The environment in the news thursday, 20 October, 2016 unep and the Executive Director in the News

U.S. coverage:

WPXI-PIT (NBC)- Our Region's Business: World Environment Day

Nature.com (blog): Costa Rican to become new UN climate chief

Reuters Canada: U.N. to pick Costa Rican as new climate chief: sources

The National Post: Getting lectured by Ban Ki-moon




U.S. coverage:
World Environment Day

WPXI-PIT (NBC) - Our Region's Business, 16 May 2010

Nature.com, 17 May 2010

Christiana Figueres, a Costa Rican climate diplomacy expert, is to become the new head of the United Nations (UN) Framework Convention of Climate Change. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is expected to confirm her appointment later in the week, the BBC reports.

Figueres, daughter of former Costa Rican president Jose Figueres Ferrer, has been involved in the international climate negotiation process since 1995. The UN’s outgoing climate chief, Yvo de Boer of the Netherlands, announced in February to step down on July 1 after nearly four years in office.

The run-off has been between Figueres and the South African tourism minister Marthinus van Schalkwyk, who had the support of several key countries and was widely considered front-runner to replace de Boer. But in the last few days a number of small island states have successfully lobbied in favour of Figueres, according to BBC.
Canada:
U.N. to pick Costa Rican as new climate chief: sources

Reuters Canada, 17 May 2010, By Alister Doyle and Gerard Wynn

OSLO/LONDON (Reuters) - U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has chosen Costa Rican diplomat Christiana Figueres as the new U.N. climate chief to head stalled, international talks, sources close to the matter said on Monday.

Figueres, 53, beat fellow short-listed candidate former South African environment minister Marthinus van Schalkwyk, to a role meant to rally global agreement on a successor to the Kyoto Protocol after a disappointing summit in Copenhagen in December.

U.N. officials would present Ban's decision to a high-level meeting of climate negotiators in Bonn on Monday. Figueres was Ban's only recommendation to replace Dutchman Yvo de Boer as head of the U.N. climate secretariat from July, sources said.

"The Secretary-General has basically made a decision and it's just a courtesy (to present it on Monday)," a source said.

Ban may make a public announcement this week on a surprise choice over van Schalkwyk, now minister for tourism in the South African government.

The scale of Figueres' task is underscored by a Copenhagen summit where 120 world leaders failed to unblock a binding deal, pledging instead to mobilize $30 billion from 2010-2012 to help poor countries deal with droughts and floods, and to try to limit warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius.

This year, negotiators have agreed little except to hold two extra sessions in the run-up to a meeting in Mexico that begins in late November.

Many policymakers expect the Mexico meeting also to fall short of a binding deal, looking to 2011 for agreement on a successor to Kyoto whose present round expires in 2012.

Some analysts are doubtful of any new formal, binding pact beyond Kyoto, expecting instead a patchwork of national targets and schemes.

GOOD FOR BUSINESS

Figueres has been a member of the Costa Rican climate negotiating team since 1995 and has held many senior posts in the U.N. climate process. Her father, Jose Figueres Ferrer, was president of Costa Rica three times.

"If they wanted a technical bureaucrat, she's probably as good as you'll get," a source said.

Business and those involved in the carbon market would welcome Figueres, said Andrei Marcu, head of regulatory and policy affairs at oil trading firm Mercuria, and an established business advocate at the U.N. talks.

"If true, this is a great challenge for her, and from a business point of view she has been willing to listen in the past and we hope she will continue to do so."

Figueres has chaired talks to increase transparency in the global carbon offset market under Kyoto, which delivers about $6.5 billion finance annually to help developing countries cut greenhouse gas emissions.

One source said that the small island developing states -- among those most at risk from climate change -- argued strongly for Figueres, saying they wanted someone from a smaller nation.

Costa Rica has one of the world's most environmentally friendly policies including a strong focus on eco-tourism and a long-term goal of becoming "carbon neutral," under which industrial emissions would be soaked up by forests.

"She has been negotiator for a country that aims to become carbon-neutral by 2021. This is what we need on the global stage," said Wendel Trio, Greenpeace International climate policy coordinator.

(Additional reporting by David Fogarty in Singapore; Editing by Ralph Boulton)

The National Post, 15 May 2010, By Rex Murphy

Then again, this is what we expect Mr. Ban to do. He is, after all, the highest functionary of the world’s most useless transnational organization, and sermonizing is mainly what its Secretary-General does. But I surely hope — within the bounds of diplomatic courtesy, of course — that Mr. Harper paid no attention to him. Or rather, since an air of candour seems to have prevailed at their tète-a-tète, Mr. Harper, as it were, returned serve.

For example, did Mr. Harper press him on the matter of Climategate and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)? Did he call to the Secretary-General’s attention the serial distortions, errors, non-peer-reviewed citations, the wholesale liftings from WWF and Greenpeace propaganda that made their way into the most recent IPCC report?
Little matters such as false claims on the melting of the Himalayan glaciers?

