From my friend, Christa Rock, shot in Plaquemines Parrish, Louisiana last week:
I'm very disappointed in the Obama administration and the happy talk they're putting out from the White House how everything is okey dokey, and the all the oil just disappeared. After BP put 5 million barrels into the open ocean? Don't think so. This video asserts that the oiling of the beaches is getting worse, not better. Dead fish everywhere, right on the beaches.
Serious disconnect here between the spin and the reality.
Their are billions of dollars of cost floating around. Because no one trusts ANY of the involved parties we should turn to scientists but some of them were "purchased" by BP. So, once again large financial forces have sufficiently confused the issue so they can slink into the darkness with minimum financial exposure. Right now I trust no one and err on the side that they all lie to some self-serving degree. The oil is "there" and we will eventually see it, or its effects.
A lot of the "happy talk" involves careless media reporting on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Budget: What Happened To the Oil? report authored by NOAA and USGS. Those interested in reading this report (it's 5 pages) can find it at:
http://www.deepwaterhorizonresponse.com/posted/2931/Oil_Budget_description_8_3_FINAL.844091.pdf
Here's my take on this rather sketchy and easily misinterpreted report.
The Oil Budget is broken down into seven categories: RESIDUAL, EVAPORATED DISSOLVED, DIRECT RECOVERY AT WELLHEAD,NATURALLY DISPERSED, CHEMICALLY DISPERSED, BURNED and SKIMMED. Description of the methodology used to fill in the pie chart is very limited, but you can figure out a lot by reading between the lines. I'm assuming all the budget percentages are mass based, but the text isn't explicit about this (the total spill is quantified as 4.9 million barrels, with "10% uncertainty"). As I read the report, natural gas is ignored.
The single biggest budget category (26%)is RESIDUAL OIL. This is a catch all for everything that couldn't be estimated or measured satisfactorily. From what I can glean in the report, it's basically the mass of 4.9 million barrels of oil minus all the mass of all the other categories. The problem with this category is that it lumps chemically distinct fractions of oil (and degradation products) going to very different places: some of the Residual Oil floats, some sinks into the sediment layers, some coats beaches and wetlands. It should include chemical components of oil incorporated into living tissues as well.
A slightly smaller percentage of the spill (25%) was lumped into the EVAPORATED DISSOLVED budget category. Why was it lumped this way? The volatile molecules in the oil quickly went into the atmosphere, while some of the more water soluble molecules tended to stay (at very low concentrations) in the water column. Again, different chemical species ending up in very different places. I'm guessing the evaporation percentage is very much larger than the dissolved percentage, but it would sure be nice to know.
DIRECT RECOVERY AT WELLHEAD amounted to 17% - assuming the 4.9 million barrel estimate is accurate. Some of the recovered oil was processed into marketable product, but it's my understanding a significant quantity of unmarketable goo was disposed as solid waste. Some recovered-at-wellhead oil was burned, but not with the best pollution control practices. Probably not a lot compared to the what goes out car tailpipes every day, but some context would have been helpful.
The report estimates 16% of the oil was NATURALLY DISPERSED and 8% was CHEMICALLY DISPERSED. Odd thing that exact 2:1 ratio. A rule of thumb perhaps? Anyway, dispersed oil isn't gone, its just been turned into droplets smaller than 100 microns diameter. The press has mostly acted as though this is great, but it's a trade off. The high surface to volume ratio of the dispersed oil means it degrades more rapidly than bigger drops of oil, but this also makes the oil more available (toxic) to marine life. Hopefully the droplets biodegrade into something relatively benign (intermediate metabolites are often more toxic than the parent compound)or are collected/deflected on some boom before they make their way to shore. Or before filter feeding organisms gobble them up as if they were food-which would not tend to happen if the oil remained blobish. Both types of dispersed droplet are neutrally buoyant and can remain in the water column a long time. The naturally dispersed oil was was physically broken apart when it was sprayed at high pressure from the well. This happened deep, and these drops stayed deep. The chemically dispersed oil was broken apart with surfactants like Corexit (these droplets are micelles, hydrophilic on the surface, hydrophobic inside). Corexit was applied at the well head and the surface, so chemically dispersed drops are still found at the surface and down deep. BPs prolific use of surfactants seems to have increased oil dispersal by 50%. Hope the trade off between coastline verses open water was a good one.
