Aljazeera English's "Inside Story" looks at oil regulations 2 years after the BP Gulf spill

Aljazeera English's "Inside Story" has a 25-minute story discussing the state of oil regulations 2 years after the BP Gulf spill, Have safety regulations improved since the BP oil spill? 04/20/2012:



Tags: bp oil disaster

BP oil disaster: worse than claimed

Continuing revelations about BP's duplicity and recklessness emphasize the need for a more aggressive approach toward regulation of off-shore drilling. And it emphasizes once again the Obama administration's lack of interest in using an opportunity like that to affirm the necessity of positive democratic government to protect the people against the misdeeds of corporations like BP. Obama is so far stuck in the neoliberal mode of minimizing regulations and making the government a partner rather than a regulator to companies like BP.

Editorial, Closer than we think Pensacola News-Journal 08/29/2010:

The ongoing revelations about the Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill, and the ensuing efforts to cap the runaway well, make it crystal clear that we can't go back to business as usual with offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.

The bottom line: We can't trust the oil industry to police itself. ...

Instead of hopefully parsing scientific reports to determine how fast natural forces can clean up the spilled oil and gas components, we could still be girding for more oil coming ashore on our beaches amidst an expanding disaster.

And let's not forget the worst-case scenario, that the well shaft itself could have collapsed and the leak become virtually unstoppable. The "solution" then might have been reduced to taking months to drill new wells and attempting to pump the huge oil field hard enough to reduce the pressure.

That could have required years.

Kimberly Blair, Oil spill: BP reverses, admits there's oil in local waters Pensacola News-Journal 08/29/2010:

During more than a dozen interviews last week, BP officials and spokespeople for a number of government agencies working on the Deepwater Horizon Oil spill response denied knowledge of oil in the bay.

Even as they spoke, however, Escambia County officials and local fishermen were reporting finding weathered oil, as they've been doing for weeks. BP's own crews were hand-scooping it up, and a submerged-oil team from BP's Deepwater Horizon Response Incident Command Post in Mobile was investigating.

"BP says it's all gone, but it's not. I've known it was out there for a month," said a commercial fisherman who asked not to be identified because he is working for BP in the cleanup and feared losing his job. [my emphasis]

The administration and the Democrats in Congress should be using this opportunity BP handed them to rehabilitate the reputation of the regulatory agencies and drive forward a green-jobs agenda. Instead, they have tried to get away with as little as they could. And oil-industry flack Ken Salazar remains as Secretary of the Interior.

And BP is a poster child for corporate recklessness. Rong-Gong Lin II reports in Investigators blast BP, saying it failed to learn from past accidents McClatchy Newspapers/Los Angeles Times 08/27/2010

The panel investigating the April 20 Deepwater Horizon disaster, which killed 11 workers and started the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history, portrayed the oil giant as ignoring past mistakes and not effectively emphasizing safety.

"If you don't change the safety culture for the entire company, you're going to have incidents," lead investigator Hung Nguyen told a BP executive Thursday at a joint U.S. Coast Guard-Interior Department hearing in Houston.

"We're concerned about BP's supervision, their expertise and their control on the rig," investigator Jason Mathews said.

Nguyen, a U.S. Coast Guard captain, admonished BP senior officials for failing to offer a satisfactory explanation of who was responsible for ensuring safety for BP's deepwater operations.

Tags: bp oil disaster

Today in neolilberalism

Paul Krugman continues his Cassandra act of raising unconventionally sound alarms over the state of the economy while those who were conventionally and respectably wrong about the state of the economy leading up to the Great Recession blather on about the terrible, hideous threat of federal spending. In America Goes Dark New York Times 08/08/2010, he writes:

... a country that once amazed the world with its visionary investments in transportation, from the Erie Canal to the Interstate Highway System, is now in the process of unpaving itself: in a number of states, local governments are breaking up roads they can no longer afford to maintain, and returning them to gravel.

How did we get to this point? It’s the logical consequence of three decades of antigovernment rhetoric, rhetoric that has convinced many voters that a dollar collected in taxes is always a dollar wasted, that the public sector can’t do anything right.

The antigovernment campaign has always been phrased in terms of opposition to waste and fraud — to checks sent to welfare queens driving Cadillacs, to vast armies of bureaucrats uselessly pushing paper around. But those were myths, of course; there was never remotely as much waste and fraud as the right claimed. And now that the campaign has reached fruition, we're seeing what was actually in the firing line: services that everyone except the very rich need, services that government must provide or nobody will, like lighted streets, drivable roads and decent schooling for the public as a whole.

So the end result of the long campaign against government is that we’ve taken a disastrously wrong turn. America is now on the unlit, unpaved road to nowhere. [my emphasis]

Despite the literary flourish in that last sentence, Krugman is pointing to a real problem. The brand of neoliberal, "Washington Consensus" economic ideology that became the dominant ideology of both parties over the last 30 years has produced a severe disparity in the distribution of income and wealth, creating a situation where the economic elites and their most visible advocates worry less and less about the general state of the public good, as long as their own prosperity - and the maldistribution of income and wealth - continues.

What we see today is the situation as it evolved over the last two decades that the late great John Kenneth Galbraith described so well in his brilliant and under-appreciated book, The Culture of Contentment (1992). He describes the situation in which the voting public in the US is relatively content with the direction of the country, then in its second decade of major deregulation, rapidly rising economic inequality, privatization and the post-Vietnam idolization of the military and its glorious generals. Given the factual exclusion of the less-contented portions of the population from direct influence on political decisions, the US is left with what in this passage from the conclusion Galbraith calls "a democracy of those with the least sense of urgency to correct what is wrong."

Books of this genre are expected to have a happy ending. With awareness of what is wrong, the corrective forces of democracy are set in motion. And perhaps they would be now were they in a full democracy — one that embraced the interests and votes of all the citizens. Those now outside the contented majority would rally, or, more precisely, could be rallied, to their own interest and therewith to the larger and safer public interest. Alas, however, we speak here of a democracy of those with the least sense of urgency to correct what is wrong, the best insulation through short-run comfort from what could go wrong.

There is special occasion here for sadness — for a sad ending — for what is needed to save and protect, to ensure against suffering and further unpleasant consequence, is not in any way obscure. Nor would the resulting action be disagreeable. There would be a challenge to the present mood of contentment with its angry resentment of any intrusion, but, in the longer run, the general feeling of security in well-being would be deepened. [my emphasis]

What he described there is a spiral that, with short-term reversals, has continued to spiral downward since then.

On the one hand, I have little use for cynicism about politics. Things need to be fixed. But if reality presents pessimistic prospects, it's also important to understand that situation clearly, as well. I'm not making an argument for Blue Dog politics. On the contrary, the Blue Dog Democratic approach is manifestly a failure in breaking down the political "culture of contentment" or in addressing the vital needs of the real (if not voting) majority of the public.

But the events of the last 20 years have largely been consistent with Galbraith's thoughtful pessimism. He was pointing out that there were major social and public-policy problems that needed to be addressed to maintain the long-term health and quality of life in the United States. As a result of largely having passed that opportunity by, we have experienced several of the very kinds of events Galbraith noted then might bring enough of a shock to the Culture of Contentment to set more fundamental changes in motion.

We've had two major domestic terrorist attacks in 1995 (Oklahoma City) and 2001 (the 9/11 attacks). While not a major attack in itself, the still-unsolved anthrax attack of 2001 played a critical role in shaping public and (especially) elite attitudes toward terrorism, coming as it did soon after the Al Qa'ida attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. We've had a series of wars, leading us to the point that we have two unpopular wars (Iraq and Afghanistan) in progress, with no actual end yet in sight, though the prospects look better for a foreseeable exit from Iraq. As Andrew Bacevich points out in his important new book published last week, Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War, we are now in a mode where the Pentagon, the corporate media and political elites of both parties have largely accepted the notion of continual shooting war as a norm for US foreign policy. And, of course, there is the Great Recession that officially began in December 2007, which is likely to have been the beginning of what Krugman calls the Third Depression (the first starting with the Crisis of 1873, the second with the Crash of 1929). And we've had a massive oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico which lays bare for the moment the dangerous nature of excessive "partnership" between the people's government and private corporations.