Did he bring up the serial mischiefs of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, as revealed by their leaked emails? The CRU is the very Nicene Council of the Church of Global Warming, where the high priests of dendrology meld graphs with the cardinals of atmospheric physics. What a knotty tale their intramural communications revealed — of jealousy that “their” science was being confuted and challenged by annoying outsiders; and, most of all, of attempts to keep the Holy of Holies — the process of peer review — within the closed circuit of their colleagues and admirers.

Did he take Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to task for the bristling ardency — so alien to any genuine scientific project — that now pervades the “global warming community”? Or, for the spiteful defiance of Dr. R.K. Pachauri, the UN’s IPCC Chairman, toward those who reported errors in his venerated report, or to the hints of potential conflicts of interest between Mr. Pachauri’s business enterprises and his position as the voice of the “international community” on the “greatest moral issue of our time”?

For if Mr. Ban chastised Stephen Harper for Canada’s failings on Kyoto, it is but cricket for Mr. Harper to chastise Ban Ki-moon for the sloppiness, evasion and propagandistic aggressiveness of his functionaries on their most beloved file.

For Canada signed Kyoto in a more innocent day, when few, or none, had either occasion or evidence to question the impartiality of those who were pushing a carbon Doomsday on the rest of us. Since that innocent day, much has changed. Advocacy has seduced science, and the loud voices of all-too-interested parties are crying up cap-and-trade schemes and “reparations” to developing countries from “climate criminals.” Western governments are being harried to vest vast sums into “alternate technologies” of little proven efficacy but of prodigiously proven cost. The West is being asked to handcuff its own growth and development, in the midst of a global recession, all under the banner of global warming.

Did either of them, Mr. Harper or Ban Ki-moon — this is Canada, after all — mention the infamous “hockey stick” global temperature graph — the emblematic, erroneous logo of this whole desperate enterprise?

Mr. Harper will have done all of us, and the world, a great service if he raised these points, and suggested that the UN’s ability to issue reprimands to anyone on this file has been greatly corroded in the last year.

The science of global warming needs a wholesale outside review. In fact, it needs to be taken out from under the umbrella of the United Nations and its “process” altogether. If some of this message was given by Mr. Harper to the UN’s chief, the meeting will have been productive and, indeed, something of a joy to truth.
National Post
General Environment News

U.S. coverage:

The Washington Post: Lawyers lining up for class-action suits over oil spill

The Washington Post: BP installs insertion tube, begins siphoning oil from leaking pipe

Reuters: Anatomy Of The Gulf Oil Spill: An Accident Waiting to Happen

Environment and Energy Daily: Researchers ponder a hurricane hitting the oil-slicked Gulf of Mexico

ClimateWire: U.S. pledges $575 million for developing nations' climate aid

Los Angeles Times: Signs of oil spill pollution might be hiding underwater

Environment and Energy Daily: Government approves GM trees; company plans for biofuel use

The New York Times: BP Reports Some Success in Capturing Leaking Oil

Los Angeles Times: Signs of oil spill pollution might be hiding underwater

The New York Times: Gap in Rules on Oil Spills From Wells

The New York Times: Giant Plumes of Oil Forming Under the Gulf
Canada:

The Globe and Mail: Ottawa begins funding push for hybrid R&D

The National Post: EPA says emission rule will shield small businesses

The National Post: Unapologetic oil

The Gazette: BP marks first success in containing oil spill




U.S. coverage:
Lawyers lining up for class-action suits over oil spill

The Washington Post, 17 May 2010, By Steven Mufson and Juliet Eilperin

On April 21, with the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig still in flames, John W. Degravelles and a group of other lawyers sued for damages. In the first of at least 88 suits filed since the disaster, they were seeking compensation for the widow of a Transocean worker who went missing and is presumed dead.

It marked the beginning of legal action that is spreading as inexorably as the oil that threatens the wildlife and economy of five states along the Gulf of Mexico.

"On Thursday, I could smell the oil and, being a toxic tort lawyer, I realized that the fact that you're smelling something means that you're inhaling something," Stuart Smith, a New Orleans lawyer, said this month when breezes were carrying the scent of the oil slick toward the city. Smith, who has sued major oil companies before, immediately contacted toxicologists and air monitors to start doing tests that could be used as evidence.

The law firms now assembling are members of the all-star team of plaintiffs' attorneys. They have experience suing big companies over asbestos, tobacco, oil company waste, breast implants and Chinese drywall. They have represented Ecuadoran shrimp farmers and New York lobstermen, patients who have swallowed Vioxx and investors who lost money on shares of Enron. And their ranks include the likes of Erin Brockovich, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and former partners of Johnnie L. Cochran Jr.

"When we put together the team for tobacco . . . it was the A-team of lawyers, and this is the same thing developing here," said Mike Papantonio, who cut his teeth on asbestos litigation and is a partner in Florida-based Levin, Papantonio, Thomas, Mitchell, Echsner & Proctor. The firm says it has won $2.5 billion in jury verdicts, including a dozen of more than $10 million each.

The prospects of getting big dollars in this case are good, too, lawyers say. They are eyeing BP, one of the five biggest publicly owned companies in the world; Transocean, the largest offshore driller in the world; Halliburton, the big oil services firm; and Cameron, maker of the well's failed blowout preventer. Anadarko Petroleum and Mitsui, BP's partners in the offshore lease, also are liable.

