Three Years Later, Panhandle Leaders Say Gulf Restoration Could Be Economic Boon

Anchor-handling tugboats battle the blazing remnants of the off shore oil rig Deepwater Horizon. U.S. Coast Guard photo.

For more information on the state of the Gulf, check out the report Restoring A Degraded Gulf of Mexico.

Three Years Later: BP Still Needs to be Held Accountable

April 18-Three years ago, on April 20, the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded and killed 11 workers. Two days later, the rig sank. Before BP finally capped the well, months later, 206 million gallons of oil had been released along with huge quantities of hydrocarbon gases.

Larry Schweiger, president and CEO of the National Wildlife Federation, said today:

“Nearly three years later, the impacts of the Gulf oil disaster continue to unfold. Dolphins and sea turtles are still dying in high numbers. Just this month scientists announced the spill’s underwater oil plume caused a massive die-off of creatures at the base of the Gulf’s food web. It’s clear that we will not know the full fallout from the disaster for years.

“BP needs to be held fully accountable. The outcome of the ongoing trial must send an unmistakable signal to every oil company that cutting corners on safety is simply not a smart thing to do.

For more on the Gulf 3 year mark, check out the blog Deepwater Horizon: The Disaster that Keeps on Harming.

And now here are highlights from NWF in the news:

It’s a double whammy of trouble for them. First they’ll endure a barrage of painful and disruptive noise from the surveys, and should the oil platforms ever get built, their lives will be at risk daily from the inevitable spills. Two years after the BP Spill in the Gulf, have we failed to learn our lesson?

Blasts that Separate Mother and Calf

Baby dolphins, known as calves, will stay close to their mothers for up to 6 years. (Photo by J. D. Ebberly/Flickr)

According to the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), the cumulative noise of all sea-going vessels is an incessant drone of near-constant sound in a growing number of oceans regions. Seismic surveys, conducted during offshore oil and gas exploration, use rapid discharges of compressed air from air gun arrays. These send acoustic shock waves down through the water column that is reflected back from sub-sea rock strata. The blasts are emitted every 10 seconds and may be as loud as 250 decibels.

Other sources of acoustic pollution associated with offshore oil and gas activities include drilling, platform machinery, vessel traffic, low-flying aircraft and helicopters, and the movement of oil, gas or water through valves and under-sea pipelines. These intense sounds travel a long distance across the ocean. A 2009 workshop of experts, sponsored by Okeanos Foundation for the Sea, reported, “These surveys can last for months and the noise they produce is virtually ubiquitous in the world’s oceans.”

In the end, the most tragic thing may be the degrading of habitat. “Chronic ocean noise – the ubiquitous din of shipping and fishing vessels, seismic surveys, pile driving: all of it – slowly but surely degrades the quality of habitat available to acoustically sensitive species,” writes Dr. Rob Williams of Oceans Initiative. Unlike some of the more intractable threats facing aquatic life however, this one is very solvable he writes. We need to cut the noise, and that means turning down the volume on the underwater heavy metal concert, not turning it up.

Sick Dolphins Reported in Gulf

Dolphins are social and intelligent animals who live in large groups called pods. Here is a dolphin dance, off of Kona Coast, Hawaii. (Photo by SteveD/Flickr)

These dolphins have a low body weight, anemia, low blood sugar and symptoms of liver and lung disease. It is so serious that the fisheries arm of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) declared an “unusual mortality event” for cetaceans (whales and dolphins) in the northern Gulf of Mexico from February 2010 to the present.

As of March 25, there were 706 cetacean “strandings” or beaching events of which five percent stranded alive and 95 percent stranded dead. Repeat: 95 percent dead. Even in the aftermath of the BP/Deepwater Horizon spill, we need to remind the oil and gas industry and its backers that seismic surveys and oil drilling can have huge consequences. After the BP spill, NWF Senior Scientist Doug Inkley said, “The Gulf oil disaster is to marine life what smoking is to humans – it could kill you, and if it doesn’t your general health suffers.”

We are still living with the legacy of the BP spill. In fact, some of the results are just emerging. Let’s not have a Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Atlantic.

You can help NWF’s call for wildlife-friendly clean energy by donating to help us protect marine mammals and by learning more about our Gulf recovery efforts.

