ProPublica--Gulf Cleanup Training Ignores Advice From Health Agency, Official Says

by Sasha Chavkin, ProPublica - June 17, 2010 2:05 pm EDT

As we've reported, workplace safety experts have expressed concern that Gulf oil spill responders aren't getting enough safety training. On Wednesday, we spoke with a federal official who said the four-hour safety course that BP is providing to Gulf cleanup workers lacks basic information on health risks and is too short to cover the necessary material.

Joseph Hughes, director of the worker training program at the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences, said the course fails to incorporate important information. Among the subjects not included are chemical inhalation, the health effects of dispersants, and the risks of direct contact with weathered crude oil.

Hughes' agency, part of the Department of Health and Human Services, helped develop the training. "We tried to recommend what we thought the right training topics were, but all of those were not included," he said.

As we reported on Wednesday, cleanup workers are continuing to suffer health problems that they believe to be related to chemical exposure, including vomiting, dizziness, and nose and throat irritation.

Hughes also said the course's four-hour duration -- a fraction of the 24-hour training usually required for cleanup workers who may be exposed to hazardous materials -- is insufficient and rests upon a faulty interpretation of safety regulations. In 1990, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration issued a directive following the Exxon-Valdez disaster that allowed the minimum training to be cut to four hours for workers performing low-risk tasks such as beach cleanup.

"The idea of the Exxon-Valdez exemption is that they would not have direct contact with crude oil or weathered oil," Hughes said. However, he said that some spill responders receiving the four-hour training, such as booming and skimming workers on vessels, are "definitely having direct oil contact."

BP spokesman Toby Odone stated that the safety trainings are appropriate for the work people are doing. "Training for Vessels of Opportunity and shoreline workers is 4+ hours and includes properties of oil, insect bites, heat, marine operations such as laying and collecting boom," Odone wrote in an e-mail. The Vessels of Opportunity program employs local boat operators and crews in cleanup activities.

Odone also wrote that workers going into oiled areas are accompanied by a technician with 40 hours of training, and that the training was approved by the government. "It was developed with OSHA and approved by OSHA and the US Coast Guard," he wrote.

OSHA is in charge of monitoring workplace safety for the cleanup. We at ProPublica have been trying to get in touch with officials there since Monday to discuss the safety trainings, but haven't yet gotten a response.

Hughes said that his office is pressing Unified Command -- the interagency spill response team that consists of BP, Transocean, the Coast Guard and numerous federal agencies -- to implement an eight-hour training course for those at greater risk of contact with hazardous materials. The course would include the chemical exposure curriculum that is not provided in the current trainings.

"The group that I'm still concerned about is the booming and skimming workers," Hughes said. "There's an effort under way to increase the training of those workers that's being discussed at the highest level."

On Wednesday, Aubrey Miller, senior medical adviser in Hughes' agency, testified to a House subcommittee that OSHA is "working with BP to develop a new eight-hour curriculum for worker safety and health training," according to a transcript of his remarks provided by the agency.

Hughes said he had not heard any dates for when this eight-hour training program would start.

As it stands, Hughes said the training goes against the precautionary principle -- the concept that the possibility of harm is enough to warrant action to reduce the risks to public health.

"We thought it was backwards," he said of the current curriculum, "that it had a reduced amount of protection for workers."

Write to Sasha Chavkin at sasha.chavkin@propublica.org.
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Onshore accidents add to concerns

Onshore accidents involving oil and gas extraction are nothing new. Unlike the BP disaster; however, they usually get little to no attention outside the immediate area where the accident or problem occurs.

By BRETT CLANTON
HOUSTON CHRONICLE
June 13, 2010, 5:10PM
A string of accidents this month at natural gas operations on land could not have come at a worse time for Houston’s vast energy industry.

With BP’s massive oil spill already prompting questions about the safety of offshore drilling in deep waters, a key growth area for the sector in recent years, the natural gas accidents are bringing new scrutiny to a business that may be even more important to the local oil and gas economy.

The incidents include two well accidents in the Marcellus Shale play in the Northeast U.S. that have reinforced regional concerns about gas drilling. Last week, two fatal gas pipeline accidents in North Texas also focused public attention on dangers associated with infrastructure used to transport the fossil fuel.

It’s not clear whether those incidents will draw onshore gas operations into the push for tighter regulation that the offshore industry already is facing amid the unfolding disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

But they do represent another setback for an industry desperate to repair its image and to reassure Americans that domestic oil and gas resources can be developed safely.

“Right now, the industry just can’t afford any more mistakes,” said Michelle Foss, chief energy economist and head of the Center for Energy Economics at the University of Texas’ Jackson School of Geosciences.

Greater scrutiny on land-based natural gas operations comes as offshore drilling practices are already under the microscope. In late May, federal regulators announced a six-month ban on deep-water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.

That was in response to the April 20 blowout at BP’s Macondo well in mile-deep waters off the Louisiana coast that killed 11 workers aboard the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig and started the biggest oil spill in U.S. history.

Government action has idled 33 rigs currently permitted to drill in the deep-water Gulf, which could result in tens of thousands of job losses across the Gulf region, say industry groups.

In Houston, the impact of the ban, along with temporary delays in shallow-water drilling, could cost 25,000 to 80,000 jobs, said Lee Hunt, president of the International Association of Drilling Contractors.

Recent accidents
No one is predicting that kind of fallout from the recent slate of onshore accidents, but they haven’t gone unnoticed either.

In Texas last week, two people were killed and three injured after a natural gas pipeline owned by DCP Midstream Partners exploded near the town of Darrouzett when a bulldozer accidentally hit it.

The day before, one person died when a power line contractor inadvertently struck a pipeline near Cleburne that was partly owned by Houston’s Enterprise Products Partners LP.

Elsewhere, a fire raged for five days last week at a rig near Moundsville, W.Va., after workers hit a pocket of methane while drilling for natural gas in the Marcellus Shale. Seven were injured, and state officials cited the permit holder, AB Resources, for not following submitted well plans.

Also, Houston’s EOG Resources was ordered by Pennsylvania officials to halt all drilling in the state after a June 3 blowout spewed natural gas and chemicals out of a well for 16 hours before it was secured. The state has since allowed the firm to resume some drilling.

‘Accelerated’ concerns
Prior to that incident, concerns about offshore drilling safety were already starting to transfer to the onshore realm, but the EOG blowout “appears to have accelerated this trend,” wrote Kevin Book, industry analyst with Clearview Energy Partners, in a report last week.

Indeed, a handful of federal lawmakers are moving forward with bills to place greater restrictions on a drilling technique called hydraulic fracturing, and environmental groups are seeing an opening.

“It just demonstrates that we’re at a point where the extraction of fossil fuels is very risky, whether it’s deep-well drilling under the ocean or hydraulic fracturing, that our dependence on fossil fuels comes with some significant risks,” said Larisa Ruoff, with Green Century Capital Management, a Boston-based investment advisory firm. The firm is trying, through shareholder proposals, to push oil and gas companies to disclose more about risks associated with hydraulic fracturing.

While proponents say hydraulic fracturing has been key in unlocking dense shale rock formations that have greatly boosted U.S. natural gas supplies, critics have raised concerns about the millions of gallons of water required to fracture each shale gas well and about possible contamination of groundwater supplies by chemicals injected into the rock.

Effect in Houston
If new regulation arises, Houston undoubtedly will feel it.

The city’s energy industry is full of small and mid-sized exploration and production companies, as well as larger players, that have made big bets on shale gas. They, in turn, support hundreds of other service providers and equipment makers with headquarters here.

“Houston is the epicenter for shale gas technology development,” said David Pursell, managing director of Houston investment bank Tudor Pickering Holt & Co.