Unlike the Exxon Valdez tanker accident, which happened in Alaska's remote Prince William Sound, the current spill could have a much bigger economic impact because the Gulf of Mexico is a busy home to valuable fisheries, tourism and shipping.

Smith, suing on behalf of fishermen, the Louisiana Environmental Action Network and four large hotels, alleges that BP and others were "grossly negligent" in allowing the blowout to occur. Damage includes removal costs, property damage and the loss of income and profits for people and businesses. Because the spill has been lingering offshore, the plaintiffs who can claim damages so far are mostly out-of-work fishermen and tourist resorts that are getting cancellations.

As rich as BP is, "if this well keeps leaking for three or four months, it's Katie bar the door," Smith said. "I don't think they have enough money." He said fishing beds might need one or two generations to recover.

Some lawyers say the case also offers a chance to take on the oil industry's political ties. Papantonio wants to depose the person who ran the Minerals Management Service under President George W. Bush to find out why the agency did not require certain types of safety devices.

"I want to talk about the mindset of this company, because that becomes probative for a company that was so reckless that it becomes manslaughter, and that affects whether there should be punitive damages," Papantonio said.

The first legal battle will be over the location of the trial. A panel will consolidate all the suits in one court for efficiency and to avoid discrepancies in rulings. The plaintiffs' attorneys will choose an executive committee. This approach has been used in 30 to 40 large class-action suits.

BP and Transocean want the case to be heard in Houston, seen as friendly to the oil business. Some plaintiffs want the case heard in Louisiana, while others prefer Mississippi or Florida.

"I've been suing oil companies for pollution almost exclusively for 23 years," Smith said. "And oil companies are the meanest, nastiest defendants in the country. They just don't care; they have so much money."

The plaintiffs' attorneys have a good bit of money, too. In a West Virginia lawsuit against DuPont, plaintiffs' attorneys spent $12 million to prepare and present their case. The initial jury verdict awarded the plaintiffs $500 million; the lawyers typically get about 30 percent.

One firm gearing up to fight BP is Weitz & Luxenberg, which has handled Vioxx and asbestos cases as well as medical malpractice and automobile accidents. Brockovich, whose battle against Pacific Gas & Electric over toxic chromium leaks was dramatized in the 2000 film starring Julia Roberts, is helping drum up clients by headlining events sponsored by the firm in Pensacola, Fla., on Thursday and in Bayou La Batre, La., on Friday.

Many of the firms have sued oil companies for years. Smith successfully sued Chevron two decades ago for not warning workers that they were cleaning pipes clogged with radioactive materials sucked from reservoirs. His firm, Smith Stag, was co-lead counsel in a case that won $300 million from Exxon for damages from radioactive contamination.

Lawyers recruited by Smith to fight BP include Robert McKee, a partner with Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based Krupnick Campbell Malone Buser Slama Hancock Liberman & McKee.

McKee has a unique résumé: He has spent 16 years litigating over the toxic effect of organic molecules on Ecuadoran farmed shrimp. McKee has sued large banana growers for damage to shrimp farms caused by pesticide runoff from Ecuadoran farms; all but two of the cases have been resolved, with two trials pending against DuPont in South Florida.

One unusual aspect of the case is that the federal government could pay damages, too, especially if plaintiffs show that its oversight was lax. An Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund, established by the 1990 Oil Pollution Act, can pay out as much as $1 billion for each spill.

Although the Oil Pollution Act says that damaged parties must first seek payment from "the responsible party" in a spill, they need to decide within 90 days whether they would rather seek money from the federal trust fund.

Each choice carries a risk. BP's liability is capped at $75 million under the law unless a court finds it guilty of gross negligence, willful misconduct or failure to comply with federal safety standards. BP chief executive Tony Hayward has indicated that his company is willing to pay more than $75 million for "legitimate" claims, and Congress might lift that cap retroactively.

On Saturday, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano wrote to Hayward saying they expect BP to fully pay claimants without a cap and without seeking reimbursement from U.S. taxpayers or the spill trust fund.

Donald A. Carr, a partner at Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman who practices environmental law, said state governments also are going to be aggressive in seeking financial compensation, particularly because they are struggling with tight budgets.

"This is an opportunity. You don't have to be cynical to see that," Carr said.

And the case will be a marathon. Papantonio, 56, said he expects to be retired by the time it is over. This might not be the biggest spill ever, but he said the location means that "this will dwarf anything we've seen."

The Washington Post, 17 May 2010, By Steven Mufson and Joel Achenbach

In the first progress in containing the oil gushing from a blown-out well at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, BP engineers on Sunday inserted a tube into a leaking pipe and began siphoning some of the oil to a drilling rig at the surface.

The deep-sea plumbing did not do anything to close the well, and a substantial amount of oil continues to leak at the bottom of the gulf, but the day's efforts were a rare bulletin of good news about 3 1/2 weeks into the crisis.