The question at this point is whether popular mobilization in some form can respond effectively to the deteriorating situations and the major shocks to the Culture of Contentment in a way that will unseat the dominant neoliberal ideology, policies and "narrative." It's certainly reasonable to see the vote for Barack Obama in 2008 as a move in that direction. And Obama's record of real accomplishment is also an illustration of the increased public insistence on addressing some major problems.

But it's way too soon to say that there has been a decisive turn away from neoliberalism. And every reason to believe that Obama and his administration are opposed to such a turn. A key moment in that ongoing conflict will be the report of the Catfood Commission (Deficit Commission) this December. If Obama and/or a substantial portion of the Democratic leadership embraces the concept of phasing out Social Security and Medicare - which would like come in the initial form of raising the retirement age and slashing benefits - it's hard to picture what the political fallout from that would be. At the very minimum, one would hope that it would energize progressive challenges to Democratic incumbents who support the Catfood Commission's anti-Social Security and anti-Medicare recommendations.

Tags: bp oil disaster, second subject, obama administration

BP oil disaster: let's not assume that "Mother Nature" is going to magically clean up our messes so quickly

For a really pessimistic take on the state of things in the Gulf of Mexico, see Jerry Cope and Charles Hambleton, The Crime of the Century: What BP and the US Government Don't Want You to Know, Part I Huffington Post 08/04/2010.

I'm glad to see, though, that there has been a good bit of reporting flagging the real problems with the BP spill. It's a bit of realism after the Obama administration's strange, Pollyannish presentation this week on how things are looking just wonderful. Here are some more:

Emily Nipps, BP cleanup efforts missed thousands of tar balls, USF researchers said St. Petersburg Times 08/06/2010

Laura Parker, Remaining Gulf Spill Still Bigger Than Exxon Valdez AOL News 08/05/2010

Tim Watson, Oil spill kills jobs, shrinks incomes and hurts industry USA Today 08/05/2010

Dan Vergano, Environment's rebound from oil spill clouded by unknowns USA Today 08/04/2010

Chris Kromm, Gulf Dead Zone shows potential long-term impact of BP disaster Facing South 08/05/2010

Rick Jervis, Plugging of Gulf oil spill doesn't dispel anxiety, uncertainty USA Today 08/04/2010

Rick Jervis, The Gulf oil spill's cost comes into focus USA Today 08/05/2010

Erika Bolstad, Renee Schoof and Margaret Talev, Scientists cast doubt on claims BP spill's no threat to Gulf McClatchy Newspapers 08/04/2010

Tags: bp oil disaster

If you're inclined to believe today's happy talk about oil in the Gulf...

... then I'd suggest you take these three posts into account:

Kate Sheppard, BP Spill: Where is the Oil? Mother Jones/Blue Marble 08/04/2010

Kate Sheppard, BP's Magical, Disappearing Oil Spill Mother Jones/Blue Marble 08/04/2010

Dan Froomkin, Administration Overly Optimistic About Fate of Spilled Oil Huffington Post 08/04/2010

When you add all the amounts in the federal report counted as chemically dispersed, naturally dispersed and residual, it comes to 50% of the 170 million gallons released into the water. (The NOAA puts the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill amount at 11 million gallons.) Plus, the information on how they developed those estimates is apparently pretty sketchy.

In other words, if you just don't count half of the oil still out there in various forms, it only sounds like half as much!

Tags: bp oil disaster

Ominous political developments

Obama's commitment to an impossible "post-partisanship" and his dedication to the neoliberal ideology have laid a number of traps for his Presidency and for the Democratic Party. Not to mention producing some bad policy decisions.

Here are some ominous recent developments in that regard:

• Missouri voters adopted by a 71% margin Proposition C, a state initiative that not only opposed the individual mandate in Obama's health care reform, but in a throwback to John C. Calhoun also adopted a state nullification measure to prevent implementation of the federal law in Missouri. (Did Missouri outlaw basic civics education 50 years ago or something? I'm surprised the state's Secretary of State even allowed something like that to go on the ballot.)(Jason Noble, Missouri sets up challenge to federal health care law Kansas City Star 08/04/2010; an apparently earlier version of Noble's story put the margin at 75%.)

• Apparently determined to declare a near-miraculous bounceback from the BP oil disaster, the Obama administration came up with an assessment of continuing risks on oil in the Gulf of Mexico that sounds like it could just as well have been prepared by BP's public relations office. (Justin Gillis, U.S. Finds Most Oil From Spill Poses Little Additional Risk New York Times 08/04/2010)

• Referring to those reported findings, Obama's energy adviser Carol Browner commented on the Today Show, "It was captured. It was skimmed. It was burned. It was contained. Mother Nature did her part." (Lauren Frayer, BP Says 'Static Kill' Effort Is Plugging Gulf Well AOL News 08/04/2010) Browner's statement may well be remembered along with Obama's now-infamous comment on April 2, "Oil rigs today generally don't cause spills. They are technologically very advanced. Even during Katrina, the spills didn't come from the oil rigs, they came from the refineries onshore." (Steven Thomma, Obama overlooked key points in giving OK to offshore drilling McClatchy Newspapers 06/11/2010)

• Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner issued an op-ed in which its hard to tell whether he was trying to sound more like Herbert Hoover or more like Pollyanna: Welcome to the Recovery New York Times 08/04/2010. Meanwhile, he assured Wall Street banksters they had nothing to fear from the Obama administration: Brady Dennis, Geithner tells bankers not to fear new financial regulations Washington Post 08/02/2010. "Your core challenge is to restore the trust and confidence of the American people and your customers and investors around the world," he told them, in prime Hoover form.

Richard Wolf reports for USA Today (Poll: Waning support for Obama on wars 08/03/2010):

Public support for President Obama's Afghanistan war policy has plummeted amid a rising U.S. death toll and the unauthorized release of classified military documents, a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll shows.

Support for Obama's management of the war fell to 36%, down from 48% in a February poll. Now, a record 43% also say it was a mistake to go to war there after the terrorist attacks in 2001. [my emphasis]

Basically, the percentage on support of Obama's war policies is extremely unlikely to drop below 30% or so in any case. So, in other words, it's getting close to hitting bottom.
I recently read an account of recent German political history that described 1970-72 period, when Willy Brandt was Chancellor and was making major strides in easing Cold War tensions with the Eastern bloc, as a tragically missed opportunity for domestic reform. I'm worried that we may look by on the 2009-10 period as a similarly lost, squandered opportunity for major constructive reforms. Robert Reich recently wrote, "Whatever the outcome of the upcoming midterm elections, the activist phase of the Obama administration has likely come to a close."(The orgins of the enthusiasm gap Salon 08/03/2010) We won't know until years from now whether that's what we're experiencing right now, the last month of a squandered chance for reform. The owl of Minerva flies at dusk, as Hegel famously said of not being able to understand the real nature of an historical period until it was passing away.

The health care reform, as progressives pointed out during the long, painful process of passing it, wound up with serious policy flaws that could also become political problems. Under the private-insurance-based structure the reform set up, accessibility to insurance could only be guaranteed by a "robust" (effective) public option to provide competition to the private carriers. The reform allows high deductibles while requiring most individuals to buy private health insurance. It's painfully obvious this could force people to buy costly junk insurance that wouldn't actually cover the actual health expenses they incur in a given year. Despite the valuable aspects of the reform, that's a gaping hole in the new system. Marcy Wheeler gave a good description of the basic problem in Health Care on the Road to Neo-Feudalism Emptywheel 12/15/2009.

Missouri's Proposition C illustrates one of the ways Republicans can use that gaping hole effectively to attack the whole concept of guaranteed health insurance. They can make the argument that health care reform forces people to buy health insurance they don't want and thereby deprives them of personal choice over their own health care. The fact that the implementation of most of the reform's provisions was pushed back to 2014 magnifies the political problem for defenders of the reform. People can see the problem of the individual mandate but can't yet see most of the benefits in practice. And the truth is that the reform as it stands with the possibility of high deductibles on individual plans and (especially) no public option is really likely to force some people to buy health insurance they don't actually get any benefit from for years at a time.

