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Oil Spill Now In Gulf Loop Current


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The first oil from the Gulf of Mexico spill has entered an ocean current that could take it to Florida and up the east coast of the US, scientists say.

The European Space Agency said satellite images suggested oil could reach the coral reefs of the Florida Keys within six days.

"We have visible proof that at least oil from the surface... has reached the current," said Dr Bertrand Chapron.

The ESA images show a stream of oil extending south into the Loop Current.

Meanwhile, the US Coast Guard said tests showed that tar balls that washed up on Florida beaches in recent days did not originate from the oil spill off Louisiana.

It is unclear where the tar balls came from, coast guard officials said.

Turbulent system

ESA scientists described the Loop Current as a "conveyor belt" that joins the Gulf Stream, the most important current in the northern hemisphere.

If oil is dragged into the Gulf Stream, it could be carried up the east coast of the US, they said.

The scientists warned that the turbulent Loop Current could mix the oil and water, making it difficult to track the oil's progress in the coming days.

"This might remove the oil film on the surface and prevent us from tracking it with satellites, but the pollution is likely to affect the coral reef marine ecosystem," Dr Fabrice Collard said.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/us_and_canada/10127904.stm

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At the rate of 60,000 barrels a day? :lol::lol::lol:

what a t0sser you are! B)

There are many stratified layers showing that oil has never been a consistently deposited sedimentary layer - it has gone through consistent layers but yet erratic leaks. Additionally, the Exxon Valdez spill has showed that nature recovers extremely quickly - it's just like going through a 24 hour fast. It might be a bit of a struggle, but not a worry in the long run.

Don't fret.

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There are many stratified layers showing that oil has never been a consistently deposited sedimentary layer - it has gone through consistent layers but yet erratic leaks. Additionally, the Exxon Valdez spill has showed that nature recovers extremely quickly - it's just like going through a 24 hour fast. It might be a bit of a struggle, but not a worry in the long run.

Don't fret.

There always used to be astronomical "howlers" in the classic Doctor Who series - like travelling to a constellation, as if it were sosmething other than a line-of-sight phenomenon.

Your attempt to say something meaningful about oceanography/geology falls into the same category of scientific howler.

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There always used to be astronomical "howlers" in the classic Doctor Who series - like travelling to a constellation, as if it were sosmething other than a line-of-sight phenomenon.

Your attempt to say something meaningful about oceanography/geology falls into the same category of scientific howler.

So you don't think nature will recover quickly?

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There are many stratified layers showing that oil has never been a consistently deposited sedimentary layer - it has gone through consistent layers but yet erratic leaks. Additionally, the Exxon Valdez spill has showed that nature recovers extremely quickly - it's just like going through a 24 hour fast. It might be a bit of a struggle, but not a worry in the long run.

Don't fret.

your ignorance is shocking!

Black storm rising

The Deepwater Horizon disaster will affect everyone from pelicans to politicians

May 6th 2010 | From The Economist

DRILLING for oil is a balancing act. If the pressure of the working fluids in the well, or the strength of concrete holding the piping in place, cannot balance the immense pressure of the oil down below, then things get very bad, very quickly. On April 20th, for some reason as yet unknown, the pressure in a well that had been drilled by the Deepwater Horizon, a rig that BP, one of the world’s largest oil companies, was using to explore a new field in the Gulf of Mexico, got out of balance. The well blew its top, causing an explosion and subsequent fire which claimed the lives of 11 of the rig’s crew of 126 and eventually sent the rig itself to the bottom of the ocean, a mile below the surface and some 40 miles (64km) off the Louisiana coast.

In the aftermath, oil started to seep to the surface. Since then the slick has grown inexorably, despite attempts to contain and disperse it. On the distant shore they watch with concern and a certain fatalism. “This is just like waiting for a hurricane,” says LeRoy Meaux, a Louisiana welder, as he works on fixing a winch to a barge. “Been there, done that.” What no one yet knows is whether the Gulf spill will, like some hurricanes, soon fade in the memories of all but those most directly affected, or whether, like Katrina, it will cause havoc that has repercussions much farther afield. Such an outcome is certainly possible. BP has its bottom line and reputation at risk. The technology of deepwater drilling, rightly celebrated for its ingenuity, faces the prospect of more critical assessment than it has received to date. And human livelihoods and natural habitats on the coasts of four states are in jeopardy at a time when offshore drilling is playing an important role in America’s national debate about the nature and security of the country’s energy supply.