On Sunday, a four-inch-wide pipe was inserted into the broken section known as the riser, from which the majority of the oil has been leaking. If it works, the inserted pipe could keep a substantial amount of the oil out of the sea by siphoning it up a mile-long pipe to the Discoverer Enterprise drillship and then to nearby barges.

"So far it's working extremely well," said Kent Wells, senior vice president for exploration and production at BP.

But the race against time continued. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration warned over the weekend that plumes of oil already spilled and suspended beneath the water surface might, as soon as Tuesday night, start to get picked up by the powerful "loop current." The current could carry the oil to the Florida Keys and beyond, scientists fear.

Moreover, BP said that to completely stop the oil from flowing into the gulf, it would have to plug the damaged well at the top. The company said it will try to do this in the next 10 days or wait weeks for a relief well to be complete.

Wells called the insertion tube, which functions like a straw, a "positive step forward." He said the company has been able to flare, or burn, some of the natural gas at the surface, an indication that the insertion pipe is working.

But he said it would not be clear for another day or two how much of the oil can be captured. At least some oil will continue to leak into the water, adding to a slick that stretches more than 80 miles wide and more than 140 miles long.

"As of now there are still reasonably substantial amounts of oil coming out" of the damaged pipeline into the ocean, said Andrew Gowers, an executive vice president at BP. "That is, in part, a factor of the pressure we are bringing to bear in producing the oil." He added that the amount of oil brought up the new line would "be steadily increased." He cautioned that "this is a gradual, carefully calibrated process aimed at steadily reducing the leak rather than a magic bullet."

BP's efforts to stop the flow of oil into the gulf come as the slick has begun to touch shorelines and come closer to currents that could carry plumes of oil suspended beneath the surface out of the gulf to areas much farther away.

A feeling of imminent calamity continues to pervade Louisiana's coastal towns, where tar balls have been washing up intermittently on beaches and watermen are dreading what they think is the inevitable arrival of the huge oil slick and its penetration into marshes rich in fish, shrimp and crabs.

In Grand Isle, just west of, and tucked underneath, the lengthy claw of the Mississippi River delta, shrimper Harry "Chu Chu" Cheramie, 59, said fishermen are encountering oil not far to the west in Timbalier Bay.

"That's going to kill our fishing grounds. We won't be able to drag that area for a long time to come," Cheramie said.

View Only Top Items in This Story

His wife, Josie, the tourism commissioner of Grand Isle, said people come to the island only for three reasons: "Play on the beach. Fish. Eat the seafood."

Fish market manager Juanita Cheramie -- no relation -- was fearful on a gloomy and rainy Sunday afternoon.

"We're going to get it. It's only a matter of time. We're just on a wing and a prayer right now," she said. When the oil hits, she said, "it's over. You can lock the gate in Leeville" -- a town up the road toward New Orleans.

In the town of Golden Meadow, along Bayou Lafourche, crabber Thomas Barrios said he felt "devastated" and "helpless."

"I've worked for this my whole life. Something my grandparents did," he said. He recently opened a fish market and a restaurant. His crabbing grounds are still open, but he doesn't know how long that will last.

"I never know when I wake up in the morning if they're going to shut the gates on me," he said.

BP said it was doing everything it can. While it tries to siphon oil up the insertion pipe, it was also making preparations to "kill" the damaged well at the sea surface by pumping drilling mud at higher pressure and weight than the oil. The mud would be pumped at more than 30,000 horsepower through three-inch hoses and through "choke" valves at the bottom of the blowout preventer near the seafloor. Wells said the valves could shoot as much as 40 barrels of mud a minute into the well.

"We'll be able to pump much faster than the well can flow," he said. "It's about us outrunning the well."

Wells said the company had brought 50,000 barrels of the mud, a mixture of clay and other substances, for the effort, which he said should be far more than needed. He said that the much-ridiculed "junk shot," in which golf balls and shredded tires would be fired into the blowout preventer, would be used only if the drilling mud were being forced upward and needed to be blocked.

Wells said it would take a week to 10 days before preparations for what the company has called the "top kill" effort would be complete.

In the meantime, BP pressed ahead with its insertion pipe, which has rubber components to seal itself off as much as possible from seawater while letting oil and gas push their way into the new pipe.

BP is also pumping 120-degree water and methanol into the long pipe to prevent the formation of crystals of gas hydrates. Those hydrates -- combinations of natural gas and sea water at high pressures and low temperatures -- form slushlike crystals that can block pipelines or even lift heavy objects off the seafloor. They were one reason for the failure of an earlier effort to lower a 98-ton steel cofferdam over the main leak site. View Only Top Items in This Story

Once the mixture of oil, gas and water reaches ships on the surface, it will be processed and separated into different components. The insertion Sunday was BP's second effort. Late Saturday, after the new tube was inserted, it was yanked out after the umbilical cord of a remotely operated vehicle got entangled with the tube's line to the surface, according to sources familiar with the project.

Meanwhile, questions continued to be raised about the cause of the drill rig accident. On CBS News's "60 Minutes," Mike Williams, the chief electronics technician for the rig's computers and electrical systems, alleged that rig operator Transocean was under pressure from BP to hurry up and finish the well, which had taken weeks longer than expected.