I don't believe the Republicans will ever abolish the individual reform, because it's a huge profit boost for health insurance companies, especially if they can get away with using high deductibles on the individual policies. But the Republicans will continue to use that as an argument against the Democrats. Missouri's vote Tuesday indicates that it can be effective.

The right solution to problem is to maintain the individual mandate (to prevent individual from gaming the system by only buying health insurance once they get sick) and set up a robust public option along with much tighter restrictions on the deductibles private insurers can impose (to prevent the insurance companies from gaming the system through exorbitant prices and poor service). An even better solution would be Medicare for all. But the Democrats let that option go by during the past two years, using the filibuster excuse to hide behind ("we can't get 60 votes in the Senate") in order to stick to the agreement the administration made with the industry to leave out the public option but include the individual mandate. (David Kirkpatrick, Obama Is Taking an Active Role in Talks on Health Care Plan New York Times 08/12/2009; Miles Logulescu, NY Times Reporter Confirms Obama Made Deal to Kill Public Option Huffington Post 03/16/2010)

At the Netroots Nation conference this year, the only speaker I heard use the term "neoliberalism" was AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka. But it's a very useful term, referring to the rehabilitation of essentially Herbert Hoover free-market economics in a nominally kinder, gentler form. Also known as the Washington Consensus, a term that has somewhat faded from usage in the 2000s, the basic elements of the neoliberal policy are described as follow by

Here is how the President put his spectacularly ill-timed decision to expand offshore drilling, framing it in his favorite Broderian manner:

So the answer is not drilling everywhere all the time. But the answer is not, also, for us to ignore the fact that we are going to need vital energy sources to maintain our economic growth and our security. Ultimately, we need to move beyond the tired debates of the left and the right, between business leaders and environmentalists, between those who would claim drilling is a cure all and those who would claim it has no place. Because this issue is just too important to allow our progress to languish while we fight the same old battles over and over again. [my emphasis] (Remarks by The President on Energy Security at Andrews Air Force Base WhiteHouse.gov 3/31/2010)

That statement combines the underlying false assumption of neoliberalism, that the interests of corporations and the public interest are essentially in harmony and therefore "the business of America is business" (as Calvin Coolidge famously put it), with the Democratic Party/left version of neoliberalism, which is to sell a falling standard of living and declining security to a union and working-class constituency.

Jamie Galbraith in James K. Galbraith Champions The Beast Manifesto The Daily Beast 08/02/2010 explains how this obsessive splitting-the-difference approach causes trouble, here in the context of the Afghanistan War and the potential Grand Bargain lurking in the background to phase out Social Security and Medicare:

This is a pernicious idea, with two major foundations. One is the simple political appeal of a balanced argument - the same as Obama's decision to stay in Afghanistan while leaving Iraq. It's nice to have things both ways, to be for stimulus now and austerity later. The problems come, in war and economics, when you have to deal with the consequences, for real people, of actions taken largely for rhetorical effect.

And, as the BP oil disaster shows, the interest of corporations and the public interests are not identical and in fact are often directly opposed in important ways.

Leaving aside any faults of character or intent to do harm, the purpose of corporations is legally defined to be maximizing value to their shareholders. Given the current stock market rules, that translates into an extreme emphasis on showing improved earnings every quarter. And beginning with the Reagan tax cuts of 1981, the structure of executive compensation at corporations has shifted heavily to direct compensation and away from corporate perks like the company jet and so forth. This means that corporations are under heavy personal and institutional incentives to minimize liabilities and bad news in the short term and always paint the rosiest scenarios for their own company's future.

So no one should be surprised that BP in recent months has sought to low-ball estimates of the oil spilled, employed the toxic dispersant Corexit to minimize visible surface oil, and generally has tried to minimize the current and long-term damage they have done with the Macambo/Deepwater Horizon catastrophe. In a real sense, that what they are supposed to do, arguably even what the law requires them to do.

But it's outrageous for the people's government to make it their goal to be boosters for private corporate interests. We should be able to count on the federal government to defend the public interest against companies like BP when they damage it. Certainly corporations have no qualms about taking an adversary position against the US government when their profits seems to require it. But the public should be able to count on our elected government to defend our interests in priority to the interests of a corporation like BP. And we especially should be able to count on the Democratic Party - that has long styled itself as the Party of the People - to defend the public interest against private greed.

The Obama administration could have and should have used the BP disaster to make that point, to assert the necessity for strong and honest regulation, and to challenge the neoliberal narrative. Let's assume for the moment that the cockeyed optimism the administration is projecting over the degree of harm done by Deepwater Horizon is accurate. He could still have framed those findings as being highly preliminary, emphasized the amount of oil allegedly still there and the uncertainties created by the unprecedented depths of this massive "spill" and the unknown effects of the Corexit dispersant, and used it to challenge the corrupt and destructive neoliberal narrative of economics and policy.

Instead, Obama seems to be pandering to what Peter Daou in a couple of tweets labels "Gulf denialism":

In many ways, #Gulf spill denialists are mirror images of #climate denialists - same MO, same long-term damage to humanity

Worst offenders on #Gulf denialism are White House/Dems who want the issue to go away and would rather not highlight damage & drilling risks

Actually, I would prefer to leave BP and the oil industry as the worst offenders, but I certainly understand Daou's point.

I think of it more as, "What the [bleep]?!" If the news is so happy, maybe the government and BP will release the scientific data for independent analysis, instead of making groups like the National Wildlife Federation sue to get it released, as they are currently doing.

The problem of American militarism is larger than just the neoliberal ideology. But neoliberalism in its American variant creates a heavy bias toward pampering the military-industrial-espionage complex. And the neoliberal bias toward privatization has created a huge market for private mercenary and spying businesses, whose implications are only beginning to be understood by the general public. (And scarcely at all by our Pod Pundits and star reporters.)

And Obama's policies on the Afghanistan War, government secrecy and protecting the torture perpetrators, combined with the "postpartisan" desire to appease Republicans and punch a hippie ("move beyond the tired debates of the left and the right") have led him to pursue a spectacularly ill-advised escalation in the Afghanistan War.

Tags: afghanistan war, second subject, neoliberalism, obama administration

The plot thickens on Corexit and the oil estimates at Mocambo/Deepwater Horizon

Seems like an appropriate image for BP and their collaborators

I find it baffling that the EPA and the Coast Guard (USGC) are seemingly justifying BPs use of the toxic Corexit dispersant in the Gulf of Mexico: Erika Bolstad and Lesley Clark, Government defends BP's use of dispersants, but worries linger McClatchy Newspapers 08/02/2010.

So far as I can see, the only benefits from using the dispersants accrued exclusively to BP. It helped their public relations by reducing the amount of visible surface oil. And it made accurate estimates of oil "spilled" by their Deepwater Horizon oil geyser more difficult to develop, helping BP limit their financial exposure from fines and legal actions.

But by minimizing the amount of oil that came to the surface or remained there, it made removal of the oil more difficult. Surface oil can be skimmed off. The underwater oil plumes are much harder to clean out to put it mildly. And it likely increased the risks of the oil to the food web, as Bolstad and Clark report:

Other scientists have linked subsea plumes of oil to the well, and fear that the tiny droplets 4,300 feet below the surface of the Gulf will be more readily absorbed and ingested by marine animals.

"These particles of dispersed oil are small enough to be easily absorbed by filter feeding animals such as oysters, and also absorbed into the bodies of crabs and shrimp," said Gina Solomon, a senior scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council. "Big globs of oil wouldn't get into these creatures as easily. That may mean a higher likelihood of contamination in the food chain, which would be bad news for predators in the ocean and also maybe for humans if seafood becomes more contaminated with oil residues."

Based on the finds of a team of scientists working for the feds, the Coast Guard is now estimating a higher amount of oil spewed into the Gulf from BP's oil disaster than they did previously: Dan Froomkin, Feds Dramatically Increase Oil Spill Estimate, Making BP's The Worst Oil Accident In History Huffington Post 08/02/2010; Erika Bolstad and Lesley Clark, Gulf oil flow was 12 times more than feds' original estimate McClatchy Newspapers 08/02/2010. Their estimate comes to around 270 million gallons. I've bolded the part that most leapt out at me from Froomkin's article:

A federal scientific task force, finally allowed access to the wellhead just prior to it being capped on July 15, took elaborate pressure readings and other measurements to reach its conclusions.