The fear in the natural gas industry is that the latest string of onshore accidents will erase momentum it had made in building support for natural gas as a clean, abundant alternative to crude oil.

“These kinds of events give environmentalists a mail-order funding cause,” said Porter Bennett, CEO of Bentek Energy, an energy market research firm in Evergreen, Colo. “That’s not a good thing from the gas industry’s standpoint.”

But Aubrey McClendon, CEO of Chesapeake Energy Corp., the nation’s second-largest natural gas producer, said while the recent accidents are regrettable, he doesn’t believe they will have a meaningful impact on the industry.

“You want to have no accidents ever, but as long as humans are involved and you’re dealing with great unknowns underneath the earth, you’re going to have some surprising things happen,” he said.

“The question is what do you do with it? If BP had been able to control that spill in a day, we wouldn’t be talking about the BP incident today.”

brett.clanton@chron.com

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ProPublica--Rise in Offshore Spills Raises Wider Questions on Drilling

by Sasha Chavkin, ProPublica - June 10, 2010 2:59 pm EDT

The catastrophe unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico has been portrayed as a one-of-a-kind disaster, a perfect storm of bad equipment, bad planning and bad luck.

But it’s far from the only spill that’s taken place this year – or even the only spill occurring in the Gulf right now.

On June 7, the Mobile Press-Register reported that the Ocean Saratoga rig has been leaking into the Gulf since April 30. Interior Department spokeswoman Kendra Barkoff confirmed the next day that “small amounts of oil” were leaking from the wells beneath the rig, about 10 miles from Louisiana’s southeastern coast.

Taylor Energy, the well’s owner, said in a statement that it was engaged in an “ongoing well intervention plan” with the government to fix damage caused by Hurricane Ivan in 2004, and that no significant new spill had occurred.

The Deepwater Horizon isn’t the only recent spill for BP, either. On May 25, according to Reuters, an accident on the Trans-Alaska pipeline spilled thousands of barrels of oil and forced the pipeline to be shut down for more than three days. BP is the largest owner of the pipeline operator, controlling 47 percent. (Read our story about BP’s troubled history in Alaska and its other U.S. operations.)

In addition, there was the Jan. 24 spill in Port Arthur, Texas, when an Exxon-Mobil tanker collided with an outgoing vessel and dumped nearly half a million gallons of oil into the Gulf.

If it seems as if oil spills – and particularly offshore spills in US. waters – are on the rise, that’s because they are.

A USA Today analysis of federal data found that spills from offshore oil rigs and pipelines have more than quadrupled in the last decade. From the 1970s to 1990s, offshore facilities averaged four spills per year of more than 50 barrels. From 2000 to 2009, the annual average soared to 17.

The report also found that the rate of oil being spilled was increasing faster than the growth in production. From USA Today:

In the 1980s, an average of about 2,900 barrels of oil and other toxic chemicals spilled a year. That figure rose to more than 4,400 in the 1990s and to more than 6,100 in the 2000s. Offshore oil production increased during that time, but the rate of barrels spilled per barrels produced continued to increase.

The company with the most spills in the last decade was BP, which had reported 23 spills of over 50 barrels without counting the Deepwater Horizon blowout.

Why are offshore oil facilities spilling more in recent years than they have in the past? More>>>

Salazar Declares Shallow Water Drilling “Safe,” Lifts Drilling Injunction, Conceals Shallow Water Oil Spill Currently Fouling Gulf

Really?!

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
June 8, 2010
3:10 PM

Taylor Energy Spill Has Caused 10-mile Slick, Is Still Spewing Oil
TUSCON, AZ - June 8 - On May 6, 2010, the U.S. Department of the Interior placed a partial moratorium on shallow and deepwater drilling in response to the April 20, 2010 explosion of BP’s Deepwater Horizon drilling project. Interior defines “shallow-water drilling” as occurring in less than 500 feet of water and “deepwater drilling” as that which occurs in greater than 500 feet of water.

The moratorium was to last 30 days while Interior conducted a drilling safety review. On May, 28, 2010, the deepwater moratorium was expanded with great fanfare, and the shallow-water moratorium was quietly lifted without comment or explanation from Interior. Despite the announced 30-day safety review period, the Interior Department has produced any report or finding to justify its apparent conclusion that shallow-water drilling is safe.

Today it was revealed that Taylor Energy Company LLC’s shallow-water drilling operation, using Diamond Offshore’s Ocean Sarasota oil rig, has been leaking oil since at least April 30, 2010. That is just 10 days after the Deepwater Horizon explosion. Taylor Energy has multiple drilling operations in the Gulf of Mexico using the Ocean Sarasota, all in waters between 430 and 440 feet in depth.

“It is unbelievable and unacceptable for the Secretary of the Interior to lift the moratorium on shallow-water oil drilling right in the middle of a large shallow-water oil spill. If Ken Salazar did not know the oil spill had occurred, he is spectacularly incompetent. If he did know, he purposefully misled the public. Either way, he has utterly failed the American public and the Gulf of Mexico,” said Kierán Suckling, executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity.

As it did BP’s Deepwater Horizon drilling project, the Minerals Management Service, under Salazar’s watch, approved the Taylor Energy drilling project with an exemption from environmental review.

“To this day, the Department of the Interior is allowing the MMS to exempt drilling projects from environmental review,” said Suckling. “If the Taylor Energy disaster doesn’t force an immediate change of policy, we can only conclude that the Department of the Interior is as fully controlled by the oil industry as MMS itself."

More Information on the Dangers of Shallow-water Drilling

Contrary to the hand waving of the Interior Department, shallow-water drilling is very dangerous. Indeed, it has a worse blowout record than deepwater drilling.

1. The largest oil spill ever in North America – the Ixtoc 1 disaster – was from a well in just 160 feet of water in the Gulf of Mexico. The damaged rig spilled some 138 million gallons of oil into the Gulf over nine months in 1979 and 1980 before it was contained.

2. The largest oil spill globally in 2009 occurred in just 250 feet of water off the western coast of Australia. The Montara spill gushed oil for 10 weeks, making it Australia’s worst offshore-oil disaster.

3. A Mineral Management Service review of blowouts between 1992 and 2006 concluded that “most blowouts occurred during the drilling of wells in water depths of less than 500 ft.” The agency found one blowout per 362 wells drilled in 500 feet of water or less and just one blowout per 523 wells drilled in deeper waters. The same report also found that 56 percent of all blowouts — whether in deep or shallow waters — happened before the true vertical depth of the well bore depth reached 5,000 feet. The blowout in the Deepwater Horizon drill occurred at about 18,000 feet below sea level.

See MMS, 2007, “Absence of fatalities in blowouts encouraging in MMS study of OCS incidents 1992-2006.”

4. In May, 2010, Elmer Danenberger, a 38-year veteran of the Minerals Management Service, testified before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources that MMS data indicate “well control performance for deepwater drilling was significantly better than for shallow water operations.”

See Danenberger, 2010, “Congressional Testimony.”
Above link will take you to main page linking to testimony.
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ProPublica--Years of Internal BP Probes Warned That Neglect Could Lead to Accidents

by Abrahm Lustgarten and Ryan Knutson, ProPublica - June 7, 2010 10:00 pm EDT

A series of internal investigations over the past decade warned senior BP managers that the company repeatedly disregarded safety and environmental rules and risked a serious accident if it did not change its ways.

The confidential inquiries, which have not previously been made public, focused on a rash of problems at BP's Alaska oil-drilling unit that undermined the company’s publicly proclaimed commitment to safe operations. They described instances in which management flouted safety by neglecting aging equipment, pressured or harassed employees not to report problems, and cut short or delayed inspections in order to reduce production costs. Executives were not held accountable for the failures, and some were promoted despite them.

