USA > History > 2010 > Environment (II)

Start of Hurricane Season

Raises New Fears

May 30, 2010
The New Yotk Times
By KENNETH CHANG

As oil continues to gush from a broken well into the Gulf of Mexico, officials and scientists are worrying that the environmental disaster could be compounded later this year by a natural one.

The hurricane season starts Tuesday and runs through November, and forecasters expect one of the most turbulent seasons ever. If a hurricane rolled over the spill, the winds and storm surges could disperse the oil over a wider area and push it far inland, damaging the fragile marshlands.

“It would very definitely turn an environmental disaster into an unprecedented environmental catastrophe,” said Brian D. McNoldy, a tropical storms researcher at Colorado State University.

Specific predictions are impossible to make because the effects would depend on the path, strength and speed of a hurricane, as well as the size and location of the oil spill when the storm arrived. Because of the counterclockwise rotation of hurricane winds, a storm passing to the west of the slick would tend to push the oil to the coast, while a storm passing to the east would drive the oil away from land.

The winds churn water down only a few hundred feet, so a hurricane would probably not have a major effect on the large plumes of oil believed to be accumulating deep underwater.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is predicting 14 to 23 named storms this season, of which 8 to 14 will turn into hurricanes and 3 to 7 of those will grow into major hurricanes with sustained winds of at least 111 miles per hour.

Last month, hurricane forecasters at Colorado State issued similar predictions: 15 named storms, 8 hurricanes and 4 major hurricanes.

The Colorado State team, Philip J. Klotzbach and William M. Gray, said there was a 43 percent chance that at least one hurricane would make landfall in Louisiana this year, based on the higher number of storms and the historical pattern of hurricane paths. (The atmospheric administration does not predict where the hurricanes will head.)

A hopeful speculation is that the oil might not be all bad news and that it might sap the storm’s energy. In 1966, a husband-and-wife team of federal hurricane researchers, Joanne and Robert H. Simpson, speculated that spraying an insoluble liquid like oil onto the ocean might even be a way to combat hurricanes by cutting off the evaporation that feeds energy into the storm.

But in a fact sheet issued last week, the atmospheric administration noted that hurricanes span 200 to 300 miles wide, much larger than the current size of the spill, and doubted that the oil could have much effect on the strength or path of a storm.

Hurricane winds would also minimize the evaporation effect.

A few years ago, when researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology built a laboratory experiment to look at the flow of heat from water to air under different conditions, they, almost as a lark, followed up on the Simpsons’ suggestion. They applied fatty alcohols onto the water, and at very low wind speeds the alcohols did suppress evaporation.

“But when the winds get up to gale force or so, the surface gets torn apart,” said Kerry A. Emanuel, a professor of atmospheric science at M.I.T. “We just didn’t see any effect at high wind speeds.”

Conversely, other effects could intensify a storm, Dr. Emanuel said. By reducing evaporation, the oil could be heating the gulf waters, similar to a person wearing a rubber suit on a hot day.

Warmer water could then mean more energy to power a stronger hurricane, Dr. Emanuel said. But he said it was unclear what was actually happening, because the oil sheen fools satellite measurements of water temperature.

    Start of Hurricane Season Raises New Fears, NYT, 30.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/31/science/earth/31hurricane.html

White House Struggles

as Criticism Over Leak Mounts

May 30, 2010
The New York Times
By CLIFFORD KRAUSS, JOHN M. BRODER and JACKIE CALMES

This article is by Clifford Krauss, John M. Broder and Jackie Calmes.

HOUSTON — The Obama administration scrambled to respond on Sunday after the failure of the latest effort to kill the gushing oil well in the Gulf of Mexico. But administration officials acknowledged the possibility that tens of thousands of gallons of oil might continue pouring out until August, when two relief wells are scheduled to be completed.

“We are prepared for the worst,” said Carol M. Browner, President Obama’s climate change and energy policy adviser. “We have been prepared from the beginning.”

Even as the White House sought to demonstrate that it was taking a more direct hand in trying to solve the problem, senior officials acknowledged that the new technique BP will use to try to cap the leak — severing the riser pipe and placing a containment dome over the cut riser — could temporarily result in as much as 20 percent more oil flowing into the water during the three days to a week before the new device could be in place.

“This is obviously a difficult situation,” Ms. Browner said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, “but it’s important for people to understand that from the beginning, the government has been in charge.”

“We have been directing BP to take important steps,” including the drilling of a second relief well, she added.

The White House said that Interior Secretary Ken Salazar would make his eighth trip to the region and that the number of government and contract employees sent to work in areas affected by the spill would be tripled.

But despite the White House efforts, the criticism also intensified. Colin L. Powell, who served as secretary of state and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told ABC’s “This Week” that the administration must move in quickly with “decisive force and demonstrate that it’s doing everything that it can do.”

Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, appearing on “Meet the Press,” again criticized the administration’s efforts, saying: “We need our federal government exactly for this kind of crisis. I think there could have been a greater sense of urgency.”

The administration has left to BP most decisions about how to move forward with efforts to contain the leak. But Ms. Browner made a point of saying that the administration, led by Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, had told BP that the company should stop the top kill. Government officials thought it was too dangerous to keep pumping drilling mud into the well because they worried it was putting too much pressure on it. BP announced Saturday evening that it was ending that effort.

BP engineers are now working on several containment plans, with the first being implemented over the next few days.

“According to BP, the riser cutting will likely start Monday or Tuesday,” the White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, said in a statement on Sunday.

Using submarine robots, technicians intend to sever the riser pipe on top of the blowout preventer, the five-story-high stack of pipes above the well that failed to shut off the leak when the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded on April 20, killing 11 workers. A funnel-like containment device will be fitted above the cut riser to draw the escaping oil through tubing attached to a drilling ship.

But BP officials acknowledged that there was no certainty that this attempt would work. Robert Dudley, BP’s managing director, appearing on “This Week,” also said that if it did work, some oil would still seep out until relief wells provided “an end point” in August.

The failure of the most recent effort — known as a top kill, which BP officials expressed great optimism about before trying it — has underlined the gaps in knowledge and science about the spill and its potential remedies. Ever since the explosion and the resulting leak, estimates of how much oil is escaping have differed by thousands of barrels a day. Both government and BP officials said on Sunday that they had no accurate idea of how much oil was spilling into the gulf.

“We honestly do not know,” Mr. Dudley said on “Meet the Press.” “We’ve always found this a difficult oil to measure because of the huge amounts of gas in the oil.”

“The one thing about this method that we’re about to go into — it will and should measure the majority of the flow,” he said.

Mr. Dudley said that the original estimates by the government and BP officials of 5,000 barrels a day were based on satellite pictures and that the current estimate of 12,000 to 19,000 barrels was “issued without an actual flow measurement.” If the leak is not contained or slowed and continues at the higher estimated flow rate of 19,000 barrels a day until Aug. 20 — four months after the accident — it could amount to close to 2.3 million barrels spilled into the gulf.

After more than a month of diagnostic tests and the pumping of tens of thousands of barrels of drilling fluids — and everything from golf balls to shards of rubber — into the broken blowout preventer, engineers are still debating about what they think may be the inner contours of the five-story stack of pipes and how to best contain its leaking gashes.

In the end, all the mysteries of what went wrong and caused one of the greatest environmental calamities of history may not be known until the well is finally killed and the ill-fated blowout preventer is brought up from the bottom of the sea.

The final plugging of the well will have to wait until August, when the two relief wells are scheduled be completed. Those wells are being drilled diagonally to intersect with the runaway well and inject it with heavy liquids and cement. Work could be slowed by storms in what is expected to be an active summer hurricane season.

Officials from BP and the administration announced on Saturday that the top kill was a failure and had been abandoned, and that engineers were once again trying to solve the problem with a containment cap. A similar operation was tried nearly four weeks ago, but it failed because a slush of icy water and gas, known as hydrates, filled the large containment device, blocking the escaping oil from entering it. This time, engineers will pump hot sea water around the new, smaller device to keep hydrates from forming, and there will be far less space between the cap and the well for any hydrates that do form to flow in.

BP officials expressed optimism on Sunday about the new operation, though one technician working on the project warned that there were concerns that hydrates could again stymie the containment effort. The technician and outside experts also warned that by cutting the riser, the engineers may increase the flow of escaping oil.

Donald Van Nieuwenhuise, director of petroleum geoscience programs at the University of Houston, said that he thought BP’s next plan had a good chance of succeeding, but that there was also a risk of increasing the flow of escaping oil by 10 percent.

“Then it just makes the situation worse for longer,” he said, unless the containment cap succeeds in collecting a substantial amount of oil.


Clifford Krauss reported from Houston, John M. Broder from Washington and Jackie Calmes from Chicago.

    White House Struggles as Criticism Over Leak Mounts, NYT, 30.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/31/us/31spill.html

Gulf Coast Fishermen Fear Disruption of Their Way of Life

May 29, 2010
The New York Times
By AMY HARMON

CHALMETTE, La. — Like thousands of other fishermen along Louisiana’s befouled coast, Buddy Greco’s son Aaron was itching to take his family’s boat out to the marshes as yet untainted by the oil gushing from a BP well offshore.

But the elder Mr. Greco insisted that Aaron, 19, accompany him instead last week to three days of BP training classes required for new jobs cleaning up the oil slicks.

“If we don’t get in now, we’ll be locked out,” Mr. Greco, who began fishing some 30 years ago with his own father, told his son. “And this could be the only job we have for a long time.”

Five weeks after the deadly explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig, many fishermen here are grappling with the realization that their way of life might be disrupted for a long time to come.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration extended the closed fishing area in the Gulf of Mexico last week, and about 25 percent of federal waters, nearly 60,000 square miles, is now off limits to commercial fishermen.

The notion that the spill would not be cleaned up in a few months, or possibly years, has hit “like the death of a family member,” said Connie Townsend, the owner of a fishing boat charter service in Terrebonne Parish. And in interviews across southern Louisiana last week, the responses included anger, denial and naked grief.

“A lot of times I want to go stand in a corner and cry — not so much for me, because I’ve done it a long time, but for him,” said Mr. Greco, 43, nodding at Aaron as they stood in line at Kentucky Fried Chicken during a lunch break from their training classes on Thursday.

Biologists said that the fishermen’s fears were not unwarranted, especially as the oil advances into the marshes that served as nurseries for many species of marine life. If the populations are significantly diminished, the fisheries will remain closed. While it is still too early to determine the toll, in Alaska, experts note, fishermen are still seeing the effects of the Exxon Valdez spill 20 years later.

“We’re hoping we can find a way to clean it up faster, but it’s very realistic that they will be feeling the impact of this for multiple years,” said Julie Anderson, a fishery specialist at Louisiana State University.

Mr. Greco’s longtime fishing partner, Stacy Geraci, 55, said his dread of the changes that might be coming woke him up at night.

“You know how your life is,” Mr. Geraci said. “Well what if someone came in and said, ‘You’re not going to be like this anymore.’ How do you make that adjustment?”

Some are turning the question on BP, the multibillion-dollar corporation whose deepwater drilling accident has upended their lives.

“Are you going to take care of all the oysters I lost?” demanded Anthony Zupanovic, 30, of Belle Chasse, La., at a town-hall-style meeting with BP and Coast Guard officials in Plaquemines Parish on Wednesday evening. Because oysters cannot crawl or swim away, they are thought to be particularly vulnerable.

Yet the affirmative answer from Bob Fryar, a BP senior vice president, did little to assuage Mr. Zupanovic, whose oyster beds were among many near the Mississippi River’s western bank, where black oil recently appeared.

“It makes you want to throw up when you see it,” Mr. Zupanovic said. “Because you know it’s coming and you can’t do anything about it.”

Just how BP will assess claims for lost income is the source of much anxiety along the Louisiana coast. Will the company also account for the upfront investment in oysters, where beds are seeded nearly two years before they are harvested, in a system more like farming than fishing? What if this shrimping season was shaping up to be the best since the early 1990s, as many fishermen contend?

“That’s a shrimping moon,” said Albone Rogers, a fourth-generation shrimper, gesturing at the nearly full orb glowing orange behind the clouds after the meeting. “You could make $8,000 in six or seven hours on a night like tonight.”

BP’s recruitment of local fishermen and their boats for the cleanup efforts has spawned its own set of concerns. Some worry that they will not pass the company’s physical exam. Others complain that the company has failed to include their boats in the Orwellian-named “Vessels of Opportunity” program, even after they registered.

But even adequate financial compensation might not mute the loss that many fishermen say centers on the nature of what they did as much as on the money they made doing it.

“You can give me all the money you want to give me, but you can’t give me that life back, because it’s a good life,” Mr. Rogers said. “It’s a very good life.”

Fishing offers a peace rarely found on shore and the pleasure of deciding each morning whether to go out. And then there is the addictive quality of hoisting huge nets full of creatures from the watery depths.

“When you pull up that drudge and it’s full of oysters, you get that rush,” Mr. Greco said during lunch last Thursday.

“You never lose the urge to want to shrimp once you’re a shrimper,” agreed Henry Martin, 66, who joined the Grecos for lunch. “When the season comes, you want to go.”

On Thursday, some fishermen were forging ahead. Luke Cibilich was preparing to drop a pile of rocks that he had bought before the spill into his oyster bed so that baby oysters might attach to them and grow. “They’re not going to do me any good sitting here,” he said.

Others were not sure what to do.

“They would make a lot of oysters,” ventured Judy Kieff, 57, referring to a similar pile she had bought.

In a region where residents tick off the disasters they have survived (Betsy, Katrina, Rita, Gustav) the way people might tick off their favorite rock bands, this one offers no obvious way to rebuild.

Michael Roberts, a fisherman from Lafitte, La., said he had to hide tears from his grandson on a recent boat ride in Barataria Bay when he saw oil staining his fishing grounds. “None of this will be the same, for decades to come,” Mr. Roberts wrote in an account he distributed by e-mail.

Mr. Roberts and his wife, Tracy Kuhns, also took video of the oil to distribute on the Internet, because they were frustrated with the lack of information from government agencies. Like many residents of the coastal areas, Ms. Kuhns worries that the dispersants being used to break up the oil will do more harm than good.

Her anger is not directed at BP but at what she considers lax oversight that contributed to the spill.

“BP is a corporation, it’s going to protect its bottom line,” Ms. Kuhns said. “But where are the government agencies who are supposed to protect the health and safety of our citizens?”

On Grand Isle, where tar balls washed ashore on the beach this month, President Obama on Friday promised to redouble the cleanup efforts.

That did not mean much to the Grecos, who having been taught how to safely extinguish chemical gases and why they needed protective clothing might take part later this week.

But meanwhile Aaron has prevailed on his father to go crabbing. While they still can.

    Gulf Coast Fishermen Fear Disruption of Their Way of Life, NYT, 29.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/us/30fishermen.html

‘Top Kill’ Fails to Plug Leak; BP Readies Next Approach

May 29, 2010
The New York Times
By LESLIE KAUFMAN and CLIFFORD KRAUSS

NEW ORLEANS — In another serious setback in the effort to stem the flow of oil gushing from a well a mile beneath the Gulf of Mexico, BP engineers said Saturday that the “top kill” technique had failed and, after consultation with government officials, they had decided to move on to another strategy.

Doug Suttles, BP’s chief operating officer for exploration and production, said at a news conference that the engineers would try once again to solve the problem with a containment cap and that it could take four to seven days for the device to be in place.

“After three full days of attempting top kill, we now believe it is time to move on to the next of our options,” Mr. Suttles said.

The abandonment of the top kill technique, the most ambitious effort yet to plug the well, was the latest in a series of failures. First, BP failed in efforts to repair a blowout preventer with submarine robots. Then its initial efforts to cap the well with a containment dome failed when it became clogged with a frothy mix of frigid water and gas. Efforts to use a hose to gather escaping oil have managed to catch only a fraction of the spill.

BP has started work on two relief wells, but officials have said that they will not be completed until August — further contributing to what is already the worst oil spill in United States history.

The latest failure will undoubtedly put more pressure — both politically and from the public — on the Obama administration to take some sort of action, perhaps taking control of the repair effort completely from BP.

President Obama, who is spending the Memorial Day weekend in Chicago, issued a statement Saturday evening on the decision to abandon the top kill.

“While we initially received optimistic reports about the procedure, it is now clear that it has not worked,” Mr. Obama said.

He said that Rear Adm. Mary E. Landry of the Coast Guard had “directed BP to launch a new procedure whereby the riser pipe will be cut and a containment structure fitted over the leak.”

“This approach is not without risk and has never been attempted before at this depth,” Mr. Obama said. “That is why it was not activated until other methods had been exhausted.”

The president continued, “We will continue to pursue any and all responsible means of stopping this leak until the completion of the two relief wells currently being drilled.”

For BP, the besieged British company, the failure could mean billions of dollars of additional liabilities, as the spill potentially worsens in the weeks and months ahead.

“I am disappointed that this operation did not work,” Tony Hayward, chief executive of BP, said in a statement. “We remain committed to doing everything we can to make this situation right.”

A technician who has been working on the project to stem the oil leak said Saturday that neither the top kill nor the “junk shot” came close to succeeding because the pressure of oil and gas escaping from the well was simply too powerful to overcome. He added that engineers never had a complete enough understanding of the inner workings of drill pipe casing or blowout preventer mechanisms to make the efforts work.

“Simply too much of what we pumped in was escaping,” said the technician, who spoke on condition of remaining unnamed because he is not authorized to speak publicly for the company.

“The engineers are disappointed, and management is upset,” said the technician. “Nothing is good, nothing is good.”

The spill began after the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded on April 20, killing 11 people. Since then, it has dumped an estimated 18 million to 40 million gallons into the gulf.

