Corexit still lingers in Gulf

While the methane seems to have been mostly burned off by bacteria, which is a good thing given its potency as a greenhouse gas, it seems that one of the dispersants used to clean up the spill is still there:

A crucial component of the chemical dispersant applied to oil gushing from BP’s blown-out well in the Gulf of Mexico last year did not break down as fast as scientists initially expected and probably remains at detectable levels in the deep ocean, scientists said on Wednesday.

Traces of the dispersant compound were found in September more than 150 miles from the well site, researchers with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution said in their report.

From the New York Times. While this isn't as bad as some of the more hysterical predictions, it is most definitely not a good thing. I, for one, will be curious to see how many Common Loons, Double-Crested Cormorants, and White Pelicans there are at my parents' cottage this year. All of these birds have always been common there, and all of them migrate through the Gulf of Mexico.

More on the Gulf oil spill

First the good news -- the plug in the oil well in the Gulf seems to be working. And in some ways the area looks much better than you'd expect. The devil may be in the details, though, as Raj Patel points out in The Nation:

In addition to making sure the slick was under-recorded, the company worked hard to make sure there was less of it to be seen. Besides the prison laborers who mopped up the oil at a discount on shore, at sea, over 1.8 million gallons of Corexit dispersants were used to make the oil vanish from sight. Such dispersants are banned by the Environmental Protection Agency, but the Coast Guard issued exemptions some seventy-four times in forty-eight days. It worked: BP's principal problem has, literally, disappeared. "I don't think we'll see any more oil going into the beaches," BP's avuncular new CEO, Bob Dudley, announced upon taking over. "… And where there is no oil on the beaches, you probably don't need people walking up and down in hazmat suits." In other words: if the oil cannot be seen, the danger has passed.

Sadly, "if you can't see it, it's not there" isn't sound environmental science. Oil enters the food system far more rapidly as an invisible emulsion than as a rainbow slick. Scientists have already discovered the spill's signature inside crab larvae, though the consequences of mixing oil and dispersant with the gulf ecology is uncertain, and won't be fully known for generations. By introducing Corexit into the gulf, BP not only hid its mess, but sowed doubt over the full extent and effects of the damage. This ignorance is no accident—for BP, it's bliss. It makes it possible for BP to argue that it cannot be held accountable for those damages that were not directly related to the spill.

There's a great big experiment running in the Gulf right now. The thing about Corexit and similar dispersants is that they're emulsifying agents -- they bring insoluble stuff like oil into a sort-of solution. On the positive side, this means that it will break down faster than it otherwise would... but that positive is very double-edged, considering the biochemical oxygen demand that will result from all that oil. There are oil eating bacteria, and this will be a huge bonanza for them... but all those extra consumers need extra oxygen to do it. And they'll produce plenty of good ol' carbon dioxide, without even giving us useful energy in the process.

BP wants to drill in Gulf again

They don't have much shame, do they?

BP PLC (BP-N41.330.651.60%) said Friday it might someday drill again into the same lucrative undersea pocket of oil that spilled millions of gallons of crude, wrecked livelihoods and fouled beaches along the Gulf of Mexico.

“There's lots of oil and gas here,” chief operating officer Doug Suttles said at a news briefing. “We're going to have to think about what to do with that at some point.”

The vast oil reservoir beneath the blown well is still believed to hold nearly $4 billion worth of crude, and until Friday BP had not indicated any plans to cash in on that potential windfall. With the company and its partners facing tens of billions of dollars in liabilities, the incentive to exploit the wells and the reservoir could grow.

From the Globe. So it seems they need that oil... so they can pay for the mess they made drilling for oil in the same darn place. Does that make sense?

The oil industry hates scrutiny

Our first example comes from China:

An American geologist held and tortured by China's state security agents was sentenced to eight years in prison Monday for gathering data on the Chinese oil industry in a case that highlights the government's use of vague secrets laws to restrict business information.

In pronouncing Xue Feng guilty of spying and collecting state secrets, the Beijing No. 1 Intermediate People's Court said his actions “endangered our country's national security.”

Its verdict said Mr. Xue received documents on geological conditions of onshore oil wells and a data base that gave the coordinates of more than 30,000 oil and gas wells belonging to China National Petroleum Corporation and listed subsidiary PetroChina Ltd. That information, it said, was sold to IHS Energy, the U.S. consultancy Mr. Xue worked for and now known as IHS Inc.

From the Globe and Mail. Not a huge surprise perhaps; China is not noted for its freedoms (except in comparison to the DPRK). But stuff like this would never happen in Western democracies, would it? Well, don't be so sure. Admittedly, not as draconian as China's law, but it raises more than a few red flags...

Still more oil spill business

The optics of this are very bad:

U.S. District Court Judge Martin Feldman, who abruptly halted President Obama's deep-water drilling moratorium Tuesday, held stock in the company that owned the Deepwater Horizon rig, according to his 2008 disclosure form, the latest available.

