Tag: Deepwater Horizon

Tracking Debris from Damaged Oil Rigs Could Help Forecast Coastal Impacts in the Future Shortly after the Deepwater Horizon disaster, mysterious honeycomb material was found floating in the Gulf of Mexico and along coastal beaches. Using state-of-the-art chemical forensics and a bit of old-fashioned detective work, a research team led by scientists at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) confirmed that the flotsam were pieces of material used to maintain buoyancy of the pipe bringing up oil from the seafloor.The researchers also affirmed that tracking debris from damaged offshore oil rigs could help forecast coastal pollution impacts in future oil spills and guide emergency response efforts-much the way the Coast Guard has studied the speed and direction of various floating debris to guide search and rescue missions. The findings were published Jan. 19 in Environmental Research Letters.On May 5, 2010, 15 days after the Deepwater Horizon explosion, oceanographer William Graham and marine technicians from the Dauphin Island Sea Lab were working from a boat about 32 miles south of Dauphin Island, Ala., when they saw a 6-mile-long, east-west line containing more than 50 pieces of white material interspersed with sargassum weed. The porous material was uniformly embedded with black spheres about ...

Reference to DeepWater Horizon oil spill Back at the height of the massive Gulf oil spill in 2010, there was quite a bit of controversy about just how much crude was blasting out of the well. According to new documents that a watchdog group released on Monday, there was heated debate among the scientists who evaluated the flow rate as well.For the first few weeks after the spill began in April 2010, BP misled the public about how big it was, and the government repeated BP's estimate without question. And when the government released its own estimate in late May of up to 25,000 barrels per day, that too was controversial-and proved to be far lower than the actual size, which was more like 53,000 barrels of oil per day.Now, an email released by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) traces efforts to downplay the spill size in the initial weeks back to the White House. The group released a May 29, 2010 email from Dr. Marcia McNutt, the director of the US Geologic Survey and head of the government's Flow Rate Technical Group (FRTG), that was released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. The email came ...

Lessons learned from the Deepwater Horizon oil spil Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar announced the creation of a specialized scientific group that will develop future scenarios and provide rapid, interdisciplinary scientific assessments during environmental crises or disasters affecting America's natural resources.The group will help ensure that preparedness, response and recovery efforts undertaken by the Department and its bureaus will be guided by the best available science and lessons learned from past events, including the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and Hurricane Katrina."Using the important lessons we've learned in preparing for and responding to past disasters, this group of expert, interdisciplinary scientists will play a major role in advising Department-wide preparedness activities and grounding them in the best available science," said Secretary Salazar. "Their efforts will help us to act quickly, decisively and effectively when hurricanes, droughts, oil spills, wildfires or other crises strike."This announcement comes as part of a Secretarial Order signed by Secretary Salazar, effective immediately, authorizing the Strategic Sciences Group to:Develop and provide the Department of the Interior with science-based assessments and interdisciplinary scenarios of environmental crises affecting Departmental resources;Rapidly assemble teams of scientists to conduct such work during environmental crises; andProvide the results of this work to ...

Bacterial played a key role to the 'oil spill clean up process' When scientist David Valentine and colleagues published results of a study in early 2011 reporting that bacterial blooms had consumed almost all the deepwater methane plumes after the 2010 Gulf of Mexico Deepwater Horizon oil spill, some were skeptical.How, they asked the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB) geochemist, could almost all the gas emitted disappear?In new results published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Valentine; Igor Mezic, a mechanical engineer at UCSB; and coauthors report that they used an innovative computer model to demonstrate the respective roles of underwater topography, currents and bacteria in the Gulf of Mexico.This confluence led to the disappearance of methane and other chemicals that spewed from the well after it erupted on April 20, 2010."As scientists continue to peel apart the layers of the Deepwater Horizon microbial story," said Don Rice, director of NSF's chemical oceanography program, "we're learning a great deal about how the ocean's biogeochemical system interacts with petroleum--every day, everywhere, twenty-four/seven. "The results are an extension of a 2011 study, also funded by NSF, in which Valentine and other researchers explained ...

