Documents indicate heavy use of dispersants in gulf oil spillBy David A. Fahrenthold and Steven Mufson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 1, 2010; A01
While the BP well was still gushing, the Obama administration issued an order that limited the spreading of controversial dispersant chemicals on the Gulf of Mexico's surface. Their use, officials said, should be restricted to "rare cases."
But in reality, federal documents show, the use of dispersants wasn't rare at all.
Despite the order -- and concerns about the environmental effects of the dispersants -- the Coast Guard granted requests to use them 74 times over 54 days, and to use them on the surface and deep underwater at the well site. The Coast Guard approved every request submitted by BP or local Coast Guard commanders in Houma, La., although in some cases it reduced the amount of the chemicals they could use, according to an analysis of the documents prepared by the office of Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.).
The documents indicate that "these exemptions are in no way a 'rare' occurrence, and have allowed surface application of the dispersant to occur virtually every day since the directive was issued," Markey wrote in a letter dated Aug. 1 to retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad W. Allen, the government's point man on the spill. Markey chairs the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming.
Some of them dealt with separate dispersant applications on the same day. Markey said it appeared that the order "has become more of a meaningless paperwork exercise" than a real attempt to curb use of the dispersants.
In an interview Saturday, Allen defended the decisions to grant the waivers, saying that overall use of dispersants declined sharply after that May 26 order to limit their use. The total use of dispersants underwater and on the surface declined about 72 percent from its peak, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
Allen said that on some days the amount of oil on the surface justified a "tactical" decision, by on-scene Coast Guard commanders, to spray some dispersants.
"There's a dynamic tension that goes on when you're managing an incident that has no precedent," Allen said. "You establish general rules and guidelines, but knowing that the people on scene have the information" means trusting them to make decisions, he said.
In the end, Allen said: "You can quibble on the semantics related to 'rare.' I like to focus on the effects we achieved" by dispersing the oil. Officials have said that, in the days since the gusher was stopped, thick sheets of oil have nearly disappeared from the gulf's surface.
EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson conceded that there had been "frustration in the field" from EPA officials about the waivers. But Jackson said it was partly alleviated June 22, nearly a month after the order was issued, when Coast Guard officials began giving the EPA a greater role in the discussions over whether to approve dispersant use.
"EPA may not have concurred with every single waiver," Jackson said. But, she said, the Coast Guard had the ultimate say: "The final decision-making rests with the federal on-scene coordinator. That's where the judgment, the ultimate decision-making ability, had to lie."
The dispersants -- variants of a Nalco product called Corexit -- break up the oil, acting like a detergent on kitchen grease. They are intended to keep the oil from reaching shore in large sheets and to make it easier for microbes to consume the oil underwater.
Charles M. Pajor, a Nalco spokesman, said that the amount of dispersant the company recommends depends on the acreage sprayed and the amount of oil spilled, with variations for oil quality, degree of weathering, temperature and thickness. Typically, two to 10 gallons per acre are used or one gallon for every 10 to 50 gallons of oil, Pajor said.
Similar dispersants were used after the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska in 1989, and afterward government officials vowed to study their environmental effects more carefully. But urgency faded, research dollars evaporated, and when this spill arrived, the questions were still unanswered.
Now, scientists say, it's difficult to tell what the added use of dispersants permitted by the Coast Guard meant for the gulf. The chemicals may have helped break up some oil before it reached sensitive marshes along the Louisiana coast. But it also may have poisoned ecosystems offshore, helped deplete underwater oxygen and sent oil swirling through the open-water habitats of fish and coral.
"It's still a trade-off. I mean, you're using dispersants to protect the shoreline, and you're going to be killing things in the water column," said Carys Mitchelmore, a professor at the University of Maryland. By using more dispersants, Mitchelmore said, "you're just going to be killing more things in the water column."
In May, under pressure from environmental groups, the EPA and the Coast Guard issued a directive to BP, ordering the company to "eliminate" the use of dispersants on the surface. The directive said BP could seek an exemption in rare cases when other cleanup methods were not feasible.
The government allowed BP to continue injecting dispersants below the surface, as oil leaked from the well on the gulf floor. Their logic was that the chemicals could be used more efficiently underwater, where the gushing of BP's well provided a turbulence that helped them work.