Part of the sticky tar mat found on a beach near where a colony of pelicans nest. Photo by Maura Wood

It seemed odd to be heading out of the Myrtle Grove Marina on a beautiful day looking for oil. The Deepwater Horizon well was capped over a year ago. BP is trying to wrap up their clean-up operations, tell us it’s all clear, and hightail it out of here. So it’s over, right?

No, it’s not over. What we saw in Louisiana’s Bay Jimmy and Barataria Bay was deeply disappointing. The oil is still there, and the impacts of the oil are evident.

We stopped first in Bay Jimmy at the marshes that took the worst oil hits. Last summer, these areas were repeatedly inundated by oil. Clean up crews determined that oil-soaked marsh grass had formed such a hard cap over the soil that sunlight and microbes couldn’t penetrate to remediate, so they had recommended “marsh raking.” By scraping the dead vegetation and oil cap off the surface of the marsh, they hoped to allow natural remediation and plant regrowth to take over.

For me, seeing these marshes is a step back in time. They appear as oil-soaked and damaged as they did a year ago. Clearly a great deal of material was removed, and the next growing season will tell the story of whether “marsh raking” is a success. But viewing the lifeless marsh edge  from the boat, with propane cannons booming to scare birds from the oily surface, was sobering and saddening.

We proceeded to Cat Island, where a colony of breeding pelicans was in full fledge when the oil hit last summer. Earlier this year, we had noted nesting proceeding as usual. Now, in September, the island was eerily deserted, nesting duties completed. The absence of birds made the condition of the mangrove canopy of the island all the more visible – the mangroves were dead or dying. When we first approached this island last year preoil, it was green, covered with a canopy of black mangrove on which the pelicans were nesting.

Photo by Maura Wood

Now, only small patches were green, and the remainder were brown lifeless sticks. Did the oil kill the mangroves? We haven’t seen data to show that is the cause. But having seen it cover the island for months during the previous year, we couldn’t help but think it certainly might be implicated. In any case, restoring thriving and healthy nesting sites for pelicans and the other water birds that share their rookeries will be an important element of repairing the damage from the oil spill.

Finally, we waded ashore on the front beach of the nearest barrier island to check it out. Tropical Storm Lee had recently come through, stirring the sand with surge and waves. Sure enough, we quickly discovered a large tar mat that had been exposed, a sticky and smelly layer that extended far down the beach.

So the oil is not gone. Barataria Bay is beautiful, but problems remain. Restoration is imperative, and funding must be dedicated to ensure a healthy and thriving Gulf.

The Deepwater Horizon rig before it sank (photo: Ideum/Flickr)

Two new reports blame a rush to drill for the explosion that led to the Gulf oil disaster that killed 11 workers, thousands of birds, hundreds of endangered sea turtles, and dozens of dolphins.

First, a new federal government report pointing to BP’s corner-cutting as a key factor in the disaster:

A 16-month federal investigation has concluded that BP’s efforts to limit costs on its mile-deep Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico contributed to the disastrous blowout last year that killed 11 workers and sunk the giant rig Deepwater Horizon.

“BP’s cost or time saving decisions without considering contingencies and mitigation were contributing causes of the Macondo blowout,” states the long-awaited report by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement.

The report, based on months of hearings and testimony from rig workers and engineers, skewers BP for dozens of mistakes and a failure to appreciate the risks of drilling and then temporarily abandoning the Macondo well.

And from the Associated Press, new details on information BP may have ignored in its push to complete the ill-fated well:

[I]nterviews and documents obtained by The Associated Press show a BP scientist identified a previously unreported deposit of flammable gas that could have played a role in the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, but the oil giant failed to divulge the finding to government investigators for as long as a year.

While engineering experts differ on the extent to which the two-foot-wide swath of gas-bearing sands helped cause the disaster, the finding raises the specter of further legal and financial troubles for BP. It also could raise the stakes in the multibillion-dollar court battle between the companies involved.

“This report confirms what we knew from the first days of the oil disaster when BP was pushing a deliberately and absurdly low estimate of the gusher’s size – that BP has put its own legal liability before the Gulf’s people and wildlife,” said Larry Schweiger, president and CEO of the National Wildlife Federation. “It also demonstrates that Congress must pass comprehensive restoration legislation to make sure BP’s fines and penalties are dedicated to making the Gulf whole.”