Now to be fair, his share in Transocean was pretty small (around $15,000) but his portfolio is described as "heavy in energy companies", all of whom stood to lose a lot from the moratorium. Oh yeah, and Feldman is a Reagan appointee according to his bio at the Federal Judicial Center. And sadly, the appointment of judges is a highly politicized affair in the US.

More on the oil spill

It seems that the CEO of BP sold a huge amount of stock in the company only weeks before the accident:

Tony Hayward cashed in about a third of his holding in the company one month before a well on the Deepwater Horizon rig burst, causing an environmental disaster.

Mr Hayward, whose pay package is £4 million a year, then paid off the mortgage on his family’s mansion in Kent, which is estimated to be valued at more than £1.2 million.

From the Telegraph (h/t jblaque). But surely that decision had nothing to do with this, right?

In related news, a judge in the US has struck down the government's moratorium on deep-water drilling. I guess we have to have some compassion for those poor oil companies...

Republican reps apologize to BP for "shakedown"

Somehow they expect to make political hay from this:

Republicans on the Hill have calculated that President Obama's successful demand that BP set up a $20 billion escrow account to pay out claims is ripe for political attack. In the wake of Wednesday's White House announcement, a host of GOP officials are raising questions about both the process by which the deal was made and the deal itself -- going so far as to apologize to BP on America's behalf.

"I'm ashamed of what happened in the White House yesterday," said Rep. Joe Barton (R-Tex.) during a hearing on Thursday morning with BP's CEO Tony Hayward." I think it is a tragedy in the first proportion that a private corporation can be subjected to what I would characterize as a shakedown -- in this case a $20 billion shakedown -- with the attorney general of the United States, who is legitimately conducting a criminal investigation and has every right to do so to protect the American people, participating in what amounts to a $20 billion slush fund that's unprecedented in our nation's history, which has no legal standing, which I think sets a terrible precedent for our nation's future."

From the Huffington Post (h/t jblaque). Just when you think the Democrats are in for a beating in November, the Republicans do something to give you hope. And the Repubs will really look silly saying stuff like that if predictions that they might have to, say, evacuate nearly three million people turn out to be true (thanks again to Blaque for that one).

Reasons to boycott BP

This is all rather academic for me, since there isn't BP station within a thousand kilometres of me. Still, it's worth a read, as are the comments, including this one:

Mary, I’m not so much concerned with FIXING the problem (which is impossible – there’ll be no return to status quo ante) as with providing the business schools with a valuable case study of how one of the world’s largest corporations destroyed itself for want of a nail.

Makes sense to me...

"Top kill" fails to stop gusher

The situation isn't getting any better:

With BP declaring failure in its latest attempt to stop the uncontrolled gusher feeding the worst oil spill in U.S. history, the company is turning to yet another mix of risky undersea robot maneuvers and longshot odds to plug the blown-out well.

Six weeks after the catastrophe began, oil giant BP PLC is still casting about for at least a temporary fix to the spewing well underneath the Gulf of Mexico that's fouling beaches, wildlife and marshland.

A relief well that's currently being drilled — which is supposed to be a better long-term solution — won't be done for at least two months. That would be in the middle of the Atlantic hurricane season, which begins Tuesday.

President Barack Obama said it is “as enraging as it is heartbreaking” that the most ambitious bid yet for a temporary solution failed.

BP said Saturday that the procedure known as the “top kill” failed after engineers tried for three days to overwhelm the crippled well with heavy drilling mud and junk 5,000 feet underwater.

From the Globe. Of course, it will stop eventually, but what will be left of the Gulf's rich biota by that time?

Did BP have advance warning of trouble?

There are reports (h/t oddlots at iTulip) to the effect that Schlumberger Ltd, a respected international consulting firm, warned BP about incorrect procedures shortly before the accident, only to have them ignored. How much of this is accurate is unclear. It is known that Schlumberger staff left the rig only a few hours before the explosion, but there are inconsistencies -- the Reuters story states that they left on a BP helicopter, while the stories making the stronger claims say that the Schlumberger folks, after their advice was allegedly ignored by BP, ordered in one of their helicopters after BP told them to wait for the next scheduled flight. Whatever the case, it's being taken seriously by some, as evidenced by the relative performance of BP's and Schlumberger's stocks:


No surprise here; the possible implications of this could be very unpleasant for BP. It's worth noting, of course, that stories aren't always true, even if you do see them on the Internet; we'll have to see where this goes.

The oil spill could be about to worsten dramatically

As bad as the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is already, US authorities are looking at the possibility that it could become far worse:

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 Response document dated April 28. "Two additional release points were found today in the tangled riser. If the riser pipe deteriorates further, the flow could become unchecked resulting in a release volume an order of magnitude higher than previously thought."

****

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.

Source (h/t Rajiv in this iTulip thread). If that happens, this could have effects that reach far from the source of the problem. For instance, further down in the same thread, we_are_toast posted the following:

You people across the pond better get your paper towels ready. If the riser pipe fails and it takes 90 days to drill a relief well, you're in for a big surprise.

Yikes. And for further emphasis, a couple of posts down we have this:

As others in the thread have pointed out, this could be the oil industry's Chernobyl.