Gulf Oil Spill: Louisiana Wetlands Blanketed With BP Crude

First Posted: 05-19-10 10:34 PM | Updated: 05-19-10 10:53 PM
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/1 ... 82796.html

(AP) -- AT PASS A LOUTRE, La. - A chocolate-brown blanket of oil about as thick as latex paint has invaded reedy freshwater wetlands at Louisiana's southeastern tip, prompting Gov. Bobby Jindal to step up calls Wednesday for building emergency sand barriers.

Jindal and Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser led a flotilla of media to inspect the oil encroaching on remote wetlands lining Pass a Loutre, near where the mouth of the Mississippi River empties into the Gulf of Mexico.

Oil from the Deepwater Horizon offshore rig disaster had been lapping at the coast before. But this was not the light rainbow sheen or the scattered tar balls seen in previous days.

Jindal, sitting at the edge of an airboat, swept a handheld fishing net through the mess and held it up. It was coated with brown sludge, which had stained the lower shafts of the leafy green reeds sticking up to eight feet out of the water.

"This has laid down a blanket in the marsh that will destroy every living thing there," Nungesser said.

Jindal said there had been indications of such coastal contamination from aerial observations on Tuesday. Wednesday's trip confirmed the incursion.

"The day that we've been fearing is upon us today," he said later at a news conference in the coastal town of Venice, about an hour away by boat.
Nungesser said the blanket of oil has extended into marshes at Pass a Loutre, North Pass and South Pass, near the river's mouth, He said it's proof that containment booms and dispersants aren't enough to save Louisiana wildlife and the economy of commercial and recreational fishing that depend on it.

Jindal and Nungesser said they are awaiting approval from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for an emergency dredging permit to dredge sand from nearby areas for the construction of a line of sand berms-in effect, a series of new barrier islands-40 miles on either side of the river. The berms would block the oil, they said, and the new, man-made beaches would be much easier to clean than the marshes that teem with plant life.

Neither official was certain what was holding up approval of the proposed dredging project.

A telephone call to the Corps for comment was not immediately returned.

On the forward lines of the spill Wednesday, an armada of shrimp boats and other vessels were stringing lines of absorbent boom to soak up the oil, hoping to shield the fragile marsh. But just outside South Pass, at the mouth of the Mississippi River, thousands of yards of shoreline remained exposed to a thin, intermittent sheen rolling in with each successive wave.

At the water's edge, the oil is soaked several inches deep into the tangled, marsh-grass roots that hold Louisiana's coastline together. Small crabs, spotted with crude, skittered among the roots and oil-covered garbage that washed in with the tide.

Farther in, rust-colored globs oozed from puddles and wrapped around the bottom of the plant stalks. Where it was thickest, the stalks bent to the water under the oil's weight.

So far the spill appears to have reached only the very edge of the marsh, a vibrant estuary that shelters dozens of species of fish, birds and mollusks, at South Pass. But over the last several days, it has inched inland.

"It's moving farther up and it's accumulating," said Lauren Valle, a Greenpeace volunteer who has been shuttling members of the media to affected areas aboard one of the environmental group's boats.

Valle said she had been turned away from some areas by BP contractors. "They're trying very hard for people not to see it. We're here to bear witness."

721
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(CBS/AP) Patches of thick, gooey oil washed into the marshes near the mouth of the Mississippi River Wednesday, and government scientists said a small portion has reached the "loop current," which could take it to Florida and up the east coast, CBS News Correspondent Kelly Cobiella reports.

"It's like a serial killer; it's just tough to track," said PJ Hahn, director of coastal management for Plaquemines Parish.

Hahn's seen the oil pop up virtually overnight in pockets along the coast.

"We have a whole series of booms that come out here off the Barrier Islands," Hahn told CBS News. "How's it getting in here? It's coming under the booms."

The oil is thick, it's black, it feels like molasses, and it sticks, Cobiella reports.

On Monday BP's CEO said he expects the environmental impact to be minimal.

"Tell that son of a bitch to get on a plane and take a look at what we've got in our backyard" Hahn told CBS News ...

Coast Guard Under 'BP's Rules'

May 18, 2010 4:04 PM

Kelly Cobiella reports that a CBS News team was threatened with arrest by Coast Guard officials in the Gulf of Mexico who said they were acting under the authority of British Petroleum.

