Tag: Deepwater Horizon

  The Disclosure and Transparency Rules (“DTR”) made by the Financial Conduct Authority govern amongst other matters the disclosure of inside information. Accordingly in compliance with Rule 2.2, BP plc makes the following announcement: Five years on from the Deepwater Horizon accident and spill in 2010, BP has reached agreements in principle to settle all federal and state claims arising from the event. BP announced that its US Upstream subsidiary, BP Exploration and Production Inc (BPXP) has executed the agreements with the US federal government and five Gulf Coast states. The agreement with the states of Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas also includes settlement of claims made by more than 400 local government entities. The principal payments are as follows: BPXP is to pay the United States a civil penalty of $5.5 billion under the Clean Water Act (CWA) – payable over 15 years. BPXP will pay $7.1 billion to the United States and the five Gulf states over 15 years for natural resource damages (NRD). This is in addition to the $1 billion already committed for early restoration. BPXP will also set aside an additional amount of $232 million to be added to the NRD interest payment at ...

  As part of an unusual mortality event investigation, a team of scientists has discovered that dead bottlenose dolphins stranded in the northern Gulf of Mexico since the start of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill have lung and adrenal lesions consistent with petroleum product exposure according to a paper published in the peer-reviewed online journal PLOS ONE. These findings support those of a 2011 health assessment of live dolphins in Barataria Bay, Louisiana, a heavily oiled area during the spill which showed those resident dolphins had poor health, adrenal disease, and lung disease. The timing, location, and nature of the detected lesions support that contaminants from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill caused these lesions and contributed to the high numbers of dolphin deaths within this oil spill's footprint. Increased dolphin deaths following the oil spill are part of the northern Gulf of Mexico unusual mortality event investigation. "This is the latest in a series of peer-reviewed scientific studies, conducted over the five years since the spill, looking at possible reasons for the historically high number of dolphin deaths that have occurred within the footprint of the Deepwater Horizon spill," said Dr. Teri Rowles, veterinarian and one of 22 contributing authors ...

  New commentary in Nature Reviews Microbiology by Samantha Joye of the University of Georgia and her colleagues argues for further in-depth assessments of the impacts of dispersants on microorganisms to guide their use in response to future oil spills. Chemical dispersants are widely used in emergency responses to oil spills in marine environments as a means of stimulating microbial degradation of oil. After the Deepwater Horizon spill in 2010, dispersants were applied to the sea surface and deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, the latter of which was unprecedented. Dispersants were used as a first line of defense even though little is known about how they affect microbial communities or the biodegradation activities they are intended to spur. The article, published May 6, summarizes previous research from laboratory and field studies assessing the impacts of dispersants, which have generated inconsistent results. "This comprehensive review illustrates a compelling need not only for more studies aimed at assessing the impacts of dispersants on microbial communities and microbial processes in marine ecosystems, but also underscores the necessity for using standardized methods and consistent metrics to document dispersant effects on microbial populations," said Joye, the UGA Athletic Association Professor of Arts and ...

(Image Credit: NOAA, Georgia Department of Natural Resources) A new online tool developed by NOAA  to manage and integrate the massive amounts of data collected by different sources during the five years following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, called DIVER for Data Integration, Visualization, Exploration, and Reporting, is now available for use by research teams and the public at https://dwhdiver.orr.noaa.gov. The DIVER announcement plays a part in the Department of Commerce’s goal of unleashing its vast resources of environmental data and delivering on one of its key priorities – transforming data capabilities and supporting a data-driven economy. NOAA is a constituent agency of the Commerce Department. “NOAA pledged from the start of the Deepwater event to be as transparent as possible with the data collected,” said Kathryn D. Sullivan, Ph.D., under secretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere and NOAA administrator. “The DIVER data warehouse approach builds upon that original pledge, and is another significant step in making NOAA’s environmental data available for the research community, resource managers and the general public.” DIVER provides unprecedented flexibility for filtering and downloading validated data collected as part of the ongoing Natural Resources Damage Assessment and response. These data collections now include more than 53,000 ...

A chromatogram of oil that leaked from the Macondo well. Each peak represents one of thousands of chemical compounds in the oil (Image Credit: Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution) Five years after the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded, killed 11 workers, and unleashed the largest accidental oil spill in history, the lingering question five years on is how long will it take the environment to get back to “normal.” What’s normal for the Gulf, however, is an elusive question for scientists. One of the most deviling issues is where vast amounts of the 4.9 million barrels of oil still unaccounted for and 1.85 million gallons of the toxic oil dispersant Corexit that sunk it went, and to what extent this combination is still affecting the seas, marshes, beaches and wildlife. The oil still at large, said a 2014 study from the University of California at Santa Barbara, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and the University of California at Irvine, is estimated at about 2 million barrels, which is on the ocean floor at depths of some 1000 meters. Scientists generally estimate it will take another five to 10 years from now to determine the full impact of the spill from BP’s ...

