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Friday is the second anniversary of the explosion at BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig that killed 11 workers and spilled upwards of five million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Thanks partly to nature’s resilience, some progress has been made. The gulf is open to fishing, beaches are mostly clean and President Obama has resurrected an ambitious oil exploration plan that he shelved immediately after the spill.

But the healing from this extraordinary act of corporate carelessness is far from complete, and there is important work to be done to minimize the chances that such a disaster will happen again. Here are central issues that remain unresolved:

THE GULF Scientists believe that the oil has mostly evaporated, been consumed by bacteria or dispersed in deep water. Yet oil has poisoned Louisiana’s salt marshes and wetlands, which are vital fish nurseries, and visibly damaged deep-sea coral. The toll on the gulf and its marine life may not be known for years. The herring population of Alaska’s Prince William Sound did not crash until three years after the Exxon Valdez spill.

REGULATION The spill exposed serious structural flaws in federal oversight of offshore drilling, including the cozy relationship between the oil industry and its regulators in the Interior Department. The department has since been reorganized to eliminate conflicts of interest, and it has agreed to give environmental concerns higher priority in the planning, leasing and drilling process.

By contrast, Congress’s response to the spill has been truly pathetic. It has not passed a single bill to prevent another catastrophe, according to a report issued Tuesday by former members of a presidential commission that investigated the spill. Congress has failed even to codify the Interior Department’s sound regulatory reforms, which could be undone by a future administration.

SAFETY The administration has developed new standards for each stage of the drilling process — from rig design to spill response — insisting that operators fully prepare for worst-case scenarios. But the commissioners’ report notes that the new equipment systems have not yet been tested in deep-water conditions.

REPARATIONS BP has paid $14 billion in cleanup costs and $6.3 billion in damages to individuals and businesses, with another $7.8 billion pledged. The company is also likely to owe several billion dollars for damages to natural resources under the Oil Pollution Act, and somewhere between $5 billion and $20 billion in penalties under the Clean Water Act, depending on the level of negligence.

BP may well prefer a negotiated settlement of these damages to a long and potentially damaging trial. If so, the Justice Department should press for the best possible deal from what is still a deep-pocketed company. Congress must make sure that the bulk of this money is used not only to address particular damage from the spill but to carry out a broad program of ecosystem restoration — the wetlands and barrier islands that had been weakened well before the spill by industrialization and mismanagement of the Mississippi River and by Hurricane Katrina.

The commissioners seemed encouraged by steps the administration had taken to strengthen the regulatory machinery and improve safety standards. (Their report also includes a strong note of caution about dangers of drilling in the Arctic, where harsh conditions would present even more difficult challenges in the event of a spill.) What disturbed them was the appalling refusal of this bitterly partisan, antiregulatory Congress to join the effort.

The Big Spill, Two Years Later,
NYT,
17 April 2012,
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/18/
opinion/the-big-spill-two-years-later.html

BP Gulf Of Mexico Oil Spill Costs

Hit $8 Billion

September 3, 2010

Filed at 2:32 a.m. ET

The New York Times

By REUTERS

LONDON (Reuters) - BP Plc said on Friday the cost of dealing with its oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico had risen to $8 billion and that it was two weeks away from sealing the well for good.

BP also indicated that there had been no major uptick in the amount of money being handed out to those affected by the spill, under the new independent compensation system, established in a deal with the White House.

On average, since August 23, the Gulf Coast Claims Facility, a $20 billion fund headed by former government pay Czar Ken Feinberg, paid out around $3.5 million per day, broadly in line with the amount paid before BP handed over responsibility for administering claims.

Some investors had feared Feinberg could take a more generous approach to paying out damages.

(Reporting by Tom Bergin; Editing by Erica Billingham)

BP Gulf Of Mexico Oil Spill Costs Hit $8 Billion,
NYT,
3.9.2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2010/09/03/
business/business-us-oil-spill-bp.html

Oil Spill Cleanup Workers

Include Many Very, Very Small Ones

August 4, 2010

The New York Times

By WILLIAM J. BROAD

Among the hidden stars of the gulf cleanup is an oil-hungry bacterium that Dr. Seuss could have named — Alcanivorax. It and fellow microbes are breaking down a significant amount of the oil that gushed into the environment from BP’s runaway well, scientists say. The microbial feasting is known as biodegradation.

On Wednesday, a report released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said early observations showed that the oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill “is biodegrading quickly,” adding that scientists were working to measure how quickly and how much of the escaped oil the microbial hordes could consume.