"Because so much is still unknown about the potential impact of dispersants, BP should use no more dispersant than is necessary," Jackson wrote in a letter to BP that day.
But, over the next nine days, BP made daily waiver requests for the use of surface dispersants. Every day the Coast Guard gave its approval. On May 28, for instance, BP sprayed 6,400 gallons of dispersant on the surface, saying it was needed to control dangerous fumes -- volatile organic compounds -- where rig and platform workers were trying to get the blowout under control.
In early June, federal documents show, an EPA official raised concerns about the ease with which BP was obtaining waivers.
"The approval process appears to be somewhat pro forma, and not as rigorous as EPA desires," the official wrote, according to a Coast Guard memo that quoted him. It said BP "must be put on notice that the request for exemptions cannot be presumed to be approved at the point they are submitted."
Two weeks later, on June 22, Jackson said that the Coast Guard had begun giving her agency a greater role in the approval of dispersant use. But federal documents show that the chemicals were still being used, sometimes more than 10,000 gallons a day. A federal official said the last surface dispersants were sprayed July 19.
Scott Dean, a BP spokesman, said that his company had been careful to obtain federal permission before using dispersants on the ocean's surface.
"Since the very beginning, BP has operated in a unified command and we have always worked hand in hand with the Coast Guard and EPA on dispersants," Dean said, "and we've complied with EPA requests regarding dispersants." He added that "dispersants are an EPA-approved and recognized tool in fighting oil spills."
Aaron Viles, at the Louisiana-based Gulf Restoration Network, said the Obama administration gave the impression of controlling the controversial dispersants while allowing their use to continue. The result, he said, was that more oil sank out of sight and out of reach of the cleanup operation.
"Clearly, you know, there was a bit of a show here," Viles said. "Whether EPA wasn't serious, or the Coast Guard didn't care, they kept cranking, and kept exposing the Gulf of Mexico to this giant science experiment."
Scientists Find Evidence That Oil And Dispersant Mix Is Making Its Way Into The Foodchain
First Posted: 07-29-10 06:27 PM | Updated: 07-31-10 09:39 AM
Scientists have found signs of an oil-and-dispersant mix under the shells of tiny blue crab larvae in the Gulf of Mexico, the first clear indication that the unprecedented use of dispersants in the BP oil spill has broken up the oil into toxic droplets so tiny that they can easily enter the foodchain.
Marine biologists started finding orange blobs under the translucent shells of crab larvae in May, and have continued to find them "in almost all" of the larvae they collect, all the way from Grand Isle, Louisiana, to Pensacola, Fla. -- more than 300 miles of coastline -- said Harriet Perry, a biologist with the University of Southern Mississippi's Gulf Coast Research Laboratory.
And now, a team of researchers from Tulane University using infrared spectrometry to determine the chemical makeup of the blobs has detected the signature for Corexit, the dispersant BP used so widely in the Deepwater Horizon
"It does appear that there is a Corexit sort of fingerprint in the blob samples that we ran," Erin Gray, a Tulane biologist, told the Huffington Post Thursday. Two independent tests are being run to confirm those findings, "so don't say that we're 100 percent sure yet," Gray said.
"The chemistry test is still not completely conclusive," said Tulane biology professor Caz Taylor, the team's leader. "But that seems the most likely thing."
With BP's well possibly capped for good, and the surface slick shrinking, some observers of the Gulf disaster are starting to let down their guard, with some journalists even asking: Where is the oil?
But the answer is clear: In part due to the1.8 million gallons of dispersant that BP used, a lot of the estimated 200 million or more gallons of oil that spewed out of the blown well remains under the surface of the Gulf in plumes of tiny toxic droplets. And it's short- and long-term effects could be profound.
BP sprayed dispersant onto the surface of the slick and into the jet of oil and gas as it erupted out of the wellhead a mile beneath the surface. As a result, less oil reached the surface and the Gulf's fragile coastline. But more remained under the surface.
Fish, shrimp and crab larvae, which float around in the open seas, are considered the most likely to die on account of exposure to the subsea oil plumes. There are fears, for instance, that an entire year's worth of bluefin tuna larvae may have perished.
But this latest discovery suggests that it's not just larvae at risk from the subsurface droplets. It's also the animals that feed on them.
"There are so many animals that eat those little larvae," said Robert J. Diaz, a marine scientist at the College of William and Mary.