Tonight CBS Evening News reported they were denied access to oiled shoreline by a civilian vessel that had clean-up workers contracted by BP, as well as Coast Guard personnel on board. CBS News video taped the exchange during which time one of the contractors told them (on tape) that " ... this is BP's rules not ours."

Neither BP nor the U.S. Coast Guard, who are responding to the spill, have any rules in place that would prohibit media access to impacted areas and we were disappointed to hear of this incident. In fact, media has been actively embedded and allowed to cover response efforts since this response began, with more than 400 embeds aboard boats and aircraft to date. Just today 16 members of the press observed clean-up operations on a vessel out of Venice, La.

The only time anyone would be asked to move from an area would be if there were safety concerns, or they were interfering with response operations. This did occur off South Pass Monday which may have caused the confusion reported by CBS today.

The entities involved in the Deepwater Horizon/BP Response have already reiterated these media access guidelines to personnel involved in the response and hope it prevents any future confusion.

Tensions between the Obama administration and the scientific community over the gulf oil spill are escalating, with prominent oceanographers accusing the government of failing to conduct an adequate scientific analysis of the damage and of allowing BP to obscure the spill’s true scope.

The scientists assert that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and other agencies have been slow to investigate the magnitude of the spill and the damage it is causing in the deep ocean. They are especially concerned about getting a better handle on problems that may be occurring from large plumes of oil droplets that appear to be spreading beneath the ocean surface.

The scientists point out that in the month since the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded, the government has failed to make public a single test result on water from the deep ocean. And the scientists say the administration has been too reluctant to demand an accurate analysis of how many gallons of oil are flowing into the sea from the gushing oil well.

“It seems baffling that we don’t know how much oil is being spilled,” Sylvia Earle, a famed oceanographer, said Wednesday on Capitol Hill. “It seems baffling that we don’t know where the oil is in the water column.”

The administration acknowledges that its scientific resources are stretched by the disaster, but contends that it is moving to get better information, including a more complete picture of the underwater plumes.

“We’re in the early stages of doing that, and we do not have a comprehensive understanding as of yet of where that oil is,” Jane Lubchenco, the NOAA administrator, told Congress on Wednesday. “But we are devoting all possible resources to understanding where the oil is and what its impact might be.”

The administration has mounted a huge response to the spill, deploying 1,105 vessels to try to skim oil, burn it and block it from shorelines. As part of the effort, the federal government and the Gulf Coast states have begun an extensive effort to catalog any environmental damage to the coast. The Environmental Protection Agency is releasing results from water sampling near shore. In most places, save for parts of Louisiana, the contamination appears modest so far.

The big scientific question now is what is happening in deeper water. While it is clear that water samples have been taken, the results have not been made public. ...

Deep Water Horizon Oil Spill Multiple Plumes
(re-posted from the node 6467 discussion)

I think I can explain the fractionation of the oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill. This is different from an ordinary blow-out in that the methane remains supercritical all the way up the drill hole to the blow-out preventer (BOP) the way the well is discharging now. Since the hydrocarbon reservoir that was penetrated has a high methane content, and is at very high pressure (~15000 psi), I am pretty sure that within the reservoir the oil + gas are miscible; a "supercritical solution." There is not a separate oil layer & gas layer until pressure is reduced. My hypothesis can explain three subsurface oil plumes:

1. A preliminary phase separation occurs between the heaviest oil components (asphaltenes) and the rest of the crude oil, which remains in a methane-based supercritical solution, as the crude rises the 18000 feet from the reservoir to the bottom of the BOP. Gravitational pressure drop depends on average density of the solution, which I guess to be ~.6 g/cc; a pressure reduction on the order of 6000 psi can be anticipated, and a corresponding temperature reduction and volume increase corresponding to adiabatic expansion. The heaviest fraction is hypothesized to have already phase separated from the crude oil prior to reaching the BOP, and this phase forms the deepest oil plume, floating within 40 feet of the sea floor. (In rising from the reservoir, most of the pressure drop is due to gravitational lifting, as the flow is too slow for much viscous dissipation. The flow may be fast enough to sweep the phase separated asphaltenes up the pipe, if the velocity is greater than the sedimentation velocity of the asphaltene droplets.)