Similar themes about BP operations elsewhere were sounded in interviews with former employees, in lawsuits and little-noticed state inquiries, and in e-mails obtained by ProPublica. Taken together, these documents portray a company that systemically ignored its own safety policies across its North American operations - from Alaska to the Gulf of Mexico to California and Texas.

Tony Hayward, BP's CEO, has committed himself to reform since taking the top job in 2007. Top BP officials would not comment for this story, but spokesman Tony Odone said that in March an independent expert reported that BP has made "significant progress" toward meeting goals set in 2007 in response to a deadly Texas refinery explosion. Odone said the notion that BP has ongoing problems addressing worker concerns is "essentially groundless."

Because of its string of accidents before the recent blowout in the Gulf, BP already faced a possible ban on its federal contracting and on new U.S. drilling leases, several senior former Environmental Protection Agency debarment officials told ProPublica. That inquiry has taken on new significance in light of the Gulf accident. One key question the EPA will consider is whether the company's leadership can be trusted and whether BP's culture can change.

The reports detailing BP's Alaska investigations -- conducted by outside lawyers and an internal BP committee in 2001, 2004 and 2007 -- were provided to ProPublica by a person close to BP who believes the company has not yet done enough to eradicate its shortcomings.

A 2001 report noted that BP had neglected key equipment needed for emergency shutdown, including safety shutoff valves and gas and fire detectors similar to those that could have helped prevent the fire and explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf.

A 2004 inquiry found a pattern of intimidating workers who raised safety or environmental concerns. It said managers were shaving maintenance costs with the practice of "run to failure," under which aging equipment was used as long as possible. Accidents resulted, including the 200,000-gallon Prudhoe Bay pipeline spill in 2006, the largest ever spill on Alaska's North Slope.

During the same period, similar problems surfaced at BP facilities in California and Texas.

In 2002, California officials discovered that BP had falsified inspections of fuel tanks at a Los Angeles-area refinery and that more than 80 percent of the facilities didn't meet requirements to maintain storage tanks without leaks or damage. Inspectors were forced to get a warrant before BP allowed them to check the tanks. The company eventually settled a civil lawsuit brought by the South Coast Air Quality Management District for more than $100 million.

In 2005, an emergency warning system failed before a Texas City refinery exploded in a ball of fire. BP's investigation of that deadly accident--conducted by a committee of independent experts -- found that "significant process safety issues exist at all five U.S. refineries, not just Texas City." It said "instances of a lack of operating discipline, toleration of serious deviations from safe operating practices, and apparent complacency toward serious process safety risk existed at each refinery." BP spokesman Odone said that after the accident the company adopted a six-point plan to update its safety systems worldwide. But last year the Occupational Safety and Health Administration fined BP $87 million for failing to make safety upgrades at that same Texas plant.

It is difficult to compare safety records among companies in industries like oil exploration. Some companies drill in harsher environments. And bad luck can play a role. But independent experts say the pervasiveness of BP's problems, in multiple locales and different types of facilities, is striking.

"They are a recurring environmental criminal and they do not follow U.S. health safety and environmental policy," said Jeanne Pascal, a former EPA debarment attorney who led the investigations into BP. "At what point are we going to say we are not going to do business with you any more, bye? None of the other supermajors have an environmental criminal record like they do." More>>>

Oil Spill Could Bring Mass Extinction to the Gulf Coast

While BP plays the influence game, environmentalists and scientists are contemplating the possibility of mass marine and wildlife extinctions as a result of the ongoing oil spill.

Published on Friday, June 4, 2010 by The Media Consortium
Oil Spill Could Bring Mass Extinction to the Gulf Coast
by Sarah Laskow

A cap placed over a severed pipe is siphoning some oil from the broken BP well in the Gulf Coast, the company said today. The company’s CEO said this morning on CBS that it was possible that this fix could capture up to 90% of the oil, but that it will take 24 to 48 hours to understand how well this solution is working. Adm. Thad Allen, the former Coast Guard chief and oil spill incident commander, called the cap “only a temporary and partial fix.”

Despite the capping procedure, it became clear this week that the onrush of oil from the BP Deepwater Horizon rig will not cease any time soon. Even in the best case scenario, thousands of barrels of oil will still flow into the ocean. Destruction is already spreading along the Gulf Coast, and before the oil stops leaking, species might be extinct and industries destroyed.

In the coming months—it’s not clear how many—oil will continue to pollute the Gulf of Mexico. BP and the Obama administration are talking about August as the end of this crisis, but other experts have projected that the spill could last until Christmas.

As Justin Elliott reports for TPMMuckraker, BP told the government it could handle a spill much larger than this one. In the initial exploration plan for the well, BP claimed “it was prepared to respond to a blowout flowing at 300,000 barrels per day — as much as 25 times the rate of the current spill,” Elliott writes. BP cannot, it turns out, respond to a blowout flowing less than 20,000 barrels per day, and the consequences for the Gulf communities are only beginning to emerge. The first casualty will be Gulf ecosystem and its inhabitants. The second casualty will be the livelihood of Gulf communities that have depended on fish, shrimp, and oysters for survival.

How long?

In 1979, another company released torrents of oil in the Gulf of Mexico, in much shallower waters than where BP was drilling. As Rachel Slajda writes for TPMMuckeraker, the clean-up methods the oil industry relied on three decades ago are similar to the technology BP is trying now. The Ixtoc spill was comparatively easy to address; yet it still took 10 months to stop.

During that spill, the nearest state, Texas, had two months to prepare for the oil to hit shore, and still “1,421 birds were found with oiled feathers and feet,” Slajda writes. The fishing industry escaped much damage, but the tourism industry lost 7-10% of its business.

Dead fish

In Louisiana, Mississippi, Florida, and other states affected by this spill, fish, fowl, restaurateurs, and oystermen won’t get off easy. As Care2 reports, the National Wildlife Federation has already documented the deaths of more than 150 threatened or endangered sea turtles and of 316 seabirds (“mostly brown pelicans and northern gannets”).

And BP is trying to keep images of the animal victims away from the public. Julia Whitty, reporting from Louisiana, writes for Mother Jones:

All up and down this shoreline angry and scared people told me some scary and infuriating stories in the past few days. I heard about the the dead and dying wildlife we’re never going to see because the victims are being carted away to early responder ships and to inaccessible buildings onshore. I’ve seen some of those photographs which can’t be shown (according to BP’s new orders) of dolphins swimming through thick gunky oil, struggling sperm whales trailing wakes a mile long in thick gunky oil, dead jellyfish in gunky oil.

Extinction

The impact of the oil spill goes beyond those individual bodies, though. As Inter Press Service reports, environmentalists and scientists “are beginning to reckon with the reality of a massive annihilation of sea creatures and wildlife.”

“You could potentially lose whole species, have extinction events,” Michael Blum, a Tulane ecology professor told IPS. “Brown pelicans were just taken off the endangered species list. On this threshold, a big dieback and mortality event, they would be pushed back into a situation where they could be endangered.” Also at Care2, Jay Holcomb, Executive Director of the International Bird Rescue Research Center, demonstrates a brown pelican being de-oiled, her feathers shampooed with Dawn detergent, her head and pouch cleaned with Q-tips.

Livelihoods destroyed

For generations, Gulf Coast residents made their living by fishing. Their fishing grounds are now off-limits. Some have found short-term work with BP fighting the oil. But those jobs come with new hazards.

Some clean-up workers have reported dizziness, nausea, and shortness of breath that they think comes from exposure to chemical dispersants. BP is not providing safety gear that would clean the air workers breathe and has threatened to fire clean-up workers who bring their own, Colorlines reports.

