do anything about it, especially if it continues on, are just mind-boggling.”

The oil slick could become the nation’s worst environmental disaster in decades, threatening hundreds of species of fish, birds and other wildlife along the Gulf Coast, one of the world’s richest seafood grounds, teeming with shrimp, oysters and other marine life.

The leak from the ocean floor proved to be far bigger than initially reported, contributing to a growing sense among many in Louisiana that the government failed them again, just as it did during Hurricane Katrina. President Barack Obama dispatched Cabinet officials to deal with the crisis.

Cade Thomas, a fishing guide in Venice, worried that his livelihood will be destroyed. He said he did not know whether to blame the Coast Guard, the federal government or oil company BP PLC.

“They lied to us. They came out and said it was leaking 1,000 barrels when I think they knew it was more. And they weren’t proactive,” he said. “As soon as it blew up, they should have started wrapping it with booms.”

The Coast Guard worked with BP, which operated the oil rig that exploded and sank last week, to deploy floating booms, skimmers and chemical dispersants, and set controlled fires to burn the oil off the water’s surface.

The Coast Guard urged the company to formally request more resources from the Defense Department. A BP executive said the corporation would “take help from anyone.”

Government officials said the blown-out well 40 miles offshore is spewing five times as much oil into the water as originally estimated – about 5,000 barrels, or 200,000 gallons, a day.

At that rate, the spill could easily eclipse the worst oil spill in U.S. history – the 11 million gallons that leaked from the grounded tanker Exxon Valdez in Alaska’s Prince William Sound in 1989 – in the three months it could take to drill a relief well and plug the gushing well 5,000 feet underwater on the sea floor.

Ultimately, the spill could grow much larger than the Valdez because Gulf of Mexico wells typically hold many times more oil than a single tanker.

Doug Suttles, chief operating officer for BP Exploration and Production, had initially disputed the government’s larger estimate. But he later acknowledged on NBC’s “Today” show that the leak may be as bad as federal officials say. He said there was no way to measure the flow at the seabed, so estimates have to come from how much oil rises to the surface.

Mike Brewer, 40, who lost his oil spill response company in the devastation of Hurricane Katrina nearly five years ago, said the area was accustomed to the occasional minor spill. But he feared the scale of the escaping oil was beyond the capacity of existing resources.

“You’re pumping out a massive amount of oil. There is no way to stop it,” he said.

An emergency shrimping season was opened to allow shrimpers to scoop up their catch before it is fouled by oil. Cannons were to be used to scare off birds. And shrimpers were being lined up to use their boats as makeshift skimmers in the shallows.

This murky water and the oysters in it have provided a livelihood for three generations of Frank and Mitch Jurisich’s family in Empire, La.

Now, on the open water just beyond the marshes, they can smell the oil that threatens everything they know and love.

“Just smelling it, it puts more of a sense of urgency, a sense of fear,” Frank Jurisich said.

The brothers hope to get all the oysters they can sell before the oil washes ashore. They filled more than 100 burlap sacks Thursday and stopped to eat some oysters. “This might be our last day,” Mitch Jurisich said.

Without the fishing industry, Frank Jurisich said the family “would be lost. This is who we are and what we do.”

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal declared a state of emergency Thursday so officials could begin preparing for the oil’s impact. He said at least 10 wildlife management areas and refuges in his state and neighboring Mississippi are in the oil plume’s path.

The declaration also noted that billions of dollars have been invested in coastal restoration projects that may be at risk.

As dawn broke Thursday in the oil industry hub of Venice, about 75 miles from New Orleans and not far from the mouth of the Mississippi River, crews loaded an orange oil boom aboard a supply boat at Bud’s Boat Launch. There, local officials expressed frustration with the pace of the government’s response and the communication they were getting from the Coast Guard and BP officials.

“We’re not doing everything we can do,” said Billy Nungesser, president of Plaquemines Parish, which straddles the Mississippi River at the tip of Louisiana.