After the announcement Saturday, the disappointment was palpable along the Louisiana shoreline, where the oil has increasingly washed up in sticky, rusty globs.

Michel Claudet, the president of Terrebonne Parish, 60 miles southwest of New Orleans, said that when he heard the news, he felt “sorrow, despair and like this ordeal will never finish. If you go around the parish, it is all our folks talk about.”

Mr. Claudet said that he was trying to remain hopeful, but that it was increasingly difficult. “As every item fails,” he said, “I am less and less optimistic.”

In New Orleans, Margaret Shockey, 67, a retired teacher, said, “One thing’s for sure, this is the last city that deserved this.”

Last week, BP described the top kill — which was an effort to pump heavy mud into the well to counter the flow of oil — as its best hope for stopping the spill. During the course of the operation, BP officials had often expressed optimism that it would work.

But on Saturday, Mr. Suttles said the operation had pumped 30,000 barrels of mud into the well and yet failed to stop it from flowing.

Admiral Landry called the failure “very disappointing.”

The new strategy is to smoothly cut the riser from which the oil is leaking and then place a cap over it. Pipes attached to the cap would take the oil to a storage boat on the surface.

Though a first effort at a containment dome failed, Mr. Suttles said BP had learned from that experience and now believed that this cap, which is custom fitted to the riser, would be more successful.

He said it would capture most but not all of the oil leaking from the well, which is believed to be gushing 12,000 to 19,000 barrels a day.

He would not give odds for the operation’s success, but said he had “a lot of confidence” that it would work.

Earlier in the day, Mr. Suttles said preparations for such an alternative plan were already under way, just in case. “That equipment is on stage and ready to go,” he said. Equipment is being deployed on land and on the seabed, he said.

If the new cap is not successful, the company has said it will look into attaching another blowout preventer to the one that already exists at the wellhead and has not functioned.

But officials emphasized that the real solution to the spill was the relief well. They said one of the relief wells was currently proceeding ahead of schedule, but was still at least a month away.

“It’s like a bad movie that just won’t end,” said Billy Altman, 45, a mechanic in New Orleans. “You know, you think they finally killed the bad guy, and then he comes back to life. It’s crazy.”


Clifford Krauss reported from Houston, and Leslie Kaufman from New Orleans. Robbie Brown contributed from New Orleans, and Sarah Wheaton from New York.

    ‘Top Kill’ Fails to Plug Leak; BP Readies Next Approach, NYT, 29.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/us/30spill.html

Anger Rises as the Oil Keeps Spewing

May 25, 2010
The New York Times

To the Editor:

Re “Oil Hits Home, Spreading Arc of Frustration” (front page, May 25):

As the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico unfolds daily, the country and the world look on, impotent to deal with the situation. We learn daily also how difficult the technological efforts to contain this blowout are and how little effective regulation was in place to forestall such a disaster.

What must be done now to prevent future disasters is to stop all current drilling in the gulf until each of the roughly 3,500 operating rigs there is inspected by an independent commission appointed by the president. Inspections would include perusal of all records, permits and safety test results, previous and current, and current demonstrations of safety installations.

Unless all rigs can be shown to be technically safe to operate now, they should be constrained from posing the risk that the BP rig has brought to reality.

Hobart W. Kraner
Murrells Inlet, S.C., May 25, 2010

The writer is a retired physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory.

•

To the Editor:

Your continuing coverage of the BP spill makes several points clear.

BP is advised by professionals from throughout the industry, and it is doing all that can be done to seal the well.

BP was not prepared to mitigate a spill or to supervise a coastal cleanup.

The federal and state governments have experience with natural disasters along the Gulf Coast, and they should be in charge of containing the oil and addressing the long-term aftermath. The cost should be borne by BP and its partners in the well.

James S. Jackson
Portland, Ore., May 25, 2010

The writer worked for 20 years as a petroleum geologist.

•

To the Editor:

The environmental and economic damage from the Deepwater Horizon disaster will surely be staggering. But equally awful will be the impact on our energy future. Several of the world’s “super giant” oil fields are in permanent and steep decline. The oil industry had thought that deepwater drilling would offset the production loss, something inconceivable now.

The unfolding catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico plainly demonstrates the limits of technology and the inevitability of human error. This calamity will be remembered as a historical turning point, the beginning of the end of cheap abundant energy.

Deepwater drilling will never be the panacea the industry had hoped, and we Americans will look back wistfully, finally understanding that energy is a blessing and not an entitlement.

Christopher Eiben
Cleveland, May 24, 2010

The writer is a drilling consultant.

•

To the Editor:

I dismissed President Obama’s critics when they first started comparing his response to BP’s oil spill to President Bush’s response to Hurricane Katrina. After all, Mr. Bush had several days to prepare for the hurricane, a fact that clearly distinguishes the current catastrophe unfolding before our eyes.

Since then, however, Mr. Obama has seemingly set out to prove his critics right. The president’s response lacks any sense of urgency.

After a month of BP’s underestimation of the scope of the spill (“The Measure of a Disaster,” by Ian R. MacDonald, John Amos, Timothy Crone and Steve Wereley, Op-Ed, May 22), Mr. Obama finally set up a commission to investigate what went wrong. A commission should have been set up weeks ago.

With each passing day, tens of thousands of barrels of oil continue to contaminate the Gulf of Mexico, and the president doesn’t seem to be taking seriously enough the long-term damage that is being unleashed on our environment, our economy and his presidency.

Ryan Talbott
Portland, Ore., May 24, 2010

•

To the Editor:

Re “Louisiana Officials Threaten Action if Spill Response Proves Inadequate” (news article, May 24):

The frustration of Louisiana officials as crude oil despoils their coast is understandable, but their demands for a more effective response are futile. BP and the government agencies are doing the best they can, with virtually all available response assets.

Major spills are rare, but, as is well known in government and industry, once oil is in the water, spill responders do very well to remove or recover even 15 percent. Dispersants “treat” a larger percentage of the oil, but transfer it from the surface into the water column rather than removing it, with effects that we don’t yet fully understand.

Our nation, and the gulf states in particular, have made a bargain with the oil industry wherein we have accepted the risks of major spills for the benefits of oil and petrochemicals. The gulf blowout, the Massey Energy coal mine explosion in West Virginia and hundreds of other tragic accidents hold clear lessons: we must pay the price to ensure safe operations, even if high; and we must get to the serious business of minimizing our use of fossil fuels.

Michael Dyer
Essex, Mass., May 24, 2010

The writer is a marine transportation engineer.

•

To the Editor:

Re “More Than Just an Oil Spill,” by Bob Herbert (column, May 22):

Blaming “the scandalous, rapacious greed of the oil industry” for this catastrophe doesn’t identify the real villains: ourselves, with our outsize energy demands for our busy, busy lives. Step by step we are trashing the planet to maintain our quality of life.

Accidents like the BP oil spill and Chernobyl make headlines, while every day mountains and valleys are destroyed from West Virginia to Wyoming to reach coal; vast areas of Canada are laid waste to obtain oil from tar sands; and forests and groundwater supplies are threatened by hydraulic fracturing for oil and natural gas, while oceans and shorelines around the world are turned into dead zones by drilling for and transporting oil.

We may point our fingers at the people who operate and regulate energy, but we must accept that ultimately the fingers point back at ourselves.

Charles Day
Philadelphia, May 23, 2010

    Anger Rises as the Oil Keeps Spewing, NYT, 25.4.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/26/opinion/l26oil.html

Oil Hits Home, Spreading Arc of Frustration

May 24, 2010
The New York Times
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON, CLIFFORD KRAUSS and JOHN M. BRODER

This article is by Campbell Robertson, Clifford Krauss and John M. Broder.

PORT FOURCHON, La. — For weeks, it was a disaster in abstraction, a threat floating somewhere out there.

Not anymore. In the last week, the oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico has revealed itself to an angry and desperate public, smearing tourist beaches, washing onto the shorelines of sleepy coastal communities and oozing into marshy bays that fishermen have worked for generations. It has even announced its arrival on the Louisiana coast with a fittingly ugly symbol: brown pelicans, the state bird, dyed with crude.

More than a month has passed since the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig blew up, spewing immeasurable quantities of oil into the Gulf of Mexico and frustrating all efforts to contain it. The billowing plume of undersea oil and water has thwarted the industry’s well-control efforts and driven government officials to impotent rage.

It has demonstrated the enduring laxity of federal regulation of offshore operations and has shown the government to be almost wholly at the mercy of BP, the company leasing the rig, to provide the technology, personnel and equipment to stop the bleeding well.

Senators and administration officials visiting the southern Louisiana town of Galliano lashed out again at BP on Monday, saying they were “beyond patience” with the company. The day before, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, who early in the crisis vowed to “keep the boot on the neck” of BP, threatened to push the company out of the way.

But on Monday, Mr. Salazar backed off, conceding to the reality that BP and the oil companies have access to the best technology to attack the well, a mile below the surface, even though that technology has proved so far to have fallen short of its one purpose. The government’s role, he acknowledged, is largely supervisory and the primary responsibility for the spill, for legal and practical reasons, remains with the company.

“The administration has done everything we can possibly do to make sure that we push BP to stop the spill and to contain the impact,” Mr. Salazar said. “We have also been very clear that there are areas where BP and the private sector are the ones who must continue to lead the efforts with government oversight, such as the deployment of private sector technology 5,000 feet below the ocean’s surface to kill the well.”

Oil industry experts said they did not take seriously the sporadic threats by the administration that the federal government might have to wrest management of the effort to plug the well from BP. The experts said that the Interior and Energy Departments do not have engineers with more experience in deepwater drilling than those who work for BP and the array of companies that have been brought into the effort to stem the leak.

“It’s worse than politics,” said Larry Goldstein, a director of the Energy Policy Research Foundation, which is partly financed by the oil industry. “They have had the authority from Day 1. If they could have handled this situation better, they would have already.”

As the verbal warfare between officials and company executives escalated, the slick from the April 20 well blowout continued to spread in billowing rust-colored splotches in the gulf, raising urgent questions about what lay beneath.

On land, shrimpers were stuffing their catch into coolers in hopes of having some in store if the season ends altogether. Hotel owners all along the gulf were trying to persuade tourists to keep their vacation plans. But as they looked to BP and the authorities for help, or at least direction, there has only been frustration.

“I never thought it would come to this,” said Ryan Lambert, a charter boat operator in Buras, La., who spoke to the federal delegation on Monday. “My guys look to me and say ‘What do I do, boss?’ And I don’t have an answer.”

Several things have become clear over the past month. Neither BP nor the government was prepared for an oil release of this size or at this depth. The federal Minerals Management Service, charged with overseeing offshore oil development, has for too long served as a handmaiden of industry. Laws governing deepwater drilling have fallen far behind the technology and the attendant risks. And no one can estimate the extent of the economic and environmental damage, or how long it will last.

“Just under 70 miles of our coast have been hit by oil,” said Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, a Republican, who criticized the disjointed response effort that he said has allowed oil to come ashore unnecessarily. “Let’s make no mistake that what is at threat here is our way of life.”

The crude has been flowing at a rate still unknown nearly a mile below the surface, escaping in quantities far greater than the small amount of oil that has been burned off, collected with booms or sucked from the broken drill pipe lying on the ocean floor.

Using conservative government and BP estimates, more than seven million gallons of oil have been released from the crippled well, nearing the size of the spill from the Exxon Valdez in 1989. Independent estimates of the gulf spill place it many times higher than the official figure, rendering the statistics about how much oil has been collected thus far nearly useless in gauging the effectiveness of the response.

For weeks BP tried without success to reactivate the seal-off valves on the dead blowout preventer, the tower of pipes designed to shut the well. Then it lowered a 40-foot steel containment chamber in an effort to funnel escaping oil to a ship on the surface, but that failed when an icy slush of gas and water stopped up the device.

In recent days, BP attached a mile-long tube into the leaking well designed to divert oil to a drill ship before it leaked into the gulf. But the company said the rate it has been able to capture has varied from day to day, between 1,360 and 3,000 barrels, far below even the most conservative estimates of how much oil was leaking.

The recriminations over the performance of BP and the Obama administration could subside if the latest effort to kill the well, now scheduled for Wednesday morning, succeeds.

In a maneuver called a “top kill,” BP is planning to pump heavy drilling fluids twice the density of water through two narrow lines into the blowout preventer to essentially plug the runaway well.

“The top kill operation is not a guarantee of success,” warned Doug Suttles, BP’s chief operating officer, who added that it had never been tried before in deep water under high pressures.

“If the government felt there were other things to do it is clearly within the power of the government to do that,” Mr. Suttles said. “Everyone is very, very frustrated.”

Mr. Suttles said that if the top kill did work, the leak could be stopped as early as Wednesday night. Then engineers could either fill the well with cement or replace the failed blowout preventer.

Shortly after officials lambasted his company in Galliano, Tony Hayward, the chief executive of BP, invited reporters to follow as he walked along the beach at Port Fourchon, which was crowded with workers in yellow Hazmat suits picking up shovelfuls of chocolate-colored crude off the sand.

Asked about the top kill, Mr. Hayward acknowledged that it was far from a sure fix.

“We rate the probability of success between 60 percent and 70 percent,” he said. “Beyond that, there is a third and fourth and fifth option around both containment and elimination.”


Campbell Robertson reported from Louisiana, Clifford Krauss from Houston and John M. Broder from Washington.

    Oil Hits Home, Spreading Arc of Frustration, NYT, 24.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/25/science/earth/25spill.html

Despite Obama’s Moratorium, Drilling Projects Move Ahead

May 23, 2010
The New York Times
By IAN URBINA

WASHINGTON — In the days since President Obama announced a moratorium on permits for drilling new offshore oil wells and a halt to a controversial type of environmental waiver that was given to the Deepwater Horizon rig, at least seven new permits for various types of drilling and five environmental waivers have been granted, according to records.

The records also indicate that since the April 20 explosion on the rig, federal regulators have granted at least 19 environmental waivers for gulf drilling projects and at least 17 drilling permits, most of which were for types of work like that on the Deepwater Horizon shortly before it exploded, pouring a ceaseless current of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

Asked about the permits and waivers, officials at the Department of the Interior and the Minerals Management Service, which regulates drilling, pointed to public statements by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, reiterating that the agency had no intention of stopping all new oil and gas production in the gulf.

Department of the Interior officials said in a statement that the moratorium was meant only to halt permits for the drilling of new wells. It was not meant to stop permits for new work on existing drilling projects like the Deepwater Horizon.

But critics say the moratorium has been violated or too narrowly defined to prevent another disaster.

With crude oil still pouring into the gulf and washing up on beaches and in wetlands, President Obama is sending Mr. Salazar and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano back to the region on Monday.

In a toughly worded warning to BP on Sunday, Mr. Salazar said at a news conference outside the company’s headquarters in Houston, “If we find they’re not doing what they’re supposed to be doing, we’ll push them out of the way appropriately.”

Mr. Salazar’s position conflicted with one laid out several hours earlier, by the commandant of the United States Coast Guard, Adm. Thad W. Allen, who said that the oil conglomerate’s access to the mile-deep well site meant that the government could not take over the lead in efforts to stop the leak.

“They have the eyes and ears that are down there,” the admiral said on CNN’s “State of the Union” program. “They are necessarily the modality by which this is going to get solved.”

Since the explosion, federal regulators have been harshly criticized for giving BP’s Deepwater Horizon and hundreds of other drilling projects waivers from full environmental review and for failing to provide rigorous oversight of these projects.

In voicing his frustration with these regulators and vowing to change how they operate, Mr. Obama announced on May 14 a moratorium on drilling new wells and the granting of environmental waivers.

“It seems as if permits were too often issued based on little more than assurances of safety from the oil companies,” Mr. Obama said. “That cannot and will not happen anymore.”

“We’re also closing the loophole that has allowed some oil companies to bypass some critical environmental reviews,” he added in reference to the environmental waivers.

But records indicated that regulators continued granting the environmental waivers and permits for types of work like that occurring on the Deepwater Horizon.

In testifying before Congress on May 18, Mr. Salazar and officials from his agency said they recognized the problems with the waivers and they intended to try to rein them in. But Mr. Salazar also said that he was limited by a statutory requirement that he said obligated his agency to process drilling requests within 30 days after they have been submitted.

“That is what has driven a number of the categorical exclusions that have been given over time in the gulf,” he said.

But critics remained unsatisfied.

Shown the data indicating that waivers and permits were still being granted, Senator Benjamin L. Cardin, Democrat of Maryland, said he was “deeply troubled.”

“We were given the clear impression that these waivers and permits were not being granted,” said Mr. Cardin, who is a member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, where Mr. Salazar testified last week. “I think the presumption should be that there should be stronger environmental reviews, not weaker.”

None of the projects that have recently been granted environmental waivers have started drilling.

However, these waivers have been especially troublesome to environmentalists because they were granted through a special legal provision that is supposed to be limited to projects that present minimal or no risk to the environment.

At least six of the drilling projects that have been given waivers in the past four weeks are for waters that are deeper — and therefore more difficult and dangerous — than where Deepwater Horizon was operating. While that rig, which was drilling at a depth just shy of 5,000 feet, was classified as a deep-water operation, many of the wells in the six projects are classified as “ultra” deep water, including four new wells at over 9,100 feet.

In explaining why they were still granting new permits for certain types of drilling on existing wells, Department of the Interior officials said some of the procedures being allowed are necessary for the safety of the existing wellbore.

Pending the recommendations of the 30-day safety review, the officials said, drilling under permits approved before April 20 “may go forward, along with applications to modify existing wells and permits, if those actions are determined to be appropriate.”

But Interior Department officials have also explained that one of the main justifications of the moratorium on new drilling was safety. The moratorium was meant to ensure that no new accidents occurred while the administration had time to review the regulatory system.