“Until it is biodegraded, naturally or chemically dispersed oil, even in small amounts, can be toxic to vulnerable species,” the report says in pointing to the importance of the microbes.

The report said the swarms were dining on most remaining aspects of the spill — dispersed oil as well as oil forming a sheen on or just below the surface.

“Colleagues who have been sampling tell me that the intrinsic biodegration rates are high,” said Ronald M. Atlas, a microbiologist at the University of Louisville and past president of the American Society for Microbiology. “I believe that most of the oil will not have a significant impact. That’s been the story with spills that stay offshore.”

Dr. Atlas cautioned, however, that microbe degradation in polluted marshes “should be considerably slower.”

And other scientists warn that the sudden appearance of swarms of oil-hungry microbes in the Gulf of Mexico could have drawbacks, saying they might consume so much oxygen that oxygen levels drop precipitously, threatening other sea life.

Samantha B. Joye, a marine scientist at the University of Georgia, told a House science subcommittee this year that drops in oxygen could especially threaten an unusual class of creatures that also live on oil: communities of clams, mussels and tube worms that flourish in the sunless depths of the gulf.

The gulf proper has an enormous ability to break down oil because thousands of natural seeps in the seabed leak oil and gas at a fairly steady rate, and have for millions of years. None are close in size to the Deepwater Horizon leak. But over the ages, swarms of microbes and other creatures have learned how to live on petrochemicals flowing from the fissures, giving the gulf some powers of natural recuperation.

Scientists say a star of the feasting is Alcanivorax — its name alluding to its voracious appetite for alkanes, some of the main chemicals of natural gas and petroleum. In unspoiled environments around the world, the marine bacterium exists in limited numbers. But it rapidly multiplies in oil-contaminated waters, as scientists portray the usual state of the gulf.

“It’s preadapted to crude oil,” said Roger Sassen, a gulf specialist recently retired from Texas A&M University who has long argued that natural remediation would cleanse its waters. “The image of this spill being a complete disaster is not true.”

In the report on Wednesday, the federal panel echoed that optimism in diplomatic language.

“It is well known,” the report said, “that bacteria that break down the dispersed and weathered surface oil are abundant in the Gulf of Mexico in large part because of the warm water, the favorable nutrient and oxygen levels, and the fact that oil regularly enters the Gulf of Mexico through natural seeps.”

Wednesday’s report also highlighted the effects of oil dispersion — a strategy that some critics of BP had faulted, especially as the company pumped chemicals into the depths that were meant to scatter the gushing oil. The report said dispersion at the surface and in the deep “increases the likelihood that the oil will be biodegraded” by billions of oil-eating microbes.

Dr. Atlas of the University of Louisville agreed. But he noted that “the extensive use of dispersants has been of toxicological concern.”

Hopes for the natural remediation of oil spills at sea have grown in recent years as scientists have discovered a new class of microbes known as hydrocarbonoclastic, a group that includes Alcanivorax. The name hydrocarbonoclastic denotes the disassembly of hydrocarbons, the building blocks of oil.

A 2003 report by the National Research Council, “Oil in the Sea,” called the biodegradation of hydrocarbons “one of the principal removal mechanisms in the aquatic environment,” as well as “a premiere research area.”

That same year, a team of German scientists reported that it had deciphered the genome of Alcanivorax, shedding light on the microbe’s genetic structure and raising the possibility of enhancing its oil-eating abilities.

Jay Lennon, a microbial ecologist at Michigan State University, said the gene sequencing helped show how Alcanivorax could break down the surface tension in fluids and attack oil.

“Micro-organisms are pretty amazing,” he said. “If there’s a way for them to make a living, they’ll do it.”

Oil Spill Cleanup Workers Include Many Very, Very Small Ones,
NYT, 4.8.2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/05/
science/earth/05microbe.html

Oil Spill Capped for a Second Day,

Offering Some Hope

July 16, 2010

The New York Times

By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON

and HENRY FOUNTAIN

NEW ORLEANS — The hemorrhaging well that has spilled millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico remained capped for a second day Friday, providing some hope of a long-term solution to the environmental disaster.

Live video from the seabed Friday morning showed that all was quiet around the top of the well, suggesting the test assessing the integrity of the well was continuing. Earlier in the week, Kent Wells, a senior vice president for BP, had said that the longer the test continued the better, because it would indicate that the pressure inside the well was holding.