In the long-term, Gulf Coast fishermen may have no source of income and will have to abandon their homes and professions.

“It’s a way of life,” shrimper Dean Blachard told Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman this week. “They destroyed a way of life, a way of life that if you take it away too long, you can’t learn this in a school. This is passed from generation to generation, so the daddy teaches the son, and the son teaches his son. And, you know, once the chain is broke, you’re never going to get it back.”

It’s understandable that the residents of the Gulf Coast might want BP to pay for the damage. At The Nation, Chris Hayes reveals that BP could be on the hook for mitigation, the cash value of injured property, and for punitive damages–all beyond the cost of cleanup itself. But, as Zygmunt J. B. Plater, a law professor who chaired a legal task force on the Exxon Valdez spill, explains:

“In Alaska, most of the damage was suffered by communities who had their quality of life destroyed, and there’s no way to put a dollar value on that.”

© The Media Consortium, 2005 - 2010
Sarah Laskow, Media Consortium blogger

Center for Biological Diversity to Sue EPA

For Immediate Release, June 2, 2010

Contact: Andrea Treece, Center for Biological Diversity, (415) 378-6558; atreece@biologicaldiversity.org

Lawsuit Seeks Full Disclosure of Dispersant Impacts on Gulf's Endangered Wildlife

SAN FRANCISCO— The Center for Biological Diversity today filed an official notice of its intent to sue the Environmental Protection Agency for authorizing the use of toxic dispersants without ensuring that these chemicals would not harm endangered species and their habitats. The letter requests that the agency, along with the U.S. Coast Guard, immediately study the effects of dispersants on species such as sea turtles, sperm whales, piping plovers, and corals and incorporate this knowledge into oil-spill response efforts.

“The Gulf of Mexico has become Frankenstein’s laboratory for BP’s enormous, uncontrolled experiment in flooding the ocean with toxic chemicals,” said Andrea Treece, an attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity. “The fact that no one in the federal government ever required that these chemicals be proven safe for this sort of use before they were set loose on the environment is inexcusable.”

Dispersants are chemicals used to break oil spills into tiny droplets. In theory, this allows the oil to be eaten by microorganisms and become diluted faster than it would otherwise. However, the effects of using large quantities of dispersants and injecting them into very deep water, as BP has done in the Gulf of Mexico, have never been studied. Researchers suspect that underwater oil plumes, measuring as much as 20 miles long and extending dozens of miles from the leaking rig, are the result of dispersants keeping the oil below the surface.

On May 24, EPA Administrator Jackson expressed concern over the environmental unknowns of dispersants, which include the long-term effects on aquatic life. Nonetheless, the federal government has allowed BP to pump nearly 1 million gallons of dispersants into the Gulf of Mexico.

“Pouring dispersants into vital fish nursery grounds and endangered species habitat simply trades one evil for another. Had the government first examined dispersants before the disaster, we would not be left wondering what sort of havoc BP is wreaking on the ecosystem just so it can make the oil less visible,” added Treece. “We cannot and will not allow this to happen again.”

Studies have found that oil dispersed by Corexit 9527 damages the insulating properties of seabird feathers more than untreated oil, making the birds more susceptible to hypothermia and death. Studies have also found that dispersed oil is toxic to fish eggs, larvae, and adults, as well as to corals, and can harm sea turtles’ ability to breathe and digest food. Formulations of the dispersants being used by BP, Corexit 9500 and 9527, have been banned in the United Kingdom due to concerns over their impacts on the marine environment.

The Center for Biological Diversity is a national, nonprofit conservation organization with more than 260,000 members and online activists dedicated to the protection of endangered species and wild places.
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Gulf of Mexico Oil Well Approved

While it is quite true that to err is human, if we do not learn from our mistakes, we really are doomed to repeat them.


By STEPHEN POWER
WASHINGTON - Federal regulators approved the first new Gulf of Mexico oil well since President Barack Obama lifted a ban on drilling in shallow water last week, angering environmentalists even as business groups urged his administration to relax a moratorium on new deepwater projects.

The Minerals Management Service said on its Web site Wednesday that it had granted a permit sought by Bandon Oil and Gas, LP to drill at a site about 50 miles off Louisiana's coast and about 115 feet beneath the water's surface.

Mr. Obama announced last week that the Interior Department would extend a moratorium on wells in more than 500 feet of water. At the same time, the administration said it would allow drilling projects to continue in less than 500 feet of water, provided they satisfy new safety and environmental requirements identified in a report that Interior Secretary Ken Salazar gave to Mr. Obama last week.

Environmental groups criticized the MMS, however, saying a 2007 study by MMS of all wells drilled between 1992 and 2006, found that most blowouts occurred in water less than 500 feet.

"This is like putting a drunk back in the driver's seat after handing him a cup of coffee," Mike Gravitz, a spokesman for Environment America, said.

At the same time, a group that represents the nation's offshore oil and gas operators said Wednesday that the administration's continuing moratorium on deepwater drilling warned will result in tens of thousands of job losses. The National Ocean Industries Association said the moratorium would halt work on 33 exploratory wells in the Gulf of Mexico.

"At a time when the spill is already causing economic stress for key industries in the region, the president's action will make things much worse by putting more Gulf citizens out of work," Burt Adams, the group's chairman, said.

An Interior spokeswoman didn't immediately respond to a request for a response to the industry group. In announcing details of the new restrictions this week, Mr. Salazar said they are a "prudent" step that will provide the government time to implement new safety requirements while a recently-appointed presidential commission investigates the cause of the April 20 Deepwater Horizon accident.

Write to Stephen Power at stephen.power@wsj.com
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EPA Officials Weigh Sanctions Against BP’s U.S. Operations

by Abrahm Lustgarten, ProPublica - May 21, 2010 1:27 pm EDT

Officials at the Environmental Protection Agency are considering whether to bar BP from receiving government contracts, a move that would ultimately cost the company billions in revenue and could end its drilling in federally controlled oil fields.

Over the past 10 years, BP has paid tens of millions of dollars in fines and been implicated in four separate instances of criminal misconduct that could have prompted this far more serious action. Until now, the company's executives and their lawyers have fended off such a penalty by promising that BP would change its ways.

That strategy may no longer work.

Days ago, in an unannounced move, the EPA suspended negotiations with the petroleum giant over whether it would be barred from federal contracts because of the environmental crimes it committed before the spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Officials said they are putting the talks on hold until they learn more about the British company's responsibility for the plume of oil that is spreading across the Gulf.

The EPA said in a statement that, according to its regulations, it can consider banning BP from future contracts after weighing "the frequency and pattern of the incidents, corporate attitude both before and after the incidents, changes in policies, procedures, and practices."

Several former senior EPA debarment attorneys and people close to the BP investigation told ProPublica that means the agency will re-evaluate BP and examine whether the latest incident in the Gulf is evidence of an institutional problem inside BP, a precursor to the action called debarment.

Federal law allows agencies to suspend or bar from government contracts companies that engage in fraudulent, reckless or criminal conduct. The sanctions can be applied to a single facility or an entire corporation. Government agencies have the power to forbid a company to collect any benefit from the federal government in the forms of contracts, land leases, drilling rights, or loans.

The most serious, sweeping kind of suspension is called "discretionary debarment" and it is applied to an entire company. If this were imposed on BP, it would cancel not only the company's contracts to sell fuel to the military but prohibit BP from leasing or renewing drilling leases on federal land. In the worst cast, it could also lead to the cancellation of BP's existing federal leases, worth billions of dollars.