The Obama administration allowed BP to lead them around by the nose on much of the hard data coming out on this disaster. It's not surprising but still stunning that it took the federal government three months to get their own team of scientists into place to do a realistic on-spot estimate.

Nor do I assume this is the final word. If the EPA and the Coast Guard is willing to flack for BP on the use of Corexit, they may be flacking for BP on the overall spill estimates.

Tags: bp oil disaster

Another measurement question: how much Corexit toxic dispersant did BP use?

Kate Sheppard, a real journalist who has been doing some of the best reporting on the BP oil catastrophe, reports on the possibility that BP's official estimate of 1.8 million gallons of the toxic dispersant Corexit used on their oil geyser at Macondo/Deepwater Horizon may be seriously lowballed (Kate Sheppard, BP "Carpet Bombed" Gulf With Dispersants Mother Jones 08/01/2010):

In one example, the subcommittee staff found that Doug Suttles, BP's chief operating officer, stated in a June 12 letter to the Coast Guard that the maximum daily application of dispersants on the surface in the days before June 16, 2010 was 3,360 gallons. But according to the dispersant totals BP provided to Markey's committee, the company applied 14,305 gallons of dispersant on June 11 alone. The company reported using another 36,000 gallons on June 13 and 10,706 gallons June 14.

Not only does this raise questions about whether BP was playing straight with the government, but also about whether the Coast Guard was following through on its responsibility to monitor the company's use of the chemicals. According to the official totals from BP and the Coast Guard, 1.8 million gallons of the chemicals have been applied. Now, it's beginning to look like the real total may be much higher.

Democratic Congressman Ed Markey is using his role as chair of the House Energy and Environment Subcommittee (of the Energy and Commerce Committee) to investigate BP's use of Corexit. In a letter of July 30 to Coast Guard Commander Thad Allen, Markey questioned whether the Coast Guard (USCG) and the EPA had enforced their own direction to BP of May 26 to limit further usage of dispersants to "rare cases". It raises a number of questions about dispersant usage. For instance, he notes in Item 9/Page 6 that BP received at least one retroactive waiver of the USCG/EPA directive on using dispersants. In another instance, the USCG "essentially gave BP permission to use as much dispersant as it wanted to for a 7 day period." (Item 6/Page 4)

The more I learn about this, the more suspicious I am that BP used Corexit for public relations purposes. The popular image of oil in the water is of oil spills, producing surface oil which is visible on sea and on land when it washes ashore. Minimizing the amount of surface oil gives BP more room to present the oil-in-the-water problem in the most benign (or least malign) light.

But surface oil is far easier to clean up through the use of skimmers, for instance. And Corexit is toxic, and the particular effects of large amounts of Corexit used to disperse a huge amount of oil at the source on the sea floor are unknown, though we do not they are going to cause a certain amount of harm. In terms of cleaning up the oil and minimizing the actual damage to marine life, fishing, tourism and the food supply, using the Corexit dispersant may have been counterproductive. But it assists BP spin efforts in the short run. Efforts which, as Sheppard reported earlier (Media Runs Defense for BP, Again Mother Jones 07/29/2010), our housebroken national media has been all to willing to enable. (h/t Marigolds2)

I certainly hope we have a thorough Congressional review that addresses the sorts of questions Markey is addressing, as well as the entire accident and the response by BP, the federal and state governments. Some of it will inevitably be embarrassing to the Obama administration, and that's fine. Accountability is important, even if the Republicans only want accountability for Democrats. There certainly no reason to let BP get off easy, and BP is the main entity to which full accountability should be applied since it was their disaster. Republican Governors Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Haley Barbour of Mississippi are especially likely to come off looking bad in a thorough accounting.

But any Congressional reviews should not interfere with what will hopefully be a serious criminal investigation by the Justice Department. Though if Obama applies his Look Forward Not Back principle to BP's Gulf oil catastrophe, a thorough Congressional investigation would be second best, even if it results in some corporate executives or employees avoiding prosecution. If the administration plans to let them skate on criminal charges anyway, why not get the facts of their misdeeds before the public via Congressional immunity, if that's what it takes?

The Christian Science Monitor has related coverage, including:

Mark Sappenfield, New Gulf oil spill mystery: How much dispersant did BP use? 08/01/2010

Mark Guarino, EPA scolds BP in Gulf oil spill: dispersant is too toxic, change it 05/20/2010:

The US Environmental Protection Agency reversed course in the Gulf oil spill cleanup effort Thursday, telling BP that had three days to stop using a chemical dispersant that the EPA’s own data suggests is unnecessarily toxic.

Mark Guarino, EPA girds for a fight with BP over dispersants in Gulf oil spill 05/25/2010:

The Obama administration's frustration with BP over the dispersant issue has been mounting since this weekend. By Sunday, it had become clear that BP would not heed an EPA directive to find an alternative to Corexit, the dispersant that the EPA rates as less effective and more toxic than as many as 12 other products. [my emphasis]

How much testing, if any, that the EPA did to make such a rating is a whole other question.

Tags: bp oil disaster

How much oil has gushed into the Gulf of Mexico from Macando/Deepwater Horizon?

This is a basic element of understanding the gigantic science experiment known as the BP oil disaster. It's inevitable that BP and its Republican defenders will play all sorts of games with the numbers.

One of the complications of this is that the liquid volume of a barrel isn't always the same: "In the U.S. Customary System it varies, as a liquid measure, from 31 to 42 gallons (120 to 159 liters) as established by law or usage." Yahoo! Education) The estimated amounts are sometimes given in news reports in barrels, sometimes in gallons.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill site How Many? A Dictionary of Units of Measurement (2001) defines "barrel" as follows:

a commercial unit of volume used to measure liquids such as beer and wine. The official U. S. definition of the barrel is 31.5 gallons, which is about 4.211 cubic feet or 119.24 liters. This unit is the same as the traditional British wine barrel. In Britain the barrel is now defined to be 36 Imperial gallons, which is substantially larger: about 5.780 cubic feet or 163.66 liters. This unit is slightly smaller than the traditional British beer and ale barrel, which held 5.875 cubic feet or 166.36 liters. There are other official barrels, defined in certain U.S. states; most of them fall in the general range of 30-40 gallons. A barrel of beer in the U.S., for example, is usually 31 U.S. gallons (117.35 liters).

Then there is this definition from Dictionary.com (my emphasis):

the quantity that such a vessel of some standard size can hold: for most liquids, 31 1 / 2 U.S. gallons (119 L); for petroleum, 42 U.S. gallons (159 L); for dry materials, 105 U.S. dry quarts (115 L).

Sizes.com agrees, but adds a wrinkle (my emphasis):

The barrel of petroleum, 1866 – present, a unit of capacity = 42 U.S. gallons (or about 5.61458 cubic feet, and though approximately 158.987 liters is taken as = 159 liters, by, for example, the U.S. Census Bureau Harmonized System), measured at a temperature of 60° Fahrenheit. It is a unit of account; actual barrels containing 42 gallons of crude oil have not been used for more than a century, if ever.

So, until further enlightened, I'm going to assume 42 gallons per barrel when I'm seeing these measurements of the Gulf oil. The following are some recent reports, with my emphasis in bold:

Curtis Morgan, When will oil spill be cleaned up? Maybe never 07/30/2010:

Yet even combining natural forces with months of burning, skimming and siphoning, the most optimistic estimates suggest tens of millions of gallons remain in the Gulf. It could be soaked into unsurveyed marshes, adrift in countless gobs too small and scattered to show up in satellite images or — most concerning — still under water.

Much of what remains will likely be difficult, or impossible, to capture or clean up.

Bruce Nichols and Deborah Zabarenko, BP prepares to plug Gulf oil well for good Reuters 08/01/2010:

The well has been temporarily sealed for two weeks after spilling up to 60,000 barrels a day since April, when an oil rig explosion killed 11 workers and triggered the leak.

Sixty thousand barrels a day for 100 days at 42 gal/bbl would be 252 million gallons.