Tension was growing in towns like Port Sulphur and Empire along Louisiana Highway 23, which runs south of New Orleans along the Mississippi River into prime oyster and shrimping waters.

Companies like Chevron and ConocoPhillips have facilities nearby, and some residents are hesitant to criticize BP or the federal government, knowing the oil industry is as much a staple here as fishing.

“I don’t think there’s a lot of blame going around here. People are just concerned about their livelihoods,” said Sullivan Vullo, who owns La Casa Cafe in Port Sulphur.

A federal class-action lawsuit was filed late Wednesday on behalf of two commercial shrimpers from Louisiana, Acy J. Cooper Jr. and Ronnie Louis Anderson.

The suit seeks at least $5 million in compensatory damages plus an unspecified amount of punitive damages against Transocean, BP, Halliburton Energy Services Inc. and Cameron International Corp.

In Buras, La., where Hurricane Katrina made landfall in 2005, the owner of the Black Velvet Oyster Bar & Grill couldn’t keep his eyes off the television. News and weather shows were making projections that oil would soon inundate the coastal wetlands where his family has worked since the 1860s.

It was as though a hurricane was approaching, maybe worse.

“A hurricane is like closing your bank account for a few days, but this here has the capacity to destroy our bank accounts,” said Byron Marinovitch, 47.

“We’re really disgusted,” he added. “We don’t believe anything coming out of BP’s mouth.”

Signs of the 2005 hurricane are still apparent here: There are schools, homes, churches and restaurants operating out of trailers, and across from Marinovitch’s bar is a wood frame house abandoned since the storm.

A fleet of boats working under an oil industry consortium has been using booms to corral and then skim oil from the surface.

The Coast Guard abandoned a plan Wednesday to set fire to the leaking oil after sea conditions deteriorated. The attempt to burn some of the oil came after crews operating submersible robots failed to activate a shut-off device that would halt the flow of oil.

Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was briefed Thursday on the issue, said his spokesman, Capt. John Kirby. But Kirby said the Defense Department has received no request for help, nor is it doing any detailed planning for any mission on the oil spill.

Obama dispatched Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lisa Jackson to help with the spill. The president said the White House would use “every single available resource” to respond.

Obama has directed officials to aggressively confront the spill, but the cost of the cleanup will fall on BP, White House spokesman Nick Shapiro said.

Mohr reported from Jackson, Miss. Associated Press writers Janet McConnaughey, Kevin McGill, Michael Kunzelman and Brett Martel in New Orleans, and Melinda Deslatte in Baton Rouge also contributed to this report.

 Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://www.nola.com/news/index.ssf/2010/04/oil_from_gulf_spill_could_reac.html

Times-Picayune  New Orleans; special thanks to Richard Charter April 29, 2010, 10:14PM

This story is by Paul Rioux and Robert Travis Scott

Susan Poag / The Times-Picayune  Oil containment booms float Thursday near the beach at Port Eads in South Pass, south of Venice, near where the Mississippi River meets the Gulf of Mexico.

With an oily stench permeating the air across southeastern Louisiana, a massive oil spill was expected to start coming ashore in the Mississippi River delta early Friday, triggering all-out efforts to stave off an enironmental and fishing industry disaster as some state officials feared a repeat of the botched response that doomed the region during Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath.

Pushed by strong southeasterly winds and rising tides, oil that has gushed from a well in the Gulf of Mexico since an April 20 explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig was expected to reach the tip of Plaquemines Parish as early as Thursday night.

Gov. Bobby Jindal declared a state of emergency Thursday after the Coast Guard confirmed that the undersea well was spewing five times as much oil as previously thought and that it was leaking from three spots instead of two.

Oil giant BP, which had been leasing the sunken rig, is leading efforts to contain and clean up the 210,000-gallon-a-day spill. But as the crisis worsened, President Barack Obama said the federal government is stepping up its involvement.

“While BP is ultimately responsible for funding the cost of response and cleanup operations, my administration will continue to use every single available resource at our disposal, including potentially the Department of Defense, to address the incident,” Obama said.