And yet, the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration has classified some of the drilling types that have been allowed to continue as being as hazardous as new well drilling. Federal records also indicate that there have been at least three major accidents involving spills, leaks or explosions on rigs in the gulf since 2002 caused by the drilling procedures still being permitted.

“The moratorium does not even cover the dangerous drilling that caused the problem in the first place,” said Daniel J. Rohlf, a law professor at Lewis & Clark Law School, adding he was not certain that the Interior Department was capable of carrying out the needed reforms.

The moratorium has created inconsistencies and confusion.

While Interior Department officials have said certain new drilling procedures on existing wells can proceed, Mr. Salazar, when pressed to explain why new drilling was being allowed, testified on May 18 that “there is no deep-water well in the O.C.S. that has been spudded — that means started — after April 20,” referring to the gulf’s outer continental shelf.

However, Newfield Exploration Company has confirmed that it began drilling a deep-water well in 2,095 feet of water after April 20. Records indicate that Newfield was issued a permit on May 11 to initiate a sidetrack drill, with a required spud date of May 10. A sidetrack is a secondary wellbore drilled away from the original hole.

Among the types of drilling permits that the minerals agency is still granting are called bypass permits. These allow an operator to drill around a mechanical problem in the original hole to the original target from the existing wellbore.

Five days before the explosion, the Deepwater Horizon requested and received a revised bypass permit, which was the last drilling permit the rig received from the minerals agency before the explosion. The bore was created and it was the faulty cementing or plugging of that hole that has been cited as one of the causes of the explosion.

In reviewing the minerals agency, federal investigators are likely to pay close attention to how permits and waivers have been granted to drilling projects.

Even before the Deepwater Horizon disaster, the use of environmental waivers was a source of concern. In September 2009, the Government Accountability Office released a report concluding that the waivers were being illegally granted to onshore drilling projects.

This month, the Interior Department announced plans to restrict the use of the waivers onshore, though not offshore. It also began a joint investigation of the offshore waiver process with the Council on Environmental Quality, an environmental arm of the White House.

The investigation, however, is likely to take months, and in the meantime the waivers are continuing to be issued. There is also a 60-day statute of limitations on contesting the waivers, which reduces the chances that they will be reversed if problems are found with the projects or the Obama administration’s review finds fault in the exemption process.

At least three lawsuits to strike down the waivers have been filed by environmental groups this month. The lawsuits argue that the waivers are overly broad and that they undermine the spirit of laws like the National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act, which forbid drilling projects from moving forward unless they produce detailed environmental studies about minimizing potential risks.

    Despite Obama’s Moratorium, Drilling Projects Move Ahead, NYT, 23.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/24/us/24moratorium.html

Officials Back to Gulf as Frustration on Spill Spreads

May 23, 2010
The New York Times
By BRIAN KNOWLTON

WASHINGTON — Under increasing criticism for not moving more aggressively to halt the oil gusher in the Gulf of Mexico, President Barack Obama sent three cabinet members to the area, examined possible new remedies and formed a special commission to investigate the disastrous leak and “make sure it never happens again.”

But the commandant of the United States Coast Guard, Admiral Thad Allen, said Sunday that the access that the BP oil conglomerate has to the mile-deep well site meant that the government could not take over the lead in efforts to stop the leak.

“They have the eyes and ears that are down there,” the admiral said on CNN’s “State of the Union" television news program. “They are necessarily the modality by which this is going to get solved.”

With some Louisiana islands now fouled by layers of heavy crude, and species like the brown pelican increasingly endangered, anger has been mounting against both the government and BP, which is legally responsible for the cleanup.

Lisa P. Jackson, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, was meeting with frustrated Louisiana residents on Sunday, while Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano were heading to the region on Monday.

Adm. Allen said that the latest attempt to cap the flow, by pumping heavy mud into the well in an operation known as a “top kill,” had been pushed back from the weekend to Tuesday.

“It’s taking time to get everything set up,” said Tom Mueller, a BP spokesman. “It’s never been done before. We’ve got to make sure everything is right.” But with layers of rust-colored oil invading fragile marshlands, damaging fishing grounds and playing havoc with tourism, the region has lost patience.

Adm. Allen said government engineers were examining a proposal, vigorously pressed by Louisiana state officials, to build an artificial array of 80 miles of protective sand berms beyond the natural barrier islands. But he said that could take a year, and quicker solutions were needed.

The admiral and BP officials said Sunday that everything was being done to plug the well before August, when relief wells being drilled to help stanch the flow should be completed.

Meantime, a tube inserted into a leaking pipe near the sea floor was recovering just 1,360 barrels a day, BP said Sunday. That is down from a high of 5,000 last week, clearly far from the entire flow.

Should the “top kill” fail, Adm. Allen said, the next step would be to install a new blowout preventer — the huge valve at the sea floor meant to allow a quick cutoff of oil — above the one that failed after the April 20 explosion that destroyed the oil rig Deepwater Horizon, killing 11 workers.

“We will keep trying to shut off this well,” Bob Dudley, managing director of BP, said on a television news program on CNN. “We’re not going to wait until August.”

But even oil-spill experts who had been somewhat more optimistic are sounding a grimmer tone, saying it is becoming clear that it could take years for the Gulf and the wildlife it supports to recover. “I’m afraid we’re just seeing the beginning of what is going to be a long, ugly summer,” Ed Overton, a Louisiana State University professor, told the Times-Picayune of New Orleans.

On Friday, Mr. Obama established a bipartisan national commission to investigate the spill and find ways to prevent a repetition.

He named two prominent former officials to lead the commission — Bob Graham, the former senator from Florida, and William K. Reilly, the former EPA administrator — and gave them six months to come up with a plan to revamp federal regulation of offshore drilling.

“I want to know what worked and what didn’t work in our response to the disaster, and where oversight of the oil and gas industry broke down,” Mr. Obama said on Saturday. “We know, for example, that a cozy relationship between oil and gas companies and agencies that regulate them has long been a source of concern.”

Mr. Obama said he would hold both the government and BP accountable. But he did not retreat from his plan to expand offshore oil drilling and in fact portrayed the commission as a means to make that possible.

“Because it represents 30 percent of our oil production, the Gulf of Mexico can play an important part in securing our energy future,” the president said. “But we can only pursue offshore oil drilling if we have assurances that a disaster like the BP oil spill will not happen again.”

Environmental groups welcomed the establishment of the commission.

Adm. Allen rejected the notion of a too-cozy relationship between the government and BP, saying the government was closely overseeing the company’s efforts.

Asked on CNN whether he trusted BP, the admiral referred to the company’s chief executive, saying: “I trust Tony Hayward. When I talk to him, I get an answer.” But he took exception with Mr. Hayward’s comment, in an interview with Sky News in Britain, that the environmental impact of the leak was likely to be “very, very modest.”

The admiral said that it would be wrong to suggest that the problem was anything short of “potentially catastrophic for this country.”

The accident has put some advocates of offshore drilling in an awkward position. But the woman who brought the phrase “Drill, baby, drill,” into the political lexicon, the former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, insisted on Sunday that her views had not changed.

“I’m a supporter of offshore drilling,” she said on Fox News Sunday, while adding that “the oil companies have got to be held accountable.” But Mrs. Palin suggested that oil-company donations to Mr. Obama’s presidential campaign might help explain why it took him “so doggone long,” in her view, to respond to the spill.

Mr. Obama has come under increasing fire for not being more aggressive. Cable channels are filled with commentators asking why the federal government has left so much to BP to handle.

The same complaints are heard on the Gulf Coast.

Adm. Allen said that he understands the deep discontent of Gulf Coast residents. "Nobody likes to have a feeling that you can’t do something about a very big problem,” said the admiral, who helped lead the recovery effort after Hurricane Katrina.

But “we’re on entirely new ground here,” he said on CNN. “This is an entirely new world.”


Peter Baker contributed reporting.

    Officials Back to Gulf as Frustration on Spill Spreads, NYT, 23.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/24/us/24spill.html

More Than Just an Oil Spill

May 21, 2010
The New York Times
By BOB HERBERT

Hopedale, La.

The warm, soft winds coming in off the gulf have lost their power to soothe. Anxiety is king now — all along the coast.

“You can’t sleep no more; that’s how bad it is,” said John Blanchard, an oyster fisherman whose life has been upended by the monstrous oil spill fouling an enormous swath of the Gulf of Mexico. He shook his head. “My wife and I have got two kids, 2 and 7. We could lose everything we’ve been working all of our lives for.”

I was standing on a gently rocking oyster boat with Mr. Blanchard and several other veteran fishermen who still seemed stunned by the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe. Instead of harvesting oysters, they were out on the water distributing oil retention booms and doing whatever else they could to bolster the coastline’s meager defenses against the oil making its way ominously and relentlessly, like an invading army, toward the area’s delicate and heartbreakingly vulnerable wetlands.

A fisherman named Donny Campo tried to hide his anger with wisecracks, but it didn’t work. “They put us out of work, and now we’re cleaning up their mess,” he said. “Yeah, I’m mad. Some of us have been at this for generations. I’m 46 years old and my son — he’s graduating from high school this week — he was already fishing oysters. There’s a whole way of life at risk here.”

The risks unleashed by the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig are profound — the latest to be set in motion by the scandalous, rapacious greed of the oil industry and its powerful allies and enablers in government. America is selling its soul for oil.

The vast, sprawling coastal marshes of Louisiana, where the Mississippi River drains into the gulf, are among the finest natural resources to be found anywhere in the world. And they are a positively crucial resource for America. Think shrimp estuaries and bird rookeries and oyster fishing grounds.

These wetlands are one of the nation’s most abundant sources of seafood. And they are indispensable when it comes to the nation’s bird population. Most of the migratory ducks and geese in the United States spend time in the Louisiana wetlands as they travel to and from Latin America.

Think songbirds. Paul Harrison, a specialist on the Mississippi River and its environs at the Environmental Defense Fund, told me that the wetlands are relied on by all 110 neo-tropical migratory songbird species. The migrating season for these beautiful, delicate creatures is right now — as many as 25 million can pass through the area each day.

Already the oil from the nightmare brought to us by BP is making its way into these wetlands, into this natural paradise that belongs not just to the people of Louisiana but to all Americans. Oil is showing up along dozens of miles of the Louisiana coast, including the beaches of Grand Isle, which were ordered closed to the public.

The response of the Obama administration and the general public to this latest outrage at the hands of a giant, politically connected corporation has been embarrassingly tepid. We take our whippings in stride in this country. We behave as though there is nothing we can do about it.

The fact that 11 human beings were killed in the Deepwater Horizon explosion (their bodies never found) has become, at best, an afterthought. BP counts its profits in the billions, and, therefore, it’s important. The 11 men working on the rig were no more important in the current American scheme of things than the oystermen losing their livelihoods along the gulf, or the wildlife doomed to die in an environment fouled by BP’s oil, or the waters that will be left unfit for ordinary families to swim and boat in.

This is the bitter reality of the American present, a period in which big business has cemented an unholy alliance with big government against the interests of ordinary Americans, who, of course, are the great majority of Americans. The great majority of Americans no longer matter.

No one knows how much of BP’s runaway oil will contaminate the gulf coast’s marshes and lakes and bayous and canals, destroying wildlife and fauna — and ruining the hopes and dreams of countless human families. What is known is that whatever oil gets in will be next to impossible to get out. It gets into the soil and the water and the plant life and can’t be scraped off the way you might be able to scrape the oil off of a beach.

It permeates and undermines the ecosystem in much the same way that big corporations have permeated and undermined our political system, with similarly devastating results.


Gail Collins is off today.

    More Than Just an Oil Spill, NYT, 21.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/22/opinion/22herbert.html

Murky Waters

May 20, 2010
The New York Times

Just about everything we know about the disastrous gulf oil spill we could have learned from Google Earth: thousands of miles of the Gulf of Mexico covered in oil slick or sheen, some of it headed for the Florida coast; almost 46,000 square miles, an area about the size of Pennsylvania, closed to fishing; miles of Louisiana marshland under siege from heavy oil.

But there is far more that we don’t know, either because the government has not extracted the information from BP or is not sharing it with the public.

Either way, this is a disservice to a nation with a strong public interest in knowing how bad this spill is. Each day seems to bring some alarming new disclosure. Even BP seems willing to concede that its 5,000-barrel-a-day estimate of the leak is much too small. Giant oil plumes mixed with seawater are reported to exist beneath the surface, but nobody in government seems to know how deep and broad they are and what fish species they may be damaging. If they know, they aren’t saying.

Here’s one thing we do know: Representative Edward Markey, a Democrat of Massachusetts, managed by the simple expedient of writing a letter to pry from BP a live feed of the oil gushing from the leak 5,000 feet below the surface. He showed it on Thursday, and scientists said the leak appeared much larger than advertised by BP. Mr. Markey’s staff said that independent scientists had asked for the same footage but BP had denied it.

As for the administration, The Times reported on Thursday that while the Environmental Protection Agency has taken water samples near the shoreline, which so far show minimal damage, it has yet to release findings from deeper waters. Some scientists have complained that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has been slow to investigate the magnitude of the spill and the damage it is causing in those waters.

Sylvia Earle, the noted oceanographer and a former senior official at NOAA, said Wednesday on Capitol Hill that “it seems baffling that we don’t know how much oil is being spilled” and where it is in the water column. Jane Lubchenco, an equally distinguished oceanographer who now runs the agency, said she was devoting “all possible” resources to finding out. One would have expected more by now — one month and counting since the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig.

At issue here are two things we want from the Obama administration: transparency and toughness. The public needs to know everything the administration knows, in real time. If the administration is being kept in the dark by BP, the answer is to get tough with BP.

The administration was a bit slow off the mark, but deserves great credit for its response to the spill. It also is dealing with a big and defensive company whose financial interest lies in minimizing the damage.

But the credibility of the federal government is on the line. Each day brings not only depressing environmental news but fresh evidence of past regulatory failures by one government agency or another. The Minerals Management Service, in particular, ignored basic environmental laws like the Marine Mammals Protection Act and its own rules to fast-track applications by BP and other companies to drill in the deepwater gulf.

President Obama is expected to appoint a commission to investigate the spill, including its causes and the regulatory lapses that preceded it. Right now, the Minerals Management Service and the Coast Guard are basically investigating themselves — an untenable situation. The new commission should include experts who do not work for either government or industry, whose cozy relationship over the years is partly responsible for this mess we are in.

    Murky Waters, NYT, 20.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/21/opinion/21fri1.html

Gulf Oil Again Imperils Sea Turtle

May 18, 2010
The New York Times
By LESLIE KAUFMAN

PADRE ISLAND NATIONAL SEASHORE, Tex. — It is nesting season here, and just offshore, Kemp’s ridley sea turtle No. 15 circles in the water before dragging herself onto the sand to lay another clutch of eggs.

The sea turtle, affectionately nicknamed Thelma by a National Park Service employee, has already beaten some terrible odds. Still in the egg, she was airlifted here from Mexico in after the 1979 blowout of the Ixtoc 1 rig, which spilled millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico and covered the turtles’ primary nesting place.

Now Thelma and others of her species are being monitored closely by worried scientists as another major oil disaster threatens their habitat. Federal officials said Tuesday that since April 30, 10 days after the accident on the Deepwater Horizon, they have recorded 156 sea turtle deaths; most of the turtles were Kemp’s ridleys. And though they cannot say for sure that the oil was responsible, the number is far higher than usual for this time of year, the officials said.

The Deepwater Horizon spill menaces a wide variety of marine life, from dolphins to blue crabs. On Tuesday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration expanded a fishing ban in the gulf because of the spreading oil. But of the endangered marine species that frequent gulf waters, only the Kemp’s ridley relies on the region as its sole breeding ground.

Since the Ixtoc 1 spill, the turtles, whose numbers fell to several hundred in the 1980s, have made a fragile comeback, and there are now at least 8,000 adults, scientists say. But the oil gushing from the well could change that.

The turtles may be more vulnerable than any other large marine animals to the oil spreading through the gulf. An ancient creature driven by instinct, it forages for food along the coast from Louisiana to Florida, in the path of the slick.

“It lives its entire life cycle in the gulf, which is why we are so critically concerned,” said Dr. Pat Burchfield, a scientist at the Gladys Porter Zoo in Brownsville, Tex., who has studied the turtle for 38 years.

The nesting season for the sea turtles runs until mid-July, and for most of that time the mothers will remain off Padre Island and the beaches of Mexico, where there is currently no oil. But then things become more chancy, as new sea turtle babies go off to sea, floating on currents in the gulf or on seaweed patches that could be covered by crude. Hungry after egg-laying, adult females are known to go to the mouth of the Mississippi, a particularly rich feeding ground, to replenish themselves.

Juvenile turtles, who stay off the shore, have made up most of the turtle deaths in the gulf so far.

André M. Landry Jr. of the Sea Turtle and Fisheries Ecology Research Laboratory at Texas A&M University, Galveston, said satellite radios had been attached to several sea turtles, including Thelma, for research. He hopes these will offer clues about what is happening offshore.

“If she is beached, it is going to be constantly sending out a signal as opposed to the random signals they send out when they randomly come up to breathe,” Dr. Landry said.

Barbara Schroeder, national turtle coordinator for NOAA fisheries, the government agency charged with assessing damage to offshore life, said that the agency was investigating the sea turtle deaths intensively, but did not have many answers yet.

She said that so far full necropsies had been performed on 50 turtles and partial necropsies on another 17. Internal inspections of the animals, she said, did not reveal oil. But she added that scientists still had to test tissue samples taken from some of the turtles for evidence of oil.

She cautioned that it might be hard to determine conclusively how the turtles died or even how the spill was affecting the species more generally.

