BP Oil Spill Worsens With No Solution in Sight, 210,000 Gallons a Day Spew into Gulf of Mexico

Ott talks about the limits on liability through the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund and EXEMPTIONS for Halliburton and others. Video at link.


From Democracy Now

May 3, 2010


Federal authorities have banned commercial and recreational fishing in a large stretch of water in the Gulf of Mexico due to the massive oil spill caused by a BP-operated rig that exploded nearly two weeks ago. An estimated 210,000 gallons of oil a day is pouring into the Gulf in what might turn out to be the worst industrial environmental disaster in U.S. history. We speak with Riki Ott, a marine toxicologist and a former commercial salmon fisherma’am from Alaska who experienced firsthand the devastating effects of the Exxon Valdez oil spill.




Guest:

Riki Ott, marine toxicologist and former salmon fisherma’am in Alaska. She is author of “Not One Drop: Betrayal and Courage in the Wake of the Exxon Valdez Spill.”


snip* RIKI OTT: It’s mind-boggling that the industry knowingly puts environment, entire communities, entire other industries like fishing industries at risk by really taking risks with reducing environmental protections, weakening environmental regulation, weakening- getting exemptions to laws, and then when something like this happens, it’s like, “Oh, my, how did this happen?” So I think we have more than an oil slick out of control, we also have these big corporations out of control. And what can be done, I think, well the reason I’m- go ahead.


ANJALI KAMAT: I was just going to ask you, you have studied the Exxon Valdez spill extensively. What are the lessons we can learn from that?


RIKI OTT: This is why I’m coming down tomorrow because it’s not just about the environment, it’s about the people, too. And I remember sitting in our community and just not knowing, our whole community not knowing. How long was thins going to take? What was going to happen to us? Would it be just this year that our income would be impacted? Would it be years? We had no idea. And the not knowing was agonizing. It was agonizing. So what we learned from this was that it’s not- the killing does not stop in 1989- well, for us, in 1989. The killing will not stop in 2010. The cloud of oil that is dispersed as dissolved droplets under the giant slick, this is killing everything in the water column. So clams, they all have a component that a life- part of their life-cycle is in the water column. Shrimp in the water column, the eggs, the young larvae. And all this is being wiped out. So it’s not just a fishery that’s closed this year, it will be closed, probably for the next couple of years because, where will be the shrimp that should have been born this year and survived and become adults? I mean, they just probably will not manifest. They won’t show up. They won’t survive. So, we found the killing did not stop. And we didn’t anticipate that and neither did the industry.


And Exxon did everything it could to reduce its liability. Exxon never paid for long-term damages. It only paid for short-term damages. So this is really something to watch out for. It’s one thing to say we’re going to hold- the President- listening to him say, we’re going to hold BP accountable to our laws. Our laws are pretty darn weak. For starters, they’re will only going to protect directly damaged parties. So fisherman, I’m sorry, but in our community, as I’m sure down in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast, the fisherman buy groceries, good restaurants, put children in school, by clothes. If the fishermen don’t have money, where- it damages all the shoreside industry as well. So, there’s collateral damage to businesses that won’t necessarily be compensated under the law. And unfortunately, the Exxon Valdez case set president in the Supreme Court that these big companies don’t have to pay much on the issue of punitive damage. It got knocked way down. So it’s more like a business expense. These big companies will go on making business, drilling for oil, and fishermen are going to go bankrupt. That’s certainly what we saw in Cordova.


AMY GOODMAN: Riki Ott, I wanted to ask about this issue of Halliburton, investigators delving into the causes of the massive gulf oil spill, examining the role of Halliburton, the giant energy services company that we know so well from places like Iraq, that was responsible for cementing the deepwater drill hole. Can you talk about what that means, the fact they just finished doing this?


RIKI OTT: I can talk a little bit more broadly about Halliburton. I have been working widely on helping communities try to transition off oil and gas. And, what I have discovered in Colorado, New Mexico, New York is this coal bed methane fracking. And actually Halliburton invented fracking and Halliburton also got an exemption, got an exemption to the U.S. Safe Drinking Water Act, it’s called the Halliburton Exemption. So I think, I’m encouraging the news media to look really more broadly at this corporate tendency to say, “Oh well, these little environmental protection laws, these laws that protect public safety, worker safety, public health, they’re in our way so we’ll just exemptions to them.” I think we need to look at what the industry has done, the fossil fuel industry, coal, oil, gas, in terms of exemptions to the Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, Superfund Act, U.S. Safe Drinking Water Act. You’ll find it’s just riddled with exemptions. And even more scary, as more oil dumps into the ocean, we are going to see more money dumped into our political campaigns because of the Citizens United case. So I’m really concerned that these big corporations are just going to buy off the politicians, buy off the judges, and it will be business as usual. It’s really time to end this corporate rule and legalize democracy. The people need to rule. I encourage people to go take a look at our website movetoamend.org that’s our national grassroots coalition to legalize democracy. Movetoamend.org.

snip* AMY GOODMAN: Riki Ott, interestingly BP may not be liable for more than $75 million. Under the law called the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund. Operators of the offshore rig face no more than $75 million in liability for the damages that might be claimed by individuals, companies, or the government. Although they are responsible for the cost of containing and cleaning-up the spill.


