1.
HOW THEY'RE FIGHTING THE OIL SPILL
By Raja Abdulrahim, Alana Semuels, and Louis Sahagun
Los Angeles Times
May 15, 2010
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-oil-spill-clean-up-20100515,0,745018.story
The oil swirling in the Gulf of Mexico -- broken up by dispersants and churned by winds and currents -- has become an elusive giant, increasingly difficult to clean up but presenting a smaller, scattered threat if it reaches shore, U.S. Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Thad Allen said Friday.
"This spill is changing in its character," said Allen, President Obama's top commander in charge of responding to the spill. "I don't believe any longer that we have a large monolithic spill." He said the roughly 60-mile-long, 100-mile-wide slick has separated into patches of oil with water in between.
"There is good and bad news in that," Allen said. "The bad news is the oil is very widely dispersed, and it's hard to kind of manage the perimeter. But on the other hand, if there are shore impacts, it will come to shore in smaller quantities that are basically subsets of what might have been a larger spill."
Given the changing nature of the 3-week-old spill, an effort is underway to evaluate cleanup strategies and more precisely answer this question: "Between incendiary burning, mechanical skimming, and dispersant application, what have we done?" Allen said.
On Friday, the slick was skirting the coast of Louisiana and the Chandeleur Islands chain. Thunderstorms and strong winds forecast this weekend are expected to hamper cleanup work.
Scientists gave mixed views on the adequacy of the work so far.
"Overall, the cleanup effort is certainly making a difference, although the exact degree of oil recovery is hard to quantify," said Julius Langlinais, professor emeritus of petroleum engineering at Louisiana State University. "In addition, a good portion of the oil out there is evaporating.
"This is not like the Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska, where the water was cold and spilled oil was heavy," he said. "Here, the water is warm and the oil is of a lighter variety. With evaporation, the heavier parts of it will fall to the bottom of the ocean as asphalt."
Dec Doran, an oil spill consultant who worked for Exxon during the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill, was not as optimistic.
Oil may have dropped to the bottom, he said. And much of the oil on the top can be expected to elude some booms and skimmers even in good weather. "If you can contain and recover 20% of this oil, you've reached the maximum efficiency of booms and skimmers," said Doran, who has worked on more than 2,000 spills.
A few experts, however, said at this point, the cleanup is all but futile.
"You can have the best plan in the world, but most of the toxic shock will be done regardless of the most Herculean effort," said Rick Steiner, a marine conservation consultant in Alaska who worked on the emergency response effort in the Exxon Valdez spill.
With response teams on a war footing in the gulf, more than 500 vessels have scooped up roughly 3.6 million gallons of oily water. More than 200 miles of booms have been deployed and about 517,000 gallons of dispersant sprayed from military cargo planes. About 378,000 gallons of oil has been corralled and burned at sea.
Cleanup crews have attacked the slick with a variety of weapons: fire, skimmers, dispersants, booms, sponges, and sandbags:
• Fire: The most effective method of destroying spilled oil is a controlled burn. Essentially, the strategy uses special U-shaped "fire booms" towed by vessels to corral portions of oil and move it to a safe place for burning.
But rising winds and 4-foot swells have made controlled burns difficult. Authorities have conducted only five since April 20, according to BP spokeswoman Rebecca Bernhard.
• Skimmers: These are vessels that sweep oil off the surface using a variety of methods, including absorbent "conveyor belts," massive spools of rope, and rotating discs that attract oil and repel water. Like burning, skimming is limited by windy conditions and choppy water.
Oily water collected from skimmers is squeezed out of collection devices and funneled into tanker vessels. The oil is extracted and processed into fuel, but about 90% of the material hauled up by skimming boats is water.
• Dispersants: Detergent-like oil dispersants have been dropped by planes to help break down the slick into droplets and allow it to degrade more rapidly. As of Friday, 192 missions had been flown, each covering more than 250 acres, BP said.
Dispersants have been used on smaller spills elsewhere, but never to this extent in U.S. waters, federal authorities said.
Environmentalists worry about the possible toxic effects of releasing such a large volume into the gulf, which has critical breeding grounds for fish including bluefin tuna. But federal officials contend that dispersants are much less toxic than oil and are considered a necessary tradeoff to try to protect the coastal environment.
On Friday, federal regulators approved an experimental plan to inject chemical dispersants into the oil gushing from the wellhead 5,000 feet underwater.
• Booms and sponges: Locally hired crews in their own boats are among the crews lowering sponge-like materials into the water to soak up the oil. The sponges are packaged in garbage bags and returned to land. But that method is slow.
Fisherman and others are also working to lay rings of hard booms, which are made of a durable PVC material, to prevent oil from washing up on shore.
But because the oil is sprayed with dispersant, it mixes in with the water and can drift beneath the booms. High waves and winds have also knocked the booms underwater or washed them ashore.
Booms were laid on the beach where dime-size globs of oil washed up at South Pass in Plaquemines Parish, La., on Wednesday. Local governments have complained of boom shortages; BP orders the material from as far away as Brazil, Norway and Alaska.
• Sandbags: To make up for boom shortages, Louisiana's Lafourche Parish worked with the National Guard to drop more than 200 one-ton sandbags on coastal areas where beaches had eroded and rivulets ran inland. But high waves and tides knocked over the sandbags, making them ineffective. The sandbag campaign was abandoned Thursday.
Time and nature also are influencing the behavior of the oil, which scientists said was being pushed and pulled by currents, and dissipated by evaporation.
"The more weathered, the more broken up the oil is, the more likely the impact on the shore will be more scattered," said Doug Helton, incident operations coordinator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "The smaller the chunks of oil, the more biological degradation can occur."