The BURNED and SKIMMED budget categories account for 5 and 3 percent of the oil, respectively. I'm assuming the burned category means slicks ignited on the surface and excludes recovered oil that was burned, but the text is vague on this point. The main thing I take away from these two categories is that it's a lot less efficient to collar stray oil at the surface than at the source.
I would characterize the report as an informed guesstimate consistent with what has been published regarding earlier oil spills. It's a snapshot in time of a dynamic system shuttling lots of stuff between different environmental partitions. The categories chosen have a bureaucratic appeal - 33% of the budget is directly associated with United Command Response activities. The people in charge have numbers to show they were busy. The report is fairly good at telling you who did what, but it's not very good at telling you what's happening in terms the environmental fates of released oil and degradation products. I'm pretty sure the big players have strong incentives not to find out too quickly.
It is dispersed. That's why they used the dispersants. That's why they can't "find" it. It has been thinned out and has mixed with sea water and it just doesn't appear visible on the surface.
Obama's Gulf War –
"Little Use For Carol Browner"
But snubs Sir Isaac Newton
BP defies gravity but has doubts about Browner.
Deepwater's no place for a "rank amateur".
Sure, snub Isaac Newton and screw with reality.
But sneer at all claims that her motives are pure.
That she speaks for Obama as well as Big Oil –
That imports can soon be a thing of the past
If deepwater drilling's allowed to continue
And we don't mind spill residues tending to last.
Four hundred and fifty plus seventy-five
Tons tilting precariously more than before.
When will it topple? That little contraption?
That is a risk she prefers to ignore.
Obviously Kent Wells and BP do, too.
But forgetting the fact it continues to leak,
They don't hesitate to call the well "static",
"A significant milestone" on their way up the creek.
Stuff it with mud and maybe the annulus –
Hope that the flex joint doesn't come loose –
Gamble that Halliburton's cement holds –
Convert the relisf wells so both wells produce.
Then when her "contraption" finally tips over,
Blame the disaster on Browner et al.
And complain to Obama she believed Isaac Newton,
Which put a huge crimp in BP's morale.
Bob Carlson
www.politicalboondoggles.com
8/5/10
To 'Happy Talk That Oil is "Evaporating Rapidly"
So, What the Hell is This?'
To 'The well is still leaking'
To '"U.S." Finds Most Oil From Spill Poses Little Additional Risk'
To 'BP pipe tilting more than Leaning Tower of Pisa'
To 'The Oil Spill's Worst-Case Scenario'
To 'Obama's Milquetoast Advisors'
To 'British Petroleum Incompetence'
Thanks for keeping the truth in front of us, eljefebob, both here and among the Gulf Watchers.
What should Obama do? Inconsistent voices yelling about jobs tied to drilling and ten other things. He has been called everything from the right,and the left. Dowd and Parker even called him female. Bobby Jindal and the mayor of Placquemines Parish have been vocal from different directions. Let's get some stability and then court. How much did BP put in the escrow-type account? At this point, I think that POTUS is damned any way that he turns.
Interesting...
Fantasy, man that bet is a tough one to take...but I will. Obama goes with the flow until he pounces...Let's see what happens.
I don't understand why the Obama administration is putting this type of spin on it. I watched talking heads today talking about mother nature doing it's job as well and a lot of the oil has evaporated, etc. What about the dispersant and it's effect on wildlife? What about the commercial fisherman who don't have a product to catch that is safe to consume?
I understand that the administration doesn't want to take the blame for the spill or the delay in capping the well - they can only do so much - but it does a disservice to the people of the Gulf coast to have the long term effects of this spill minimized. It's no better than the Republicans saying that the moratorium was worse than the spill, economically.
go eljefe !
there's no way it's gone - dispersed into droplets and floating in the water column somewhere, yes; layers/plumes floating below the surface, probably; layered all over the bottom of the GoM on coral reefs and in wetlands, for sure.
but hey, if it's all gone and there's nothin' to see, then there's no more 'zone of exclusion/no fly area', right ?
so the public and the media and shrimpers and pleasure boaters will all be allowed to go out and look for themselves and film, right ? or not.
when the public is allowed to cruise the GoM again will be the test of when it's actually over -
HELLO!? BP doesn't want to pay for their mistake. What better way for them to avoid their responsibility, than to pretend there is no problem.
WTF!? How many times are they going to get away with this. You know, I know, my 10 year old niece knows that the oil is still there.
We need a betting pool. I bet that BP pulls off this lame sleight of hand and the American Tax Payer winds up paying for this. Any takers?