“People think this is like television, where the mystery is solved in one hour,” she said. “It is very complex. Most of the impacts occurring to turtles are out of sight. Most turtles never wash ashore.”

The Kemp’s ridley is millions of years old; its ancestors once swam with dinosaurs. Sandy olive in color, Kemp’s ridleys are the smallest of the sea turtles, only about two feet across. Although the turtles have been spotted along the Atlantic Seaboard, they return to the warm waters of the gulf to breed.

As recently as the 1940s, they were abundant in the Mexican gulf waters. Tens of thousands at a time would come ashore on the same day at Rancho Nuevo, a remote Mexican beach in Tamaulipas State, to lay their eggs in the synchronized pattern unique to their breed. But pollution, the collection of eggs for food and aphrodisiacs and the nets of shrimp trawlers depleted their numbers.

Then came the blowout on the Ixtoc 1. The deepwater well dumped three million barrels of crude into the gulf, covering the beach at Rancho Nuevo. Nine thousand hatchlings had to be airlifted to nearby beaches. Although the role of the oil in killing the turtles was never confirmed, by 1985, there were fewer than 1,000 Kemp’s ridleys left.

To prevent a single environmental catastrophe from sending the turtles into extinction, eggs from remaining turtles, including an egg that became sea turtle No. 15, were brought here to Padre Island to begin a new colony. She came in 1986.

At birth, the babies were set free in the surf down the road from the ranger station to allow them to imprint the beach on their memories, then captured again and protected until they were nine months old and less susceptible to becoming prey.

“We called it head start, after the school program,” said Donna J. Shaver, chief of sea turtle science and recovery for the National Park Service at Padre Island, who has worked with the sea turtles there since 1980.

No. 15 has returned to the island six times to lay clutches of eggs, burying her most recent round of 92 eggs in the sand by an enormous rusted, beached buoy only one and a half miles from where she was first put into the surf 24 years ago.

“Their precision is really amazing,” Dr. Shaver said. Scientists will be watching the radio blips from the tagged turtles closely, but the tracking devices are not infallible.

The transmitters might stop functioning because of dead batteries. And even if a turtle is known to have beached, the carcass might never be found or might be found only after serious decomposition, and the cause of death might never be known.

Still, Dr. Shaver prefers to think positively until more results come in. “When I got here, there were many who thought the species might not survive at all,” she said. “We’ve come so far.”

    Gulf Oil Again Imperils Sea Turtle, NYT, 18.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/19/science/earth/19turtle.html

BP Reports Some Success in Capturing Leaking Oil

May 16, 2010
The New York Times
By SHAILA DEWAN

NEW ORLEANS — After more than three weeks of efforts to stop a gushing oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, BP engineers achieved some success on Sunday when they used a milelong pipe to capture some of the oil and divert it to a drill ship on the surface some 5,000 feet above the wellhead, company officials said.

After two false starts, engineers successfully inserted a narrow tube into the damaged pipe from which most of the oil is leaking.

“It’s working as planned,” Kent Wells, a senior executive vice president of BP, said at a briefing in Houston on Sunday afternoon. “So we do have oil and gas coming to the ship now, we do have a flare burning off the gas, and we have the oil that’s coming to the ship going to our surge tank.”

Mr. Wells said he could not yet say how much oil had been captured or what percentage of the oil leaking from a 21-inch riser pipe was now flowing into the 4-inch-wide insertion tube. “We want to slowly optimize it to try to capture as much of the oil and gas as we can without taking in a large amount of seawater,” he said.

So far, the spill has not spoiled beaches or delicate wetlands, in part because of favorable winds and tides and in part because of the use of booms to corral the oil and chemical dispersants.

The capture operation on Sunday was the first successful effort to stem the flow from the damaged well, which has been spewing oil since a rig exploded on April 20 and sank.

The announcement by BP came on the heels of reports that the spill might be might much worse than estimated. Scientists said they had found giant plumes of oil in the deep waters of the gulf, including one as large as 10 miles long, 3 miles wide and 300 feet thick.

BP officials pointed out that even if the tube was successful, it was only a stopgap measure. The real goal, they said, is to seal the well permanently.

Preparations continued on Sunday on a plan to pump heavy drilling mud into the well through the blowout preventer, the safety device at the wellhead that failed during the accident.

In the procedure, called a top kill, the mud would be used to overcome the pressure of the rising oil, stopping the flow. The mud would be followed by cement, which would permanently seal the well.

Mr. Wells said Sunday that BP was a week to 10 days away from trying the maneuver.

The mud would be pumped from a drill ship, the Q4000, that is in place on the surface. Mr. Wells said the ship had more than 2 million gallons of mud on board — far more than needed — to pump into the well, which had reached about 13,000 feet below the seabed when the accident occurred.

In a brief interview, Mr. Wells said that a “junk shot,” an effort to clog the blowout preventer with golf balls and other objects before the mud is used, was still a possibility.

But in an apparent indication of the tube’s success, BP was already building a backup version.

The tube is basically a five-foot-long section of pipe outfitted with rubber seals designed to keep out seawater, attached in turn to a milelong section of pipe leading from the drill ship to the seafloor.

It was one of several proposed methods of stanching the flow of at least 210,000 gallons of oil a day that has been threatening marine life and sensitive coastal areas in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. BP officials have emphasized that none of the methods have been tried before at the depth of this leak.

At the briefing, Mr. Wells was asked about reports from a research vessel that discovered the huge plumes of oil. He said that he did not know anything about them, but that the Unified Area Command, the cooperative effort involving BP and state and local agencies, was seeking more information.

The plume reports added to the many questions that have been raised about the amount of leaking oil, which many scientists have said is far higher than the official estimate of 5,000 barrels, or 210,000 gallons, a day. That estimate was reached using satellite imagery, flyovers and visual observation, company officials have said.

The reports also raised concerns about the use of oil dispersants underwater, which the Environmental Protection Agency approved on Friday after several tests. Normally, dispersants are used on the surface, and scientists have said that the effects of using them underwater are largely unknown.

Representative Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts and chairman of the Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment, criticized BP, saying it had failed to respond substantively to his requests for more information about how it had reached its estimate of how much oil is leaking. He also said the company had refused to engage independent scientists who might offer a better assessment of the amount.

“BP is burying its head in the sand on these underwater threats,” Mr. Markey said in a written statement on Sunday. “These huge plumes of oil are like hidden mushroom clouds that indicate a larger spill than originally thought and portend more dangerous long-term fallout for the Gulf of Mexico’s wildlife and economy.”

BP began trying to insert the tube on Friday, but an effort to connect the pipe leading from the drill ship to the tube failed and the device had to be brought back to the surface for adjustments.

“This is all part of reinventing technology,” Tom Mueller, a BP spokesman, said on Saturday. “It’s not what I’d call a problem — it’s what I’d call learning, reconfiguring, doing it again.”

Around midnight Saturday, the tube was reinserted and worked for about four hours before it was dislodged after being mishandled by the submersibles, Mr. Wells said.

“At that time, we were just starting to get oil to the surface,” Mr. Wells said.

The oil was going to the Discoverer Enterprise, a drill ship, which has equipment for separating water from oil and can hold about 5 million gallons of oil.

Though that attempt failed, it was important because it demonstrated that features designed to keep hydrates from forming were working, Mr. Wells said. Hydrates, icelike structures of methane and water molecules that form in the presence of seawater at low temperatures and high pressures, forced BP to abandon an earlier effort to corral the leak with a 98-ton containment dome.


Henry Fountain contributed reporting from New York.

    BP Reports Some Success in Capturing Leaking Oil, NYT, 16.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/17/us/17spill.html

Latest Effort to Stop Gulf Oil Leak Hits a Snag

May 15, 2010
Filed at 3:02 p.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

ROBERT, La. (AP) -- BP says it expects to be using a mile-long tube to siphon crude from a gushing well beneath the Gulf of Mexico by Saturday night. The company said it had a setback but is working again to insert it.

The company began early Friday with the latest effort to contain a massive oil spill caused by an exploded drilling rig. Engineers have been carefully trying to insert the tube into a damaged oil pipe a mile below the surface by using robotic submarines.

Doug Suttles, BP's chief operating officer, said Saturday that the contraption was brought back to the surface Friday night to readjust it. But he says the company working again to insert it and expects to be bringing oil up to the surface by Saturday night.

At least 210,000 gallons of oil has been leaking into the Gulf each day since the explosion three weeks ago.

------

Associated Press writers Janet McConnaughey near Fort Jackson, Erica Werner, Matthew Daly and Frederic J. Frommer in Washington, Jason Dearen in New Orleans and Melinda Deslatte in Baton Rouge, La., contributed to this report.

    Latest Effort to Stop Gulf Oil Leak Hits a Snag, NYT, 15.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/05/15/us/AP-US-Gulf-Oil-Spill.html

White House Keeps Up Heat on BP Over Oil Spill

May 15, 2010
Filed at 3:01 p.m. ET
The New York Times
By REUTERS

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Top Obama administration officials demanded "immediate public clarification" on Saturday from BP Plc Chief Executive Tony Hayward over BP's intentions about paying costs associated with the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

"The public has a right to a clear understanding of BP's commitment to redress all of the damage that has occurred or that will occur in the future as a result of the oil spill," Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano wrote in a letter to Hayward.

"Therefore, in the event that our understanding is inaccurate, we request immediate public clarification of BP's true intentions," Salazar and Napolitano said in the letter.

Crude oil is gushing unchecked from BP's blown-out offshore well a mile deep on the floor of the Gulf and the company has yet to figure out a way to stem the flow.

The spill might prove to be one of the most devastating environmental disasters the United States has ever faced, Salazar and Napolitano wrote in the letter, released to the media on Saturday and dated May 14, the same day an angry President Barack Obama lashed out at oil industry executives over their response to the calamity.

There have been questions about the implications of the current U.S. law, which limits energy companies' liability for lost business and local tax revenues from oil spills to $75 million.

Salazar and Napolitano cited repeated statements by company executives that BP was taking responsibility for the spill and would cover spill-related costs.

"Based on these statement, we understand that BP will not in any way seek to rely on the potential $75 million statutory cap to refuse to provide compensation to any individuals or others harmed by the oil spill," they wrote.

(Editing by Doina Chiacu)

    White House Keeps Up Heat on BP Over Oil Spill, NYT, 15.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2010/05/15/us/politics/politics-us-oil-rig-leak-obama.html

Obama Vows End to ‘Cozy’ Oversight of Oil Industry

May 14, 2010
The New York Times
By HELENE COOPER and JOHN M. BRODER

WASHINGTON — President Obama angrily denounced the finger-pointing among the three companies involved in the Gulf of Mexico oil spill as a “ridiculous spectacle,” and vowed on Friday to end what he called the “cozy relationship” between the government and the oil industry that has existed for a decade or more.

In sharp remarks during an appearance in the Rose Garden, Mr. Obama announced a review of environmental safeguards for oil and gas exploration to prevent future spills. He said that he “will not tolerate any more finger-pointing or irresponsibility” from the industry or the government over who made the mess or how to fix it.

“This is a responsibility that all of us share,” Mr. Obama said. “The oil companies share it. The manufacturers of this equipment share it. The agencies and the federal government in charge of oversight share that responsibility.”

Mr. Obama said that he, too, feels the “anger and frustration” expressed by many Americans, and particularly by residents and business people in the gulf region.

“We know there’s a level of uncertainty,” Mr. Obama said, over just how much oil is gushing into the gulf from the undersea well that was left damaged and leaking by an explosion and fire that sank a drilling rig in April. He added that his administration’s response has always been “geared toward the possibility of a catastrophic event.”

Reacting to reports that federal regulators allowed extensive offshore drilling without first demanding the required environmental permits, the White House and the Interior Department said Friday that there would be a review of all actions taken by the Minerals Management Service, the agency responsible for offshore rigs, under the National Environmental Policy Act.

The law, enacted after the Santa Barbara oil spill in 1969, mandates that federal agencies must complete a thorough environmental assessment before approving any major project, especially one including offshore drilling.

The minerals service short-circuited the process when it granted hundreds of recent drilling permits, according to documents and current and former government officials. The BP well that blew in the gulf last month was granted an exemption from the assessment process because company officials assured regulators that it carried little hazard. Officials went along with the company and granted the permit.

The administration said it would study the way oil regulators apply the environmental law and make changes if necessary.

A review of the overall environmental policy procedures for the Minerals Management Service is an important part of the comprehensive and thorough investigation of the explosion and the resulting leak, said Interior Secretary Ken Salazar. “But it also continues the reform effort that we have been undertaking at M.M.S. and throughout Interior,” he added.

    Obama Vows End to ‘Cozy’ Oversight of Oil Industry, NYT, 14.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/15/us/politics/15obama.html

Size of Oil Spill Underestimated, Scientists Say

May 13, 2010
The New York Times
By JUSTIN GILLIS

Two weeks ago, the government put out a round estimate of the size of the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico: 5,000 barrels a day. Repeated endlessly in news reports, it has become conventional wisdom.

But scientists and environmental groups are raising sharp questions about that estimate, declaring that the leak must be far larger. They also criticize BP for refusing to use well-known scientific techniques that would give a more precise figure.

The criticism escalated on Thursday, a day after the release of a video that showed a huge black plume of oil gushing from the broken well at a seemingly high rate. BP has repeatedly claimed that measuring the plume would be impossible.

The figure of 5,000 barrels a day was hastily produced by government scientists in Seattle. It appears to have been calculated using a method that is specifically not recommended for major oil spills.

Ian R. MacDonald, an oceanographer at Florida State University who is an expert in the analysis of oil slicks, said he had made his own rough calculations using satellite imagery. They suggested that the leak could “easily be four or five times” the government estimate, he said.

“The government has a responsibility to get good numbers,” Dr. MacDonald said. “If it’s beyond their technical capability, the whole world is ready to help them.”

Scientists said that the size of the spill was directly related to the amount of damage it would do in the ocean and onshore, and that calculating it accurately was important for that reason.

BP has repeatedly said that its highest priority is stopping the leak, not measuring it. “There’s just no way to measure it,” Kent Wells, a BP senior vice president, said in a recent briefing.

Yet for decades, specialists have used a technique that is almost tailor-made for the problem. With undersea gear that resembles the ultrasound machines in medical offices, they measure the flow rate from hot-water vents on the ocean floor. Scientists said that such equipment could be tuned to allow for accurate measurement of oil and gas flowing from the well.

Richard Camilli and Andy Bowen, of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, who have routinely made such measurements, spoke extensively to BP last week, Mr. Bowen said. They were poised to fly to the gulf to conduct volume measurements.

But they were contacted late in the week and told not to come, at around the time BP decided to lower a large metal container to try to capture the leak. That maneuver failed. They have not been invited again.

“The government and BP are calling the shots, so I will have to respect their judgment,” Dr. Camilli said.

BP did not respond Thursday to a question about why Dr. Camilli and Mr. Bowen were told to stand down. Speaking more broadly about the company’s policy on measuring the leak, a spokesman, David H. Nicholas, said in an e-mail message that “the estimated rate of flow would not affect either the direction or scale of our response, which is the largest in history.”

Dr. MacDonald and other scientists said the government agency that monitors the oceans, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, had been slow to mount the research effort needed to analyze the leak and assess its effects. Sylvia Earle, a former chief scientist at NOAA and perhaps the country’s best-known oceanographer, said that she, too, was concerned by the pace of the scientific response.

But Jane Lubchenco, the NOAA administrator, said in an interview on Thursday: “Our response has been instantaneous and sustained. We would like to have more assets. We would like to be doing more. We are throwing everything at it that we physically can.”

The issue of how fast the well is leaking has been murky from the beginning. For several days after the April 20 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig, the government and BP claimed that the well on the ocean floor was leaking about 1,000 barrels a day.

A small organization called SkyTruth, which uses satellite images to monitor environmental problems, published an estimate on April 27 suggesting that the flow rate had to be at least 5,000 barrels a day, and probably several times that.

The following day, the government — over public objections from BP — raised its estimate to 5,000 barrels a day. A barrel is 42 gallons, so the estimate works out to 210,000 gallons per day.

BP later acknowledged to Congress that the worst case, if the leak accelerated, would be 60,000 barrels a day, a flow rate that would dump a plume the size of the Exxon Valdez spill into the gulf every four days. BP’s chief executive, Tony Hayward, has estimated that the reservoir tapped by the out-of-control well holds at least 50 million barrels of oil.

The 5,000-barrel-a-day estimate was produced in Seattle by a NOAA unit that responds to oil spills. It was calculated with a protocol known as the Bonn convention that calls for measuring the extent of an oil spill, using its color to judge the thickness of oil atop the water, and then multiplying.

However, Alun Lewis, a British oil-spill consultant who is an authority on the Bonn convention, said the method was specifically not recommended for analyzing large spills like the one in the Gulf of Mexico, since the thickness was too difficult to judge in such a case.

Even when used for smaller spills, he said, correct application of the technique would never produce a single point estimate, like the government’s figure of 5,000 barrels a day, but rather a range that would likely be quite wide.

NOAA declined to supply detailed information on the mathematics behind the estimate, nor would it address the points raised by Mr. Lewis.

Mr. Lewis cited a video of the gushing oil pipe that was released on Wednesday. He noted that the government’s estimate would equate to a flow rate of about 146 gallons a minute. (A garden hose flows at about 10 gallons per minute.)

“Just anybody looking at that video would probably come to the conclusion that there’s more,” Mr. Lewis said.

The government has made no attempt to update its estimate since releasing it on April 28.

“I think the estimate at the time was, and remains, a reasonable estimate,” said Dr. Lubchenco, the NOAA administrator. “Having greater precision about the flow rate would not really help in any way. We would be doing the same things.”