Williams also said that there were problems with the blowout preventer before the accident. He said one of the control pods wasn't functioning as it should have weeks earlier. BP said in congressional testimony last week that it found one of the pods had a dead battery.

Williams also said that a crew member accidentally lowered steel pipe into a closed blowout preventer and that bits of rubber from a gasket were found later in the drilling fluid. That rubber gasket might have helped seal the space around the pipe in an accident.

Achenbach reported from Grand Isle, La.
Anatomy Of The Gulf Oil Spill: An Accident Waiting to Happen

Reuters, 17 May 2010, By John McQuaid

It's hard to believe now, as oil from the wrecked Deepwater Horizon well encroaches on the Louisiana marshes. But it was only six weeks ago that President Obama announced a major push to expand offshore oil and gas drilling. Obama's commitment to lift a moratorium on offshore drilling reflected the widely-held belief that offshore oil operations, once perceived as dirty and dangerous, were now so safe and technologically advanced that the risks of a major disaster were infinitesimal, and managing them a matter of technocratic skill.

But in the space of two weeks, both the politics and the practice of offshore drilling have been turned upside down. Today, the notion that offshore drilling is safe seems absurd. The Gulf spill harks back to drilling disasters from decades past - including one off the coast of Santa Barbara, Calif. in 1969 that dumped three million barrels into coastal waters and led to the current moratorium. The Deepwater Horizon disaster is a classic "low probability, high impact event" - the kind we've seen more than our share of recently, including space shuttle disasters, 9/11, and Hurricane Katrina. And if there's a single lesson from those disparate catastrophes, it's that pre-disaster assumptions tend to be dramatically off-base, and the worst-case scenarios downplayed or ignored. The Gulf spill is no exception.

The post-mortems are only beginning, so the precise causes of the initial explosion on the drilling platform and the failure of a "blowout preventer" to deploy on the sea floor probably won't be established for weeks or months. But the outlines of serious systemic problems have already emerged, indicating just how illusory the notion of risk-free drilling really was, while pointing to some possible areas for reform. These blunders include weak government oversight of the complex technical challenge of drilling deep wells many miles under the ocean surface and BP's failure to evaluate - or even consider - worst-case scenarios.

A "blowout" on an oil rig occurs when some combination of pressurized natural gas, oil, mud, and water escapes from a well, shoots up the drill pipe to the surface, expands and ignites. Wells are equipped with structures called blowout preventers that sit on the wellhead and are supposed to shut off that flow and tamp the well. Deepwater Horizon's blowout preventer failed. Two switches - one manual and an automatic backup - failed to start it.

When such catastrophic mechanical failures happen, they're almost always traced to flaws in the broader system: the workers on the platform, the corporate hierarchies they work for, and the government bureaucracies that oversee what they do. For instance, a study of 600 major equipment failures in offshore drilling structures done by Robert Bea, an engineering professor at the University of California, Berkeley, found that 80 percent were due to "human and organizational factors," and 50 percent of those due to flaws in the engineering design of equipment or processes.

Bea has worked as an engineer on offshore drilling operations and was also one of the leaders of an independent engineering study of the New Orleans levee failures during Hurricane Katrina. And the Gulf spill has some similarities to the 2005 flood, which was caused in large part by faulty floodwalls approved by the Army Corps of Engineers. The common threads between Katrina and the current oil spill, Bea wrote in an email, are "hubris, arrogance, ignorance... combined with a natural hazard."

With near-shore and shallow reserves of fossil fuels largely depleted, drilling has moved farther offshore, into deeper waters and deeper underground. The technology for locating oil and gas reserves and for drilling has improved, but the conditions are extreme and the challenges more formidable. "This is a pretty frigging complex system," Bea said in an interview. "You've got equipment and steel strung out over a long piece of geography starting at surface and terminating at 18,000 feet below the sea floor. So it has many potential weak points. Just as Katrina's storm surge found weaknesses in those piles of dirt - the levees - gas likes to find weakness in anything we connect to that source."

He questions whether energy companies and government agencies have fully adapted to the new realities. "The danger has escalated exponentially," he said. "We've pushed it to the bloody edge in this very, very unforgiving environment, and we don't have a lot of experience."

Finally, there's a problem with fragmentation of responsibility: Deepwater Horizon was BP's operation. But BP leased the platform from Transocean, and Halliburton was doing the deepwater work when the blowout occurred. "Each of these organizations has fundamentally different goals," Bea said. "BP wants access to hydrocarbon resources that feed their refinery and distribution network. Halliburton provides oil field services. Transocean drives drill rigs, kind of like taxicabs. Each has different operating processes."

Andrew Hopkins, a sociology professor at the Australian National University and an expert on industrial accidents, wrote a book called Failure to Learn about a massive explosion at a BP refinery in Texas City in 2005 that killed 15 people. He says that disaster has several possible insights for the oil spill: one was that BP and other corporations sometimes marginalize their health, safety, and environmental departments. "The crucial voice for safety in Texas City was shielded from the site manager, and the very senior agency people in the BP corporate head office in London had no role in ensuring safety at the site level," he said. "The organizational structures disempowered the voices for safety and I think you've got the same thing here" in the Gulf spill.