Congress has yet to pass any legislation responding to the worst oil disaster in American history:

Sea turtle swims through oily gulf waters, May 2010

• Not to make offshore oil drilling safer
• Not to raise the liability caps to ensure that oil companies are held accountable for their mistakes
• Not to ensure that we restore the Gulf of Mexico and the Mississippi River Delta that were so severely impacted by this disaster.

Take Action

Please take a moment to ask your members of Congress to dedicate BP fines and penalties to restoring the Mississippi River Delta’s wildlife, wetlands and ecosystems.

The British government warned Monday that several hundred tons of oil may have leaked into the North Sea from a Royal Dutch Shell rig.

The Department for Energy and Climate Change said it estimates that the leak from a flow line at the Gannet Alpha platform off the Scottish coast that began last week could have spilled several hundred tons of oil into the sea.

An oil rig in the North Sea (photo: flickr/Tuftronic10000)

By all accounts this isn’t another Deepwater Horizon, and (thankfully) it didn’t happen in rough winter conditions, but it illustrates just how dishonest the oil companies are about their ability to protect our oceans and marine wildlife. Several hundred tons of oil is not a dribble—it’s a lot of fuel, enough to create a slick 20 miles long. And it’s at least the 11^th reported incident at the platform since 2009, for an industry that notoriously under-reports its spills.

But go ahead, Shell, insist that this is just another “isolated incident” or a “minor accident” or whatever it is your PR folks cook up to let you sleep at night. I guess it doesn’t matter when you’re making billions in profits and have Congress on speed dial.

Walrus cows and yearlings on the ice pack (photo: US Fish & Wildlife Service)

As for the rest of us, isn’t it time to stop trusting these people? How many more spills will it take to realize that we’re being lied to by an industry that isn’t accountable to anyone? If Shell has its way, next summer they’ll be punching holes in the ocean floor north of Alaska, home to walrus, bowhead and beluga whales, polar bears and other iconic species.

Climate change is already melting the sea ice upon which so many animals and native peoples rely—do they really need another kick in the teeth?

—————————–

For a great, in-depth look at the recent history and politics of oil in the Arctic, check out Subhankar Banerjee’s essay “BPing the Arctic, Again — Fast Tracking Shell’s Dangerous Drilling.”

In a statement BOEMRE (the offshore regulatory agency) said that they “found no evidence that the proposed action would significantly affect the quality of the human environment.” The final outcome is contingent on a few more approvals – for safety permits and other things – but most observers believe the point is clear: the government wants drilling to happen and is working hard to make that a reality.

So what’s the big deal?  A lot of folks have pointed out the obvious: there’s no way Shell or any other company could control a blowout or clean up an oil spill in these conditions. They don’t (and won’t) have icebreaker ships to get to a spill. The skimmer ships and absorbent boom that BP used in the Gulf of Mexico were heartbreakingly useless, but even these measures wouldn’t work in the Arctic.

The Canadian Coast Guard ship Amundsen on an ice floe in the Beaufort Sea (photo: flickr/indigo-)

But don’t take it from me. According to US Coast Guard Commandant Robert Papp:

“If the company fails, if the response plan fails, the federal government must in some way be able to back it up with some resources. We had plenty of resources, from bases to communication systems to helicopters, in the Gulf of Mexico. And if this were to happen off the North Slope of Alaska, we’d have nothing.”

And for all of their assurances that we’ve come a long way since the Deepwater Horizon, BOEMRE still doesn’t do real-world testing of safety equipment (including blow-out preventers and capping stacks) for drilling operations in the Gulf of Mexico. So it’s ludicrous to think that they’ll do real-world testing in the Arctic, where there’s no response infrastructure in place.

Computer simulations and warehouse tests don’t cut it. Not to get cute but the only way to know if you can control a blowout in the freezing, icy, howling midnight is to, well, test equipment in freezing, icy, howling midnight.

Even so, Shell is claiming they will recover 90% of any oil that spills.  Funny thing is, BP only recovered 3% of the Deepwater Horizon oil and Exxon’s Valdez cleanup only accounted for 9%.  It would be a triumph of epic proportions to recover even 10 or 15% of a possible Arctic spill.  The reality is that Shell is lying, and the government seems to be fine with that.

Exxon Mobile CEO Jed Clampett and family in search of black gold

The Exxon discovery is a display of the animal spirits that still live in the U.S. energy industry, notwithstanding the political efforts to stifle them. As much as Washington tries, the U.S. economy is hard to keep down.