Eric Terrill, director of the Coastal Observing Research and Development Center at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, which has helped track the spill, said that it is not growing like a large puffy cloud. Instead it is being carried beneath the surface, making it difficult to contain and recover the oil as it spreads throughout the water.
Terrill said he is certain the oil will get into the Loop Current, a strong flow that would bring it to the Florida Keys and around to the East Coast. "It's just a matter of when," he said.
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2.
U.S.
Green business
HUGE BP SPILL MEANS A HIGH-STAKES HURRICAN SEASON
By Joshua Schneyer
Reuters
May 14, 2010
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE64D69K20100514?type=domesticNews
BP's oil spill could make for one of the highest-stakes U.S. Gulf hurricane seasons on record.
Storms may scuttle clean-up efforts, force containment vessels to retreat, or propel spilled crude and tar balls over vast expanses of sea and beach, scientists said.
Meteorologists say that climate conditions are ripe for an unusually destructive hurricane season, the storm-prone period that runs from June 1 to the end of November in the Gulf. Oceanographers say that could hurt the clean-up.
"If a storm comes into this situation it could vastly complicate everything," said Florida State University oceanography professor Ian MacDonald.
"All efforts on the shoreline and at sea, the booms and structures and rigs involved in clean-up and containment, could stop working."
As thousands of spill responders gird for a clean-up that could last for months or years after the leaking well is capped, weather and ocean currents are emerging as major unknowns, raising anxiety levels, economic and environmental stakes in the Gulf as storm season nears.
Compounding the uncertainty is how little research has been done on how storms affect oil spills. Some believe storm surges may help disperse the oil off shore or break down the slick. Other research suggests the oil slick itself could keep storms from gathering strength.
Recent Atlantic Basin readings showed water temperatures up to 0.8 degrees Celsius above normal, and near a record high for the season. El Nino, which creates wind shear that can prevent Gulf hurricanes from forming, has recently subsided. The factors could spur major storms in the Gulf this year.
"It only takes one storm to wreak havoc," said Chris Shabbot, a meteorologist at Sempra in Connecticut. "The consensus forecast is for above average storm activity as the El Nino (event) decays and the Atlantic is as warm or warmer than 2005."
Colorado State University's renowned team of forecasters is calling for an above-average hurricane season that may bring 15 named storms this year, eight of hurricane strength.
Accuweather's Joe Bastardi also fears a destructive season.
"I hate to say it since the oil spill is already affecting people, but I think this hurricane season is going to be big," he said in an interview.
The next official hurricane season outlook from the government's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is due on May 20.
STORMS AND CURRENTS
Miles and miles of booms have been placed offshore along the Gulf Coast to help stop the slick from making landfall.
Amid the menacing forecasts, oceanographers and spill-responders are considering how storms and deep ocean currents would affect the movement of spilled oil, which authorities say could soon hit land in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama or Florida.
The U.S. coast of the Gulf of Mexico spans some 1,680 miles. The spill, gushing an estimated 5,000 barrels a day from a subsea oil well 50 miles south of Louisiana, has formed a thin oil slick that covered more than 1,200 square miles in late April, according to Louisiana State University researchers. The slick has been harder to define this month, and may be shrinking, LSU professor Nan Walker said.
Lurking under the sea surface, viscous tar balls are forming, facilitated by wave activity, as the heavier hydrocarbon molecules gradually sink toward the sea-floor, a process that can take months, scientists said.
Experts are having trouble modeling how the oil will react in water since BP hasn't disclosed exactly what kind of crude is spilling. Lighter oil evaporates quicker and is more easily dispersed by chemicals. Heavier crude can be more damaging to marine or bird life, but it could sink faster or be easier to contain.
As many as 520 vessels are already responding to the spill throughout the Gulf, according to U.S. authorities. Efforts to stop the spill involve drilling relief wells from a seaborne rig, which BP says could take three months. The company is also trying to cap the leak with a metal funnel on the sea-floor, to gather oil into a giant hose connected to a storage ship above.
Both of those efforts could be disrupted by tropical storms, which can force evacuation of oil and gas rigs throughout the Gulf.
Peter Niiler, an oceanographer at the Scripps Institution in San Diego, has researched how even winds caused by a low pressure cycle can displace floating scientific buoys from waters near Florida to Texas in less than a week.
"Anything on the ocean surface, including oil, can move very fast and just about anywhere that wind or currents push it," Niiler said.
The oil slick might even reach waters and shores abroad, scientists and foreign authorities warned this week.
Mexican officials say if the spill persists into the fall it could reach Mexican beaches along the country's Gulf Coast, the site of famed tourist destinations like Cancun.
Some of the spilled crude should make its way into the LOOP current, a deep ocean stream that transfers heat from the tropics to higher latitudes and becomes the Gulf Stream.
"If you look at it, the LOOP current could lead that oil right to Havana, Cuba," said Florida State's MacDonald.
After sweeping near Havana, the LOOP current continues toward the Florida Keys and the Gulf Stream heads up the U.S. Eastern Seaboard.
Some researchers said a wider dispersion of the spill may be good, and storms could help that process along. Researchers at NOAA, in a report last week, said the oil slick may also help to impede storm formation by preventing heat transfer from sea to air.
"There are two important issues here: the effect of hurricanes on the spill, and the effect of the spill on hurricanes," said Doron Nof, professor of oceanography at Florida State University.
"I think what a hurricane would do is break up the oil spill, making it even harder to clean up," he said.
(Additional reporting by Robert Campbell in Mexico City; Editing by Alden Bentley)
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