Federal officials will visit spill zone Friday

Top officials from the Homeland Security Department, Environmental Protection Agency and Interior Department were scheduled to visit the vast spill zone Friday to help coordinate the response.

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration models show the sweet crude oil spill could reach parts of the Louisiana coastline late Thursday and proceed into Breton Sound and Chandeleur Sound by Saturday.

At least 10 state and national wildlife management areas and wildlife refuges in Louisiana and Mississippi are in the path of the more than 20,000-square-mile oil plume.

Officials with the state’s Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority announced they will open the the Caernavon Diversion in Plaquemines Parish at a rate of 8,000 cubic feet per second to deliver fresh water into the marshes on the edge of Breton Sound on the east side of the Mississippi River. On the west side, The David Pond in St. Charles Parish will divert 4,000 cubic feet per second into the Barataria basin.

Booms are being deployed to protect Louisiana’s fragile coast, but the winds, high waves and high tides that are expected to pick up in the next few days threaten to wash the oil over the boom lines, state officials said.

Oily odor reported in New Orleans

Residents throughout the New Orleans area on Thursday reported an oily odor apparently coming from the spill, which was more than 90 miles from the Cresecent City.

State health and environmental officials requested continuous air quality testing and monitoring by the federal Environmental Protection Agency.

Health officials said people sensitive to reduced air quality may experience nausea, vomiting or headaches. Anyone with these symptoms should consider staying indoors, ventilating their homes with air conditioning and avoiding strenuous outdoor activity, the officials said.

U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano declared that the oil spill is of “national significance,” allowing the federal government to devote more people and resources to clean-up efforts.

Jindal asked the Defense Department to pay for 6,000 members of the Louisiana National Guard to assist with the cleanup for at least 90 days.

Commercial fishers pitched in by placing containment booms to help protect their livelihoods as the spill threatened one of the nation’s most productive fisheries, supplying 50 percent of the wild shrimp crop.

Federal ‘lackadaisical response’ worrisome

State lawmakers expressed growing concern about whether the federal government and corporate officials are reacting with the speed and resources required to avert an environmental and fishing industry disaster.

Citing memories of the faltering federal response to Hurricane Katrina nearly five years ago, Rep. Sam Jones, D-Franklin, told the House chamber that he was “in deep concern about the lackadaisical response we have gotten on the oil spill containment.”

After participating in a conference call with officials from the state and BP, Jones said he was distressed about what appeared to be a lack of plans and preparation for containment to prevent the oil from coming ashore. He said the officials have a clean-up policy, but not a prevention policy.

“I would ask the president to send all he can now,” said Jones, who was an aide to Gov. Kathleen Blanco during the Katrina response. “We need the facts, we need the A-team here.”

Doug Suttles, BP’s chief operating officer, said the response is the largest oil spill containment operation in history, with more than 1,000 workers and 76 vessels.

Suttles said workers have been placing containment booms to protect Louisiana’s coastline for the past four or five days. He said 34 miles of booms were in place Thursday afternoon, with nearly 60 more miles of boom on hand.

New dispersal method planned

He said workers are poised to deploy underwater dispersants to try to break up the spill before it reaches the water’s surface, a new method that has never been used in the United States.
 A test burn of floating oil corralled in a boom succeeded in burning off about 450 gallons of oil in 45 minutes Wednesday night, Suttles said. He said additional burns are planned in the coming days.

But efforts to plug the leak have been complicated because the well is 5,000 feet below the water’s surface.

A robotic submarine has failed in numerous attempts to stop the leak by activating a blowout preventer, a series of shut-off valves connected to the wellhead. Suttles said workers activated the device after the explosion, but it apparently didn’t seal completely.

BP is building three containment domes to be placed underwater to corral the oil as it leaks from three spots on a pipe attached to the wellhead. But the domes won’t be finished for two to four weeks, and the method has never been used on a leak so far below the water’s surface.

A rig is in place to begin drilling a relief well within the next day or two, but Suttles said the drilling could take three months.