Present and former officials said the crucial question in deciding whether to impose such a sanction is assessing the offending company's culture and approach: Do its executives display an attitude of non-compliance? The law is not intended to punish actions by rogue employees and is focused on making contractor relationships work to the benefit of the government. In its negotiations with EPA officials before the Gulf spill, BP had been insisting that it had made far-reaching changes in its approach to safety and maintenance, and that environmental officials could trust its promises that it would commit no further violations of the law.

EPA officials declined to speculate on the likelihood that BP will ultimately be suspended or barred from government contracts. Such a step will be weighed against the effect on BP's thousands of employees and on the government's costs of replacing it as a contractor.



(U.S Coast Guard Photo)Even a temporary expulsion from the U.S. could be devastating for BP's business. BP is the largest oil and gas producer in the Gulf of Mexico and operates some 22,000 oil and gas wells across United States, many of them on federal lands or waters. According to the company, those wells produce 39 percent of the company's global revenue from oil and gas production each year -- $16 billion.

Discretionary debarment is a step that government investigators have long sought to avoid, and which many experts had considered highly unlikely because BP is a major supplier of fuel to the U.S. military. The company could petition U.S. courts for an exception, arguing that ending that contract is a national security risk. That segment of BP's business alone was worth roughly $4.6 billion over the last decade, according to the government contracts website USAspending.

Because debarment is supposed to protect American interests, the government also must weigh such an action's effect on the economy against punishing BP for its transgressions. The government would, for instance, be wary of interrupting oil and gas production that could affect energy prices, or taking action that could threaten the jobs of thousands of BP employees.

A BP spokesman said the company would not comment on pending legal matters.

The EPA did not make its debarment officials available for comment or explain its intentions, but in an e-mailed response to questions submitted by ProPublica the agency confirmed that its Suspension and Debarment Office has "temporarily suspended" any further discussion with BP regarding its unresolved debarment cases in Alaska and Texas until an investigation into the unfolding Gulf disaster can be included.

The fact that the government is looking at BP's pattern of incidents gets at one of the key factors in deciding a discretionary debarment, said Robert Meunier, the EPA's debarment official under President Bush and an author of the EPA's debarment regulations. It means officials will try to determine whether BP has had a string of isolated or perhaps unlucky mistakes, or whether it has consistently displayed contempt for the regulatory process and carelessness in its operations.

In the past decade environmental accidents at BP facilities have killed at least 26 workers, led to the largest oil spill on Alaska's North Slope and now sullied some of the country's best coastal habitat, along with fishing and tourism economies along the Gulf.

Meunier said that when a business with a record of problems like BP's has to justify its actions and corporate management decisions to the EPA "it's going to get very dicey for the company."

"How many times can a debarring official grant a resolution to an agreement if it looks like no matter how many times they agree to fix something it keeps manifesting itself as a problem?" he said.

Documents obtained by ProPublica show that the EPA's debarment negotiations with BP were strained even before the April 20 explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig. The fact that Doug Suttles, the BP executive responsible for offshore drilling in the Gulf, used to head BP Alaska and was the point person for negotiations with debarment officials there, only complicates matters. Now, the ongoing accident in the Gulf may push those relations to a break.

Discretionary debarment for BP has been considered at several points over the years, said Jeanne Pascal, a former EPA debarment attorney who headed the agency's BP negotiations for six years until she retired last year.

"In 10 years we've got four convictions," Pascal said, referring to BP's three environmental crimes and a 2009 deferred prosecution for manipulating the gas market, which counts as a conviction under debarment law. "At some point if a contractor's behavior is so egregious and so bad, debarment would have to be an option."

In the three instances where BP has had a felony or misdemeanor conviction under the Clean Air or Clean Water Acts, the facilities where the accidents happened automatically faced a statutory debarment, a lesser form of debarment that affects only the specific facility where the accident happened.

One of those cases has been settled. In October 2000, after a felony conviction for illegally dumping hazardous waste down a well hole to cut costs, BP's Alaska subsidiary, BP Exploration Alaska, agreed to a five-year probation period and settlement. That agreement expired at the end of 2005.

The other two debarment actions are still open, and those are the cases that EPA officials and the company have been negotiating for several years.

In the first incident, on March 23, 2005, an explosion at BP's Texas City refinery killed 15 workers. An investigation found the company had restarted a fuel tower without warning systems in place, and BP was eventually fined more than $62 million and convicted of a felony violation of the Clean Air Act. BP Products North America, the responsible subsidiary, was listed as debarred and the Texas City refinery was deemed ineligible for any federally funded contracts. But the company as a whole proceeded unhindered.



Workers respond on March 3, 2006 to the largest oil spill on Alaska's North Slope after 200,000 gallons of oil leaked from a hole in a pipeline in Prudhoe Bay. (BPXA)A year later, in March 2006, a hole in a pipeline in Prudhoe Bay led to the largest ever oil spill on Alaska's North Slope – 200,000 gallons -- and the temporary disruption of oil supplies to the continental U.S. An investigation found that BP had ignored warnings about corrosion in its pipelines and had cut back on precautionary measures to save money. The company's Alaska subsidiary was convicted of a misdemeanor violation of the Clean Water Act and, again, debarred and listed as ineligible for government income at its Prudhoe Bay pipeline facilities. That debarment is still in effect.

That accident alone -- which led to congressional investigations and revelations that BP executives harassed employees who warned of safety problems and ignored corrosion problems for years -- was thought by some inside the EPA to be grounds for the more serious discretionary debarment.

"EPA routinely discretionarily debars companies that have Clean Air Act or Clean Water Act convictions," said Pascal, the former EPA debarment attorney who ran the BP case. "The reason this case is different is because of the Defense Department's extreme need for BP."

Instead of a discretionary debarment, the EPA worked to negotiate a compromise that would bring BP into compliance but keep its services available. The goal was to reach an agreement that would guarantee that BP improve its safety operations, inspections, and treatment of employees not only at the Prudhoe Bay pipeline facility, but at its other facilities across the country.

According to e-mails obtained by ProPublica and several people close to the government's investigation, the company rejected some of the basic settlement conditions proposed by the EPA -- including who would police the progress -- and took a confrontational approach with debarment officials.

One person close to the negotiations said he was confounded by what he characterized as the company's stubborn approach to the debarment discussions. Given the history of BP's problems, he said, any settlement would have been a second chance, a gift. Still, the e-mails show, BP resisted.

As more evidence is gathered about what went wrong in the Gulf, BP may soon wish it hadn't.

It's doubtful that the EPA will make any decisions about BP's future in the United States until the Gulf investigation is completed, a process that could last a year. But as more information emerges about the causes of the accident there -- about faulty blowout preventers and hasty orders to skip key steps and tests that could have prevented a blowout -- the more the emerging story begins to echo the narrative of BP's other disasters. That, Meunier said, could leave the EPA with little choice as it considers how "a corporate attitude of non-compliance" should affect the prospect of the company's debarment going forward.

ProPublica reporters Mosi Secret and Ryan Knutson and director of research Lisa Schwartz contributed to this report.
Visit ProPublica website for their full coverage of the BP spill

ProPublica--Whistleblower Sues to Stop Another BP Rig From Operating

by Abrahm Lustgarten, ProPublica - May 17, 2010 1:27 pm EDT
A whistleblower filed a lawsuit today to force the federal government to halt operations at another massive BP oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico, alleging that BP never reviewed critical engineering designs for the operation and is therefore risking another catastrophic accident that could "dwarf" the company's Deepwater Horizon spill.

The allegations about BP's Atlantis platform were first made last year, but they were laid out in fresh detail in the lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Houston against Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and the Minerals and Management Service, the agency responsible for regulating offshore drilling in the Gulf.