At the end of the tether

On the sea floor beneath the Deepwater Horizon sat a device called a blowout preventer, capable of sealing off the well with a number of hydraulic systems, including one designed to slice right through the whole stack. Had it been activated beforehand it should have been able to contain the pressure in the well, saving the rig. Activated after the blowout, it would have done nothing to save the rig, but should still have been able to isolate the oil in the well from the sea above it. But neither of the two systems that should have activated the preventer after the blowout seems to have done so—or if they did, the preventer did not do its job. Oil continued to flow into the spindled and mutilated remains of the piping that had originally risen from the sea floor to the drilling platform, coming out of that wreckage at three different points and spreading over thousands of square kilometres.

The United States Coast Guard has estimated that 5,000 barrels of oil are being added to the slick every day. Ian MacDonald, a marine biologist at Florida State University who studies oil that comes out of natural seeps on the sea floor, estimates on the basis of pictures and maps from the coastguard that the rate may be as much as five times that. The largest accidental oil spill in history, which was also in the Gulf, was due to a 1979 blowout on a Mexican rig called Ixtoc-1 (see chart). Between June 1979 and March 1980 it released around 3.3m barrels. For comparison, the Exxon Valdez fiasco in Alaska in 1989, America’s most infamous oil spill, released just 260,000 barrels. At the coastguard rate the Deepwater Horizon leak would take years to match Ixtoc-1; at Mr MacDonald’s rate, months.

BP has developed a number of plans for stemming the flow before then. The one most assured of success requires the drilling of a new well that would intersect the existing one. Remarkably, there seems little doubt that threading such a well into the old one is possible, despite its being only seven inches across and 18,000 feet (5,500 metres) down. But more than one attempt may be needed, which is why BP has two rigs earmarked for relief wells. One has already started drilling; the other is expected to get under way shortly. Their work, though, will take months.

Even if the leakage is only at the lower end of the estimates, months could add up to a great deal of oil on coastlines important for fishing, tourism and the environment. So the race is on for approaches that could work quicker. On May 5th remotely operated submersibles managed to seal off the smallest of the three leaks, which did not reduce the overall flow, but has simplified matters. BP is also building a pair of cofferdams that could sit over the leaks like inverted funnels, with piping allowing the oil up to a drilling ship at the surface.

The first of these cofferdams is already built and due to be sunk by May 7th. No such system has been put together at this sort of depth before, so getting it to work is unlikely to be easy. There are, though, other options. While attempts to get the blowout preventer to shut off the flow entirely have so far failed, BP is investigating a technique called “top kill” that entails putting new pipe into the preventer through which to apply downward pressure.

Many local fishing boats have signed on as vessels of opportunity to help the coastguard; the rest are tied up at their docks, as fishing in the area is no longer permitted. The seafood industry is worth $2.4 billion to the state of Louisiana when fishing, processing, selling and cooking in restaurants are all taken into account, and a fishing ban will eat into that. Tuan Nguyen, a seafood wholesaler in the small community of Venice, Louisiana, says his business was shut down for eight months after Katrina, in 2005, and his savings were obliterated: “I don’t know what we’re going to do, because the bills are coming in every day.”

The first known animal victim of the spill was a northern gannet, currently recovering. Dead jellyfish and turtles are now washing up on the beaches, and fish are suffocating. When the oil starts to wash up in quantity, the greatest environmental threat will be to the Louisiana wetlands. Oil on the fine white sand of the Mississippi, Alabama and Florida coastlines would depress tourism, but workers could scrape it up and haul it away. The muddy lattice of marshes, bayous, and barrier islands that makes up southern Louisiana is different.

The erosion of these delicate environments was a pressing issue even before the spill, made worse by the damage Katrina did to barrier islands. If the oil penetrates the wetlands it could worsen the problem further by killing the vegetation that does its best to hold the marshes together. It will also affect the wildlife therein. Mike Carloss, a biologist with the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, says the brown pelicans and terns in the area are already stressed by the seasonal demands of nest building and fighting for territory, and are thus particularly vulnerable.

One of the things that the fishing boats helping the coastguard can do to help is spread dispersants. Oil is dangerous to seabirds because it dissolves the grease that insulates their feathers; they get cold and die. Dispersants cut the oil as washing-up liquid cuts the grease on dishes, allowing oil on the surface to spread down into the water. This lessens its effects on surfaces and shorelines, though it might make things worse for fish. Once dispersed the oil can then be broken down more easily by bacteria that have evolved to live off natural sources of hydrocarbons.

To avoid contaminating the sea floor, most dispersants are used only in deep water. Today’s dispersants are not as toxic as those used on the big spills of the 1970s, but they still require care, and must be kept away from some sensitive places, such as reefs and spawning grounds.

Boom and bust

There is only a short window—from a few hours to up to two days—in which dispersants are useful, says Simon Rickaby, a marine-pollution expert at Britain’s Institute of Marine Engineering Science and Technology. This is because the light fractions of an oil spill—as much as 40% of the total—will evaporate quite quickly (air-quality monitoring stations have been set up along the coast to make sure that this, in itself, does not become a health hazard). The oil left behind becomes thicker and forms a sort of mousse that is less susceptible to dispersants.