The oil stopped flowing around 2:25 p.m. Thursday when the last of several valves was closed on a cap at the top of the well, Mr. Wells said.

The announcement that the oil had stopped flowing into the Gulf came after a series of failed attempts to cap or contain the runaway well that tested the nation’s patience. Mr. Wells emphasized that pressure tests were being conducted to determine the status of the well, which is now sealed like a soda bottle. BP and the government could decide to allow the oil to flow again and try to collect all of it; they could allow the oil to flow and, if tests show the well can withstand the pressure from the cap, close the well during hurricanes; or they could leave the well closed permanently.

The last option seems unlikely, but whatever the decision, the cap is an interim measure until a relief well can plug the leak for good.

“I am very pleased that there’s no oil going into the Gulf of Mexico,” Mr. Wells said, “but we just started the test and I don’t want to create a false sense of excitement.”

That was not much of a risk along the Gulf Coast, where countless livelihoods have been put in jeopardy and fishermen frequently and gloomily remark that Prince William Sound has never been the same since the Exxon Valdez disaster.

“It’s like putting a Band-Aid on a dead man in my opinion,” said Jeff Ussury, 48, who considers his days as a crabber over for good. He doubted the news of the capping was even true.

“I started out kind of believing in them,” he said, “but I don’t believe in them at all anymore.”

Whether it was just the eye of the hurricane or the morning after the storm, the moment was a time to take stock of just how much damage had already been done since the deadly explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig on the night of April 20.

For weeks, the BP spill camera — which along with terms like “top kill,” “containment dome” and “junk shot” made up a growing list of phrases that many people wish they had never learned — had shown a horrible chocolate plume of oil pouring upward from the broken blowout preventer, a symbol of government and corporate impotence. The plume has been a constant presence in the corner of TV screens, mocking reassurances from officials on the news programs who describe the latest attempt to stop the gushing.

But the view on Thursday afternoon was eerily tranquil, just the slate blue of the deep interspersed with small white particles floating across the screen. Though the exact amount of the oil that has poured out of the well may never be known, it was suddenly and for the first time a fixed amount. The disaster was, for a little while at least, finite.

At the White House, President Obama called the development a “positive sign,” though he cautioned that the operation was still in the testing phase.

In statements, Louisiana officials, including Gov. Bobby Jindal, said they were “cautiously optimistic.”

Officials at all levels played down expectations. Thad W. Allen, the retired Coast Guard admiral who is coordinating the spill response, told reporters on Thursday that the cap was primarily meant to be used to shut the well during extreme weather.

“The intention of the capping stack was never to close in the well per se,” he said. “It creates the opportunity if we have the right pressure readings to shut in the well. It allows us to abandon the site if there is a hurricane.”

He said that after the test, the cap would be used to capture oil through surface ships — two that are on the site now and two more that will be in operation in a week or two. With all four collection ships in place, BP could capture all of the oil, estimated at 35,000 to 60,000 barrels per day.

Mr. Wells cautioned that the test could take 48 hours or more, as scientists study pressure readings from the cap. If pressure rises and holds, that would be a sign that the casing — the 13,000-foot string of pipe that lines the well bore — is undamaged.

But if the pressure stays low or falls, that would suggest the well is damaged. In that case, Mr. Wells said, the test probably would be stopped well ahead of schedule, valves would be reopened and collection systems that had been shut down for the test would start again.

“Depending on what the test shows us, we may need to open this well back up,” he said.

The test had been delayed by about two days, first when the government ordered a last-minute review of the procedure out of concern that, by allowing the buildup of pressure, the test itself might harm the well. A particular fear, experts said, was that it might cause a shallow blowout — damaging the well lining close to the seabed, which could allow oil and gas to escape into the gulf outside the well, making the spill worse.

By Wednesday afternoon, those concerns had been allayed and preparations were made to begin the test. But late that night, a hydraulic leak was discovered in part of the choke valve equipment, and the test was scrubbed.

Thursday afternoon the test began again, first with the shutting down of pipes that funneled oil and gas to two surface ships.

In even the most optimistic case, the BP oil spill is far, far from over.

There are still millions of barrels of oil out in the gulf and months of work missing for fishermen and shrimpers; inestimable harm is still being inflicted on wildlife throughout the food chain; and anger still seethes along the Gulf coast.

“What’s to celebrate?” asked Kindra Arnesen, the wife of a shrimper from Plaquemines Parish, La., who has become a recognizable voice of outrage over the past two and a half months.