The whistleblower is Kenneth Abbott, a former project control supervisor contracted by BP who also gave an interview to "60 Minutes" on Sunday night. In a conversation last week with ProPublica, Abbott alleged that BP failed to review thousands of final design documents for systems and equipment on the Atlantis platform -- meaning BP management never confirmed the systems were built as they were intended – and didn't properly file the documentation that functions as an instruction manual for rig workers to shut down operations in the case of a blowout or other emergency.

Abbott alleges that when he warned BP about the dangers presented by the missing documentation the company ignored his concerns and instead emphasized saving money.

"There were hundreds, if not thousands, of drawings that hadn't been approved and to send drawings (to the rig) that hadn't been approved could result in catastrophic operator errors," Abbott told ProPublica. "They turned their eye away from their responsibility to make sure the overall design works. Instead they are having bits and pieces fabricated and they are just hoping that these contractors who make all these separate pieces can pull it together and make it safe. The truth is these contractors see a piece of the puzzle; they don't see the whole thing."

BP did not respond to a request for comment from ProPublica, but has previously addressed Abbott's concerns in a January letter to Congressional investigators stating that the allegations are unfounded and that the Atlantis platform had final documentation in place before it began operating.

According to an email sent to Abbott by BP's ombudsman's office, an independent group employed by the company to address internal complaints, BP had not complied with its own rules governing how and where the documentation should be kept but had not necessarily violated any regulations for drilling. The email does not address the specifics raised in the lawsuit.

A spokesperson for the Department of Interior said the agency would not comment on pending litigation.

Congress and the Minerals and Management Service have been investigating Abbott's concerns since last year, when he and Food and Water Watch, a Washington D.C.-based environmental organization, first filed the complaints. But according to both Abbott and FWW, little has been done. After the Deepwater Horizon Gulf spill underscored their concerns, they decided to jointly file the lawsuit. Abbott was laid off shortly after he raised the concerns to BP management.

According to the lawsuit, by Nov. 28, 2008, when Abbott last had access to BP's files, only half of the 7,176 drawings detailing Atlantis' sub-sea equipment had been approved for design by an engineer and only 274 had been approved "as built," meaning they were checked and confirmed to meet quality and design standards and the documentation made available to the rig crew. Ninety percent of the design documents, the suit alleges, had never been approved at all.

The Atlantis rig is even larger than the Deepwater Horizon rig that sank in April. It began producing oil in 2007 and can produce 8.4 million gallons of oil a day.

The components include some of the critical infrastructure to protect against a spill. According the suit, none of the sub-sea risers – the pipelines and hoses that serve as a conduit for moving materials from the bottom of the ocean to the facility had been "issued for design." The suit also alleges that none of the wellhead documents were approved, and that none of the documents for the manifolds that combine multiple pipeline flows into a single line at the seafloor has been reviewed for final use.

Directions for how to use the piping and instrument systems that help shut down operations in the event of an emergency, as well as the computer software used to enact an emergency shutdown, have also not been approved, the lawsuit says. According to the lawsuit, 14 percent those documents had been approved for construction, and none received final approval to ensure they were built and functioning properly.

"BP's worst-case scenario indicates that an oil spill from the BP Atlantis Facility could be many times larger than the current oil spill from the BP Deepwater Horizon," the lawsuit states. "The catastrophic Horizon oil spill would be a mere drop in the bucket when compared to the potential size of a spill from the BP Atlantis facility."

It is not clear from the lawsuit or the limited statements made by BP or federal regulators if BP has corrected the documentation problem since Abbott was laid off.

Abbott told ProPublica he raised the documentation issues repeatedly in emails and conversations with management, "saying this was critical to operator safety and rig safety."

"They just ignored my requests for help," he said. "There seemed to be a big emphasis to push the contractors to get things done. And that was always at the forefront of the operation."

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the contrarian: Republicans Move To Protect BP

by Dave McGill
May 14, 2010 08:03 PM EDT
It seemed like a no-brainer, yesterday, when Democratic leaders tried to raise the liability limit for companies involved in drilling operations from $75 million to $10 billion. But that was before it ran into Republican opposition and failed to pass.

The American Petroleum Institute had vigorously opposed the effort claiming that it would increase the cost of exploration and production in the Gulf of Mexico by 25%. In effectively saying it would be better for the American taxpayer to pony up the money, the institute further claimed that increasing the cap would reduce government revenues, cost thousands of American jobs and threaten our nation’s energy security.

Thus, the oil gushing into the gulf has apparently been matched by the convoluted logic being spewed by those opposing the bill. The insanity may have reached a peak when Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) complained that the “Big Oil Bailout Prevention Liability Act,” as she called it, would empower only “the biggest of the big oil companies” to do the deep water drilling.

Hello - isn’t it obvious that when shoddy work results in billions of dollars of liability and cleanup costs, the companies had better be the “the biggest of the big?”

Meanwhile, there are a couple of new wrinkles in the Deepwater Horizon operation that may discourage even the Republicans from protecting the companies involved. First of all, a whistleblower/former oil worker told CNN yesterday that it is common practice for the drilling companies to shortcut the tests called for except when inspectors are present. High pressure tests that are required to be maintained for a minimum of five minutes, for example, are dispensed of within a few seconds, he said.

Secondly, the release of the video of the pipe gushing out the oil has had unintended consequences for the three finger-pointing companies involved. They were probably unaware of a scientist named Steve Werely who has made a career of performing liquid flow analyses and has written a book on flow measurement. Based on his analysis of the video, Werely told National Public Radio and, later, CNN, that the estimate of 5,000 barrels per day that has been floated out by BP is way off the mark. Using a technique called particle image velocimetry, he found that the outflow is, in fact, 70,000 barrels per day with a possible error factor of plus or minus 20%, or somewhere between 56,000 and 84,000 barrels per day.

So, rather than the 210,000 gallons a day that we’ve been told about, the gusher may be unloading more than 2.9 million gallons a day, and if there is a miscalculation of that size, it could explain why the attempted solutions aren't working.

According to Werely’s analysis, the oil flow is the equivalent of the Exxon Valdez spill every four days and, in the 24 days since the disaster started, 70 million gallons may have already fouled the waters of the Gulf.

The McClatchy Newspaper chain reported today that it could take months to contain the problem and it has been reported that the scientific community feels it is not being sufficiently utilized.

Clearly, this already represents an ecological and economic disaster of historic proportions. It is high time for the Obama administration to step in and bring all resources to bear on the problem.

Dave McGill, News Correspondent
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New York Times--Obama Vows End to ‘Cozy’ Oversight of Oil Industry

Promises sound really good...


By HELENE COOPER and JOHN M. BRODER
Published: May 14, 2010
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.” More>>>

Venezuela Offshore Rig Sinks

Two in one month?!

New York Times:
By SIMON ROMERO
Published: May 13, 2010

LIMA, Peru — An offshore natural gas exploration rig leased to Venezuela’s national oil company sank off the coast of northeastern Venezuela and forced the rig to evacuate all 95 of its workers, President Hugo Chávez announced early Thursday.

In an attempt to calm nerves after the explosion of an offshore drilling rig last month in the Gulf of Mexico, Venezuelan energy officials said that the sunken natural gas rig posed no environment threat and that no workers had died. The cause of the sinking was unclear.

Mr. Chávez, who made the initial announcement about the sunken rig via his account on Twitter, the social networking site, also said that two Venezuelan Navy patrols were sent to the waters by the rig, which is owned by Aban Singapore, a wholly owned subsidiary of Aban Offshore, India’s largest oil rig company.

“You know this platform is semisubmergible,” Mr. Chávez told his followers on Twitter. “At midnight it listed, took on water, ceased operations and they evacuated,” he said. More>>>

New Mexico Independent--In oil and coal disasters, parallel tales of lax regulation

I'm an advocate for regulation and have been told many times that the oil and gas industry is regulated, so what's my problem. My problem is this: Not only are existing regulations insufficient, they are not properly enforced. All the regulations in the world aren't going to make a bit of difference if they are not enforced.