But the more profound problem is a failure to put risks in perspective. BP and other companies tend to measure safety and environmental compliance on a day-to-day, checklist basis, to the point of basing executive bonuses on those metrics. But even if worker accident rates fall to zero, that may reveal nothing about the risk of a major disaster. "These things we are talking about are risks that won't show up this year, next year - it may be 10 years down the road before you see one of these big blowouts or refinery accidents," Hopkins said. "This same thing happened in the global financial crisis. Bankers were paid big bonuses for risks taken this year or next year, but the real risks came home to roost years later."

That assumption - that catastrophic risks were so unlikely they were unworthy of serious attention - appears to have driven a lot of the government decision-making on drilling as well. The Minerals Management Service, a division of the Interior Department, oversees drilling on the Outer Continental Shelf. Since the 1980s, the MMS has routinely granted a blanket exemption from doing a comprehensive environmental impact statement to individual drilling operations, according to Holly Doremus, a professor of environmental law at Berkeley. The Washington Post and the Associated Press reported last week that BP's Deepwater Horizon lease received that exemption (called a "categorical exclusion") last year. It was based on several analyses that downplayed the risks of a major oil spill. One, published in 2007, estimated the "most likely size" of an offshore spill at 4,600 barrels. NOAA's current, conservative estimate of the Gulf spill put its total at more than 80,000 barrels, increasing at a rate of 5,000 per day.

Energy companies have aggressively lobbied to avoid formally analyzing worst-case scenarios since the Carter administration first required them in instances where there was uncertainty about the risk of disaster.

"They thought it would lead to irrational public resistance to projects," Doremus said. "But to me this Deepwater Horizon thing is an example where a worst-case analysis would have been useful. If they had done a worst case analysis they'd have to consider, well, 'What if our blowout preventer didn't work? And what if it happened during a bout of bad weather when the spill might reach the shore?'" Instead, BP officials admitted they were stunned by the disaster, and they and the government have largely improvised their response.

The evidence shows MMS has not taken an aggressive stance policing offshore drilling. Based on experience with malfunctioning blowout preventers, for instance, the MMS did suggest that energy companies install backup devices for triggering them. But it was only a suggestion, not a requirement, and U.S. drilling operators have declined to do so.

MMS has also been plagued by scandals in recent years, including one in which eight employees were disciplined for partying, having sex with, and receiving expensive gifts from their energy industry counterparts. Critics question whether the agency possesses the independence or the power to effectively tackle these issues post-spill. One sign of trouble: The MMS is a major player in investigating the spill and in the Outer Continental Shelf Oversight Board set up by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to examine the broader safety issues the accident raises.

"MMS is the regulator, and regulatory failure is a part of this," Hopkins said. "It's going to be investigating itself. It's totally inappropriate."

Reprinted with permission from Yale Environment 360

BP makes headway in containing oil leak

Los Angeles Times, 17 May 2010 By Jim Tankersley, Raja Abdulrahim and Richard Fausset,

Officials for the oil company BP said they could not estimate how much oil and gas was flowing through the tube, nor what percentage of the leak was being contained, until Monday or Tuesday at earliest. They originally said the plan might suck up as much as 75% of the leaking oil.

Without the number of gallons retrieved, it remained unclear Sunday whether the nation's brightest minds would be capable of solving an engineering conundrum that is spewing 210,000 gallons of oil a day, and perhaps more, into the gulf waters from a canyon 5,000 feet below the sea.

Although relatively little oil has washed up on land so far, scientists are growing worried about the effects of massive plumes of oil hovering below the surface in areas teeming with life, including plankton, turtles, dolphins and whales.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano warned in a statement Sunday that the latest in a series of short-term attempts at stopping the leak was "not a solution, and it is not clear how successful it may be."

In recent days, the Obama administration has assembled a "dream team" of scientists to deal with the leak, including experts in robotics, physics, X-ray technology and the hydrogen bomb. Energy Secretary Steven Chu, a physicist who won the Nobel Prize, met with BP engineers in Houston last week and promised that the "intellectual horsepower of the country is engaged in solving this problem."

But unlike many science and engineering problems that can be worked out in a lab or on a blackboard, this one is unfolding far from the reach of a human hand, in real time, with a potentially high penalty for failure.

"It's not just theory. It's reality that has to be dealt with," said Henry Petroski, a Duke University professor of civil engineers and history. "This is a really tough problem."

The leak was triggered April 20 by a blowout of a BP well that caused an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon, a mobile oil rig that had just finished drilling an 18,000-foot hole about 48 miles off Louisiana. The accident killed 11 workers, and the $600-million rig now lies at the bottom of the sea.

BP's engineers first focused on using robot submarines to shut off the blowout preventer, an apparatus that had failed to sever or plug the well pipe. More recently, a 100-ton box lowered over the leak in an attempt to siphon it to the surface failed when icy gas crystals, hydrates, clogged it.