Spill experts are brainstorming

In the meantime, BP has assembled spill experts from several major oil companies to brainstorm ways to stop the leak. The company has also asked for military technology, including better underwater imaging equipment and robotic submarines.

“We’re going to turn over every single stone until we get this thing stopped,” Suttles said. All clean-up costs will be paid by BP, formerly British Petroleum, which saw its stock price plunge more than 8 percent Thursday.

Oil containment booms are everywhere in Coast Guard Cut at the mouth of South Pass, south of Venice, on Thursday.  The Department of Interior announced it will send teams to conduct safety inspections on all oil rigs and platforms in the Gulf. Three similar inspections on the Deepwater Horizon this year, including one days before the explosion, found nothing amiss.

State Department of Wildlife and Fisheries Secretary Robert Barham said the agency has biologists at the projected impact points along the coast to monitor the situation. He said bird nesting grounds and other wildlife habitats are in danger in the Breton Sound area.

With oil predicted to reach Pass a Loutre on Thursday night, Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser said he would declare a state of emergency. He said predictions are that the oil could reach marshes as far inland as Fort Jackson in four days.

‘A second line of defense’

“We’re going to set up a second line of defense,” a haggard-looking Nungesser said shortly after emerging from a closed-door meeting with BP, Coast Guard and parish officials in Belle Chasse.

He said commercial fishers are volunteering to lay booms, hoping to protect the marshes.

The Obama administration said the spill could affect plans the president announced just last month to allow oil and gas drilling in the eastern Gulf of Mexico and the outer continental shelf off the mid-Atlantic coast.

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said the plans could be altered depending on the findings of a federal investigation into what caused the oil rig explosion, which left 11 workers missing and presumed dead.

Gulf Coast environmental groups, joined by Greenpeace USA, urged Obama to personally view the damage so he can re-examine his plan to expand off-shore drilling.

“This rig was equipped with the latest technology, yet still we have a catastrophe on our hands,” said Aaron Viles of the Gulf Restoration Network. “Once an accident of this magnitude occurs, it’s clear that there’s little that can be done to protect our coasts.”

Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., took to the Senate floor Thursday afternoon to warn that the response to the deadly oil rig accident and spill shouldn’t be to limit future off-shore drilling.

While Landrieu said the spill is a major disaster and substantial threat to her state’s coastlines and wildlife, she said the sweet crude oil slick isn’t nearly as thick as the one that caused substantial damage to the Santa Barbara, Calif., coastline in 1969, leading to a four-decade moratorium on drilling off the California and Florida coasts.
Paul Purpura, Kia Hall Hayes and Bruce Alpert contributed to this report.
Paul Rioux can be reached at prioux@timespicayune.com or 504.826.3785.

http://www.floridatoday.com/article/20100430/NEWS01/4300329/1006/Brevard+emergency+officials+focus+on+oil+spill

FloridaToday.com

Brevard emergency officials focus on oil spill

BY JIM WAYMER * FLORIDA TODAY * APRIL 30, 2010

Brevard County emergency management and environmental officials will keep close watch into next week, should the Space Coast have to brace for globs of oil or tar that might lap ashore, kill sea turtles and foul new multi-million-dollar beaches.

As the 4,700-square-mile oil slick spread toward Louisiana, experts wondered if a shift in winds or currents might send it to Florida next.

“There’s wild trajectory at this point, because you don’t know,” said Ernie Brown, director of the Natural Resources Management Office.

He met Wednesday with Brevard Emergency Management Director Bob Lay to talk over potential scenarios and impacts.

The slick drifted about 90 miles south of Pensacola Bay Thursday, but only 30 miles north of its potential conveyor belt to the Space Coast: the Gulf of Mexico Loop Current.
The current can surge northward by several hundred miles. And if oil entrains into the current, it could sweep into the Keys, around Florida and be offshore of Brevard within a week. Then it would be up to which way the wind blows.