Laws intended to prevent recent tragedies went largely unenforced
By Mike Lillis 5/12/10 9:08 AM

On the surface, the two accidents couldn’t have been more different. The first occurred in the rugged mountains of Appalachia; the second was more than a thousand miles away in the Gulf of Mexico. One was miles underground; the other thousands of feet underwater. One happened in pursuit of coal; the other in the unending search for domestic oil.

Yet last month’s deadly explosion at the Upper Big Branch coal mine in southern West Virginia, and the more recent fatal blast on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig off the coast of Louisiana, have at least this much in common: Both were likely preventable, according to a growing number of lawmakers and workplace safety experts — if only federal regulations designed to prevent such disasters had been enforced.

“I don’t believe it is enough to label this catastrophic failure as an unpredictable and unforeseeable occurrence,” Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.), chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said during a Tuesday hearing on the Deepwater Horizon disaster. “If this is like other catastrophic failures of technological systems in modern history … we will likely discover that there was a cascade of failures: technical, human and regulatory.”

The message is clear: Regulations are only as good as the people enforcing them. And Congress, some experts are warning, would do well to recognize that trend as lawmakers contemplate reforms as diverse as those governing coal mines, oil rigs and Wall Street.

Along those lines, Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize winning economist for the New York Times, noted this week that the problems at the Interior Department are by no means unique. Instead, they represent “a broader pattern that includes the failure of banking regulation and the transformation of the Federal Emergency Management Agency … into a cruel joke.” The common thread, Krugman argued, “is the degradation of effective government by antigovernment ideology.”

Krugman targeted the Bush administration in particular. But many work safety experts are quick to note that the lax enforcement over the extraction industries represents a much broader trend, beginning well before Bush took office, and extending well beyond his exit. Along the way, federal enforcement agencies have been stacked, at times, with anti-regulation regulators — many of whom still remain. And the industries have showered millions of dollars on Congress in order to persuade lawmakers that, when it comes to protecting workers, business knows best. The results have been predictable.

“We have a strong anti-regulatory bent in this country,” said Celeste Monforton, former work-safety official in the Labor Department who’s now at George Washington University, “Regulation is like a four-letter word.” More>>>

Tests show high levels of air-borne chemicals at Venice

I doubt that many coastal communities have really thought about what they might now be breathing thanks to the BP disaster.

Written by Walter Pierce
Monday, 10 May 2010

Tests conducted last week in Venice by environmental chemist Wilma Subra show highly elevated levels of hydrogen sulfide and other volatile organic chemicals, according to the Louisiana Environmental Action Network. Subra monitored the air in Venice — one of the southernmost points of coastal Louisiana and the base of operations for much of the oil-containment efforts related to last month's Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill — from April 28 to May 7.

Her analyses show that hydrogen sulfide, a colorless, flammable gas that is found in high concentration in natural gas and in smaller concentrations in crude oil, reached a high point of 1,192 parts per billion on May 3. Hydrogen sulfide is detectable by smell at .5 ppb and can cause physical reactions such as irritation to the eyes, nose, throat and lungs as well as nausea, dizziness, confusion and headache at 5 to 10 ppb. On three of the days during the monitoring period, hydrogen sulfide exceeded the physical reaction level by 100 to 120 times.

Subra’s analysis also found that between April 30 and May 6, levels of volatile organic chemicals such as benzene, tetrachloroethane, nitropropane and ethylene chloride likely exceeded Louisiana Ambient Air Standards and may have exceed the highest concentration of Annual Average Standard by up to 50 times.

Subra’s analysis of air quality at Venice was conducted at the request of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Click here for source article

Common Dreams.org: BP, US Search for New Fix to US Oil Spill

BP, US Search for New Fix to US Oil Spill
NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana - BP officials desperately searched Monday for a new fix to the enormous Gulf of Mexico oil spill after efforts to cap a gushing leak with a containment dome hit a perilous snag.

British energy giant BP, which owns the lion's share of the leaking oil and has accepted responsibility for the clean-up, is facing the jaw-dropping possibility that, failing a swift fix it has yet to deliver with a containment dome, the crisis could spiral into an even worse environmental calamity.

The White House also was scrambling to contain fallout from the massive disaster threatening to take a toll on President Barack Obama's political and energy agenda.

In Washington, Obama on Monday "will meet with a number of Cabinet members and senior staff in the White House Situation Room to review BP efforts to stop the oil leak, as well as to decide on next steps to ensure all is being done to contain the spread, mitigate the environmental impact and provide assistance to affected states," a White House statement said.

Meanwhile the Minerals Management Service (MMS) said it "continues to work with BP to explore all options that could stop or mitigate oil leaks from the damaged well."

The BP-leased Deepwater Horizon rig sank some 80 km (50 miles) southeast of Venice, Louisiana April 22, two days after an explosion that killed 11 workers.

The riser pipe that had connected the rig to the wellhead now lies fractured on the seabed a mile below, spewing out oil at a rate at some 5,000 barrels, or 210,000 gallons, a day.

Sheen from the leading edge of the slick has surrounded island nature reserves off the coast of Louisiana and tar balls have reached as far as the Alabama coast, threatening tourist beaches further east.

Sea life is being affected in a low-lying region that contains vital spawning grounds for fish, shrimp and crabs and is a major migratory stop for many species of rare birds.

The 2.4-billion-dollar Louisiana fishing industry has been slapped with a temporary ban in certain areas due to health concerns about polluted fish.

BP, facing a barrage of lawsuits and clean-up costs soaring above 10 million dollars a day, had pinned its hopes on a 98-ton concrete and steel containment box that it successfully lowered 5,000 feet (1,500 meters) down over the main leak.

But the contraption lay idle on the seabed as engineers furiously tried to figure out how to stop it clogging with ice crystals.

Still, if efforts fail to make the giant funnel system effective, there is no solid plan B to prevent potentially tens of millions of gallons of crude from causing one of the worst ever environmental catastrophes.

Untold damage is already being done by the 3.5 million gallons estimated to be in the sea so far, but the extent of that harm will rise exponentially if the only solution is a relief well that takes months to drill.

Admiral Thad Allen, head of the US Coast Guard, suggested they were considering what he called a "junk shot" to plug the main leak.

"They're actually going to take a bunch of debris, shredded up tires, golf balls and things like that and under very high pressure shoot it into the preventer itself and see if they can clog it up and stop the leak," Allen, who is leading the US government's response, told CBS television.

This could be risky as experts have warned that excessive tinkering with the blowout preventer -- a huge 450-ton valve system that should have shut off the oil -- could see crude shoot out unchecked at 12 times the current rate.

There are also fears the slick, which covers an area of about 2,000 square miles (5,200 square kilometers), could be carried around the Florida peninsula if it spreads far enough south to be picked up by a special Gulf current.

"If this gusher continues for several months, it's going to cover up the Gulf coast and it's going to get down into the loop current and that's going to take it down the Florida Keys and up the east coast of Florida," warned Florida Senator Bill Nelson. More>>>

Dispersant 'may make Deepwater Horizon oil spill more toxic'

It seems pretty counter-productive to be using a substance more hazardous than oil in an attempt to clean up the mess.

Guardian, May 5, 2010
Dispersant 'may make Deepwater Horizon oil spill more toxic'
Scientists fear chemicals used in oil clean-up can cause genetic mutations and cancer, and threaten sea turtles and tuna
By Suzanne Goldenberg

Chemicals used to break up the Deepwater Horizon oil spill before it reaches shore could do lasting damage to the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, environmental scientists say.