And Scott Angelle, Secretary of Louisiana’s Department of Natural Rescources, was practically breathless:

This is a great day for the Gulf of Mexico offshore energy industry and a great day for America. One year since our fight to lift the moratorium on deepwater drilling began, ExxonMobil has made one of the largest Gulf of Mexico discoveries in ten years. This discovery proves that the Gulf of Mexico offshore industry is capable of finding the fuel that energizes America in a safe and responsible manner.

Mr. Angelle and co. seem happy to ignore an important fact: In no way has the industry proven it can act in a “safe and responsible manner.” Exxon’s oil sits under 7,000 feet of water, which is two thousand feet deeper than the Macondo well that exploded last spring. And thanks in large part to opposition from industry, Congress still hasn’t passed a single law to make drilling safer — the House of Representatives is actually trying to roll back safeguards and open up the entire coast to development.

Congress' To-Do List

What’s really baffling is that drilling advocates should be the biggest proponents of safety, because another accident like the Deepwater Horizon could spell the end of that enterprise as we know it. Exxon and folks on Capitol Hill would do well to remember who caused the disaster in the first place (that would be BP, a charter member of Big Oil) instead of acting like the blameless victims of an environmentalist conspiracy.

And when you think about it, we’re not much better off today than we were before Exxon’s announcement. The discovery is certainly a big one, but from the way industry and their friends are backslapping you would think they just solved world hunger. Let’s put it in perspective: The United States used about 7 billion barrels of oil last year, and analysts say Exxon’s new find will only give us about 35 days of energy.  Max. And that’s assuming Exxon can pump it all (they won’t — they’ll probably recover less than half) and every drop stays in the US (it won’t — much of the oil is destined for export to foreign markets).  But hey, on the bright side, their stock went up on the news.

So before we get too excited about this, let’s be clear about what we’re cheering for: corporate profits, not energy security, environmental protection, or worker safety.

Ken Salazar, Secretary of the Interior, was scheduled for a pay adjustment that would bring his salary in line with the other Cabinet secretaries; before he joined the White House, Salazar was a member of the US Senate and therefore ineligible for the higher-paying Cabinet salary. But Sen. Vitter, a champion for his state’s oil and gas industry, accused Salazar of stifling production in the Gulf of Mexico and vowed to block the raise until the Interior Department meets his demands.

Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar helps volunteers clean up oil damage to beach at Gulf Islands National Seashore (photo: Tami A. Heilmann-DOI)

From TheHill.com:

“Given the completely unsatisfactory pace of your department’s issuance of new deepwater exploratory permits in the Gulf, I cannot possibly give my assent,” Vitter said in a letter to Salazar. […]

Vitter said he would agree to Salazar’s pay increase once BOEMRE begins issuing deepwater permits for new exploratory wells in the Gulf at a rate of six per month.

Politico’s David Rogers writes that Sen. Vitter’s tactics may cross the line on Congressional ethics rules:

It was Washington politics at its rawest, but Vitter’s actions also tread close to federal statutes which make it a crime to offer anything of value to a public official “to influence any official act.”

“It reads like the bribery statute,” said a Washington defense attorney with long experience dealing with such cases. And in a letter provided Tuesday to Capitol newspapers including POLITICO, Salazar— a former state attorney general in Colorado— asked that the pay bill be withdrawn rather than give in to what he saw as Vitter’s “attempted coercion of public acts here at the Department.”

Vitter has been working closely with his Democratic counterpart, Mary Landrieu, on legislation to restore the Gulf’s damaged ecosystem, but it’s not the first time he’s taken on the Administration over drilling decisions—Vitter has also blocked Senate confirmation of the the US Fish & Wildlife Service director until 15 new deepwater permits have been issued for the Gulf. The Interior Department has already issued 14 permits this year, and President Obama recently announced plans to accelerate drilling in the Arctic and off the Atlantic coast.

The Deepwater Horizon rig burns (photo: Anthony Posey/flickr)

Congress remains starkly divided on the issue—last week the Senate rejected a bill that would have opened new areas to offshore drilling, sped up the permitting process and removed important environmental safeguards. The House passed three similar measures earlier this month, drawing fire from worker safety advocates and environmental groups who pointed out that Congress still hasn’t passed legislation responding to the Deepwater Horizon tragedy.