“For Florida, it’s not good news,” said Yonggang Liu, an oceanographer at the University of Florida who’s using numerical models and satellite imagery to forecast the slick’s trajectory. “Once it gets close to shore, it’s more driven by the winds.”

His forecast through May 2 shows the slick stretching out into three main large fingers. Two swing toward the Mississippi Delta, but a third lingered along the Panhandle as the Loop Current swells ever closer to the spill zone.

If the two meet and the oil swings around Florida, eddies that spin off the Gulf Stream could carry emulsified oil and soft tar balls, the same way red tide that originates in the Gulf gets delivered to Brevard and the Indian River Lagoon.

“We anticipate it going into the Loop Current in a few days, then it will be headed to the Florida Keys and the East Coast of Florida,” said Mitchell Roffer of Roffer’s Ocean Fishing Forecasting Service in West Melbourne. “Very scary. Very scary.”
His forecast, which also taps satellite imagery, put the edge of the sheen about 30 miles north of the northern edge of the Loop Current.

“Not all the ocean is controlled by winds,” Roffer added. “It’s certainly going to be pushed back toward the northwest, but you’re not going to stop the flow of that water with the short-term wind.”

The spill threatens peak spawning season for Atlantic bluefin tuna, a threatened species, his forecast said.

“This whole zone is a highly populated area with such fish as tuna, dolphin, wahoo, marlin, snapper, grouper and sharks, as well as turtles and birds,” Roffer said in his forecast.
Sea turtles could get hit the worst as they enter their nesting season, which officially begins May 1 for most species.

State biologists already find tar and plastic in the guts of about 90 percent of the baby turtles captured along seaweed lines in the Gulf Stream. Either their mouths get sealed shut with tar, or their guts are lined with plastic.

The tar and oil also could threaten to foul a just-completed $12.4 million dredging project that pumped sand onto beaches in Indialantic and Melbourne Beach, as well a $7.8 million project that bypassed sand from Port Canaveral onto more than a mile of Cape Canaveral shoreline.

County officials expect a less toxic brew, should the slick reach here.

“By that point in time, you’d have extremely weathered, emulsified petroleum product,” Brown said. “If that happened, we would be moving very quickly to remove it from the beach.”

Oil emulsifies within about three days, said John Trefry, a geochemist at Florida Tech.
About 10 to 20 percent would vaporize.

“The rest is just going to either decompose, mainly with sunlight or bacteria over time or end up on the beach,” Trefry said.
The drilling rig, Deep Horizon, sank on Earth Day, April 22, about 130 miles southeast of New Orleans, after an explosion two days earlier. The rig blew up after a high-pressure surge during drilling. Eleven mission crew members were never recovered.
Officials this week increased their earlier estimate of the well’s leak rate from 1,000 barrels of oil per day to 5,000 barrels, or 210,000 gallons. Efforts to shut off the well have failed.

Scientists said the rarity of such large-scale spills in the gulf and a lack of observation instruments make it difficult to predict what the oil slick might do.

On April 9, a British consultant released a 177-page report that found only a 1 percent chance per year or less of a blowout and oil spill from offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. They called the risks “serious but manageable” and dwarfed by risks from hurricanes and shipping but stressed the uncertainty.

So does Trefry.

“It’s hard to know,” he said of the slick reaching here. “It depends on how much it keeps on coming. It’s such an unknown right now. Certainly this is the fear of everyone. This is the worst of all scenarios. Nobody wants that. If none of this gets beached, we’ll be O.K.”

 Contact Waymer at 242-3663 or jwaymer@floridatoday.com.  Special thanks to Richard Charter

Special thanks to Richard Charter
By Ben Raines
April 30, 2010, 2:18PM

 A leaked memorandum obtained by the Press-Register on the unfolding spill disaster in the Gulf makes clear the Coast Guard now fears the Deepwater Horizon well site could be on the verge of becoming an unchecked gusher shooting millions of gallons of oil per day into the Gulf. ‘The following is not public’ document states

 A confidential government report on the unfolding spill disaster makes clear the Coast Guard now fears the well could be on the verge of becoming an unchecked gusher shooting millions of gallons of oil per day into the Gulf. A confidential government report on the unfolding spill disaster in the Gulf makes clear the Coast Guard now fears the well could become an unchecked gusher shooting millions of gallons of oil per day into the Gulf.