2. A very large pressure drop occurs in passing through the partially sealed BOP. When the solution goes through the flow restriction at the BOP, its pressure goes from ~9000 psi to near 2250 psi, causing a phase separation in which the natural gas based phase goes subcritical in less than a second. Even after the expansion, the two phase flow is still very hot, high enough for the methane phase to remain a good solvent for the light oil fractions. (The expansion should be close to an isothermal expansion, differing only from isothermal due to the Joule effect, and due to condensation of a liquid phase; I expect a small increase in temperature going through the BOP orifice.) As pressure and density are reduced, the supercritical methane phase decomposes into two phases, a primarily heavy oil liquid phase, saturated with methane (I expect this to be a viscous liquid, specific gravity ~.8; still containing quite a bit of dissolved methane), and:

3. A subcritical dense gas phase solution containing most of the gasoline and light oil fractions, and some heavy oil. This dense gas phase also forms downstream of the BOP “orifice.” This dense gas phase contains most of the methane. After this exits the pipe and mixes with sea water, the methane separates out as this solution cools, leading to the lowest density, lowest viscosity, fastest rising oil plume. This fraction, the light oil/gasoline plume could have a density as low as ~.75 g/cc) and would rise quickly; perhaps this is the only plume to reach the surface so far.

4. A fourth subsea plume of methane hydrate is formed as the natural gas separates from the light oil/gas phase as it cools and expands (after exiting the riser pipe). Most of the methane forms hydrates and slowly settles to the ocean floor (methane hydrate at this depth has density of 1.04 g/cc, so it sinks).
This scenario can explain four distinct plumes emanating from the leaking Deep Horizon well head. Most of the 3-phase hydrocarbon mixture vents out of the riser about a mile away from the BOP, while something like 15% of the hydrocarbon flow exits from a kink just above the BOP. After the three hydrocarbon phases mix with sea water, the fourth phase (methane hydrate) forms. The asphaltenes, which form the densest phase and the lowest plume, may take years to reach the surface, by which time they may well have mixed with the Atlantic deep waters via the circulation around Florida.

What is happening at the Deep Horizon oil spill is sort of a doomsday scenario, which can only happen this way because of the unique stepwise pressure reduction as the oil exits the reservoir. Because the oil has been fractionated, it is not rising as a single phase, as has been the case in all previous oil spills. If my hypothesis is correct, most of the oil is contained in two separate plumes that have not yet reached the ocean surface...God help us.

There are testable predictions that come out of this theory:

1) If there are three oil plumes as I suggest, and the oil that has made it to the surface so far is from the "lightest" (lowest molecular weight, lowest boiling point range). The tarballs that are forming now will be the residue of the light fraction, after evaporation of volatiles, and should be depleted of asphaltenes compared to the oil samples obtained by BP before they attempted to kill the well.

2) Similarly, there should be asphaltene content differences between each of the plume samples collected by the Pelican Research vessel (http://news.olemiss.edu/index.php?/niustblog/) such that asphaltene content is highest for the deepest samples.

Chrysostomus wrote:Wait...so, the Coast Guard, a national organization and part of the American Armed Forces, is taking orders from British Petroleum, a public corporation?

wunksta wrote:im pretty sure that in the end, this will be put on the tax payers

Moridin wrote:This video argues that the BP oil spill was not so much a failure of the free market, but more a failure of state capitalism. The government does not care about innocent people being kill in Iraq or Afghanistan for no apparent reason, it does not care very much about people being tortured at Guantanamo, does not care about the indoctrination of children into creationism in many state schools. So why on earth do you think it cares about an oil spill?

It further argues that governments helps to create these corporations; it has created the legal inviolability to liability that corporations enjoy.

(video snipped)

piscator wrote:[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_enCDXmVj0[/youtube]

Moridin wrote:This video argues that the BP oil spill was not so much a failure of the free market, but more a failure of state capitalism. The government does not care about innocent people being kill in Iraq or Afghanistan for no apparent reason, it does not care very much about people being tortured at Guantanamo, does not care about the indoctrination of children into creationism in many state schools. So why on earth do you think it cares about an oil spill?

It further argues that governments helps to create these corporations; it has created the legal inviolability to liability that corporations enjoy.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbVfVm1-B7w[/youtube]

FACT-MAN-2 wrote:The disaster is most assuredly a free market failure, and the government is complicit in that to some extent. There's nothing anyone can point to specifically that the government either did or didn't do that led to this tragedy, albeit better oversight on the safety angle and less pressure from BushCo to drill, baby drill, might have played a preventative role.

But BP is responsible for failing to sufficienrly test the blowout preventer and for the lax safety on the rig, and for the pressure to move quickly and get the well into production. And Halliburton is responsible for a botched cementing job.