Bob Marshall, Surface of Gulf of Mexico looks better, but millions of gallons of oil remain below New Orleans Times-Picayune 07/29/2010:

For months a fleet of research vessels has been tracking clouds of diffused oil particles floating 3,300 to 4,300 feet below the surface, said Steve Murawski, NOAA's chief scientist for fisheries. The microscopic droplets were formed when the dispersant Corexit was pumped into the geyser of oil and methane that for 84 days rocketed into the Gulf from the failed wellhead 5,000 feet below the surface.

"These are tiny droplets, between 20 and 60 microns, and with the concentrations we're seeing (4 to 5 parts per million) when you put this in a beaker it looks like clear sea water," Murawski said. "You can't see it, but there's definitely components (of the oil) in the water." ...

"The confusion comes with the word 'oil' itself," he said. "Most people hear 'oil' and they think of the dark, gloppy stuff that comes in the can at the automotive store, or from the barrels in Saudi Arabia.

"But oil is composed of many, many more components than the black stuff you see. And when that black stuff is gone, there's still plenty of those components -- many of which are extremely toxic -- still in the water."

Rader, like other marine scientists, is concerned the public will lose interest in the threat posed by the disaster once the surface is clear.

"If you go back and look at the sheer amount of oil dumped -- 60,000 barrels a day for 87 days -- you get about 220 million gallons," he said. "Of that, 11 million gallons were burned and 30-some million were collected, meaning about 50 million gallons were eliminated.

"That leaves you about 175 million gallons of oil-based pollution loose in the Gulf. And when it degrades from the thick stuff you can see, that doesn't mean it's all gone. There's still an untold amount of toxins from that oil in the marine environment."

Curtis Morgan, Recovery in the Gulf: A test of technology, nature and time Miami Herald 07/31/2010:

Take 100 to 200 million gallons of light sweet crude. Add two million gallons of industrial solvents and trade-secret chemicals. Blend 5,000 feet below the ocean surface. Spread across fragile estuaries and rich ocean waters. Stew in hot sun and hungry bacteria for three months. As a finishing touch, whip lightly in a tropical depression. ...

"The sheer volume of oil that's out there has to mean there will be some very significant impacts," said Jane Lubchenco, administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which has a team calculating an "oil budget" intended to narrow down how much remains unaccounted for and where it might be.

But a crude calculation, based on the estimated spill minus the oil cleaned up and biodegraded, would put the unaccounted-for amount at anywhere from 50 million to 115 million gallons.

George Prentice, BP lawsuits over oil spill take center stage Reuters 07/29/2010:

Millions of gallons of oil leaked into the ocean over nearly three months -- until the well was capped two weeks ago.

Katarzyna Klimasinska, BP to Begin Permanent Plugging of U.S. Gulf Well Bloomberg Business Week 08/01/2010:

Before being sealed last month, Macondo [Deepwater Horizon] was spewing 35,000 to 60,000 barrels of crude into the Gulf, according to a government estimate released in June. Allen said July 30 that the government will release a new estimate within a few days for the amount of oil that was leaking into the Gulf, as well as for how much oil has been dispersed.

BP will owe fines on the amount of escaped oil, so they have a financial as well as public relations incentive to minimize the officially estimated amount.

Curtis Morgan and Fred Tasker, Gulf oil spill: 100 days, 10 lessons Miami Herald 07/29/2010:

For weeks after the April 20 spill, BP was estimating the flow of oil at 5,000 to 20,000 barrels a day, and responded with a "top hat" containment device capable of sucking up only about 15,000 barrels a day. But by mid-June government scientists were saying the well was spilling 50,000 barrels a day or more, and the Obama administration demanded a bigger, faster response from BP.

Fifty thousand barrels a day for 100 days at 42 gal/bbl would be 210 million gallons.

Tags: bp oil disaster

Way too soon for starry-eyed optimism about BP's science experiment

"We've never dealt with this before, the complication of this much oil coming from the deep sea and being hit heavily with chemical dispersants," said Ron Kendall, director of the Institute of Environmental and Human Health at Texas Tech University. "We have conducted the largest environmental toxicology experiment in the history of this country in the Gulf of Mexico." [my emphasis] (Curtis Morgan, When will oil spill be cleaned up? Maybe never McClatchy Newspapers 07/30/2010)

Morgan reports that the size of the oil slick has shrunken considerably:

A massive slick once the size of Florida has shrunk faster than anyone expected. The Coast Guard reported blue water over the Deepwater Horizon site last week and so little floating oil that skimming vessels were burning more fuel motoring around the Gulf than they were finding.

Though incomplete, initial field surveys found less than 400 acres of oiled Louisiana marsh, with most oil collected along the outer fringes. Gov. Bobby Jindal even reopened some bayou waters to commercial fishing on Friday. ...

Yet even combining natural forces with months of burning, skimming and siphoning, the most optimistic estimates suggest tens of millions of gallons remain in the Gulf. It could be soaked into unsurveyed marshes, adrift in countless gobs too small and scattered to show up in satellite images or — most concerning — still under water.

Much of what remains will likely be difficult, or impossible, to capture or clean up.

But it strikes me that the reporting in this article is uneven. One of the problems of the BP/federal response to the oil disaster is that BP has been keeping much of the scientific research it has gathered secret, and the federal government has been slow to produced the kind of intensive scientific research that was clearly going to be needed from the day it became clear that we were dealing with a potentially months-long geyser of oil spewing into the Gulf.

Morgan's article in the early paragraphs presents a rosy picture of the self-healing powers of the Gulf, without noting that the self-healing may get rid of the oil from the water but have other negative effect for people. Some oil will be taken from the water into the food chain. Part of the effect of microbes biodegrading the oil will be a spike in the amount of oxygen absorbed, which is virtually certain to produce "dead zones" in the Gulf in which larger organisms can't survive so long as the low-oxygen conditions persist. And what the particular effects will be on the deepest depths of the water affected, in which the water is lower-oxygen than nearer the surface, is a major unknown.

And since we still don't know the actual magnitude of the underwater oil "plumes", it seems starry-eyed optimistic to be gushing [groan] about how well the ocean is cleaning itself. Obviously, BP has a definite self-interest in encouraging such optimism, as does the oil industry generally. As noted below, Morgan's own article provides substantial reasons to not indulge in the false optimism reflected in the early paragraphs.

One limitation of much of the reporting on this BP oil disaster is that in previous such incidents, the oil spilled into the water manifested itself as surface oil. In this case, the underwater oil is the biggest problem and a large unknown. Morgan does reference one of the implications of this in his article, in a section which raises obvious questions about the optimistic hype earlier in the piece:

Rocky Kistner of the Natural Resources Defense Council found plenty in plain and ugly sight during a 10-mile trip last week along the Louisiana delta into Barataria Bay.

Kistner, who mans the Gulf Resource Center that NRDC set up in the delta fishing village of Buras, documented the mess on his blog to counter perceptions the Gulf was clean again, a spin he dismissed as "deception by dispersal."

While BP and federal managers were stressing how hard it had become to find enough oil to skim, Kistner was motoring with a local fisherman through big, mostly lifeless pockets of what resembled "spongy orange cake batter'' that put out an overpowering odor "like being stuck in a gas station with all the pump nozzles pointing at your face."

Local shrimpers, he said, worry BP's heavy use of chemical dispersants, sanctioned by the federal government as a trade-off to keep oil from fragile marshes and off vulnerable sea birds, instead has left it to settle into their fishing grounds, out of sight and mind.

Hugh Kaufman, an EPA whistleblower in this incident, argues that BP's reckless use of toxic dispersants was done to take advantage of the fact that the public and the federal government have become accustomed to thinking of oil disasters like this as a problem of surface oil (EPA Whistleblower Hugh Kaufman: We've Now Poisoned Thousands of Square Miles of the Gulf Crooks and Liars 07/30/2010):

KAUFMAN: Well, first of all, the dispersants mixed with the oil and the water is extremely toxic. Sweden has done studies on this. Israel has done studies on this.

And the only real purpose of using so many dispersants with the oil was to cover up the volume of oil that was released from that well. So, that and lying about how much is coming out was a mechanism to help BP save billions of dollars in fines.

O‘DONNELL: Should they have not used dispersants at all?

KAUFMAN: That‘s correct. If they did not use dispersants, they would have been able to get most of that oil off of the surface and would not have endangered all of the fish and ecosystem underneath the water that now will be affected for decades on down the line.