By BP's own account, it has mobilised a third of the world's supply of dispersant, so far pouring about 140,000 gallons (637,000 litres) of the cocktail into the Gulf as of today. Some of the dispersant has been injected directly into the source of the spill on the ocean floor, a technique never deployed before, deepening concerns about further damage to the environment.

The dispersants are designed to break down crude into tiny drops, which can be eaten up by naturally occurring bacteria, to lessen the impact of a giant sea of crude washing on to oyster beds and birds' nests on shore. But environmental scientists say the dispersants, which can cause genetic mutations and cancer, add to the toxicity of the spill. That exposes sea turtles and bluefin tuna to an even greater risk than crude alone. Dolphins and whales have already been spotted in the spill.The dangers are even greater for dispersants poured into the source of the spill, where they are picked up by the current and wash through the Gulf. More>>>

ProPublica--Congressmen Raised Concerns About BP Safety Before Gulf Oil Spill

I think I need a label titled "incompetence." I have this feeling it would have to be applied to just about every post though...

by Abrahm Lustgarten, ProPublica - May 4, 2010 5:30 pm EDT
May 5: This post has been corrected.

A 2006 oil leak in Alaska, which temporarily shut down the Prudhoe Bay drilling field pipeline, was referenced in a letter dated Jan. 14, 2010, from two congressman to BP Exploration (Alaska) Inc.
In the months before BP's Deepwater Horizon rig sank in a ball of fire in the Gulf of Mexico, the company had four close calls on pipelines and facilities it operates in Alaska, according to a letter from two congressmen obtained by ProPublica [2].

In that letter, dated Jan. 14, 2010, Reps. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., and Bart Stupak, D-Mich., noted that the company's efforts to cut costs could imperil safety at BP facilities.

Between September 2008 and November 2009, three BP gas and oil pipelines on Alaska's North Slope ruptured or clogged, leading to a risk of explosions, the letter said. A potentially cataclysmic explosion was also avoided at a BP gas compressor plant, where a key piece of equipment designed to prevent the buildup of gas failed to operate, and the backup equipment intended to warn workers was not properly installed.

The letter was addressed to BP's president of Alaskan operations, John Mingé. The congressmen have been investigating BP's safety and operations since 2006, when a 4,800-barrel oil spill temporarily shut down the Prudhoe Bay drilling field pipeline.

[Anonymous Tipline: If you work for BP or a contractor on a rig in the Gulf, or anywhere else, we'd like to hear from you. Tell us about your work conditions, your management, and your observations of what is happening. We will not publish your identity. Call 917-512-0254, fax documents to 212-514-5250 or e-mail Abrahm.Lustgarten@propublica.org.]

Neither Waxman nor Stupak returned calls for comment, and it wasn't clear from the letter how they obtained the information. The pipeline problems were mentioned in trade and local press, but the compressor plant incident does not appear to have been previously reported.

In 2006, after a string of highly publicized accidents, BP publicly committed to improving its safety record, and by many accounts it made progress. But this letter suggests that concerns about the safety of BP operations persisted in the months leading up to the accident in the Gulf this April, which killed 11 workers and has led to the largest U.S. oil spill in recent history.

In the letter, the congressmen say the "serious safety and production incidents" could affect the operation of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System, a "vital energy security asset" that supplies one-fourth of the nation's daily oil needs.

BP announced strong profits on April 27. According to a banking analyst report, the company benefited from having cut some 5,000 jobs and saving $4 billion in operating expenses.

A BP spokesman in Alaska did not respond by the time of publication after requesting and receiving detailed questions from ProPublica. More>>>

BP: Billionaire Polluter

BP has a really stellar operating record...In an imaginary universe where all oil companies are responsible and honest.

Posted on May 4, 2010
By Amy Goodman

Less than a week after British Petroleum’s Deepwater Horizon drilling platform exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 workers and unleashing what could be the worst industrial environmental disaster in U.S. history, the company announced more than $6 billion in profits for the first quarter of 2010, more than doubling profits from the same period the year before. Oil industry analyst Antonia Juhasz notes: “BP is one of the most powerful corporations operating in the United States. Its 2009 revenues of $327 billion are enough to rank BP as the third-largest corporation in the country. It spends aggressively to influence U.S. policy and regulatory oversight.” The power and wealth that BP and other oil giants wield are almost without parallel in the world, and pose a threat to the lives of workers, to the environment and to our prospects for democracy.

Sixty years ago, BP was called the Anglo-Iranian Oil Co. (AIOC). A popular, progressive, elected Iranian government had asked the AIOC, a largely British-owned monopoly, to share more of its profits from Iranian oil with the people of Iran. The AIOC refused, so Iran nationalized its oil industry. That didn’t sit well with the U.S., so the CIA organized a coup d’é tat against Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh. After he was deposed, the AIOC, renamed British Petroleum, got a large part of its monopoly back, and the Iranians got the brutal Shah of Iran imposed upon them, planting the seeds of the 1979 Iranian revolution, the subsequent hostage crisis and the political turmoil that besets Iran to this day.

In 2000, British Petroleum rebranded itself as BP, adopting a flowery green-and-yellow logo, and began besieging the U.S. public with an advertising campaign claiming it was moving “beyond petroleum.” BP’s aggressive growth, outrageous profit and track record of petroleum-related disasters paint a much different picture, however. In 2005, BP’s Texas City refinery exploded, killing 15 people and injuring 170. In 2006, a BP pipeline in Alaska leaked 200,000 gallons of crude oil, causing what the Environmental Protection Agency calls “the largest spill that ever occurred on the [Alaskan] North Slope.” BP was fined $60 million for the two disasters. Then, in 2009, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) fined BP an additional $87 million for the refinery blast. Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis said: “BP has allowed hundreds of potential hazards to continue unabated. ... Workplace safety is more than a slogan. It’s the law.” BP responded by formally contesting all of OSHA’s charges.

President Barack Obama said of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, “Let me be clear: BP is responsible for this leak; BP will be paying the bill.” Riki Ott is not so sure. She is a marine toxicologist and former “fisherma’am” from Alaska, and was one of the first people to respond to the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil disaster. Exxon deployed an army of lawyers to delay and defeat the legal claims of the people who were physically and/or financially harmed by the Valdez spill. “What we know is that the industry does everything it can to limit its liability,” she told me.

The (Mobile, Ala.) Press-Register reported that Alabama Attorney General Troy King told BP to “stop circulating settlement agreements among coastal Alabamians.” Apparently, BP was requiring owners of fishing boats seeking work mitigating the spill to waive any and all rights to sue BP in the future. Despite a BP spokesperson’s pledge that the waivers would not be enforced, the news report stated, “King said late Sunday that he was still concerned that people would lose their right to sue by accepting settlements from BP of up to $5,000.”

Even if BP doesn’t trick victims into signing away the right to sue, the 1990 Oil Pollution Act, while requiring polluters to pay the actual hard costs of the cleanup, caps the additional financial liability of a spill at just $75 million. Given that millions of people will be impacted by the spill, by the loss of fisheries and tourism, and by the cascade of impacts on related industries, $75 million is small change. More>>>

ProPublica Continues Coverage Related to BP Oil Spill

If you pay attention to the fines issued to oil and gas companies when they mess up (sometimes), you quickly catch on that the fines amount to basically nothing. Usually ranging in the low thousands, they are nothing more than a minor slap on the wrist. A story published today by ProPublica, raises the issue of this in relation to offshore drilling. To read the article, click here.
Another story published today by ProPublica, raises serious questions about members of a nonprofit conservation group and its close ties to the oil and gas industry. So close in fact, that one of thier board members is an executive at Transocean, the company that owns the Deepwater Horizon rig that exploded last month. To read the article, click here.