“The following is not public,” reads the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Emergency Ops document dated April 28. “Two additional release points were found today. If the riser pipe deteriorates further, the flow could become unchecked resulting in a release volume an order of magnitude higher than previously thought.”

In scientific circles, an order of magnitude means something is 10 times larger. In this case, an order of magnitude higher would mean the volume of oil coming from the well could be 10 times higher than the 5,000 barrels a day coming out now. That would mean 50,000 barrels a day, or 2.1 million gallons a day. It appears the new leaks mentioned in the Wednesday release are the leaks reported to the public late Wednesday night. 

“There is no official change in the volume released but the Coast Guard is preparing for a worst-case release,” continues the document.

The emergency document also states that the spill has grown in size so quickly that only 1 to 2 percent of it has been sprayed with dispersants.

The Press-Register obtained the emergency report from a government official. The White House, NOAA, the Coast Guard and BP Plc did not immediately return calls for comment made early this morning.

The worst-case scenario for the broken and leaking well pouring oil into the Gulf of Mexico would be the loss of the wellhead and kinked piping currently restricting the flow to 5,000 barrels — or 210,000 gallons — per day.

If the wellhead is lost, oil could leave the well at a much greater rate.

“Typically, a very good well in the Gulf can produce 30,000 barrels a day, but that’s under control. I have no idea what an uncontrolled release could be,” said Stephen Sears, chairman of the petroleum engineering department at Louisiana State University.

On Thursday, federal officials said they were preparing for the worst-case scenario but didn’t elaborate.

Kinks in the piping created as the rig sank to the seafloor may be all that is preventing the Deepwater Horizon well from releasing its maximum flow. BP is now drilling a relief well as the ultimate fix. The company said Thursday that process would take up to 3 months.

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To see updated projection maps related to the oil spill in the Gulf, visit the Deepwater Horizon Response Web site established by government officials.

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“I’m not sure what’s happening down there right now. I have heard there is a kink in what’s called the riser. The riser is a long pipe that connects the wellhead to the rig. I really don’t know if that kink is a big restriction. Is that really a big restriction? There could be another restriction further down,” said LSU’s Sears. “An analogy would be if you have a kink in a garden hose. You suspect that kink is restricting the flow, but there could be another restriction or kink somewhere else closer to the faucet.

BP Plc executive Doug Suttles said Thursday the company was worried about “erosion” of the pipe at the wellhead.

Sand is an integral part of the formations that hold oil under the Gulf. That sand, carried in the oil as it shoots through the piping, is blamed for the ongoing erosion described by BP.

“The pipe could disintegrate. You’ve got sand getting into the pipe, it’s eroding the pipe all the time, like a sandblaster,” said Ron Gouget, a former oil spill response coordinator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Oil scooped up from the Gulf of Mexico 17 miles southeast of the South Pass of the Mississippi River is seen on the hand of deck hand Jordan Ellis on the Louisiana coast Friday, April 30, 2010. The oil originated from a leaking pipeline after last week’s explosion and collapse of the Deepwater Horizon.”When the oil is removed normally, it comes out at a controlled rate. You can still have abrasive particles in that. Well, now, at this well, its coming out at fairly high velocity,” Gouget continued. “Any erosive grains are abrading the inside of the pipe and all the steel that comes in contact with the liquid. It’s essentially sanding away the pipe.”

The formation that was being drilled by the Deepwater Horizon when it exploded and sank last week is reported to have tens of millions of barrels of oil. A barrel contains 42 gallons.

“The loss of a wellhead, this is totally unprecedented,” said Gouget. “How bad it could get from that, you will have a tremendous volume of oil that is going to be offgassing on the coast. Depending on how much wind is there, and how those gases build up, that’s a significant health concern.”