I was listening to some of the, quote, "experts" who are being paid by BP at universities who are saying that the oil has disappeared. It hasn‘t disappeared. It‘s throughout thousands of square miles in the Gulf, mixed with dispersants, and because the temperatures down there are so cold, they‘re going to be around for decades. [my emphasis]

After months of dramatic proof that cockeyed optimism about the safety of deepwater drilling, it's foolish for anyone (other than BP and the oil industry that have a financial stake in promoting that perception) to minimize the actual and potential problems from this disaster.

As Morgan reports, the ongoing risks are huge:

BP's blownout well poured 10 to 20 times the volume of oil into the Gulf of Mexico than the Exxon Valdez spill into Prince William Sound in Alaska. BP added another 1.8 million gallons of Corexit, a dispersant federal environmental regulators acknowledge can kill or disrupt reproduction in everything from plankton to fish.

The oil giant's submersible robots pumped three-quarters of a million gallons directly into the flow at the sea-floor, a technique never tried or tested before. Scientists suspect the dispersant contributed to the creation of the massive plumes discovered extending as far as 142 miles in one direction from the blown-out well and 42 miles in another.

"That's really the big, big issue," said Susan Shaw, director of the Marine Environmental Research Institute in Maine. "Once you have got that dispersed oil, there is no way to clean it."

Tags: bp oil disaster

Netroots Nation 2010

I'm at the Netroots Nation convention in Las Vegas, currently attending a panel on "Is the BP Oil Disaster the Breaking Point for Communicating About Clean Energy?"

This is my third consecutive NN convention. Las Vegas is a convenient spot for conventions, because they have a lot of facilities for them.

Here are some of the more interesting points to me coming up in the discussion are the following.

Amanda Terkel is one of the panelists, who I was curious to hear live because her blog posts are often very insightful. She emphasized that it was imperative for the Obama administration to show that government can work by responding well to the crisis and therefore offset the Republican/Tea Party anti-government message. She thinks the Joe Barton incident of apologizing to BP as a good example of a situation in which the anti-government message (gubment shouldn't be messin' with private bitnesses) was discredited. She hopes progressives will be able to use this to show the need for effective regulation.

One panelist observed that the netroots called attention early to BP's understatement of the volume of the oil flow. BP's liability is related to the amount of oil released, so this is a big deal.

Jason Miner observed that the BP disaster occurred in a complex messaging environment, in which climate change legislation and cap-and-trade were being discussed. On the other hand, skepticism of both corporations and big government. The fact that many of the people in the coastal areas most affected wanted to continue offshore oil drilling made it more difficult to get the personal stories that would back a clean-energy framing.

Phil Radford of Greenpeace cautioned about the "bad actor" narrative, that it could be a problem if the disaster is defined as BP's failure as a company and the larger problem of unacceptable risk with deepwater drilling.

Another panelist observed that industry lobbyists hate being exposed. There is a federal database available at the Office of the Clerk/Lobby Disclosure Database that is challenging to search but useful on lobbyists and their incomes and the sources of it. Greenpeace has recently done an expose on Koch Industries, a privately-held energy company whose owners, among other things, have been major supporters of the Libertarian Party as well as Republicans.

Steve Kretzmann emphasized the fact that the federal government is massively subsidizing oil companies while providing only a fraction of that support to clean energy.

Radford mentioned that in 2008, wind power was providing 10 times more power in the US than coal. This is a good point in the face of arguments that we're tied to oil and gas for the indefinite future.

2:28PM PST: Due to some annoying technical problems, I wasn't able to post this immediately after the session. The sessions will be available online relatively soon, I don't know precisely when.

Tags: bp oil disaster, netroots nation 2010

Credibility Geyser Seep? Or, BP vs. the feds, the continuing story

Daniel Chang and Curtis Morgan report on the arguments between BP and the Coast Guard/Obama administration over the current phase in the BP oil catastrophe response in U.S. keeps pressure on BP over oil spill seepage Miami Herald 07/19/2010:

The biggest success in three months of trying to plug the runaway oil well in the Gulf of Mexico -- a cap that has shut the oil down for four days -- has also underscored the lingering distrust between BP executives and government officials overseeing the response.

A case in point: It took a late-night teleconference Sunday for BP to persuade the government's point man on the response that the company is doing all it can to ensure that leaks of oil and gas from the seafloor around the well will not make the situation worse.

They also provide a roundup of various important information on the disaster, including the first reference I've caught to multiple "seeps" having been detected. This was buried down inside the story, but it kind of slapped me in the face:

[Coast Guard chief] Allen gave no details on the size or exact location of the seeps, except to say that one was detected within two miles of the site, another within 80 yards and several others within a few hundred yards. [my emphasis]

Say what? There are numerous "seeps"? And they are right by the main well but are unrelated to the oil geyser? This is starting to sound like one of those Perry Mason episodes where the cops catch someone standing over a dead body holding the smoking gun that killed him in his hand but Perry eventually proves the guy's innocent.

I don't think Perry would take BP's case, though. It would spoil his perfect record of acquitals. Not that either BP or the Obama administration has inspired huge confidence with their secrecy during this disaster. But we definitely have a Credibility Seep here. At this rate, maybe only hours from being a Credibility Geyser.

Chang and Morgan include a target range on the pressure in the well cap that is notably above the 6,000 pounds/square inch (psi) that BP likes and the 7,500 reportedly favored by the Coast Guard:

Since shutting the well with the experimental cap last week, BP has monitored the pressure and reported a slow increase -- an encouraging sign -- to a reading of about 6,800 pounds per square inch as of Monday.

Ideally, engineers are looking for pressure readings between 8,000 and 9,000 pounds per square inch, which would indicate minimal or no damage to the well bore. Lower readings could suggest a leak. [my emphasis]

More:

Among the issues the two sides had to smooth over during the Sunday night teleconference: the availability of Remotely Operated Vehicles -- submersible robots that roam the seafloor with video cameras and tools -- to respond to seeps; the types of sensors BP uses to gather data from the well site; and "to make sure on a routine basis they were doing seismic and acoustic testing, and that resources were available to respond quickly."

Speculative translation: the Coast Guard thinks BP is lying about the "seeps" but is letting them keep the well capped anyway.

Kent Wells, BP's senior vice president, said at a briefing Monday after Allen spoke that the company's meetings with federal scientists have been spirited and constructive.

Speculative translation: they yelled and cussed at each other.

"It'd be very, very premature," Allen said, "to say the well is shut in until the relief well is done."

Speculative translation: We think BP is lying to make it look like they have things under control but we still aren't shutting down their fake capping operation yet because [fill in your own guess].

Tags: bp oil disaster

BP's oil catastrophe: the (poisonous) gift that keeps on giving

Nothing quite like the smell of benzine first thing in the morning!

"Gift" is one of those rare German words that is both spelled and pronounced just like it is in English. Only in German, it means "poison". In that sense, BP's disaster really is the Gift that keeps on giving.

Bill Sasser points to the air pollution risk from BP oil-disaster response inGulf oil spill: Fouling air as well as water? 07/18/2010:

Last week, the EPA said that residents of two hard hit coastal communities in Louisiana – Grand Isle and Venice – face a “moderate health risk” due to hydrocarbon fumes. In Terrebonne Parish, residents of the town of Cocodrie and the surrounding area are also reporting strong odors of petroleum.

For months since BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil well blew, residents along the Gulf Coast, including many in New Orleans and other metro regions miles away from the shore, have said they smell fumes from the oil spill. Some have reported symptoms ranging from red eyes and runny noses to sinus infections and flu-like symptoms.

Sometimes stating the bare facts can be grimmer than scare talk:

Anna Hrybyk of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade said the environmental group is analyzing data on benzene levels in Louisiana 20 times above normal. In another finding, air samples taken in mid-May outside the organization’s office near downtown New Orleans showed elevated levels of hexane and heptane, neurotoxins found in petroleum. [Editor's note: The original paragraph has been changed to accurately describe the work of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade.]

"The levels were similar to what you would be exposed to pumping gas at a gas station – not high enough for a public health agency to issue a warning, but it does effect quality of life," said Ms. Hrybyk.