The need for early action, and the fact that the Deepwater Horizon spill is in much deeper water than most, has given rise to a new way of using dispersants. A remotely operated underwater vehicle with a “wand” rather like those used for weedkiller has been dispensing nine gallons a minute of dispersant thousands of feet below the surface, close to the leaks. The idea is to see if the slick can be broken up before it even reaches the surface.

As well as dispersants, some of the 200 or so boats and ships fighting the slick are deploying booms to prevent the oil getting into sensitive coastal locations and to corral it in places where it is concentrated enough to skim or, if the conditions are right, burn. A typical skimmer uses rotating drums or discs of plastic onto which the oil clings and is then scraped off by something like a windscreen wiper. Like dispersants, both burning and skimming need fresh oil—once things get mousseux there is much less that can be done.

By May 4th, 487,000 feet of booms had been deployed, and over 650,000 feet more were available for use. Success, though, will depend on the conditions. Currents draw water under the booms, while waves splash the oil over; strong winds capsize or sink them. Although bad weather, like that of the May Day weekend, keeps boats and booms at bay, it also acts as a dispersant itself, mixing the oil into the water. Over the coming weeks and months the prevailing weather will determine whether the oil stays reasonably contained or spreads farther afield.

The various efforts to deal with the crude were, as of May 5th, costing BP about $6m a day. The costs fall to BP because, as the majority shareholder in the consortium leasing the Deepwater Horizon (the junior partners are America’s Anadarko and Japan’s Mitsui) and the project’s operator, it is liable under American law for the costs of cleaning up. BP is also, at the moment, taking most of the blame from angry Louisianans and from stockmarkets. By May 5th its capitalisation had fallen by $30 billion, or about 16%.

But a number of other companies played a role. Transocean, the world’s largest offshore-drilling firm, owned and ran the Deepwater Horizon. The blowout preventer was made by Cameron International, a specialist engineer. Then there is the cementing of the wellhead, a process which is necessarily tricky. When the cement is wet, its pressure serves to balance the forces inside the well; when it is dry its strength does. But as it sets from wet to dry things can go wrong. This process, which has been implicated in a number of blowouts, was carried out by Halliburton, an engineering-services firm. How blame is eventually allocated among these companies remains to be seen.

Meanwhile the costs of dealing with the spill are going up. The relief wells will cost $150m apiece, and the cofferdam experiment will cost millions, too. Cleaning up after a lot of oil hits the shore will raise the stakes considerably higher. Financial analysts forecast that in the worst case BP could spend as much as $12 billion fixing the mess, though it would later recoup some of that from its partners. That would be “utterly” within BP’s financial capabilities, a company spokesman says.

Being nasty to oil companies is never hard, and BP’s record over the past years has not endeared it to American public opinion. A fire at the company’s Texas City refinery in 2005 killed 15 workers and revealed what at the time was clearly a poor safety culture. The subsequent corporate soul-searching and reform was not particularly obvious to the public; the Alaskan North Slope’s largest-ever oil spill, in which at least 4,800 barrels of crude seeped out of a BP pipeline just a year later, was more noticeable. In 2007 the company paid more than $300m to settle an investigation into allegations that it had fixed the propane market in 2004. This all gives Washington the whip hand. BP’s chief executive, Tony Hayward, and Andy Inglis, the head of its upstream division, can look forward to a hard time on Capitol Hill in the weeks to come.

From sea to slimy sea

Some legislators are talking about changing the legal limit to the amount of third-party damages the company can be sued for. This limit, which was set after the Exxon Valdez spill, now stands at $75m; damages above that figure are meant to be met by a federally managed disaster fund which gets its money from a small tax on oil production and imports. Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey, who opposes drilling off that state’s shores, talks of increasing the cap to $10 billion, which would open the way for compensation claims as large as the clean-up costs. BP, aware both of the potential downside and of the harm Exxon did to its reputation as it fought off claims against it after the Exxon Valdez, says it will pay all “legitimate” claims, suggesting it is willing to go beyond the current cap, but not lose sight of it.

Then there is the question of expanding offshore drilling. The White House had shown itself willing to countenance more offshore drilling as a way of getting support from Republicans for energy and climate legislation it wants. The proposal is in some ways symbolic. Technically recoverable reserves in the Gulf of Mexico stand at around 41 billion barrels, about a quarter of them to be found in deepwater fields such as the one that the Deepwater Horizon was exploring. The amount of technically recoverable oil off the non-Gulf coasts of the lower 48 states is estimated as just 18 billion barrels, according to the Energy Information Administration (EIA), a division of the Department of Energy. Drilling off these coasts would account for just 7% of domestic production by 2030 and have an “insignificant” impact on prices, says the EIA.