The whole thing is just more evidence that our systems of governance and economy have become obsolete and we're in bad need of sweeping change and modernization on these fronts, else we are going to suffer many of these kinds of disasters.

FACT-MAN-2 wrote:

The disaster is most assuredly a free market failure, and the government is complicit in that to some extent. There's nothing anyone can point to specifically that the government either did or didn't do that led to this tragedy, albeit better oversight on the safety angle and less pressure from BushCo to drill, baby drill, might have played a preventative role.

But BP is responsible for failing to sufficienrly test the blowout preventer

and for the lax safety on the rig,

and for the pressure to move quickly and get the well into production.

And Halliburton is responsible for a botched cementing job.

The whole thing is just more evidence that our systems of governance and economy have become obsolete and we're in bad need of sweeping change and modernization on these fronts, else we are going to suffer many of these kinds of disasters.

Seth wrote:

FACT-MAN-2 wrote:

The disaster is most assuredly a free market failure, and the government is complicit in that to some extent. There's nothing anyone can point to specifically that the government either did or didn't do that led to this tragedy, albeit better oversight on the safety angle and less pressure from BushCo to drill, baby drill, might have played a preventative role.

Well, the "don't drill anything anywhere" would certainly eliminate the risk of oil spills, but it would have the unintended consequences of starving billions of people to death in short order, so I doubt that's the rational solution.

But BP is responsible for failing to sufficienrly test the blowout preventer

And you know this how, exactly? Last I heard even BP didn't know why the BOP failed.

jesus Seth, BP is a 2-time felon with a history of falsifying wellhead tests making carefully crafted public statements for the express purpose of limiting and externalizing their liability, and you are gonna hold them as credible in this?

and for the lax safety on the rig,

And how would this cause a blowout?

and for the pressure to move quickly and get the well into production.

Tempus fugit. Every company wishes to move quickly and put their product into the market. Given what it's going to cost BP to clean up the mess, I doubt that they intentionally shortcut any reasonable drilling safety measures.

when the BP company man overrides the TO pusher (and likely the Halliburton cement experts) and orders the mud out of a deep problem hole that required 14-16+ ppg weights, that's an egregious safety concern and criminal negligence, because it's highly likely the mud was the only thing holding the reservoir down
they knew this, and still pulled the mud out
the rest is still unfolding, and there is a strong likelihood that it will continue to unfold for months and decades

And Halliburton is responsible for a botched cementing job.

Was it botched? How do you know this? Perhaps it was an unpreventable series of accidents that no one could have reasonably foreseen. Multi-million dollar efforts were in place to prevent precisely what happened, and three different safety systems evidently failed simultaneously. I seriously doubt that BP intended for all three shutoff systems in the BOP to fail simultaneously, and I rather suspect that they did everything they could to ensure that a blowout did not happen, because such events cost them a lot of money and lives when they happen.

it was botched, or not completed, and this happens a lot - the hole would have held if the cement (including plugs and packoffs) was adequate
the main thing is that BP didn't take the time/money to adequately inspect the cement job before they took the mud out of the hole - no calipers, no CBL, short time for the cement to set up before BP gave the order pull off the hole after the cement failed what little tests were performed on problem equipment

Seth wrote:Oil drilling is a dangerous and sometimes unpredictable pursuit, and it's not possible to provide 100 percent guarantees that nothing bad will ever happen. It's the nature of the industry, and because society requires oil for survival, risks must be taken, and very, very occasionally everything goes bad at once and a confluence of circumstances leads to a disaster.
If BP committed errors and failed to abide by existing safety regulations, then this will be determined in due time. But the notion that more pieces of government paper will prevent such a thing from ever happening again is just silly. Even NASA, with it's zero-defect overkill still has had its share of disasters.

sounds like a fine argument against drilling in the Arctic, America's last wilderness, and a place where fuckups can't be fixed for years

FACT-MAN-2 wrote:The whole thing is just more evidence that our systems of governance and economy have become obsolete and we're in bad need of sweeping change and modernization on these fronts, else we are going to suffer many of these kinds of disasters.

How is more government, or "sweeping change and modernization" going to prevent what happened?

By Bob Marshall, The Times-Picayune
May 14, 2010, 8:52PM

Half of the all the life created in the nature-rich Louisiana coast, one of the world's most productive estuaries, takes place in the thin layer of slime on top of the marshes.