Oil itself is of course toxic, especially over long exposure. But some scientists worry that the mixture of oil with dispersants will actually prove more toxic, in part because of the still not entirely understood ingredients of Corexit, and in part because of the reduction in droplet size.
"Corexit is in the water column, just as we thought, and it is entering the bodies of animals. And it's probably having a lethal impact there," said Susan Shaw, director of the Marine Environmental Research Institute. The dispersant, she said, is like " a delivery system" for the oil.
Although a large group of marine scientists meeting in late May reached a consensus that the application of dispersants was a legitimate element of the spill response, another group, organized by Shaw, more recently concluded "that Corexit dispersants, in combination with crude oil, pose grave health risks to marine life and human health and threaten to deplete critical niches in the Gulf food web that may never recover."
One particular concern: "The properties that facilitate the movement of dispersants through oil also make it easier for them to move through cell walls, skin barriers, and membranes that protect vital organs, underlying layers of skin, the surfaces of eyes, mouths, and other structures."
Perry told the Huffington Post that the small size of the droplets was clearly a factor in how the oil made its way under the crab larvae shells. Perry said the oil droplets in the water "are just the right size that probably in the process of swimming or respiring, they're brought into that cavity."
That would not happen if the droplets were larger, she said.
The oil droplet washes off when the larvae molt, she said -- but that's assuming they live that long. Larvae are a major food source for fish and other blue crabs -- "their siblings are their favorite meal," Perry explained. Fish are generally able to excrete ingested oil, but inverterbrates such as crabs don't have that ability.
Perry said the discovery of the oil and dispersant blobs is very troubling -- but not, she made clear, because it has any impact on the safety of seafood in the short run. "Unlike heavy metals that biomagnify as they go up the foodchain, oil doesn't seem to do that," she said. Rather, she said, "we're looking at long-term ecological effects of having this oil in contact with marine organisms."
Diaz, the marine scientist from William and Mary, spoke at a lunchtime briefing about dispersants on Capitol Hill on Thursday.
Dispersant, he explained, "doesn't make the oil go away, it just puts it from one part of the ecosystem into another."
In this case, he said, "the decision was to keep as much of the oil subsurface as possible." As a result, the immediate impact on coastal wildlife was mitigated. But the effects on ocean life, he said, are less clear -- in part because there's less known about ocean ecosystems than coastal ones.
"As we go further offshore, as the oil industry has gone offshore, we find that we know less," he said. "We haven't really been using oceanic species to assess the risks, and this is a key issue."
(Similar concerns have been expressed about the lack of important data that would allow scientists to accurately assess the effects of the spill on the Gulf's sea turtles, whose plight is emerging as particularly poignant.)
Diaz warned of the danger posed to bluefin tuna -- and also to "the signature resident species in the Gulf, the shrimp." He noted that all three species of Gulf shrimp spawn offshore before moving back into shallow estuaries.Diaz also expressed concern that dispersed oil droplets could end up doing great damage to the Gulf's many undersea coral reefs. "If the droplets agglomerate with sediment," he said, "they could even settle to the bottom."
Nancy Kinner, co-director of the Coastal Response Center at the University of New Hampshire, said the use of dispersants in this spill raises many issues that scientists need to explore, starting with the effects of long-term exposure. She also noted that scientists have never studied the effects of dispersants when they're injected directly into the turbulence of the plume, as they were here, or at such depth, or at such low temperatures, or under such pressure.
She also said it will be essential for the federal government to accurately determine how much oil made it out of the blown well. A key data point for scientists is the ratio of dispersant to oil, she said, and "if you don't know the flow rate of the oil, you don't know what you dispersant to oil ratio is."
After a series of ludicrous estimates, the federal government settled last month on an official estimate of about 20,000 to 40,000 barrels a day, but BP is widely expected to contest that figure and some scientists think it is still a low-ball estimate.
There seems to be no doubt that history will record that the use of dispersants was good for BP, making it harder to tell how much oil was spilled, and reducing the short-term visible impact. But what's less clear is whether it will turn out to have been good for the Gulf.
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Dan Froomkin is senior Washington correspondent for the Huffington Post. You can send him an e-mail, bookmark his page; subscribe to his RSS feed, follow him on Twitter, friend him on Facebook, and/or become a fan and get e-mail alerts when he writes.
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