For now, the regulators’ focus is on wells already drilled. The Interior Secretary, Ken Salazar, who is heading the investigation into the Deepwater Horizon accident, says production will not be halted in the Gulf, which provides about 30% of America’s 6.7m barrel-a-day output. But teams from the Minerals Management Service (MMS) have been dispatched to examine the region’s rigs, and in particular their blowout preventers.

Climate of concern

Meanwhile, if lobbying by BP and other oil companies in recent years is shown—as some suspect—to have thwarted laws that might have made things safer, the oil industry’s reputation will suffer still more. And as natural-gas and oil companies press authorities in America to open more land to drillers seeking shale-gas deposits, which politicians will be comfortable accepting the argument that the cement casing of wells and the hydraulic fracturing of rocks close to water sources is risk-free?

The political implications do not stop there. The accident seems likely to strengthen the hands of environmentalists keen to turn America away from oil and towards some unconvincingly specified alternative mixture of noble abstinence, natural gas, electricity and ethanol. At the same time, it could harm the most important environmental measure currently on the table in Washington: a troubled Senate bill that might, for the first time, put a price on American emissions of carbon dioxide. Some of this legislation’s tenuous support has depended on its embrace of energy policies that many Republicans, but few environmentalists, favour: offshore drilling and nuclear power. Renewed opposition to offshore drilling could break the various constituencies apart. “The political compromise on offshore drilling is about as fragile as the Louisiana wetlands,” says Paul Bledsoe, a Clinton-era Interior Department official. “The fate of one could determine the fate of the other.”

Some of the long-term effects of the disaster are clear. Once the oil has stopped flowing and the inquiries have finished, there will be a new, stricter, more costly and, it is to be hoped, more effective safety regime for deepwater drilling off American shores. Technologies involved in that may well also end up used elsewhere. (Some other countries already mandate safety measures America does not, though it is not clear they would have made a difference in this case.) Reforms of the MMS, a regulator widely seen as co-opted by the industry it regulates, are already under way and should pick up pace.

A cofferdam, off to sit on a leakThere may also be lasting advances in dealing with deep-sea leaks and surface spills. Robert Bea, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, points out that the drilling technologies and capabilities showcased in a structure such as Deepwater Horizon are so far beyond those of decades past as to be almost space-age. Clean-up techniques have evolved much less impressively. This may, in part, be because large spills have grown rarer as tanker technology, too, has improved.

Other impacts depend on the wind, the currents and the success of the various engineering initiatives. If the flow is quickly stanched, things may get back to normal, and the respect that the engineers will surely win might even slightly brighten the oil industry’s reputation. If the leak drags on and the spill reaches unprecedented proportions the more severe political, economic and environmental consequences will start to play out.

On the environmental score there is some good news. The immediate carnage that an oil spill can wreak does not normally lead to lasting environmental damage, though that may not hold for delicate wetlands already under lots of other stress. The type of crude oil coming from the Deepwater Horizon well is easier to degrade than the stuff that sometimes spills from tankers, says Eelco Leemans of the North Sea Foundation, a green lobby group. And a warmer, choppier environment is less easily damaged than the Alaskan shores that were affected by the Exxon Valdez. Even there, though, many think the environment has, a generation on, pretty much recovered.

One of the reasons that there is doubt as to the degree of that recovery is that there wasn’t a good record of the state of affairs before the spill for comparison. Such a survey was done before oil from the tanker Sea Empress hit the Welsh coast in 1996, and made it possible to monitor the quite pleasing speed of the recovery. Gulf-coast environmentalists might do well to make similar records before the black tide hits and their world is thrown, for a while, out of balance.

http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=16059982

April 30, 2010 8:18 AM BST

Gulf of Mexico oil spill largest in US history

NEW ORLEANS (Commodity Online) : The massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, leaking from a ruptured well moved closer to the mouth of the Mississippi River.

Analysts said the oil spill that threatened to eclipse even the Exxon Valdez disaster spread out of control with a faint sheen washing ashore along the Gulf Coast.

The spill was bigger than imagined ,five times more than first estimated ,and closer. Faint fingers of oily sheen were reaching the Mississippi River delta, lapping the Louisiana shoreline in long, thin lines, they said.

The oil slick could become America's worst environmental disaster in decades, threatening hundreds of species of fish, birds and other wildlife along the Gulf Coast, one of the world's richest seafood grounds, teeming with shrimp, oysters and other marine life. Thicker oil was in waters south and east of the Mississippi delta about five miles offshore.

http://uk.ibtimes.com/articles/21568/20100430/gulf-mexico-oil-spill-largest-us-history.htm

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