Five years after the nation’s largest off-shore oil spill, the leaders of three aspects of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill recovery effort, including the Gulf Coast Ecosystem Restoration Council (Council), the Natural Resource Damage Assessment (NRDA) Trustees, and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation (NFWF), expressed continued commitment to ensure the Gulf of Mexico fully recovers from this disaster. Although involved in separate processes with different responsibilities, the leaders of these efforts emphasize they are coordinating with one another to ensure efforts fit together for the benefit of the Gulf environment and the people affected by the spill. “Five years after the devastating Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the Council’s mission remains critical to restoring the ecosystem and economy for the people who live, work and play in the Gulf region,” said U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker, Chairperson of the Gulf Restoration Council. “We will continue doing everything we can in coordination with our partners and stakeholders in the region to make sure the Gulf Coast comes back stronger and more vibrant than before the disaster.” The Council expects to publish an initial draft funded priorities list for public comment and then select projects for funding later this year. “We ...

  Five years after the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history, communities along the Gulf of Mexico continue to struggle with the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, according to University of Florida researchers engaged in a series of projects funded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. And while most of the nation's attention continues to focus on the environmental and financial toll of the spill that killed 11 workers and flooded Gulf waters with millions of gallons of oil, the less obvious consequences, including those related to public health, may prove the most long-lasting, researchers say. "The individuals in these communities know how to deal with natural disasters such as hurricanes, but the oil spill forced them to face something they didn't understand," said J. Glenn Morris Jr., director of UF's Emerging Pathogens Institute and lead investigator of the study. "In terms of long-term effects, it's always the monster you don't know that's the most unsettling." Morris and his team studied levels of anger, anxiety and depression at various points over the past five years in residents of Franklin County, Fla., and Baldwin County, Ala. The researchers observed that while 10 percent to 13 percent of ...

  In response to the findings of investigations into the Deepwater Horizon tragedy, and following a thorough evaluation of recommendations from industry groups, equipment manufacturers, federal agencies, academia and environmental organizations, Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell announced proposed regulations to better protect human lives and the environment from oil spills. The measures include more stringent design requirements and operational procedures for critical well control equipment used in offshore oil and gas operations. “Both industry and government have taken important strides to better protect human lives and the environment from oil spills, and these proposed measures are designed to further build on critical lessons learned from the Deepwater Horizon tragedy and to ensure that offshore operations are safe,” said Secretary Jewell, who recently discussed the Administration’s energy reform agenda in remarks at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “This rule builds on enhanced industry standards for blowout preventers to comprehensively address well design, well control and overall drilling safety.” The proposed rule, which will be open for public comments, addresses the range of systems and equipment related to well control operations. The measures are designed to improve equipment reliability, building upon enhanced industry standards for blowout preventers and blowout ...

Oil mixed with gas spewed into the Gulf of Mexico. A first-of-its-kind study observed how oil droplets are formed and measured their size under high pressure. They further simulated how the atomized oil spewing from the Macondo well reached the ocean's surface during the Deepwater Horizon accident. The findings from the University of Miami (UM) Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science and University of Western Australia research team suggest that the physical properties in deep water create a natural dispersion mechanism for oil droplets that generates a similar effect to the application of chemical dispersants at oil spill source. "These results support our initial modeling work that the use of toxic dispersants at depth should not be a systematic oil spill response," said Claire Paris, Associate Professor of Ocean Sciences at the UM Rosenstiel School. "It could very well be unnecessary in some cases." The research team from C-IMAGE (Center for the Integrated Modeling and Analysis of the Gulf Ecosystem) conducted eight experiments to simulate different pressures of oil from a blowout at depth. The oil was placed in a high-pressure chamber, called a sapphire autoclave, and monitored using a high-speed, high-resolution camera to evaluate how droplets form at ...

When oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill first began washing ashore on Pensacola Municipal Beach in June 2010, populations of sensitive microorganisms, including those that capture sunlight or fix nitrogen from the air, began to decline. At the same time, organisms able to digest light components of the oil began to multiply, starting the process of converting the pollutant to carbon dioxide and biomass. Once the lightest fractions of the oil had been consumed, the organisms that had been digesting those compounds declined, replaced by others able to chew up the remaining heavier materials. Ultimately, a year after the spill, the oil had mostly disappeared and microbial populations buried in the beach sands looked much like they had before the spill, though there were as-yet unexplained differences. That's the scenario observed by scientists who have studied the oil's impact on the complex microbial communities - which contain hundreds of single-celled organisms - on this one Gulf Coast beach. Using advanced genomic identification techniques, they saw a succession of organisms and identified population changes in specific organisms that marked the progress of the bioremediation. They also identified the specific genes contained in the oil-eating microbes and the enzymes they used at ...