WHOI Scientists A new study provides a composite picture of the environmental distribution of oil and gas from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico. It amasses a vast collection of available atmospheric, surface and subsurface chemical data to assemble a "mass balance" of how much oil and gas was released, where it went and the chemical makeup of the compounds that remained in the air, on the surface, and in the deep water.In June 2010, a WHOI-led team used the autonomous underwater vehicle Sentry in the Gulf of Mexico to define and characterize the deepsea hydrocarbon plume from the Deepwater Horizon spill. Sentry, equipped with a miniaturized mass spectrometer called TETHYS, was able to crisscross plume boundaries 19 times to help determine the trapped plume's size, shape, and composition. (Photo by Chris Reddy, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)The study, "Chemical data quantify Deepwater Horizon hydrocarbon flow rate and environmental distribution," is published online in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA.The lead author, NOAA research chemist Thomas Ryerson, assembled an all-star team of 14 scientists from diverse backgrounds and organizations including academia, private research institutions and federal labs, all of whom played important roles ...

Will Americans Buy BP's Slick PR Blitz Following Gulf Oil Spill? Nearly 20 months after its massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill - and just as the nation focuses on New Orleans, host of the BCS title game - BP is pushing a slick nationwide public relations campaign to persuade Americans that the Gulf region has recovered.BP PLC's rosy picture of the Gulf, complete with sparkling beaches, booming businesses, smiling fishermen and waters bursting with seafood, seems a bit too rosy to many people who live there. Even if the British oil giant's campaign helps promote the Gulf as a place where Americans should have no fear to visit and spend their money, some dismiss it as "BP propaganda."The PR blitz is part of the company's multibillion dollar response to the Gulf oil spill that started after the BP-leased Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded off the coast of Louisiana on April 20, 2010, killing 11 workers and leading to the release of more than 200 million gallons of oil. As engineers struggled to cap the out-of-control well, it turned into the largest offshore oil spill in U.S. history.Now, BP is touting evidence that the Gulf's ecology has not been severely ...

Halliburton to pay for all costs and damages from DeepWater Horizon oil spill tragedy

Charges for providing false information in federal document US prosecutors are readying criminal charges against British oil giant BP employees over the 2010 Deepwater Horizon accident that led to the catastrophic Gulf oil spill, The Wall Street Journal reported online.The charges if brought and prosecuted by the US Justice Department would be the first criminal charges over the disaster.Citing sources close to the matter, the Journal said the prosecutors are focusing on US-based BP engineers and at least one supervisor who they say may have provided false information to regulators on the risks of deep water drilling in the Gulf.Felony charges for providing false information in federal documents may be made public early next year, said the Journal.A conviction on that charge would carry a fine and up to five years in prison, the newspaper said.The Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) has already issued a second list of violations regarding BP's operation of the Macondo well that blew out in April 2010, causing the worst maritime environmental disaster in history.The US drilling safety agency has said it determined BP had failed to conduct an accurate pressure integrity test in one area of the well.And in four different sections ...

How do you clean up an oil spill? Philippe Cousteau has been down in the Gulf covering the disastrous oil spill that has affected not only our precious ocean life, but also the livelihood of many fisherman that depend upon the gulf to survive. Here's one of Philippe's interviews with a local named Suzie.

According to a new NOAA study The amount of air pollutants in the atmospheric plume generated by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill was similar to a large city according to a new NOAA-led study published in a special issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.Researchers from the NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL) and NOAA's Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) in Boulder, Colo., along with university colleagues, focused on ozone and particulate matter-two pollutants with human health effects.About eight percent, or about one of every 13 barrels of the Deepwater Horizon-spilled oil that reached the ocean surface, eventually made its way into airborne organic particles small enough to be inhaled into human lungs, and some of those particles likely reached the Gulf coast when the winds were blowing toward the shore, according to the study."We could see the sooty black clouds from the burning oil, but there's more to this than meets the eye. Our instruments detected a much more massive atmospheric plume of almost invisible small organic particles and pollutant gases downwind of the oil spill site," said Ann M. Middlebrook, scientist at NOAA ESRL's Chemical Sciences Division (CSD) and lead author of the ...