Environmental groups contend, however, that the flow rate is a vital question. Since this accident has shattered the illusion that deep-sea oil drilling is immune to spills, they said, this one is likely to become the touchstone in planning a future response.

“If we are systematically underestimating the rate that’s being spilled, and we design a response capability based on that underestimate, then the next time we have an event of this magnitude, we are doomed to fail again,” said John Amos, the president of SkyTruth. “So it’s really important to get this number right.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 13, 2010

An earlier version of this article misstated the date of the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig.

    Size of Oil Spill Underestimated, Scientists Say, NYT, 13.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/14/us/14oil.html

A Bad Bet on Carbon

May 12, 2010
The New York Times
By ROBERT BRYCE

Washington

ON Wednesday, John Kerry and Joseph Lieberman introduced their long-awaited Senate energy bill, which includes incentives of $2 billion per year for carbon capture and sequestration, the technology that removes carbon dioxide from the smokestack at power plants and forces it into underground storage. This significant allocation would come on top of the $2.4 billion for carbon capture projects that appeared in last year’s stimulus package.

That’s a lot of money for a technology whose adoption faces three potentially insurmountable hurdles: it greatly reduces the output of power plants; pipeline capacity to move the newly captured carbon dioxide is woefully insufficient; and the volume of waste material is staggering. Lawmakers should stop perpetuating the hope that the technology can help make huge cuts in the United States’ carbon dioxide emissions.

Let’s take the first problem. Capturing carbon dioxide from the flue gas of a coal-fired electric generation plant is an energy-intensive process. Analysts estimate that capturing the carbon dioxide cuts the output of a typical plant by as much as 28 percent.

Given that the global energy sector is already straining to meet booming demand for electricity, it’s hard to believe that the United States, or any other country that relies on coal-fired generation, will agree to reduce the output of its coal-fired plants by almost a third in order to attempt carbon capture and sequestration.

Here’s the second problem. The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has estimated that up to 23,000 miles of new pipeline will be needed to carry the captured carbon dioxide to the still-undesignated underground sequestration sites. That doesn’t sound like much when you consider that America’s gas pipeline system sprawls over some 2.3 million miles. But those natural gas pipelines carry a valuable, marketable, useful commodity.

By contrast, carbon dioxide is a worthless waste product, so taxpayers would likely end up shouldering most of the cost. Yes, some of that waste gas could be used for enhanced oil recovery projects; flooding depleted oil reservoirs with carbon dioxide is a proven technology that can increase production and extend the life of existing oilfields. But the process would be useful in only a limited number of oilfields — probably less than 10 percent of the waste carbon dioxide captured from coal-fired power plants could actually be injected into American oilfields.

The third, and most vexing, problem has to do with scale. In 2009, carbon dioxide emissions in the United States totaled 5.4 billion tons. Let’s assume that policymakers want to use carbon capture to get rid of half of those emissions — say, 3 billion tons per year. That works out to about 8.2 million tons of carbon dioxide per day, which would have to be collected and compressed to about 1,000 pounds per square inch (that compressed volume of carbon dioxide would be roughly equivalent to the volume of daily global oil production).

In other words, we would need to find an underground location (or locations) able to swallow a volume equal to the contents of 41 oil supertankers each day, 365 days a year.

There will also be considerable public resistance to carbon dioxide pipelines and sequestration projects — local outcry has already stalled proposed carbon capture projects in Germany and Denmark. The fact is, few landowners are eager to have pipelines built across their property. And because of the possibility of deadly leaks, few people will to want to live near a pipeline or an underground storage cavern. This leads to the obvious question: which members of the House and Senate are going to volunteer their states to be dumping grounds for all that carbon dioxide?

For some, carbon capture and sequestration will remain the Holy Grail of carbon-reduction strategies. But before Congress throws yet more money at the procedure, lawmakers need to take a closer look at the issues that hamstring nearly every new energy-related technology: cost and scale.

Robert Bryce, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, is the author, most recently, of “Power Hungry: The Myths of ‘Green’ Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future.”

    A Bad Bet on Carbon, NYT, 13.5.2010,  http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/13/opinion/13bryce.html

Senate Gets a Climate and Energy Bill, Modified by a Gulf Spill That Still Grows

May 12, 2010
The New York Times
By JOHN M. BRODER

WASHINGTON — The long delayed and much amended Senate plan to deal with global warming and energy was unveiled on Wednesday to considerable fanfare but uncertain prospects.

After nearly eight months of negotiations with lawmakers and interest groups, Senators John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, and Joseph I. Lieberman, independent of Connecticut, produced a 987-page bill that tries to limit climate-altering emissions, reduce oil imports and create millions of new energy-related jobs.

The sponsors rewrote the section on offshore oil drilling in recent days to reflect mounting concern over the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, raising new hurdles for any future drilling off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts while allowing it to proceed off Louisiana, Texas and Alaska.

Mr. Kerry said the United States was crippled by a broken energy policy and falling behind in the global race for leadership in clean-energy technology.

“We’re threatened by the impacts of a changing climate,” he said in a packed Senate hearing room. “And right now, as one of the worst oil spills in our nation’s history washes onto our shores, no one can doubt how urgently we need a new energy policy in this country. Now is the time to take action.”

It may be difficult, however, for him to persuade the Senate to act. The country is nervously watching efforts to halt the gulf spill, the Senate is torn by deep partisan hostility and the public is uncertain whether the benefits of combating global warming are worth the costs. There is also no assurance that the bill will break through the crowded Senate calendar to reach the floor this year.

No Republicans have stepped forward to support the two senators’ efforts.

President Obama endorsed the proposal.

“Americans know what’s at stake by continuing our dependence on fossil fuels,” Mr. Obama said Wednesday. “But the challenges we face — underscored by the immense tragedy in the Gulf of Mexico — are reason to redouble our efforts to reform our nation’s energy policies. For too long, Washington has kicked this challenge to the next generation. This time, the status quo is no longer acceptable to Americans.”

He called on the Senate to move ahead so that a final bill could be enacted this year.

One of the central elements of the Senate bill — incentives to increase domestic offshore oil production — was changed in the aftermath of the explosion and fire on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in the gulf on April 20, which left an undersea well leaking oil. Instead of providing for a broad expansion of offshore drilling, the measure would have the effect of sharply limiting oil operations off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts by giving states the right to veto any drilling plan that could cause environmental or economic harm.

The original oil drilling provision was drafted in part by Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, a supporter of expanded drilling and an important envoy to other Republicans. Mr. Graham had been a partner in drawing up the climate legislation, but he dropped out of the effort last week over the problems raised by the gulf spill and an unrelated dispute with the Senate leadership over immigration.

Mr. Graham said Wednesday that while he agreed with many of the goals of his former partners, he did not think that the Senate was likely to act this year.

“The problems created by the historic oil spill in the gulf, along with the uncertainty of immigration politics, have made it extremely difficult for transformational legislation in the area of energy and climate to garner bipartisan support at this time,” he said.

The Kerry-Lieberman proposal would treat each major sector of the economy differently, while providing something for every major energy interest: loan guarantees for nuclear plant operators, incentives for use of natural gas in transportation, exemptions from emissions caps for heavy industry, generous pollution permits for utilities for years, modest carbon dioxide limits for oil refiners and substantial refunds for consumers.

The bill’s overall goal is to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by 17 percent (compared with 2005 levels) by 2020, and by 83 percent by 2050. The targets match those in a House bill passed last year and in the Obama administration’s announced policy goal.

There is no economywide cap-and-trade system like that in the House measure, but electric utilities will face limits on their greenhouse-gas emissions and a market will be established to allow them to trade pollution permits. The leader of the main utility industry trade group, Thomas R. Kuhn of the Edison Electric Institute, stood with Mr. Kerry and Mr. Lieberman on Wednesday and endorsed their bill.

The oil industry will have to buy emissions permits, based loosely on the price set in the utility-trading markets. It is expected they will pass along added costs to consumers in the form of higher fuel prices. The American Petroleum Institute said it was withholding judgment until the measure’s effects on the oil and gas industry could be analyzed. Some oil companies, however, including BP and ConocoPhillips, have indicated their support.

It cannot yet be known whether the concessions and compromises embodied in the bill will let it attract the 60 votes needed to thwart a filibuster.

Some environmental advocates were involved in drafting the bill and were highly supportive. But other environmentalists said the bill did not go far enough and offered too many concessions to win industry support.

The United States Chamber of Commerce, whose support was avidly courted, refused to endorse the measure, calling it a “work in progress” that may prove too costly to business.

    Senate Gets a Climate and Energy Bill, Modified by a Gulf Spill That Still Grows, NYT, 12.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/13/science/earth/13climate.html

5 Die as Tornadoes Hit Oklahoma

May 11, 2010
The New York Times
By DERRICK HENRY

At least five people were reported dead Monday night in Oklahoma after severe weather caused tornadoes to form across parts of the southern Plains, with some touching down with deadly force in the Oklahoma City area.

The storm cut a path of destruction that flipped vehicles over on roads and flattened or splintered houses. In news footage from KFOR-TV in Norman, some houses appeared to have simply been shaven from their foundations. A video also showed a tornado rapidly crossing a highway, dwarfing speeding cars as it continued along a grassy field.

The Oklahoma Department of Emergency Management told The Associated Press that two people were killed Oklahoma City and that three were killed in Cleveland County, south of the city. The agency did not immediately have additional details, including how the people died.

Officials also reported that at least 58 others suffered injuries throughout Oklahoma because of severe weather. Two of those injured were in critical condition. In some neighborhoods in Oklahoma City, emergency workers were going door to door to make sure everyone was accounted for. The severe weather also hit parts of Arkansas, Kansas and Missouri.

In Cleveland County, a tornado with winds of 103 m.p.h. touched down about 4 miles southeast of Norman, then crossed a highway. Roofs were blown off and power lines were reported damaged. In Kay County, near Braman, officials reported that a tornado flipped over cars as it sped through. Spotters reported that debris was visible in funnel clouds in Noble County.

The Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Okla., issued a tornado warning that remained in effect until midnight central daylight time Monday for 25 counties in eastern Oklahoma, four counties in western Arkansas, nine counties in southeast Kansas, and five counties in southwest Missouri. The watch area stretched along a line from 45 miles northeast of Chanute, Kan., to 65 miles south of McAlester, Okla., the weather service said in an advisory.

The advisory also warned of hail up to 4 inches in diameter, wind gusts of up to 80 m.p.h. and lightning. Weather scientists at the storm prediction center had predicted the severe weather, saying that the atmosphere contained the right combination of winds, heat and moisture to create dangerous conditions. Oklahoma officials also had warned residents to prepare for the storms’ potential damage.

Officials also predicted severe weather for Tuesday and possibly Wednesday.

    5 Die as Tornadoes Hit Oklahoma, NYT, 11.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/11/us/11tornado.html

New Ways to Drill, Old Methods for Cleaning Up

May 10, 2010
The New York Times
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr. and LESLIE KAUFMAN

HOUSTON — As hopes dim for containing the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico anytime soon, more people are asking why the industry was not better prepared to react.

Members of Congress are holding hearings this week and demanding to know why the federal Minerals Management Service did not force oil companies to take more precautions. Environmentalists are saying they tried to raise the alarm to Congressional committees that the industry had no way to respond to a catastrophic blowout a mile below the sea.

Local officials in the gulf are beginning to ask, “What was Plan B?” The answer, oil industry engineers are acknowledging, was to deploy technology that has not changed much in 20 years — booms, skimmers and chemical dispersants — even as the drilling technology itself has improved.

“They have horribly underestimated the likelihood of a spill and therefore horribly underestimated the consequences of something going wrong,” said Robert G. Bea, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who studies offshore drilling. “So what we have now is some equivalent of a fire drill with paper towels and buckets for cleanup.”

For years, major oil companies, as well as the Minerals Management Service, played down the possibility of an uncontrolled blowout on the sea floor, arguing that safeguards like blowout preventers were practically foolproof.

In November, Walter D. Cruickshank, deputy director of the Minerals Management Service, told a Senate committee that an undersea blowout and massive spill that had occurred in East Timor last year was highly unlikely in the Gulf of Mexico because of tighter United States regulations. All wells had safety devices to shut off the flow in emergencies, he said.

At the same hearing, a BP vice president, David Rainey, promoted the oil companies’ “blowout preventer technology, which includes redundant systems and controls” and told senators that “contrary to popular perception, ours is a high-tech industry.”

What government regulators and industry officials did not foresee in the Deepwater Horizon disaster last month is that the rig would sink and that robots would not be able to stanch the flow of oil at such depths, even though a consultant hired by government regulators in 2003 had warned that they were unreliable.

“This is the first time the industry has had to confront this issue in this water depth, and there is a lot of real-time learning going on,” BP’s chief executive officer, Tony Hayward, acknowledged at a news conference Monday. “The investigation of this whole incident will undoubtedly show up things that we should be doing differently.”

Once oil was flowing into the water, the methods of dealing with it have changed little in decades, environmentalists say. Tenting spills with giant upside-down funnels has been done in shallower waters, but until last weekend, it had not been tried in deep water. The first attempt failed.

“The oil industry went off the deep end with a new kind of risk, and they didn’t bother to build a response capability before they had a big disaster,” said Richard Charter, an advocate with Defenders of Wildlife who studies offshore drilling.

The heart of the industry’s plan to contain the oil falls to the Marine Spill Response Corporation, a nonprofit organization formed in 1990 after the Exxon Valdez disaster. It is maintained largely by fees from the biggest oil companies.

Judith Roos, a vice president of Marine Spill Response, said the majority of its equipment, including booms and skimmers, was bought in 1990. “The technology hasn’t changed that much since then,” she said.

Steve Benz, president of the corporation, said his group had no budget for research.

In the last three years, however, the company has added C-130 planes to spray dispersants. On this, the company says, it is ahead of the regulatory curve.

Allison Nyholm, a policy adviser with the American Petroleum Institute, said the industry had done extensive experiments with improving skimmers, booms and dispersants. Some booms are fire retardant and allow burning on the water, for example, while others actually absorb oil.

She noted that blowout scenarios were rare and needed to be handled on a case-by-case basis.

“One of the best tools is how you bring the best professionals together to respond to the spill,” Ms. Nyholm said. “It is not the dispersant or the boom or the burn, it is how quickly can you get the right people together.”

Yet Rick Steiner, a marine biologist and frequent consultant on big oil spills, said the oil companies could have had some version of the containment dome ready before the spill, rather than building one after it happened.

“It is like building the fire truck when your house is on fire,” Dr. Steiner said.

Engineers who work on rig structures said such prefabricated containment domes would not be practical. They said that each dome would have to be tailored to the spill, so there was little sense in making one beforehand.

Jeffrey Short, a former scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who now works for the environmental group Oceana, said it was clear that the industry was not willing to pay for enough boats and booms to enclose such a fast-growing spill.

“It’s just really hard to corral something that’s expanding at that rate,” Dr. Short said. “Ultimately it’s an investment challenge. How much money are you willing to spend on an event that happens infrequently?”

Several environmentalists also said the industry should have predicted that a blowout of this magnitude would eventually happen. John F. Amos, a former geologist for oil companies who now runs an organization that tracks oil spills using satellite images, told Congress last fall that the undersea blowout in East Timor was a warning. It leaked for 10 weeks before crews managed to drill relief wells. “Blowouts are surprisingly regular occurrences,” he said. “But ones that lead to catastrophic spills like this are quite rare.”

Jerome J. Schubert, an engineer at Texas A&M who has written extensively about undersea drilling, found in a 2005 study that “blowouts will always happen no matter how far technology and training advance” and that there were no foolproof safeguards to stop them. The study, co-written by Samuel F. Noynaert and financed by BP, found that blowouts in undersea wells had occurred at a steady rate since the 1960s despite improvements in technology.

“The best safeguards don’t always work,” he said.


James C. McKinley reported from Houston, and Leslie Kaufman from New York.

    New Ways to Drill, Old Methods for Cleaning Up, NYT, 10.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/11/us/11prepare.html

Op-Ed Columnist

Sex & Drugs & the Spill

May 10, 2010
The New York Times
By PAUL KRUGMAN

“Obama’s Katrina”: that was the line from some pundits and news sources, as they tried to blame the current administration for the gulf oil spill. It was nonsense, of course. An Associated Press review of the Obama administration’s actions and statements as the disaster unfolded found “little resemblance” to the shambolic response to Katrina — and there has been nothing like those awful days when everyone in the world except the Bush inner circle seemed aware of the human catastrophe in New Orleans.

Yet there is a common thread running through Katrina and the gulf spill — namely, the collapse in government competence and effectiveness that took place during the Bush years.

The full story of the Deepwater Horizon blowout is still emerging. But it’s already obvious both that BP failed to take adequate precautions, and that federal regulators made no effort to ensure that such precautions were taken.

For years, the Minerals Management Service, the arm of the Interior Department that oversees drilling in the gulf, minimized the environmental risks of drilling. It failed to require a backup shutdown system that is standard in much of the rest of the world, even though its own staff declared such a system necessary. It exempted many offshore drillers from the requirement that they file plans to deal with major oil spills. And it specifically allowed BP to drill Deepwater Horizon without a detailed environmental analysis.

Surely, however, none of this — except, possibly, that last exemption, granted early in the Obama administration — surprises anyone who followed the history of the Interior Department during the Bush years.

For the Bush administration was, to a large degree, run by and for the extractive industries — and I’m not just talking about Dick Cheney’s energy task force. Crucially, management of Interior was turned over to lobbyists, most notably J. Steven Griles, a coal-industry lobbyist who became deputy secretary and effectively ran the department. (In 2007 Mr. Griles pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about his ties to Jack Abramoff.)