“My way of life’s over, they’ve destroyed everything I know and love,” she said, before going on to explain, in detail, why she believes the pressure tests are likely to fail.

Liz Robbins contributed reporting from New York.

Oil Spill Capped for a Second Day, Offering Some Hope,
NYT, 16.7.2010,
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/17/
us/17spill.html

Prosecuting Crimes Against the Earth

June 3, 2010
The New York Times
By DAVID M. UHLMANN

Ann Arbor, Mich.

“IF our laws were broken ... we will bring those responsible to justice,” President Obama pledged on Tuesday, in announcing an investigation of the events leading to the April 20 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig. His words may have been, in part, political damage control; efforts to contain the spill remain dire. But federal prosecutors have been working behind the scenes for weeks to determine whether BP, Transocean (the owner of the rig) and Halliburton (the company that did the cementing job on the deep-ocean well) should be charged with crimes.

Now, it’s up to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to ensure that the legal response to the calamitous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is better than the emergency response.

If the spill had resulted from a hurricane or lightning strike, or if it had been an unavoidable accident — an equipment failure that happened without warning — it wouldn’t warrant criminal prosecution. Increasingly, however, it appears that there was negligence or worse in the events leading to the explosion of the rig.

News reports have described warning signs that went unheeded and deviations from standard industry practice: Gas was seeping into the well. The blowout preventer was leaking. Concerns were raised about the well casing. There were signs of trouble with the cement in the well. Mud circulation was limited. A final concrete plug was not properly installed. And when disaster struck, the blowout preventer failed.

Prosecutors must examine all witness statements, internal documents and any physical evidence that remains after the explosion. But if the news articles are accurate, the Justice Department should bring criminal charges against BP, and possibly Transocean and Halliburton, for violations of the Clean Water Act, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and the Refuse Act — the same charges brought in the Exxon Valdez case. Exxon ultimately paid a criminal fine of $125 million, the largest ever for an environmental crime.

In this case, though, a fine of that size may not satisfy the many people who are outraged by the gulf spill. The public expects felony charges and multibillion-dollar fines.

All three of the environmental laws that may have been broken provide for criminal penalties, but only the Clean Water Act includes felony charges. For the government to prove a felony violation of the act it would need to demonstrate that the defendant knew oil would be discharged into United States waters. A felony violation can be easy to prove when a business dumps waste into a river, but it’s harder in the case of an oil spill.

No one thinks BP, Transocean or Halliburton intended to spill oil into the gulf. But given good evidence, the government could argue that the companies cut corners or deviated so much from standard industry practice that they knew a blowout could happen. Or, the government could argue that, even if the initial gusher involved only negligence (a misdemeanor under the Clean Water Act) each additional day represents a knowing violation. Both approaches are untested, because there have been so few oil spill cases — but the gulf disaster warrants trying aggressive strategies.

Ultimately, the public would like to see oil company executives brought up on felony charges, leading to jail time that might inspire more careful drilling in the future. But only those directly involved in misconduct can be charged with crimes, and it is likely that executives of BP, Transocean and Halliburton played no such personal role in the disaster.

Faced with these challenges, the Justice Department must find out whether BP or the other companies misled the government about the integrity of the well, or the amount of oil gushing from it. This could be the basis for charges of felony obstruction of justice against the companies and individuals involved.

The Justice Department’s case against BP will be strengthened by the company’s history of criminal violations, which offer evidence of a culture that puts profits before the environment and worker safety. After a 2005 explosion at its Texas City refinery, which killed 15 workers, BP pleaded guilty to violating the Clean Air Act by failing to maintain a safe facility. It also pleaded guilty to violating the Clean Water Act by having corroded pipelines that caused oil spills in Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay in 2006.

Criminal prosecution cannot restore the gulf or end the suffering of the people who live along its shores. But it could ensure just punishment. And it would make it more likely that the companies involved would pay all claims for damage to the gulf coast, because the $75 million cap on liability, set by the Oil Pollution Act of 1990, does not apply in criminal cases.

Most important, criminal prosecution would send a clear message that an environmental disaster of this magnitude cannot be allowed to happen again.

David M. Uhlmann,

a law professor at the University of Michigan,

was the chief of the environmental crimes section

at the United States Department of Justice

from 2000 to 2007.

Prosecuting Crimes Against the Earth, NYT, 3.6.2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/04/opinion/04uhlmann.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

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

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.