In other words, the smell at your house might not make you sick, it just makes your home smell like a gas station. Heckuva job, BP!

I'm not familiar with the work of Lewis Seiler and Dan Hamburg, both of the Voice of the Environment organization. But at least some of the questions they pose in Pandora's Box in the Gulf: Does Hope Remain? CommonDreams.org 07/18/2010 look to me well worth exploring. For instance:

3. Why aren't the perpetrators of this disaster being charged for negligence, manslaughter, or worse? Whistleblowers pointed out before the explosion that the last several hundred feet of the well borehole lacked protective cement casing, a dangerous situation that increased the chances for an explosive event to occur. Just five hours before the rig went up in flames, an expert who'd worked with the US Army extinguishing oil fires in Iraq was flown to the rig for consultation. He informed BP that if they continued to pump saltwater into the hole it would blow. He then demanded immediate evacuation for himself and his men. The Transocean Corporation, whose blowout preventer failed to operate on April 20, advised BP to stop drilling after receiving negative pressure test results. Despite these warnings BP did nothing, allowing eleven men to die, and inflicting incalculable damage on the lives of Gulf coast residents, the environment and economy that will take decades, if not centuries to recover. ...

6. Why did Halliburton Corporation buy the world's largest oil disaster service company, Boots & Coots, just two weeks before the Deepwater Horizon exploded?

Halliburton doesn't want to lose out on either its oil services business or oil disaster business. By Ernest Scheyder and Braden Reddall report for Reuters in Halliburton profit beats forecasts 07/19/2010 that the company is worried about the prospect of new restrictions of deepwater drilling:

Strong U.S. onshore drilling helped oilfield services company Halliburton Co (HAL.N) report a better-than-expected 83 percent jump in quarterly profit, and its shares jumped 3.6 percent.

Halliburton expects land-drilling growth to offset the impact of a U.S. deepwater drilling ban that followed a disastrous blow-out at a BP Plc (BP.L) well in the Gulf of Mexico on which Halliburton did the cement work.

The world's second-largest oilfield services company plans to maintain its overall infrastructure in the Gulf in expectation of activity picking up again, though it is moving some equipment and staff out of the region for now.

That could mean their shareholders might have to settle for less than 83% profit increases for a quarter or two. That would be a real tragedy:

Halliburton expects the six-month deepwater moratorium to trim 2010 earnings per share by 5 to 8 cents per quarter. Analysts had been expecting a profit of $1.44 per share this year, up from $1.27 in 2009, though many now expect estimates to rise due to the unexpectedly strong North American performance.

Luckily for them, they hope to minimize their financial liability for their role in the Deepwater Horizon disaster:

Halliburton, based in Houston and Dubai, said the Gulf of Mexico disaster and the subsequent deepwater suspension would usher in a new regulatory climate and have a profound impact on how deepwater drilling is performed.

But it repeated that it is indemnified under its contract with BP, so long as BP is able to shoulder the cost. [my emphasis]

Some press reports today are no longer putting the conflict between BP and the Coast Guard over whether to keep the well simply capped off for now "between the lines." E.g, Mark Seibel, BP told it can keep well sealed after scare over possible leaks McClatchy Newspapers 07/19/2010:

[Coast Guard head] Allen's statement was his third in 24 hours that indicated tension between government officials and BP over the containment cap test. On Sunday, just a few hours after Dudley had told reporters BP would like to keep the containment cap sealed indefinitely, Allen issued a pointed statement saying that there was no agreement to do that. He followed that with the letter to Dudley in which Allen demanded that BP inform him within four hours if any new leak is discovered and provide a written explanation of its intentions for the containment cap. [my emphasis]

Part of what BP may be doing in their negotiating and PR strategy is to put the Coast Guard in the position of ordering the cap reopened in hopes of deferring onto the Coast Guard some of the blame for the resumption of the oil geyser's flow into the Gulf.

Tags: bp oil disaster

BP vs. the feds

This Reuters story by By Tom Bergin and Chris Baltimore, Investors worry about seepage at capped BP well 07/19/2010, starts bringing the indications of a BP split with the federal government over how to stop the oil geyser permanently out from "between the lines" into the text:

U.S. authorities probing the spill are looking into why workers missed signs of an impending explosion and have drawn up a list of more than 20 anomalies in the crew's response to them, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The current plan had been for BP to resume siphoning the oil after the completion of the pressure tests on the well, which extends 2.5 miles under the seabed, to judge if it is able to withstand the process to seal the leak.

But Doug Suttles, BP's chief operating officer, said the company now hopes to keep the damaged well shut until the relief well is completed in August and the leak is sealed off with heavy drilling mud and cement.

"We're hopeful that if the encouraging signs continue that we'll be able to continue the integrity test all the way to the point that we get the well killed," he told reporters before Allen issued his statement. "Clearly we don't want to reanimate flow into the Gulf if we don't have to."

Suttles' statement could indicate diverging viewpoints between BP and the U.S. government on plans for the well integrity test. It prompted Allen -- who will ultimately make the final call on the test -- to issue a statement that "nothing had changed" in the joint plan.

Tags: bp oil disaster

Remember "Houston, we have a problem"?

The BP oil disaster had what could turn out to be just such a moment on Sunday. The Coast Guard's Admiral Thad Allen refers to some of the issues in a formal letter he sent Sunday to BP:

Given the current observations from the test, including the detected seep a distance from the well and undetermined anomalies at the well head, monitoring of the seabed is of paramount importance during the test period.

Yes, that is a new oil "seep" detected at some distance from the Deepwater Horizon well, capped at the moment. Plus, new potential problems of some sort at the main well/oil geyser site.

As a continued condition of the test, you are required to provide as a top priority access and coordination for the monitoring systems, which include seismic and sonar surface ships and subsea ROV and acoustic systems. When seeps are detected, you are directed to marshal resources, quickly investigate, and report findings to the government in no more than four hours. I direct you to provide me a written procedure for opening the choke valve as quickly as possible without damaging the well should hydrocarbon seepage near the well head be confirmed.

I actually don't know if we should be reading anything into this or not, e.g., frustration on the Coast Guard's part over inadequate reporting on the oil flow. But if the new "seep" is verified, the feds are likely to insist that BP open the cap to relieve pressure in the well. If speculated from the reporting over the last week that BP was insistent on just capping off the well, while the Coast Guard wanted them to continue pumping oil to the surface to minimize chances of creating a new oil flow into the Gulf from a break in the well shaft.

Mark Seibel reports for McClatchy in Oil seep near BP well could mean trouble for relief well plans 07/18/2010:

No details were given on the size or exact location of the seep, or what it was made of — crude oil, methane, natural gases or hydrocarbons. But the prospect is ominous. If oil is entering from areas distant from the well bore, it suggests that areas of the seafloor and substrata are allowing oil to escape.

If this scenario is accurate, the well cap will likely be reopened to prevent the existing environmental disaster from becoming even worse and even harder to fix. Once the valves are open, oil would gush once again into the ocean, cutting the pressure on the well system for the first time in three days.

I don't know if this part of Allen's letter is some kind of legal formality or a message to get their act together better on the response and on keeping the feds informed:

As the National Incident Commander, I must remain abreast of the status of your source control efforts. Now that source control has evolved into a period beyond the expected 48 hour interval of the Well Integrity Test, I am requiring that you provide me a written update within 24 hours of your intentions going forward. I remain concerned that all potential options to eliminate the discharge of oil be pursued with utmost speed until I can be assured that no additional oil will spill from the Macondo Well.

The same question applies to this passage, as well:

As you develop the plans above, note that the primary method of securing the source is the relief well and this effort takes precedence. Therefore, I direct you to provide a detailed plan for the final stages of the relief well that specifically addresses the interaction of this schedule and any other activity that may potentially delay relief well completion. [my emphasis]

I try to be cautious about too much speculation. But neither BP nor the Obama administration has been a model of transparency on this disaster these last three months. I wonder if this might eventually prove to be an indication that BP is dragging their feet on the relief wells for some reason, e.g., being too cheap to pay for them.