Given this history, it’s not surprising that the Minerals Management Service became subservient to the oil industry — although what actually happened is almost too lurid to believe. According to reports by Interior’s inspector general, abuses at the agency went beyond undue influence: there was “a culture of substance abuse and promiscuity” — cocaine, sexual relationships with industry representatives, and more. Protecting the environment was presumably the last thing on these government employees’ minds.

Now, President Obama isn’t completely innocent of blame in the current spill. As I said, BP received an environmental waiver for Deepwater Horizon after Mr. Obama took office. It’s true that he’d only been in the White House for two and half months, and the Senate wouldn’t confirm the new head of the Minerals Management Service until four months later. But the fact that the administration hadn’t yet had time to put its stamp on the agency should have led to extra caution about giving the go-ahead to projects with possible environmental risks.

And it’s worth noting that environmentalists were bitterly disappointed when Mr. Obama chose Ken Salazar as secretary of the interior. They feared that he would be too friendly to mineral and agricultural interests, that his appointment meant that there wouldn’t be a sharp break with Bush-era policies — and in this one instance at least, they seem to have been right.

In any case, now is the time to make that break — and I don’t just mean by cleaning house at the Minerals Management Service. What really needs to change is our whole attitude toward government. For the troubles at Interior weren’t unique: they were part of a broader pattern that includes the failure of banking regulation and the transformation of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, a much-admired organization during the Clinton years, into a cruel joke. And the common theme in all these stories is the degradation of effective government by antigovernment ideology.

Mr. Obama understands this: he gave an especially eloquent defense of government at the University of Michigan’s commencement, declaring among other things that “government is what ensures that mines adhere to safety standards and that oil spills are cleaned up by the companies that caused them.”

Yet antigovernment ideology remains all too prevalent, despite the havoc it has wrought. In fact, it has been making a comeback with the rise of the Tea Party movement. If there’s any silver lining to the disaster in the gulf, it is that it may serve as a wake-up call, a reminder that we need politicians who believe in good government, because there are some jobs only the government can do.

    Sex & Drugs & the Spill, NYT, 10.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/10/opinion/10krugman.html

BP Plans to Park Oil Box, Unload New Equipment

May 9, 2010
Filed at 2:25 p.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

ON THE GULF OF MEXICO (AP) -- Crews planned Sunday to park the giant oil containment box on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, and offload equipment that could be used in a new attempt to stem the flow of gushing into the sea.

The equipment being offloaded from another vessel would use a tube to shoot mud and concrete directly into the well's blowout preventer, a process that could take two to three weeks. But BP PLC spokesman Mark Proegler told AP that no decisions have been made on what step the company will take next.

The company was considering three options, including the technique known as a ''top kill,'' Proegler said.

Crews planned to secure the box about 1,600 feet from the massive leak site, much farther away from where it was placed Saturday after icelike crystals clogged the top when it was over the leak, according to a daily activity sheet reviewed by The Associated Press.

It could be at least a day before BP can make another attempt at putting a lid on a well spewing about 200,000 thousands of gallons of crude into the Gulf each day.

The company's first attempt to divert the oil was foiled, its mission now in serious doubt. Meanwhile, thick blobs of tar washed up on Alabama's white sand beaches, yet another sign the spill was spreading.

It had taken about two weeks to build the box and three days to cart the containment box 50 miles out and slowly lower it to the well a mile below the surface, but the frozen depths were just too much. BP officials were not giving up hopes that a containment box -- either the one brought there or another one being built -- could cover the well. But they said it could be Monday or later before they decide whether to make another attempt to capture the oil and funnel it to a tanker at the surface.

The box was moved hundreds of feet away while officials tried to figure out their next move.

''I wouldn't say it's failed yet,'' BP chief operating officer Doug Suttles said of the containment box. ''What I would say is what we attempted to do ... didn't work.''

Early Sunday, there was little visible new activity at the site of the oil spill. The skies were clear, but the waves on the sea were kicking up and the wind was more breezy than in previous days.

There was a renewed sense of urgency as dime- to golfball-sized balls of tar washed up Saturday on Dauphin Island, three miles off the Alabama mainland at the mouth of Mobile Bay and much farther east than the thin, rainbow sheens that have arrived sporadically in the Louisiana marshes.

''It almost looks like bark, but when you pick it up it definitely has a liquid consistency and it's definitely oil,'' said Kimberly Creel, 41, who was hanging out and swimming with hundreds of other beachgoers. ''... I can only imagine what might be coming this way that might be larger.''

About a half dozen tar balls had been collected by Saturday afternoon at Dauphin Island, Coast Guard chief warrant officer Adam Wine said in Mobile, and crews in protective clothing patrolled the beach for debris. Authorities planned to test the substance but strongly suspected it came from the oil spill.

In the nearly three weeks since the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded April 20, killing 11 workers, about 210,000 gallons of crude a day has been flowing into the Gulf. As of Sunday, some 3.5 million gallons had poured into the sea, or about a third of the 11 million gallons spilled in the Exxon Valdez disaster.

Until Saturday none of the thick sludge -- those indelible images from the Valdez and other spills -- had reached shore.

It had taken more than 12 hours to slowly lower to the seafloor the peaked box the size of a four-story house, a task that required painstaking precision to accurately position it over the well for fear of damaging the leaking pipe and making the problem worse. Nothing like it had been attempted at such depths, where water pressure can crush a submarine.

Company and Coast Guard officials had cautioned that icelike hydrates, a slushy mixture of gas and water, would be one of the biggest challenges to the containment box plan, and their warnings proved accurate. The crystals clogged the opening in the top of the peaked box, BP's Suttles said, like sand in a funnel, only upside-down.

Options under consideration included raising the box high enough that warmer water would prevent the slush from forming, or using heated water or methanol. Even as officials pondered their next move, Coast Guard Rear Adm. Mary Landry said she must continue to manage expectations of what the containment box can do.

''This dome is no silver bullet to stop the leak,'' she said.

The captain of the supply boat that carried the hulking, concrete-and-steel vault for 11 hours from the Louisiana coast last week wasn't giving up hope.

''Everybody knew this was a possibility well before we brought the dome out,'' Capt. Demi Shaffer, of Seward, Alaska, told an Associated Press reporter stationed with the 12-man crew of the Joe Griffin in the heart of the containment zone. ''It's an everyday occurrence when you're drilling, with the pipeline trying to freeze up.''

The spot where the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded and sank now teems with vessels working on containing the rogue well. There are 15 boats and large ships at or near the site -- some being used in an ongoing effort to drill a relief well, considered a permanent if weeks-away fix.

Settling in to a wait-and-see mode, the vessels were making sure they were ready for the long haul. Late Saturday night, the Joe Griffin pumped roughly 84,000 gallons of fresh water into the tanks of the Ocean Intervention III, one of the vessels with the undersea robots helping in the containment effort.

News that the containment box plan, designed to siphon up to 85 percent of the leaking oil, had faltered dampened spirits in Louisiana's coastal communities.

''Everyone was hoping that that would slow it down a bit if not stop it,'' said Shane Robichaux, of Chauvin, a 39-year-old registered nurse relaxing at his vacation camp in Cocodrie. ''I'm sure they'll keep working on it till it gets fixed, one way or another. But we were hopeful that would shut it down.''

The original blowout was triggered by a bubble of methane gas that escaped from the well and shot up the drill column, expanding quickly as it burst through several seals and barriers before exploding, according to interviews with rig workers conducted during BP PLC's internal investigation. Deep sea oil drillers often encounter pockets of methane crystals as they dig into the earth.

As the bubble rose, it intensified and grew, breaking through various safety barriers, said Robert Bea, a University of California Berkley engineering professor and oil pipeline expert who detailed the interviews exclusively to an Associated Press reporter.

------

Larimer reported from Dauphin Island, Ala. Associated Press writers Ray Henry in Hammond, La., John Curran in Cocodrie, La., and AP Global Media Services Production Manager Nico Maounis in Dauphin Island contributed to this report.

    BP Plans to Park Oil Box, Unload New Equipment, 9.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/05/09/us/AP-US-Gulf-Oil-Spill.html

Amount of Spill Could Escalate, Company Admits

May 4, 2010
The New York Times
By JOHN M. BRODER, CAMPBELL ROBERTSON and CLIFFORD KRAUSS

This article is by John M. Broder, Campbell Robertson and Clifford Krauss.

WASHINGTON — In a closed-door briefing for members of Congress, a senior BP executive conceded Tuesday that the ruptured oil well in the Gulf of Mexico could conceivably spill as much as 60,000 barrels a day of oil, more than 10 times the estimate of the current flow.

The scope of the problem has grown drastically since the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded and sank into the gulf. Now, the discussion with BP on Capitol Hill is certain to intensify pressure on the company, which is facing a crisis similar to what the Toyota Motor Company had with uncontrolled acceleration — despite its efforts to control the damage to its reputation as a corporate citizen, the problem may be worsening.

Amid growing uncertainty about the extent of the leak, and when it might be stanched, pressure on BP intensified on multiple fronts Tuesday, from increasingly frustrated residents of the Gulf Coast to federal, state and local officials demanding more from the company.

The company considered a broad advertising campaign, but top BP executives rejected the idea before planning even started. “In our view, the big glossy expressions of regret don’t have a lot of credibility,” said Andrew Gowers, a BP spokesman.

Instead, the company has dispatched executives to hold town meetings in the affected region, and it has turned to lower-profile social media outlets to trumpet its cleanup efforts and moves to organize volunteers.

The Senate energy committee has summoned executives from BP and Transocean Ltd., the rig operator, as well as a number of oil industry technical experts to a hearing next week. The next day, the oversight and investigations subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee will hold a hearing, to which top executives of BP, Transocean and Halliburton have been asked to appear, a committee spokeswoman said.

That panel, which will look at the possible problems leading to explosions on the rig as well as the adequacy of containment and cleanup measures, would probably be the first of several, Representative Bart Stupak, Democrat of Michigan, the subcommittee chairman, said in a statement.

A separate federal investigation into the explosion is under way by the Coast Guard and the Minerals Management Service.

At Tuesday’s briefing, David Rainey, the BP vice president for Gulf of Mexico production, said the company was employing a variety of untried techniques to stanch the oil gushing from the well 5,000 feet below the surface.

At the briefing, Mr. Rainey and officials from Transocean and from Halliburton, which was providing cementing services on the platform, also acknowledged that they did not know how likely it was that oil from the spill would be caught up in the so-called loop currents in the gulf and be carried through the Florida Keys into the Atlantic Ocean. “What we heard today from BP, Halliburton and Transocean were a lot of worst-case scenarios without any best-case solutions,” said Representative Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, who leads the Energy and Environment Subcommittee of the House energy panel.

Federal officials have raised the possibility of a leak of more than 100,000 barrels a day if the well were to flow unchecked, but the chances of that situation occurring were unclear.

Also on Tuesday, the company’s chief executive, Tony Hayward, told Senator Bill Nelson, Democrat of Florida, that the spill would clearly cause more than $75 million in economic damage, the current cap on liability for drilling accidents.

Mr. Nelson and the two Democratic senators from New Jersey, Frank R. Lautenberg and Robert Menendez, have introduced legislation to raise that cap to $10 billion, and to make sure that the new limit applies to this spill.

While BP continues to acknowledge its responsibility to shut off and clean up the oil, it is being barraged by government officials and civil lawyers who are redoubling efforts to ensure that the company’s legal obligations are clearly defined and strictly enforced.

Attorneys general from the five Gulf Coast states have been drafting a letter to BP that will lay out demands. In the letter, they are expected to urge BP specifically to define what is meant by its repeated statement that it intends to pay “legitimate” claims, a term Attorney General Troy King of Alabama said was unacceptably nebulous.

They are also expected to press for a fund to begin paying out claims to state and local governments and to residents.

The attorneys general asked for the creation of such a fund in a meeting with BP officials on Sunday, and the next day BP announced that $25 million block grants were going to the four states most likely to be affected to help begin their efforts to prepare. But, Mr. King said, “that’s not going to be enough.”

For now, weather patterns seem to be holding the giant oil slick offshore, and are expected to do so for several more days, temporarily sparing the coast — and sparing BP the renewed criticism that would surely come with oil landfall. A containment dome is being readied to drop over the worst of the leaks.

BP has significantly stepped up its lobbying on Capitol Hill, spending nearly $16 million in 2009, more than triple what it spent just two years before, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics, a watchdog group.

But that money does not sway public opinion.

The company’s top crisis managers have been dispatched to the gulf. Mr. Gowers, the BP spokesman, said the company was now “considering some targeted advertising in the affected states” to publicize how to make claims and how to sign up to help with the cleanup.

Mr. Hayward also gave a briefing on Tuesday for reporters from Gulf Coast newspapers and The Associated Press in which he said he wanted to “win the hearts and minds” of the people.

Mr. Hayward has been a frequent guest on the morning news shows, with a consistent message: “It wasn’t our accident, but we are absolutely responsible for the oil, for cleaning it up.”

It is a mixed message, advertising experts say.

“It’s a situation laced with irony, and perceived hypocrisy,” said Abbey Klaassen, executive editor of Advertising Age. “It is a fine line between what they want to say for legal reasons and what consumers want to hear which is: ‘Mea culpa. We accept responsibility, we will clean it up, and this will never happen again.’ ”

BP is playing to a particularly skeptical and vigilant audience in the gulf, where people have become accustomed to frustrating clashes with insurance companies and government agencies in the five years since Hurricane Katrina.

“We’re preparing for the worst,” said Jim Hood, the attorney general of Mississippi, referring both to the spill itself and the possibility of fierce legal struggles. The state has been taking photos and video of coastal areas and counting fish and birds, he said, to have a record of what exists before the oil arrives.


Campbell Robertson reported from New Orleans, John M. Broder from Washington, and Clifford Krauss from Houston. Sewell Chan contributed reporting from Washington.

    Amount of Spill Could Escalate, Company Admits, NYT, 4.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/05/us/05spill.html

More Victims Feared as Tenn. Floodwaters Recede

May 4, 2010
Filed at 6:44 a.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) -- The Cumberland River having reached its crest was little comfort amid fears that receding floodwaters could reveal more victims of deadly storms that swamped much of middle Tennessee.

The death toll was at 29 across three states, but hope was slim that number would stand Tuesday as recovery begins in earnest.

The flooding, which pushed the river's muddy waters into Nashville's historic downtown, came amid severe storms that brought flash floods so swift many could not escape.

Residents and authorities know they'll find widespread property damage in inundated areas, but dread even more devastating discoveries.

''Those in houses that have been flooded and some of those more remote areas, do we suspect we will find more people? Probably so,'' Nashville Fire Chief Kim Lawson said. ''We certainly hope that it's not a large number.''

Thousands of people fled rising water and hundreds were rescued, but bodies were recovered Monday from homes, a yard, even a wooded area outside a Nashville supermarket. By Monday night, the rapidly rising waters were blamed in the deaths of 18 people in Tennessee alone, including 10 in Nashville.

The weekend storms also killed six people in Mississippi and four in Kentucky, including one man whose truck ran off the road and into a flooded creek. One person was killed by a tornado in western Tennessee.

In Nashville, the Cumberland also deluged some of the city's most important revenue sources: the Gaylord Opryland Hotel and Convention Center, whose 1,500 guests were whisked to a shelter; the adjacent Opry Mills Mall; even the Grand Ole Opry House, considered by many to be the heart of country music.

''That's the hub of the whole deal down here,'' 82-year-old businessman John Hobbs said of the entertainment complex. ''Without them nobody would be down here. That's like the star of the whole family.

Floodwaters also edged into areas of downtown, damaging the Country Music Hall of Fame, LP Field where the Tennessee Titans play and the Bridgestone Arena, home to the NHL's Nashville Predators and one of the city's main concert venues.

Carly Horvat, 29, lives in a downtown condo and ventured out with a few friends to look at damage Monday night.

''I have never heard the city so quiet,'' Horvat said. ''Usually, you hear whooping and hollering from Broadway.''

Damage estimates range into the tens of millions of dollars. Gov. Phil Bredesen declared 52 of Tennessee's 95 counties disaster areas after finishing an aerial tour from Nashville to western Tennessee during which he saw flooding so extensive that treetops looked like islands.

The severity of the storms caught everyone off guard. More than 13.5 inches of rainfall were recorded Saturday and Sunday, according to the National Weather Service, making for a new two-day record that doubled the previous mark.

Dramatic rescues continued into Monday as water crept into areas that had remained safe during weekend downpours.

Authorities and volunteers in fishing boats, an amphibious tour bus and a canoe scooped up about 500 trapped vacationers at the Wyndham Resort along the river near Opryland. Rescuers had to steer through a maze of underwater hazards, including submerged cars, some with tops barely visible above floodwaters the color of milk chocolate.

Bill Crousser was riding his Jet Ski past a neighbor's house when he rescued a man, his wife and their dog moments before flames from a fire in the garage broke through the roof.

''We just got the hell out of there,'' Crousser said.

The water swelled most of the area's lakes, minor rivers, creeks, streams and drainage systems far beyond capacity. It flowed with such force that bridges were washed out and thousands of homes were damaged. Much of that water then drained into the Cumberland, which snakes through Nashville.

The Cumberland topped out around 6 p.m. Monday at 51.9 feet, about 12 feet above flood stage and the highest it's reached since 1937. It began to recede just in time to spare the city's only remaining water treatment plant.

Still, about 50 Nashville schools were damaged and floodwaters submerged hundreds of homes in the Bellevue suburb alone, including Lisa Blackmon's. She escaped with her dog and her car but feared she lost everything else.

''I know God doesn't give us more than we can take,'' said Blackmon, 45, who lost her job at a trucking company in December. ''But I'm at my breaking point.''