This weekend's plan involved running a long suction tube from a ship to the damaged riser pipe on the ocean floor. A 4-inch-wide insertion tube was guided into the 21-inch-wide riser, which also was plugged with rubber diaphragms.

If all goes as planned, a flow of nitrogen in the tube will lift the oil to the ship. Methanol will be added to help prevent the formation of hydrates, and heated seawater will promote the flow of oil.

At a Houston news conference, company leaders said they first inserted the tube about midnight Saturday. It operated for four hours and was just beginning to bring oil to the surface ship when an undersea robot knocked the tube loose. Engineers reinstalled the tube a few hours later.

BP officials said the flow rate was slowly increasing. But they couldn't say how much they had collected. "I don't have any idea at this point," said Kent Wells, BP's senior vice president for exploration and production.

Even if successful, BP must also contain a second leak on the ocean floor.

The huge and growing stain of oil continues to hover in and around the shores and inlets of Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi. The latest oil landfall was reported at Grand Isle, La., where a number of tar balls washed ashore, said Coast Guard Petty Officer Erik Swanson.

At the same time, scientists have begun measuring the vast quantities of oil hidden to the human eye. Vernon Asper, an oceanographer and marine professor at the University of Southern Mississippi, was part of a group that landed at Cocodrie, La., on Sunday, after completing a two-week research trip in the gulf. Asper said they documented plumes of oil 2,000 to 6,000 feet below the water's surface, covering an area 4 miles wide and 15 miles long.

Bacteria in the water naturally break down oil, but that process sucks up large amounts of oxygen. Such a scenario could cause dead zones similar to a seasonal one caused by nitrogen-rich runoff down the Mississippi River.

"We're concerned about that, because everything that lives down there at these depths in the water needs oxygen, so if you use up all the oxygen they're going to be impacted," said Ralph Portier, an environmental science professor at Louisiana State University.

Portier said he also feared that the deep oil plumes could emerge years or even decades from now, potentially threatening coastlines for generations.

But Portier emphasized that researchers were dealing with a novel situation riddled with unknowns. "This is a scenario where reality is ahead of the science," he said.

In Washington on Sunday, Senate leaders disagreed on whether to raise a $75-million congressionally mandated cap on oil company liability.

On NBC's "Meet the Press," Sen. Charles E. Schumer of New York, the third-ranking Democrat in the Senate, said it was time to lift the cap, but Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky countered that caps could keep energy exploration competitive.

"The danger in taking the cap too high is that you end up with only massive, very large oil producers able to meet that cap and produce in the gulf," McConnell said.

BP Chief Executive Anthony Hayward and other company officials have said they are taking full responsibility for cleaning up the spill and will pay what they call "legitimate" claims.

Wells, the BP vice president, emphasized that engineers continued to pursue "multiple options" to contain the spill, including a second-generation insertion tube; a smaller version of the failed containment box; and a "hot tap," in which robots would bore a hole into the riser pipe and attach a new pipe to carry oil to the surface.

A "top kill" procedure could begin in seven to 10 days, Wells said. Engineers may attempt to pump thousands of barrels of fluid into the well to overcome the well's natural release pressure and stem the flow, before entombing the opening with cement.

If the pumping alone does not suffice, Wells said, the company would probably proceed with a plan to attempt to block the well pressure with a mixture that would include rubber and golf balls.

In New Orleans, meanwhile, the Gulf Aid concert got underway an hour late because of rain, but it attracted a crowd one promoter described as "defiant."

"You know, in Katrina, we waited for the insurance companies, we waited for the government, we waited for FEMA, we waited and waited and waited," said David Freedman, an organizer and general manager of WWOZ radio station. "The reality is we don't wait anymore."

With beads of sweat on her face, concertgoer Elizabeth Fredrickson danced and twirled to tunes by local musicians inside Mardi Gras World, overlooking the Mississippi River. "It's all about culture," Fredrickson said. "But here's the thing: We're going to lose our culture because seafood is a big part of our culture."


BP Reports Some Success in Capturing Leaking Oil

The New York Times, 16 May 2010, By Shaila Dewan

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NEW ORLEANS — After more than three weeks of efforts to stop a gushing oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, BP engineers achieved some success on Sunday when they used a milelong pipe to capture some of the oil and divert it to a drill ship on the surface some 5,000 feet above the wellhead, company officials said.

After two false starts, engineers successfully inserted a narrow tube into the damaged pipe from which most of the oil is leaking.

“It’s working as planned,” Kent Wells, a senior executive vice president of BP, said at a briefing in Houston on Sunday afternoon. “So we do have oil and gas coming to the ship now, we do have a flare burning off the gas, and we have the oil that’s coming to the ship going to our surge tank.”

Mr. Wells said he could not yet say how much oil had been captured or what percentage of the oil leaking from a 21-inch riser pipe was now flowing into the 4-inch-wide insertion tube. “We want to slowly optimize it to try to capture as much of the oil and gas as we can without taking in a large amount of seawater,” he said.

So far, the spill has not spoiled beaches or delicate wetlands, in part because of favorable winds and tides and in part because of the use of booms to corral the oil and chemical dispersants.