Coming soon to a coastline near you? (photo: flickr/hunting.glee)

Now, it’s one thing to support offshore drilling, but the Hastings bills are something else entirely: they would actually weaken the rules that were in place a year ago, before the BP rig sank and spewed 2oo million gallons of crude oil into the ocean. And keep in mind that Congress still hasn’t passed a single bill addressing oil spills, worker safety or Gulf restoration.

The House of Representatives just approved the first of the three today, opening new areas including offshore Virginia to drilling.  The bill also forces regulators to rely on outdated, pre-BP spill Environmental Impact Statements, the government’s tool for deciding where it’s safe to drill and what steps we should take to prevent disasters.  They’ll be voting on a second bill next week that limits the regulators’ ability to review drilling permits; the third bill would open up virtually the entire US coast to oil development.

Essentially what this says is, “All the lessons we’ve learned since the spill?  Just ignore them.”

The bills’ supporters, to nobody’s surprise, are dusting off the gas prices bogeyman.  They figure that Americans care enough about $4 gas that we’re willing to overlook everything else, but the fact is that more offshore drilling won’t affect the price at the pump: according to the nonpartisan Energy Information Agency, opening up the entire US coast to development (which is what the House bills would do) wouldn’t lower costs at all by 2020, and would only lower prices by three cents a gallon by 2030! And we’re already producing oil and gas at the highest levels in nearly a decade.  It’s hard to get much plainer proof than that–the US can’t drill its way to cheap gas.

So what are these bills really about?  It’s hard to see them as anything except a giveaway to Big Oil companies (who, in case you didn’t notice, are doing just fine) and a political reaction to the White House’s post-spill drilling reforms.  And what’s really scary is that the offshore drilling agency is already short on resources and can’t possibly keep pace with the new paperwork and oversight responsibilities the bills would create…talk about kicking someone when they’re down.

Ken Salazar, Secretary of the Interior, put it more bluntly:

“I don’t have amnesia, and neither does the president.  And much of the legislation that I have seen being bandied around, especially with the House Republicans, is almost as if the Deepwater Horizon Macondo well incident never happened.”

Today’s vote, though, showed that amnesia is a bipartisan problem: 33 Democrats joined 231 Republicans on the wrong side of this issue.

NWF sent a letter to Congress opposing the bills, and we’ll continue to fight these and other irresponsible policies that endanger wildlife, coastal communities, and the natural resources we all rely upon.  To read more about our work to restore the Gulf and prevent another disaster, visit nwf.org/oilspill.

————————————

NWF letter – Hastings bills

Santa Barbara Oil Blowout, 1969, photo by USGS

Historically, environmental disasters have tended to prompt introspection, learning and some level of commitment to do a better job in the future.

When an oil blowout blackened the waters near Santa Barbara in 1969, the nation galvanized in its support for protecting our coasts and oceans, and a grassroots movement leading to the first Earth Day was begun.

Later that year, the burning Cuyahoga River led us to question our widespread practice of simply dumping pollution into rivers and streams, a process that led to the Clean Water Act and the modern architecture of environmental law.

The Exxon Valdez Oil Spill shocked and horrified us, and our political leaders responded by demanding better oil spill prevention and response, double-hulled tankers, better surveillance and more oversight.

One year after the largest oil spill disaster in our history, however, the loudest cries from our elected leaders are not for a sober assessment of our energy options, or even for improvements in oil drilling safety or emergency preparedness.  Instead, we see a mad rush for decreased regulation and taking even more risks in the hopeless pursuit of drilling our way to energy security.

The Deepwater Horizon disaster led to...ever-riskier offshore drilling?

Despite extensive evidence of ecological damage in the Gulf and no evidence of any improved ability to prevent and respond to oil spills, drilling has simply resumed apace. Worse, pressure has only increased to push into other frontier areas like the Arctic Ocean, a sensitive and productive environment where the oil industry has not demonstrated an ability to clean up an oil spill.

Congress has made no move to implement the recommendations of the National Commission on the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill. The U.S. House of Representatives will likely pass legislation to speed up offshore drilling and reduce or eliminate the environmental safeguards.

It’s beyond ironic that our national response to the Deepwater Horizon tragedy has largely been to drill more, faster, riskier, and with less concern for the environment. It’s desperate, and it’s doomed to fail us.

TAKE ACTION! Urge Congress to mark the oil spill anniversary by passing legislation that dedicates BP’s fines from the spill toward restoring the Gulf.