To the watching world the environmental threat that BP's oil disaster poses to the nature-rich Louisiana coast is captured in images of beautiful birds or furry creatures crippled by thick black goo. But scientists who know these estuaries best are more concerned about a less photogenic community.

The grass, microscopic algae and critters living in the wafer-thin top layer of marsh mud - called the benthic community - are the fuel that drives the whole system. If it's covered with oil, everything above, including birds, fish and cute, furry critters, will be in trouble. And so will the humans who rely on the marsh for storm protection and seafood production.

"The top two millimeters of that marsh muck is where the action is in a coastal estuary," said Kevin Carman, dean of the College of Basic Sciences at LSU. "That's the base, the food that fuels the whole system. If you lose that in a large enough area it could have a disproportionate impact on the food web, and everything that depends on it: fish, shrimp, oysters, all the species that rely on the estuary."

Half of the all the life created in the one of the world's most productive estuaries takes place in this slimy zone just seven-hundredths of an inch thick. It's a world too small for the human eye to detect and involves creatures few people have ever heard of, but one that looms huge for the larger critters in the system.

The production line starts with microalgae, single-celled organisms that feed and grow on nutrients deposited in the mud by decaying organic matter - primarily the local saltwater marsh grasses. Microalgae perform several key functions, including removing carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen, and leaving behind a sticky, glue-like substance that helps bind organic and mineral soils in the marsh, an important factor in fighting coastal land loss.

Most critically to the estuarine food chain, the microalgae are the forage for a vast range of equally tiny worms and crustaceans and other invertebrates, as well as the early stages of shrimp, crabs, oysters and almost all fish from menhaden to speckled trout and reds.

In fact, marine biologists estimate 97 percent of all marine species in the Gulf of Mexico depend on estuaries at some point in their life cycles, which means that benthic community has an impact far beyond the beach line.

...

piscator wrote:Tiniest victims of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill may turn out to be most important

By Bob Marshall, The Times-Picayune
May 14, 2010, 8:52PM

Half of the all the life created in the nature-rich Louisiana coast, one of the world's most productive estuaries, takes place in the thin layer of slime on top of the marshes.

To the watching world the environmental threat that BP's oil disaster poses to the nature-rich Louisiana coast is captured in images of beautiful birds or furry creatures crippled by thick black goo. But scientists who know these estuaries best are more concerned about a less photogenic community.

The grass, microscopic algae and critters living in the wafer-thin top layer of marsh mud - called the benthic community - are the fuel that drives the whole system. If it's covered with oil, everything above, including birds, fish and cute, furry critters, will be in trouble. And so will the humans who rely on the marsh for storm protection and seafood production.

"The top two millimeters of that marsh muck is where the action is in a coastal estuary," said Kevin Carman, dean of the College of Basic Sciences at LSU. "That's the base, the food that fuels the whole system. If you lose that in a large enough area it could have a disproportionate impact on the food web, and everything that depends on it: fish, shrimp, oysters, all the species that rely on the estuary."

Half of the all the life created in the one of the world's most productive estuaries takes place in this slimy zone just seven-hundredths of an inch thick. It's a world too small for the human eye to detect and involves creatures few people have ever heard of, but one that looms huge for the larger critters in the system.

The production line starts with microalgae, single-celled organisms that feed and grow on nutrients deposited in the mud by decaying organic matter - primarily the local saltwater marsh grasses. Microalgae perform several key functions, including removing carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen, and leaving behind a sticky, glue-like substance that helps bind organic and mineral soils in the marsh, an important factor in fighting coastal land loss.

Most critically to the estuarine food chain, the microalgae are the forage for a vast range of equally tiny worms and crustaceans and other invertebrates, as well as the early stages of shrimp, crabs, oysters and almost all fish from menhaden to speckled trout and reds.

In fact, marine biologists estimate 97 percent of all marine species in the Gulf of Mexico depend on estuaries at some point in their life cycles, which means that benthic community has an impact far beyond the beach line.

...

http://www.nola.com/news/gulf-oil-spill ... lf_of.html

infographic:

http://media.nola.com/2010_gulf_oil_spi ... 2f237b.jpg



when we have a situation whereby a business is allowed to reap all the rewards of its endeavors in an ecosystem for itself while externalizing its risks on others - the Tragedy of the Commons is the result

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

in biological terms..."A parallel was drawn recently between the tragedy of the commons and the competing behaviour of parasites that through acting selfishly eventually diminish or destroy their common host"

Garrett Hardin's original paper:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/f ... /3859/1243