The capture operation on Sunday was the first successful effort to stem the flow from the damaged well, which has been spewing oil since a rig exploded on April 20 and sank.

The announcement by BP came on the heels of reports that the spill might be might much worse than estimated. Scientists said they had found giant plumes of oil in the deep waters of the gulf, including one as large as 10 miles long, 3 miles wide and 300 feet thick.

BP officials pointed out that even if the tube was successful, it was only a stopgap measure. The real goal, they said, is to seal the well permanently.

Preparations continued on Sunday on a plan to pump heavy drilling mud into the well through the blowout preventer, the safety device at the wellhead that failed during the accident.

In the procedure, called a top kill, the mud would be used to overcome the pressure of the rising oil, stopping the flow. The mud would be followed by cement, which would permanently seal the well.

Mr. Wells said Sunday that BP was a week to 10 days away from trying the maneuver.

The mud would be pumped from a drill ship, the Q4000, that is in place on the surface. Mr. Wells said the ship had more than 2 million gallons of mud on board — far more than needed — to pump into the well, which had reached about 13,000 feet below the seabed when the accident occurred.

In a brief interview, Mr. Wells said that a “junk shot,” an effort to clog the blowout preventer with golf balls and other objects before the mud is used, was still a possibility.

But in an apparent indication of the tube’s success, BP was already building a backup version.

The tube is basically a five-foot-long section of pipe outfitted with rubber seals designed to keep out seawater, attached in turn to a milelong section of pipe leading from the drill ship to the seafloor.

It was one of several proposed methods of stanching the flow of at least 210,000 gallons of oil a day that has been threatening marine life and sensitive coastal areas in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. BP officials have emphasized that none of the methods have been tried before at the depth of this leak.

At the briefing, Mr. Wells was asked about reports from a research vessel that discovered the huge plumes of oil. He said that he did not know anything about them, but that the Unified Area Command, the cooperative effort involving BP and state and local agencies, was seeking more information.

The plume reports added to the many questions that have been raised about the amount of leaking oil, which many scientists have said is far higher than the official estimate of 5,000 barrels, or 210,000 gallons, a day. That estimate was reached using satellite imagery, flyovers and visual observation, company officials have said.

The reports also raised concerns about the use of oil dispersants underwater, which the Environmental Protection Agency approved on Friday after several tests. Normally, dispersants are used on the surface, and scientists have said that the effects of using them underwater are largely unknown.

Representative Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts and chairman of the Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment, criticized BP, saying it had failed to respond substantively to his requests for more information about how it had reached its estimate of how much oil is leaking. He also said the company had refused to engage independent scientists who might offer a better assessment of the amount.

“BP is burying its head in the sand on these underwater threats,” Mr. Markey said in a written statement on Sunday. “These huge plumes of oil are like hidden mushroom clouds that indicate a larger spill than originally thought and portend more dangerous long-term fallout for the Gulf of Mexico’s wildlife and economy.”

BP began trying to insert the tube on Friday, but an effort to connect the pipe leading from the drill ship to the tube failed and the device had to be brought back to the surface for adjustments.

“This is all part of reinventing technology,” Tom Mueller, a BP spokesman, said on Saturday. “It’s not what I’d call a problem — it’s what I’d call learning, reconfiguring, doing it again.”

Around midnight Saturday, the tube was reinserted and worked for about four hours before it was dislodged after being mishandled by the submersibles, Mr. Wells said.

“At that time, we were just starting to get oil to the surface,” Mr. Wells said.

The oil was going to the Discoverer Enterprise, a drill ship, which has equipment for separating water from oil and can hold about 5 million gallons of oil.

Though that attempt failed, it was important because it demonstrated that features designed to keep hydrates from forming were working, Mr. Wells said. Hydrates, icelike structures of methane and water molecules that form in the presence of seawater at low temperatures and high pressures, forced BP to abandon an earlier effort to corral the leak with a 98-ton containment dome.

Environment and Energy Daily, 17 May 2010, By Lauren Morello

The Atlantic Ocean hurricane season begins June 1, and scientists tracking the Gulf of Mexico oil spill are beginning to think about what would happen if a storm hit the growing slick.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration won't release its initial hurricane season forecast until Thursday, but experts said it would only take one storm in the Gulf to complicate the ongoing effort to stanch the gushing oil and limit its environmental impact.

NOAA talking points list a number of open questions, such as whether the oil plume could affect storm formation by suppressing evaporation of Gulf water and how a hurricane could change the size and location of the oil slick. There's no record of a hurricane hitting a major oil spill, experts said.

Still, several scientists are worried that a hurricane could drive oil inland, soiling beaches and wetlands and pushing polluted water up river estuaries.

"My 'oh, no' thought is that a hurricane would pick up that oil and move it, along with salt, up into interior regions of the state that I am convinced the oil will not reach otherwise," said Robert Twilley, an oceanographer at Louisiana State University.

"The bottom line is, how much oil are we going to get into our wetlands? We don't know," he said. "This thing is gushing out in these huge numbers."

That's a question that Florida State University researchers Steven Morey and Dmitry Dukhovskoy are trying to answer with computer models of storm surge and ocean currents.