------

Associated Press writers Travis Loller, Kristin M. Hall, Lucas L. Johnson II, Teresa Walker, Sheila Burke, Randall Dickerson and Joe Edwards in Nashville contributed to this report.

    More Victims Feared as Tenn. Floodwaters Recede, NYT, 4.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/05/04/us/AP-US-Tennessee-Floods.html

U.S. Farmers Cope With Roundup-Resistant Weeds

May 3, 2010
The New York Times
By WILLIAM NEUMAN and ANDREW POLLACK

DYERSBURG, Tenn. — For 15 years, Eddie Anderson, a farmer, has been a strict adherent of no-till agriculture, an environmentally friendly technique that all but eliminates plowing to curb erosion and the harmful runoff of fertilizers and pesticides.

But not this year.

On a recent afternoon here, Mr. Anderson watched as tractors crisscrossed a rolling field — plowing and mixing herbicides into the soil to kill weeds where soybeans will soon be planted.

Just as the heavy use of antibiotics contributed to the rise of drug-resistant supergerms, American farmers’ near-ubiquitous use of the weedkiller Roundup has led to the rapid growth of tenacious new superweeds.

To fight them, Mr. Anderson and farmers throughout the East, Midwest and South are being forced to spray fields with more toxic herbicides, pull weeds by hand and return to more labor-intensive methods like regular plowing.

“We’re back to where we were 20 years ago,” said Mr. Anderson, who will plow about one-third of his 3,000 acres of soybean fields this spring, more than he has in years. “We’re trying to find out what works.”

Farm experts say that such efforts could lead to higher food prices, lower crop yields, rising farm costs and more pollution of land and water.

“It is the single largest threat to production agriculture that we have ever seen,” said Andrew Wargo III, the president of the Arkansas Association of Conservation Districts.

The first resistant species to pose a serious threat to agriculture was spotted in a Delaware soybean field in 2000. Since then, the problem has spread, with 10 resistant species in at least 22 states infesting millions of acres, predominantly soybeans, cotton and corn.

The superweeds could temper American agriculture’s enthusiasm for some genetically modified crops. Soybeans, corn and cotton that are engineered to survive spraying with Roundup have become standard in American fields. However, if Roundup doesn’t kill the weeds, farmers have little incentive to spend the extra money for the special seeds.

Roundup — originally made by Monsanto but now also sold by others under the generic name glyphosate — has been little short of a miracle chemical for farmers. It kills a broad spectrum of weeds, is easy and safe to work with, and breaks down quickly, reducing its environmental impact.

Sales took off in the late 1990s, after Monsanto created its brand of Roundup Ready crops that were genetically modified to tolerate the chemical, allowing farmers to spray their fields to kill the weeds while leaving the crop unharmed. Today, Roundup Ready crops account for about 90 percent of the soybeans and 70 percent of the corn and cotton grown in the United States.

But farmers sprayed so much Roundup that weeds quickly evolved to survive it. “What we’re talking about here is Darwinian evolution in fast-forward,” Mike Owen, a weed scientist at Iowa State University, said.

Now, Roundup-resistant weeds like horseweed and giant ragweed are forcing farmers to go back to more expensive techniques that they had long ago abandoned.

Mr. Anderson, the farmer, is wrestling with a particularly tenacious species of glyphosate-resistant pest called Palmer amaranth, or pigweed, whose resistant form began seriously infesting farms in western Tennessee only last year.

Pigweed can grow three inches a day and reach seven feet or more, choking out crops; it is so sturdy that it can damage harvesting equipment. In an attempt to kill the pest before it becomes that big, Mr. Anderson and his neighbors are plowing their fields and mixing herbicides into the soil.

That threatens to reverse one of the agricultural advances bolstered by the Roundup revolution: minimum-till farming. By combining Roundup and Roundup Ready crops, farmers did not have to plow under the weeds to control them. That reduced erosion, the runoff of chemicals into waterways and the use of fuel for tractors.

If frequent plowing becomes necessary again, “that is certainly a major concern for our environment,” Ken Smith, a weed scientist at the University of Arkansas, said. In addition, some critics of genetically engineered crops say that the use of extra herbicides, including some old ones that are less environmentally tolerable than Roundup, belies the claims made by the biotechnology industry that its crops would be better for the environment.

“The biotech industry is taking us into a more pesticide-dependent agriculture when they’ve always promised, and we need to be going in, the opposite direction,” said Bill Freese, a science policy analyst for the Center for Food Safety in Washington.

So far, weed scientists estimate that the total amount of United States farmland afflicted by Roundup-resistant weeds is relatively small — seven million to 10 million acres, according to Ian Heap, director of the International Survey of Herbicide Resistant Weeds, which is financed by the agricultural chemical industry. There are roughly 170 million acres planted with corn, soybeans and cotton, the crops most affected.

Roundup-resistant weeds are also found in several other countries, including Australia, China and Brazil, according to the survey.

Monsanto, which once argued that resistance would not become a major problem, now cautions against exaggerating its impact. “It’s a serious issue, but it’s manageable,” said Rick Cole, who manages weed resistance issues in the United States for the company.

Of course, Monsanto stands to lose a lot of business if farmers use less Roundup and Roundup Ready seeds.

“You’re having to add another product with the Roundup to kill your weeds,” said Steve Doster, a corn and soybean farmer in Barnum, Iowa. “So then why are we buying the Roundup Ready product?”

Monsanto argues that Roundup still controls hundreds of weeds. But the company is concerned enough about the problem that it is taking the extraordinary step of subsidizing cotton farmers’ purchases of competing herbicides to supplement Roundup.

Monsanto and other agricultural biotech companies are also developing genetically engineered crops resistant to other herbicides.

Bayer is already selling cotton and soybeans resistant to glufosinate, another weedkiller. Monsanto’s newest corn is tolerant of both glyphosate and glufosinate, and the company is developing crops resistant to dicamba, an older pesticide. Syngenta is developing soybeans tolerant of its Callisto product. And Dow Chemical is developing corn and soybeans resistant to 2,4-D, a component of Agent Orange, the defoliant used in the Vietnam War.

Still, scientists and farmers say that glyphosate is a once-in-a-century discovery, and steps need to be taken to preserve its effectiveness.

Glyphosate “is as important for reliable global food production as penicillin is for battling disease,” Stephen B. Powles, an Australian weed expert, wrote in a commentary in January in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The National Research Council, which advises the federal government on scientific matters, sounded its own warning last month, saying that the emergence of resistant weeds jeopardized the substantial benefits that genetically engineered crops were providing to farmers and the environment.

Weed scientists are urging farmers to alternate glyphosate with other herbicides. But the price of glyphosate has been falling as competition increases from generic versions, encouraging farmers to keep relying on it.

Something needs to be done, said Louie Perry Jr., a cotton grower whose great-great-grandfather started his farm in Moultrie, Ga., in 1830.

Georgia has been one of the states hit hardest by Roundup-resistant pigweed, and Mr. Perry said the pest could pose as big a threat to cotton farming in the South as the beetle that devastated the industry in the early 20th century.

“If we don’t whip this thing, it’s going to be like the boll weevil did to cotton,” said Mr. Perry, who is also chairman of the Georgia Cotton Commission. “It will take it away.”


William Neuman reported from Dyersburg, Tenn., and Andrew Pollack from Los Angeles.

    U.S. Farmers Cope With Roundup-Resistant Weeds, NYT, 3.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/04/business/energy-environment/04weed.html

Oil Spill Options Are Weighed as Obama Travels to Gulf

May 2, 2010
The New York Times
By LESLIE KAUFMAN and JOSEPH BERGER

NEW ORLEANS — As President Obama traveled to Louisiana on Sunday for a first-hand briefing on the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, federal officials in Washington said they were putting their hopes on drilling a parallel relief well to plug the unabated gusher. Drilling such a well could take three months.

“The scenario is a very grave scenario,” Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar said on the NBC news program “Meet the Press.” “You’re looking at potentially 90 days before you get to the ultimate solution, which is drilling a relief well 3 1/2 miles below the ocean floor. In that time, lots of oil could spread.”

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on Sunday restricted fishing for at least 10 days in waters most affected by the oil spill, largely between Louisiana state waters at the mouth of the Mississippi River to waters off Florida’s Pensacola Bay.

The slick, emanating from a pipe 50 miles offshore, was creeping into Louisiana’s fragile coastal wetlands as strong winds and rough waters hampered cleanup efforts. Oil could hit the shores of Alabama and Mississippi on Monday.

The spill was set off by an explosion on April 20 at the Deepwater Horizon rig in which 11 workers were killed. Two days later, the rig sank, leading to the first visible signs of a spill.

The objective of drilling a relief well parallel to the original rig would be to pour cement into the damaged well and plug it. Efforts to turn off the ruptured well by using remotely operated underwater vehicles working a mile below the surface have failed so far.

The president and chairman of BP America, Lamar McKay, told ABC’s “This Week” program on Sunday that another possible solution — placing a dome over the damaged well, effectively capping it — could be deployed in six to eight days. BP employees were ready to begin drilling the relief well as soon as the seas calm down.

He defended his company’s response as “extremely aggressive,” but he acknowledged that fail-safe mechanisms on the rig that were designed to prevent an oil spill had not worked as predicted and that a “failed piece of equipment” was to blame for the spill.

After arriving in New Orleans by midday, President Obama was expected to travel by motorcade to Venice, La., for a briefing with Coast Guard officials.

Janet Napolitano, Homeland Security secretary, appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” said the Obama administration had organized an “all-hands-on-deck” response to the spill, which occurred just weeks after Mr. Obama announced plans to open additional areas for offshore oil drilling. That offshore decision, criticized by some environmental groups, has been placed on hold pending a re-evaluation after the Gulf Coast spill.

Meanwhile, The Associated Press reported that offshoots from the spill had made their way into South Pass, an important channel through the salt marshes of Southeastern Louisiana that is a breeding ground for crabs oysters, shrimp and redfish sold by a number of small seafood businesses dependent on healthy marshland for their livelihood.

“This is the very first sign of oil I’ve heard of inside South Pass,” Bob Kenney, a charter boat captain in Venice, told the AP. “It’s crushing, man, it’s crushing.”

The worst oil spill in American history is considered to be the rupture in the Exxon Valdez, an oil tanker bound for Long Beach, Calif., which in 1989 spewed 10.8 million gallons of crude oil into Prince William Sound in Alaska, though larger spills have occurred outside American waters. The Valdez spill killed hundreds of thousands of seabirds as well as sea otters, seals, bald eagles and a few orca whales.

Seabirds and fish are also endangered by the Deepwater Horizon spill as well as the coastal marshes that foster the growth of scores of species of wildlife.

There was concern that if the spill is not plugged, oil could seep into the Gulf Stream, the current that warms seawater and influences the climate in places as remote as Newfoundland and Europe. If that happens, slicks of oil could travel around the thumb-like tip of Florida and make it way to the eastern beaches.

“It will be on the East Coast of Florida in almost no time,” Hans Graber, executive director of the University of Miami’s Center for Southeastern Tropical Advanced Remote Sensing, told The Associated Press. “I don’t think we can prevent that. It’s more of a question of when rather than if.”

Officials in charge of the cleanup have also been speaking hopefully of a new technique to break down the oil nearer the wellhead: the distribution of chemical dispersants. The new approach would use these dispersants underwater, near the source of the leaks. In two tests the method appeared to keep crude oil from rising to the surface.

At least 600,000 feet of surface containment booms have been deployed or will soon be deployed, according to Doug Helton, a fisheries biologist who coordinates responses to spills for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. But he acknowledged that was not enough to cover the shoreline.

Adm. Thad W. Allen, the commandant of the Coast Guard, said Saturday that that capping the well was the priority.

“Estimates are useful, but we are planning far beyond that,” he said. It doesn’t really matter, the admiral said, whether it is 1,000 barrels or 5,000 barrels a day that are leaking.

Asked whether the slick was affecting shipping lanes and other offshore drilling operations, Admiral Allen said that disruptions had been minimal.

The tenor on shore among local residents was increasingly angry, with criticism directed at federal officials, who they said should have responded more quickly after the rig exploded April 20. Some said that not enough booms had been placed in the area, and fishermen noted the growing public concern over contaminated seafood, though they said such worries were premature.

Six of the 32 oyster beds on the east side of the Mississippi River have been closed, and the oil was still 70 or 80 miles away, according to Mike Voisin, chairman of the Louisiana Oyster Task Force.

“We want people to know there is not tainted seafood right now,” said Harlon Pearce, chairman of the Louisiana Seafood Promotion and Marketing Board and owner of Harlon’s LA Fish. “Everything we’re doing is precautionary.”

Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana said at a news conference that he would meet soon with leaders from coastal parishes to develop local contingency plans. He called on BP, the company responsible for the cleanup, to pay for the plans and for the Coast Guard to approve them, arguing that local officials’ perspectives would prove crucial in the emergency response.

“This isn’t just about our coast, it’s about our way of life in Louisiana,” Mr. Jindal said.


Joseph Berger reported from New York. Reporting was also contributed by Robbie Brown from Venice, La., Sam Dolnick from Baton Rouge, La., and Liz Robbins from New York.

    Oil Spill Options Are Weighed as Obama Travels to Gulf, NYT, 2.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/03/us/03spill.html

Oil From Spill Is Reported to Have Reached the Coast

April 30, 2010
The New York Times
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON

NEW ORLEANS — Coast Guard officials were investigating reports early Friday morning that oil from a massive spill in the Gulf of Mexico had washed ashore overnight, threatening fisheries and wildlife in fragile marshes and islands along the Gulf Coast.

Officials had not confirmed whether any tentacles of the oil slick had actually touched land, but Petty Officer Shawn Eggert of the United States Coast Guard said that officials were planning a flyover Friday morning to assess how the oil was moving, and whether it was making landfall.

As the oil crept closer to shore on Thursday, the response to the spill intensified abruptly, with the federal government intervening more aggressively.

Resources from the United States Navy were marshaled to supplement an operation that already consisted of more than 1,000 people and scores of vessels and aircraft.

Calling it “a spill of national significance” which could threaten coastline in several states, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced the creation of a second command post in Mobile, Ala., in addition to the one in Louisiana, to manage potential coastal impact in Alabama, Mississippi and Florida. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar ordered an immediate review of the 30 offshore drilling rigs and 47 production platforms operating in the deepwater Gulf, and is sending teams to conduct on-site inspections.

Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana declared a state of emergency and to request the participation of the National Guard in response efforts.

About 40,000 feet of boom had been placed around Pass-a-Loutre, the area of the Mississippi River Delta where the oil was expected to touch first, a spokesman for Mr. Jindal said.

The Navy provided 50 contractors, 7 skimming systems and 66,000 feet of inflatable containment boom, a spokesman said. About 210,000 feet of boom had been laid down to protect the shoreline in several places along the Gulf Coast, though experts said that marshlands presented a far more daunting cleaning challenge than sandy beaches.

Eight days after the first explosion on the rig, which left 11 workers missing and presumed dead, the tenor of the response team’s briefings changed abruptly Wednesday night with a hastily called news conference to announce that the rate of the spill was estimated to be 5,000 barrels a day, or more than 200,000 gallons — five times the previous estimate. By Thursday, it was apparent that the cleanup operation desperately needed help, with no indication that the well would be sealed any time soon and oil drifting closer to shore.

The response effort has been driven by BP, the company that was leasing the rig and is responsible for the cleanup, under the oversight of the Coast Guard and in consultation with the Minerals Management Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. While additional federal resources, including naval support, were available before Wednesday, officials had given little indication that such reinforcements would be deployed so quickly and at such a scale.

“Some of it existed from the start,” Rear Adm. Mary E. Landry of the Coast Guard, the federal on-scene coordinator, said of the federal resources. “We can ramp it up as we need it.”

Referring to what she called “dynamic tension” among the participants in a spill response, Admiral Landry said it was her duty to ensure that BP was trying every approach available.

“If BP does not request these resources, then I can and I will,” she said.

Asked whether the Coast Guard had confidence in BP’s efforts, Admiral Landry said, “BP, from Day 1, has attempted to be very responsive and be a very responsible spiller.”

BP, in turn, has pointed out on more than one occasion that Transocean owned the oil rig and the blowout preventer, a device that apparently failed to function properly and that is continuing to be the most significant obstacle to stopping the spill.

Underscoring how acute the situation has become, BP is soliciting ideas and techniques from four other major oil companies — Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Shell and Anadarko. BP officials have also requested help from the Defense Department in efforts to activate the blowout preventer, a stack of hydraulically activated valves at the top of the well that is designed to seal it off in the event of a sudden pressure release.

Doug Suttles, the chief operating officer for exploration and production for BP, said the company had asked the military for better imaging technology and more advanced remotely operated vehicles. As of now, there are six such vehicles monitoring or trying to fix the blowout preventer, which sits on the sea floor.

“To be frank, the offer of help from all quarters is welcome,” said David Nicholas, a BP spokesman.

But Norman Polmar, an expert on military systems, said the robotic submersibles used by the oil industry were better equipped to try to stop the oil leak than any of the Navy’s minisubs. The Navy’s unmanned subs have cameras and can retrieve bits of hardware, he said, but are not designed to plug a hole in a pipe or do repair work.

Other efforts to contain the spill included a tactic that Admiral Landry called “absolutely novel”: crews awaited approval on Thursday night to begin deploying chemical dispersants underwater near the source of the leaks. Aircraft have dropped nearly 100,000 gallons of the dispersants on the water’s surface to break down the oil, a more conventional strategy.

BP is also designing and building large boxlike structures that could be lowered over the leaks in the riser, the 5,000-foot-long pipe that connected the well to the rig and has since become detached and is snaking along the sea floor. The structures would contain the leaking oil and route it to the surface to be collected. This temporary solution could take several weeks to execute.