RIKI OTT: This will be the first time that the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 is really put to test. So, we’re kind of a little bit in cold water here, but what we know is that the industry does everything it can to limit its liability. I am sure that this happened also to the Oil Pollution Act of 1990. So, we’ll see how this plays out. But, the people should not count, even though the President is saying, “We will make sure BP pays,” BP is going to pay to the extent that it is made to pay by law. And these big corporations, they help write our laws and they help elect our Congress people that pass the laws. So, we’re kind of playing on a very stacked deck.

in full: http://www.democracynow.org/2010/5/3/bp_oil_spill_worsens_with_no



The Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund (OSLTF)
http://www.uscg.mil/npfc/About_NPFC/osltf.asp

May 3, 2010, 4:14 p.m. EDT

additional video at link.

snip* Boston College Law Professor Zygmunt Jan Broël Plater, who served on a task force for the Alaska Oil Spill Commission in the Valdez spill, said it's still impossible to predict BP's ultimate liability in the spill.

"If we're talking Alaska as a precedent, it will probably be in the billions, and most of it which will be written off in taxes," he commented. "It's clear, however, that after the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989, the majority of money damages will be based on nonstatutory liabilities rather than Oil Pollution Act of 1990 or other federal laws.

"Also, working in the legal-research task force for Alaska Oil Spill Commission, we noted the opportunity for equitable/injunctive remedies, federal and state, that could be remarkably helpful in prevention and response way beyond money damages."

Plater pointed out that the U.S. Supreme Court has been moving away from massive punitive damages, as evidenced by its ruling in favor of Exxon Mobil Corp. (NYSE:XOM) in the Valdez case in 2008.

After a lengthy legal battle that stretched over a couple of decades, the high court ruled punitive damages are allowed in the lawsuit over the 1989 Valdez oil spill, but said that lower courts should reduce the $2.5 billion award. See Exxon Valdez award story.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/gulf-oil-spill-could-be-worse-than-exxon-valdez-2010-05-03

snip* The U.S. considered requiring a remote-controlled shut-off mechanism several years ago, but drilling companies questioned its cost and effectiveness, according to the agency overseeing offshore drilling. The agency, the Interior Department's Minerals Management Service, says it decided the remote device wasn't needed because rigs had other back-up plans to cut off a well.

snip* While U.S. regulators have called the acoustic switches unreliable and prone, in the past, to cause unnecessary shut-downs, Inger Anda, a spokeswoman for Norway's Petroleum Safety Authority, said the switches have a good track record in the North Sea. "It's been seen as the most successful and effective option," she said.

The manufacturers of the equipment, including Kongsberg Maritime AS, Sonardyne Ltd. and Nautronix PLC, say their equipment has improved significantly over the past decade.

The Brazilian government began urging the use of the remote-control equipment in 2007, after an extensive overhaul of its safety rules following a fire aboard an oil platform killed 11 people, said Raphael Moura, head of safety division at Brazil's National Petroleum Agency. "Our concern is both safety and the environment," he said.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704423504575212031417936798.html


More here: ** The Department of Interior was riddled with scandal and ethics problems during the Bush administration, and his Secretary of the Interior from 2001 to 2006 was Gale Norton, a former lobbyist for the lead industry, who took a job with Shell Oil after leaving her cabinet post. She is now the subject of a corruption probe at the DOJ.

Government watchdogs and environmental groups have long asserted that Norton, her former deputy at Interior, J. Steven Griles, Vice President Dick Cheney, through his national energy strategy task force, and Congress gave energy companies preferential treatment.



Former Interior Secretary Gale Norton is focus of corruption probe

The Justice Department investigation centers on a 2006 decision to award oil shale leases in Colorado to a Royal Dutch Shell subsidiary. Months later, the oil giant hired Norton as a legal counsel.