Seibel's report creates a bit of confusion in his report when he says, "It is possible, too, that monitors have sensed naturally occurring seeps, which are a common phenomenon in the Gulf." If there is a confirmed seep in the vicinity of the Deepwater Horizon well, I would imagine the feds would order BP to open the cap and go back to siphoning oil out of it. Especially since the pressure levels inside the cap as of Sunday haven't convinced the Coast Guard that there are no leaks in the well walls:

Oil seeping from the well into the rocks and up through the seafloor, however, would pose a new problem because it would be difficult to locate the many paths it might be taking to the surface. BP currently hopes to seal the well permanently by intercepting it with a relief well. Heavy drilling mud would then be pumped into the Deepwater Horizon well, filling the well bore and drill pipe and stopping the oil from flowing by its sheer weight. A leak from the well bore through rock and to the seafloor, however, might defy such efforts.

Scientists have been concerned that such leaks could be one reason pressure in the new containment cap has not reached the levels they had expected. A pressure reading of over 7,500 psi, or pounds per square inch, would indicate the well casing is intact. A lower reading could suggest a leak. On Sunday, pressure had reached 6,775 psi, BP said. Officials have said the low pressures might be caused either by a leak in the well or depletion of the oil reservoir during the past three months. [my emphasis]

A depletion of the oil reservoir?! That's a surprising thing for anyone to say, given that this well taps into the second-largest known oil reserve in the world.

It's worth mentioning here an observation from Bmaz at Emptywheel, The Wishing Well: Is Macondo the Mouth of Hell Silenced? 07/15/2010:

I have a nagging question on the integrity of the well that has neither been answered to date nor put to rest by the seemingly joyous news today [of the oil flow being capped]. Namely, it is a given from the way it occurred, not to mention subsequently admitted by Thad Allen and BP, that the "Top Kill" process was cut quite short due to inexplicable loss of mud in process indicating a lack of well integrity at some point (or multiple points) in the bore length. There is no reason to believe whatever caused said leakage, and fear leading to the termination of Top Kill, has magically corrected or repaired itself. [my emphasis]

Tags: bp oil disaster

Bobby Jindal's sand berms to nowhere

I wrote a few days ago about Louisiana Gov. Bobby's Jindal's games with the BP oil disaster. One of them, which I've started to think of as the Sand Beams To Nowhere project, is coming apart. Literally.

Len Bahr, one of the public critics of the project, has the story in Chandeleur sand berm segment shrinking like a wool sweater in hot water! LACoastPost 07/11/2010. He provides pictures of before (06/25/2010):

And after (07/07/2010):

Heckuva job, Bobby!

But, living as he does in the through-the-looking-glass alternative universe of today's Republican Party, ole Bobby says the fact that they are washing away showed that his sand berms boondoggle worked! Seriously: Louisiana governor says sand berms working CNN 07/15/2010. The Republicans have truly gone postmodern: you just create you own reality. And recreate it whenever convenient.

In the material world, though, at least somebody benefited from getting BP disaster-relief money, thanks to ole Bobby's efforts. That would be the Shaw Group, who got the contract for the boondoggle: The Shaw Group to Provide Louisiana Coastline with Sand Berm Construction Yahoo! Finance (apparently reproducing a Shaw Group press release) 06/04/2010. By what surely is pure coincidence, the Shaw Group also happens to be ole Bobby's third largest company campaign contributor for the period 2004-2010 (Career Profile(since 1989): Bobby Jindal OpenSecrets.org 06/30/2010). The oil industry has been his second-largest contributor by industry group during that period.

See also: Brad Johnson, Bobby Jindal’s "barrier islands" are washing away 07/15/2010

Tags: bp oil disaster

BP oil disaster: good news or not?

It's hard to know what to make of today's news on the BP oil disaster. Froms of the reports I'm seeing as of this writing, the cap is still containing oil. But it's uncertain whether that's good news or not, beyond the fact that the cap itself isn't leaking.

Given the lack of adequate transparency from both BP and the Obama administration, following this story has some aspects of "Kremlinology," i.e., you find yourself reading between the lines to make sense of varying and sometimes contradictory reports. Earlier this week, I got the impression that 9,000 pounds per square inch (psi) was the magic number for the pressure inside the cap. If it reached 9,000 psi and held, it showed there were no lower breaks in the well shaft itself. If it only reached 6,000 psi, that meant there were breaks farther down and that was really bad news.

So what do we make of this Los Angeles Times report from Richard Fausset, Gulf oil spill: BP oil cap appears to be working; 48-hour testing period may be extended 07/17/2010, which says:

In a telephone briefing with reporters Saturday morning, BP Senior Vice President Kent Wells said the pressure inside the well remained in a range that gave him some confidence that the underground pipes haven't been leaking. ...

Low pressure readings could indicate the existence of leaks. If they do exist, BP and government officials say that a full seal of the well at the top could force more oil out of the pipes, eventually up to the seabed, creating new leaks, and a much more complicated problem.

Wells said there had always been a possibility that the test would be extended beyond 48 hours, and that an extension may help experts learn more about the well.

The pressure readings inside the well Saturday morning were at 6,745 pounds per square inch and rising slowly. Though relatively good news, that number does not give the clearest answer about what is going on underground. Wells said that a reading of 7,500 psi "would really say to us that we do have integrity under essentially any scenario."

A measurement between 6,000 and 7,500 psi is more of a gray area. On Friday, Wells said the current pressure buildup seemed to indicate that the well hasn't been leaking, but that the underground oil reservoir had released so much oil since the beginning of the gusher in April that its pressure had diminished.

Wells said the federal government would make the final decision about whether to keep the well sealed at the top or to open it again. If it is opened, some oil would again spill into the Gulf of Mexico, and some would be collected by a series of riser pipes and containment ships. [my emphasis]

My reading between the lines of this and other recent reports is that there has been some difference on how to use the new cap, BP wanting to fully choke off the oil geyser for now, the feds wanting them to keep pumping as much oil as they can out of it. Also, BP (in my reading) is taking a distinctly more optimistic position on well integrity than the feds.

Beyond that, it's hard for me to even guess what the changing story of what oil pressure inside the cap measures whether there are breaks in the well shaft lower down.

This is another report, from Kristen Hays of Reuters, BP more upbeat well capped, but could extend tests 07/17/2010.

Despite the seemingly upbeat title, this article from McClatchy's Renee Schoof,
Despite BP efforts to clean Gulf, nature will do most of it Biloxi Sun-Herald 07/16/2010, gives a general survey of the far-reaching effects of this catastrophe:

Even the consequences are hard to gauge. Scientists can’t predict how quickly the microbes will work or how much damage the oil will do first. However, livelihoods already have been wrecked and wildlife is endangered.

"I think the bottom line is that once the oil gets into the water column — not just the surface — the genie is out of the bottle (and) that we do not have any effective ways to get the genie back into the bottle," said Robert Bea, a University of California engineering professor and an expert on offshore drilling. ...

Bea said two of the newer approaches used by BP to combat the blowout didn't work very well.

The unprecedented use of chemical dispersants — more than 1.8 million gallons — helped keep oil off beaches, where people notice it, but the dispersants were ineffective and environmentally destructive, he said.

And the other apporach that "didn't work very well"? That would be the whiz-bang miracle ship called A Whale:

And the "A Whale," a converted tanker made into a skimmer more than three football fields in length, won’t be effective in the turbulent water of the open ocean, Bea said.

The company that owns the vessel, TMT Offshore Group of Taiwan, concluded Friday after several days of tests the oil was too dispersed in deep water for the skimmer to work effectively. [my emphasis]

It doesn't say whether the other two open questions about the hastily-configured vessel were answered: whether it could actually separate out the oil the way it claimed, and whether it could stay seaworthy while doing it.

Oh, and those relief wells? The may not be magic, either: Marian Wang,
Interior: Blowout Preventers on BP's Relief Wells Also Had Problems ProPublica 07/15/2010. Lovely.

Marian Wang at ProPublica also took a look at the stories and urban legends about foreign assistance, Foreign Help in the Gulf: The Facts Are Murky 07/13/2010:

The issue of a few wonder-working foreign vessels aside, the better question still seems to be why the more than 570 skimmers already deployed in the Gulf have fallen short of BP's promises about how well they would work.

Or, for that matter, how the government and BP plan to clean up crude oil that we all know has penetrated into the deep waters of the Gulf. [my emphasis]

Tags: bp oil disaster