Mr. Suttles said three such structures were being prepared, one of which is complete and could corral the worst of the leaks. But citing the disclosure of the new leak on Wednesday night, experts said more were certainly possible.

“All that movement is going to continue to stress and fatigue the pipe and create more leaks,” said Jeffrey Short, Pacific science director for Oceana and former chemist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who helped clean the spill from the Exxon Valdez in 1989.

“This is not on a good trajectory,” he added.

The next solution is drilling relief wells that would allow crews to plug the gushing cavity with mud, concrete or other heavy liquid. The drilling of one such well is expected to begin in the next 48 hours, Mr. Suttles said, but it could be three months before the leak is plugged by this method.

The legal and political dimensions of the oil spill spread as well on Thursday, with lawyers filing suits on behalf of commercial fishermen, shrimpers and injured workers against BP; Transocean; Cameron, the company that manufactured the blowout preventer; and other companies involved in the drilling process, including Halliburton.

Representative Edward J. Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat who is chairman of the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, has asked the heads of major oil companies, including BP, to testify at a hearing about the spill.

Opponents of President Obama’s plan to expand offshore drilling have also called for a halt. Senator Bill Nelson, Democrat of Florida, called Thursday for a moratorium on all new offshore oil exploration while the cause of this rig explosion is under investigation. Mr. Nelson, a longtime opponent of oil drilling off the coasts of Florida, said in a letter to Mr. Obama that the spreading oil spill threatened environmental and economic disaster all along the Gulf Coast.

Administration officials stressed that the president’s offshore drilling plan was the beginning of a lengthy review process and did not mean that large new areas would see immediate oil and gas activity. They also said that they expected that members of Congress and the public would have new questions about the safety of offshore operations and that the administration would rethink its commitment to offshore drilling in light of the accident.

“That is the beginning of a process,” said Carol M. Browner, the White House coordinator of energy and climate policy. “What is occurring now will also be taken into consideration.”


Robbie Brown contributed reporting from Robert, La.; John M. Broder and Helene Cooper contributed from Washington; and Christopher Drew and Henry Fountain from New York.

    Oil From Spill Is Reported to Have Reached the Coast, NYT, 30.4.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/01/us/01gulf.html

Size of Spill in Gulf of Mexico Is Larger Than Thought

April 28, 2010
The New York Times
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON and LESLIE KAUFMAN

NEW ORLEANS — Government officials said late Wednesday night that oil might be leaking from a well in the Gulf of Mexico at a rate five times that suggested by initial estimates.

In a hastily called news conference, Rear Adm. Mary E. Landry of the Coast Guard said a scientist from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had concluded that oil is leaking at the rate of 5,000 barrels a day, not 1,000 as had been estimated. While emphasizing that the estimates are rough given that the leak is at 5,000 feet below the surface, Admiral Landry said the new estimate came from observations made in flights over the slick, studying the trajectory of the spill and other variables.

An explosion and fire on a drilling rig on April 20 left 11 workers missing and presumed dead. The rig sank two days later about 50 miles off the Louisiana coast.

Doug Suttles, chief operating officer for exploration and production for BP, said a new leak had been discovered as well. Officials had previously found two leaks in the riser, the 5,000-foot-long pipe that connected the rig to the wellhead and is now detached and snaking along the sea floor. One leak was at the end of the riser and the other at a kink closer to its source, the wellhead.

But Mr. Suttles said a third leak had been discovered Wednesday afternoon even closer to the source. “I’m very, very confident this leak is new,” he said. He also said the discovery of the new leak had not led them to believe that the total flow from the well was different than it was before the leak was found.

The new, far larger estimate of the leakage rate, he said, was within a range of estimates given the inexact science of determining the rate of a leak so far below the ocean’s surface.

“The leaks on the sea floor are being visually gauged from the video feed” from the remote vehicles that have been surveying the riser, said Doug Helton, a fisheries biologist who coordinates oil spill responses for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, in an e-mail message Wednesday night. “That takes a practiced eye. Like being able to look at a garden hose and judge how many gallons a minute are being discharged. The surface approach is to measure the area of the slick, the percent cover, and then estimate the thickness based on some rough color codes.”

Admiral Landry said President Obama had been notified. She also opened up the possibility that if the government determines that BP, which is responsible for the cleanup, cannot handle the spill with the resources available in the private sector, that Defense Department could become involved to contribute technology.

Wind patterns may push the spill into the coast of Louisiana as soon as Friday night, officials said, prompting consideration of more urgent measures to protect coastal wildlife. Among them were using cannons to scare off birds and employing local shrimpers’ boats as makeshift oil skimmers in the shallows.

Part of the oil slick was only 16 miles offshore and closing in on the Mississippi River Delta, the marshlands at the southeastern tip of Louisiana where the river empties into the ocean. Already 100,000 feet of protective booms have been laid down to protect the shoreline, with 500,000 feet more standing by, said Charlie Henry, an oil spill expert for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, at an earlier news conference on Wednesday.

On Wednesday evening, cleanup crews began conducting what is called an in-situ burn, a process that consists of corralling concentrated parts of the spill in a 500-foot-long fireproof boom, moving it to another location and burning it. It has been tested effectively on other spills, but weather and ecological concerns can complicate the procedure.

Such burning also works only when oil is corralled to a certain thickness. Burns may not be effective for most of this spill, of which 97 percent is estimated to be an oil-water mixture.

A burn scheduled for 11 a.m. Wednesday was delayed. At 4:45 p.m., the first small portion of the spill was ignited. Officials determined it to be successful.

Walter Chapman, director of the Energy and Environmental Systems Institute at Rice University, said a 50 percent burn-off for oil within the booms would be considered a success. Admiral Landry called the burn “one tool in a tool kit” to tackle the spill. Other tactics include: using remote-controlled vehicles to shut off the well at its source on the sea floor, an operation that has so far been unsuccessful; dropping domes over the leaks at the sea floor and routing the oil to the surface to be collected, an operation untested at such depths that would take at least two to four more weeks; and drilling relief wells to stop up the gushing cavity with concrete, mud or other heavy liquid, a solution that is months away.

The array of strategies underscores the unusual nature of the leak. Pipelines have ruptured and tankers have leaked, but a well 5,000 feet below the water’s surface poses new challenges, officials said.

Reached in southern Louisiana on Wednesday, where he was visiting the response team’s command center, Tony Hayward, the chief executive of BP, said he did not yet know what went wrong with the oil rig. BP, which was leasing the rig from Transocean, is responsible for the cleanup under federal law.

Until Wednesday night, the well had been estimated to be leaking 1,000 barrels, or 42,000 gallons, each day.

The response team has tried in vain to engage a device called a blowout preventer, a stack of hydraulically activated valves at the top of the well that is designed to seal off the well in the event of a sudden pressure release — a possible cause for the explosion on the rig.

Mr. Hayward said the blowout preventer was tested 10 days ago and worked. He said a valve must be partly closed, otherwise the spillage would be worse.

There are a number of things that can go wrong with a blowout preventer, said Greg McCormack, director of the Petroleum Extension Service at the University of Texas, which provides training for the industry.

The pressure of the oil coming from below might be so great that the valves cannot make an adequate seal. Or in the case of a shear ram, which is designed to cut through the drill pipe itself and seal it off, it might have encountered a tool joint, the thicker, threaded area where two lengths of drilling pipe are joined.

Still, Mr. McCormack said, “something is working there because you wouldn’t have such a relatively small flow of oil.” If the blowout preventer were completely inoperable, he said, the flow would be “orders of magnitude” greater.

Mr. Hayward, of BP, said the crude spilling from the well was very light, the color and texture of “iced tea” and implied that it would cause less environmental damage than heavier crude, like the type that spilled from the Exxon Valdez into Prince William Sound in 1989. He said in most places it was no more than a micron thick and in the thickest areas was one-tenth of a millimeter, or the width of a hair.

Mr. Hayward declined to answer questions about any potential political fallout and said BP “will be judged primarily on the response.”

As the investigation into the cause continued, officials, scientists and those who make their living on the Gulf Coast were focused on the impending prospect of the oil’s landfall.


Campbell Robertson reported from New Orleans, and Leslie Kaufman from New York. Henry Fountain and Liz Robbins contributed reporting from New York.

    Size of Spill in Gulf of Mexico Is Larger Than Thought, NYT, 28.4.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/29/us/29spill.html

F. E. Dominy, Who Harnessed Water in the American West, Is Dead at 100

April 28, 2010
The New York Times
By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Floyd E. Dominy, a child of the Dust Bowl who pursued his dream of improving nature and human society by building vast water projects in the West — steamrolling over pristine canyons, doubtful politicians and irate conservationists — died on April 20 in Boyce, Va. He was 100.

His family announced the death.

Even before he became the longest-serving commissioner of the federal Bureau of Reclamation (1959 to 1969), Mr. Dominy, as a rising bureaucrat, showed a knack for persuading senators and representatives to push ahead with massive dams in the arid West.

Marc Reisner in his 1986 book, “Cadillac Desert: The American West and its Disappearing Water,” said Mr. Dominy cultivated Congress “as if he were tending prize-winning orchids.”

Mr. Reisner quoted an official in the Interior Department, of which the Reclamation Bureau is a part, as saying, “Dominy yanked money in and out of those congressmen’s districts like a yo-yo.”

Mr. Dominy, who was not an engineer, worked his political and administrative magic in completing the Glen Canyon, Flaming Gorge and Navajo Dams in the upper Colorado River basin, and the Trinity River part of California’s Central Valley Project, among many others. The projects stored and regulated water flow, generated electric power and created lakes for recreation. They enabled crops and cities to sprout from the desert.

But they also sometimes drowned thousands of years of Native American history, and millions of years of natural history — not to mention destroying fish habitats. David Brower, the founding director of the Sierra Club, called his own acceptance of the Glen Canyon dam — in return for the bureau’s pulling back on another — his greatest failure.

Mr. Dominy took the opposite view in a speech in North Dakota in 1966, calling a Colorado River without dams “useless to anyone.” He added, “I’ve seen all the wild rivers I ever want to see.”

Michael L. Connor, the current head of the bureau, said in a speech in 2009 that the agency had 472 dams, and was the nation’s largest water wholesaler, serving 31 million people. Sixty percent of the nation’s vegetables and a quarter of its fruit and nuts are grown with “Reclamation water,” Mr. Connor said.

The sheer size of this plumbing empire has long caused friction with politicians from other regions, as well as sparked concern among White House budget hawks. Mr. Dominy argued forcefully that fruits and vegetables grown during the winter months improved the health of all Americans, and that reservoirs created by the bureau attracted more vacationers than national parks.

He could even ascend to lyricism, as he did in describing Lake Powell, which the Glen Canyon Dam would create in 1966. In a book distributed by the Bureau of Reclamation called “Lake Powell: Jewel of the Colorado,” he wrote, “Dear God, did you cast down two hundred miles of canyon and mark, ‘For poets only’? Multitudes hunger for a lake in the sun.”

Mr. Brower countered that the lake’s pre-emption of natural habitat could also ultimately affect multitudes. “A thousand people a year times ten thousand years will never see what was here,” he said.

Floyd Elgin Dominy was born on a farm in Adams County, Neb., on Dec. 24, 1909. His family lacked an indoor toilet. He graduated from the University of Wyoming with a degree in agricultural economics, briefly taught school and then became an agricultural extension agent in Wyoming. He hit upon the idea of helping farmers build small dams to store water for their livestock, and built 300 in the county.

“That was more than in the whole rest of the West,” he said in an interview with Mr. Reisner. “I was a one-man Bureau of Reclamation.”

During World War II, Mr. Dominy helped establish instant farms to provide food for miners and loggers dumped into foreign jungles to harvest critical materials for the war effort. After the war, he returned to Washington, went to a phone booth and called the Reclamation Bureau. He had a job in three hours, Mr. Reisner said.

Mr. Dominy’s rise in the bureau was rapid. After starting in 1946, he became assistant commissioner in 1957, associate commissioner in 1958 and commissioner in 1959. He did not behave like a cookie-cutter bureaucrat. Mr. Reisner called him “freewheeling and reckless,” while Mr. Connor chose the phrase “larger than life.”

Mr. Dominy’s wife of 53 years, the former Alice Criswell, died in 1982. He is survived by his daughters, Janice DeBolt and Ruth Swart Young; his son, Charles; eight grandchildren; 23 great-grandchildren; and one great-great-granddaughter.

Mr. Dominy was proud of his role in lubricating the development of America’s West. One thing he did question in an interview with The Sacramento Bee in 2002 was the government’s selling water so cheaply that there was little incentive to conserve.

“It almost staggers my mind when I fly over Phoenix,” he said, “and see all those swimming pools.”

    F. E. Dominy, Who Harnessed Water in the American West, Is Dead at 100, NYT, 28.4.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/29/us/29dominy.html

Aftershocks Rattle Mexico-California Region Hit by Quake

April 5, 2010
The New York Times
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER

LOS ANGELES — Strong aftershocks jolted cities along the border between the United States and Mexico early Monday, a day after a powerful earthquake killed at least two people in northern Mexico, damaged homes and knocked out power to thousands of people.

The governor of Baja California, Mexico, where the 7.2-magnitude earthquake struck on Sunday afternoon, said he had asked for federal disaster assistance because of the damage to the urban infrastructure. The governor, Jose Guadalupe Osuna Millan, said in an interview with the Mexican television network Televisa that 233 people had been injured, and that some of those were being treated in tents outside hospitals.

Mexicali, a large industrial city near the quake’s epicenter, was reported to have suffered widespread blackouts, along with fires, gas leaks and phone line damage. Photographs posted on Twitter and some news sites showed buildings with crumbled facades and food on supermarket shelves sent crashing to the floor. Mr. Escobedo said that a multistory parking structure had collapsed at the Mexicali City Hall but that no one was injured.

Alfredo Escobedo, the Baja California state civil protection director, told The Associated Press that one man was killed in a house collapse outside Mexicali. The other man was killed when he panicked as the ground shook, ran into the street and was struck by a car, Mr. Escobedo said.

Across the border from Mexicali, in Calexico, Calif., the police sealed off the downtown area, which is lined with buildings built in the 1930s and ’40s. Broken glass and plaster littered some sidewalks and goods in several stores had been scattered across the floor.

A police officer said the City Council had declared a state of emergency. Some traffic lights were out, and in at least one hotel television sets were flung to the floor and lamps toppled over but the electricity was on and damage did not seem widespread and there were no reports of casualties.

Three strong aftershocks with magnitudes of about 5.0 jolted Baja on Monday, and scores of lesser tremors rippled through the region, according to the United States Geological Survey. There were no reports of additional damage.

Carlton Hargrave, 64, was standing in the entryway of Family Style Buffet when the quake hit on Sunday. His restaurant, he said in a telephone interview, was “almost completely destroyed.”

“We’ve got tables overturned, plates broken on the floor, the ceiling’s caved in,” Mr. Hargrave said with a shaky voice over the sound of his feet crunching rubble and glass. “It was big. I mean, it was major.”

In the United States, the shaking was particularly acute in San Diego, where it set off alarms and sent the San Diego fire department responding to several calls, The San Diego Union-Tribune reported.

“We have some reports of scattered property damage,” Sgt. Ramona Hastings of the San Diego Police Department said in a telephone interview.

At a Sheraton hotel in downtown San Diego, the floor cracked opened and prevented the front doors from shutting. Officials ordered all guests and staff from the building, pending an inspection from structural engineers. Fire officials reported a water main break in front of a hospital and another water line break at a department store.

“There’s scattered stuff all over the place,” said Maurice Luque, a spokesman for the San Diego fire department. “There’s nothing colossal.”

Even for California residents who are veterans of previous and more punishing earthquakes, the temblor was impressive.

“House was shaking,” Timothy Nash said in a Twitter message from San Diego. “Pic fell off bookcase. Lasted about 30 seconds. Worst I’ve felt here since Northridge The Northridge earthquake of Jan. 17, 1994 — a 6.7-magnitude temblor that was centered in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Reseda — lasted for about 20 seconds but proved to be one of the most devastating natural disasters to hit the United States. There were 72 deaths attributed to the quake, and it caused an estimated $20 billion in damage.

Initial reports indicated that Sunday’s earthquake, while bigger in magnitude, caused nowhere near the damage.

While this earthquake exceeded the numerical magnitude of the 7.0 earthquake in Haiti earlier this year, the damage there was far greater because the epicenter was near the heavily populated capital city, Port-au-Prince.

The Baja earthquake was the largest in a series that have taken place in the region that presages it, beginning with a 4.2 quake on March 31. It was followed by strong aftershocks.

In Los Angeles, homes slid from side to side for well over a minute, a nauseating and seemingly endless wave that could be felt from the beach to the Hollywood Hills. Power failures caused by the temblor were reported in Yuma, Ariz.

Emilio Magaña, 39, a priest at St. Patrick’s Roman Catholic Church in Calipatria, Calif., had just finished a morning of Easter services at different locations around rural Imperial County and was napping in his church in the middle of lettuce and carrot fields when the quake struck.

“I awoke to my bed shaking and heard some pictures from the walls falling down,” he said. “My nerves were a little rattled because it was a long earthquake. It lasted almost 2 minutes. It was one very long one, then short temblors. I’ve never felt anything like it.”


Reporting was contributed by Randal C. Archibold from Calexico, Calif., and Rebecca Cathcart from Los Angeles, Brian Stelter from New York, Rob Davis from San Diego, and Elisabeth Malkin from Mexico City.

    Aftershocks Rattle Mexico-California Region Hit by Quake, NYT, 5.4.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/06/us/06quake.html