September 17, 2009|Jim Tankersley and Josh Meyer

http://articles.latimes.com/2009/sep/17/nation/na-norton17

This is uncharted waters for the oil industries. I doubt that there is any real way that this be stopped any time soon. I'll bet that there's already discussions at high levels at a small nukes need to be detonated to seal the leak(s). Its far worse that anyone cares to admit.

http://trueslant.com/juliaioffe/2010/05/04/nuke-that-slick/

Using a nuclear weapon to seal this would be absurd. Talk about the cure being worse than the disease.

Yeah it does sound extreme, but the prospect of watching oil and gas gush into the gulf for the next 15 years until the formation is depleted is pretty extreme. Capping a well at 5000 feet below the surface at 2200 psi pressure is extreme. We're talking about drilling a relief well from a moving floating drilling barge in 5000 feet of water into the seabed and then into an existing production well that's no more than 24" in diameter. The reason we are into this mess is that it's difficult at best to just drill the production well in the first place. If they can't seal that well with 90 days, you'll have over half a million barrels of oil in the gulf. That's twice what the Exxon Valdez spill amounted to. The Russians drilled a parallel hole so that they could use an explosion to fuse the production zone to seal the path to the surface. The blast was contained by exploding it about a mile underground to contain the radiation. If they can't drill into the original wellbore and pump mud into it, the only other alternative is to let the zone deplete itself. That would take years to happen.

The ENTIRE wellhead is gone. Capping such a well depends on implementing one of two measures, placing a pressure control device on top of the production pipe or drilling a new well to plug the old one. Both are extremely difficult to do with a surface well and next to impossible in shallow offshore well. This is a very deep well. Whats more, there are three release points.

If the well can't be capped, the next alternative is to use dispersants and booms to try to contain the spill. There are tens of millions of barrels of oil in that formation. With the volume of oil, gas and brine in that formation, how effective do you think dispersants would be in protecting most of the gulf shoreline and maybe the Atlantic coast with that much oil in the water? When you consider all of that, maybe using a fission explosive to seal the wellbores doesn't sound so extreme.

http://www.examiner.com/x-23222-Fort-Lauderdale-Green-Culture-Examiner~y2010m4d30-Oil-spill-in-Louisiana-worsening

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2010/05/02/officials-warn-of-potential-catastrophe-from-gulf-of-mexico-oil-spill/?fbid=rmOqBb20YPm

Relief wells don't have to intersect the initial wellbore, they just have to get near it.

While BP's initial "domes" may not work, they can certainly design one that will LONG before 15 years passes.

Are you nuts? The potential unintended consequences of a nuclear blast are enormous. The current situation is really bad, but this would just make it far worse. Besides, you wouldn't need a nuclear weapon. American conventional explosives are more than adequate, not to mention far less dangerous.

Labeling an idea as "extreme" is a very subjective way to look at this. It doesn't make any sense to dismiss an idea out of hand because one doesn't "believe" the idea is a good one. If you can't offer a rational reason why this won't work, your opinion doesn't have much merit. Deep subsurface nuclear tests have been conducted by the hundreds without incident. The only practical problem is that setting off a small underground nuclear explosion still violates the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. We would have to ask the other signatories for an exception, which I don't think anyone of them would object to as long as we didn't do something stupid like using the occasion to actually live test a 4th generation nuclear weapon. I think that this is one of the very few acceptable uses of a nuclear explosion.

Sorry, but you're wrong about the relief well, it HAS to intersect or you can't pump drilling mud down the original drill-shaft to kill the blowout. You have to pump enough mud into the hole so that the weight of it exceeds the pressure coming up. Getting near it would be useless. In fact, you only need to be close with a nuclear device. Conventional explosives won't be effective because of the sheer amount needed and the fact that they don't burn hot enough to melt the surrounding rock to form a plug. How do you even get 500,000 pounds (5 kilotons) of conventional explosives down a 24" hole? A gun type nuclear device can be made to easily fit and 5 kt. device is pretty small. This article describes how such and event would play out.

http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/intro/ugt.htm

A small blast a mile deep would leave a small void no more than 30' in diameter of air and molten rock that would never see the light of day. No leaks would occur. On the surface you might feel some of the shock wave but overall it would be a minor event compared to a mass extinction event in the Gulf of Mexico.

That BP cap is just a temporary CYA measure to buy time to figure out a permanent solution. They don't even know whether the oil spill will float it off the platform.

No, I'm not nuts. I've worked in oil and gas production as a petroleum engineer and I'm familiar with the characteristics of underground nuclear testing. The biggest challenge isn't technical, but convincing people that any technology can be useful if properly and responsibly implemented. There isn't anything implicitly evil about using a nuclear device.

Thanks for the thread, Jefferson.