Fish Kill near Jones Park, Mississippi - Video

http://www.corexit.com/red-alert-fish-are-dying-as-a-result-of-corexit-matt-simmons-murdered-before-it-explodes

RED ALERT Fish are dying

I

Gulf oil spill: Has it caused a new fish kill?

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/greenspace/2010/08/gulf-oil-spill-dead-fish-kill-mississippi.html

Gulf oil spill: Has it caused a new fish kill? (UPDATED)

August 23, 2010 | 4:47 pm

Louisiana state biologists Monday were investigating whether a large fish kill at the mouth of the Mississippi River was caused by oil or dispersants from the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The gulf also contains a vast dead zone created by agricultural runoff along the river.

"By our estimates, there were thousands, and I'm talking about 5,000 to 15,000 dead fish," St. Bernard Parish President Crag Taffaro said in a news release Monday. "Different species were found dead, including crabs, sting rays, eel, drum, speckled trout, red fish, you name it, included in that kill."

The fish were found floating at the top of the water, collected along plastic booms that were placed to contain millions of gallons of oil from the spill that was touched off by the April 20 explosion of BP's Deepwater Horizon drilling rig. The oil flowed into the gulf until July 15 when the gusher was capped.

A half-mile long swirl of thick substance with several tar balls and a strong smell of diesel was discovered Monday around Louisiana's Grassy Island, St. Bernard Parish officials announced. Skimmers were collecting the scum.

"There is what we believe to be some recoverable oil in the area," Taffaro said. "We will be sampling that and recovering what we can. We don't want to jump to any conclusions because we've had some oxygen issues by the Bayou La Loutre Dam from time to time.

"The Marine Division of Wildlife and Fisheries is on it ... It does point to the need for us to continue to monitor our waters."

According to St. Bernard Parish spokeswoman Karen Bazile, the fish were found in the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, a 76-mile shipping shortcut from the Gulf of Mexico to New Orleans that was dug by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in the 1960s. "It is blamed for massive wetlands loss and is widely believed to have worsened the flooding from Hurricane Katrina," she said in an e-mail. "Since that storm, the federal government has paid for a rock structure across the channel at Bayou La Loutre to stop the flow of salt water, also putting an end to shipping in the channel."

UPDATE: On Monday evening, St. Bernard Parish oil disaster information officer, Jennifer Belson, said that preliminary testing by the state's Wildife & Fisheries indicated that the cause of the fish kill was "hypoxia" or lack of oxygen. "But we don't have the final testing back," she said. Hypoxia is most often caused by an excess of nitrogen and phosphorus from agricultural fertilizer or human waste, but it can also be caused by chemical dispersants, which were used extensively after the oil spill.

Ralph Portier, an environmental scientist at Louisiana State University, cautioned in an interview that, "A lot of things can explain a fish kill, which is not uncommon during the hot summer weather in Louisiana. It could be the nutrient-rich environment with a lot of heat. It could be rainfall. It could be changes in salinity or upwelling from disturbed sediment."

The Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, he noted, is "like a dead end canal with water that does not mix as much as you would like it to." If oil were the cause, he said, he would expect a more gradual, rather than a sudden fish kill.

But he said he could not rule out that the fish kill could be related to the oil spill. Fresh water, which has been diverted into the marshes since the spill, can change salinity levels and affect fish, he noted. The fish kill announcement, he said, "goes to show how sensitive the (oil spill) issue is. You can imagine the angst of a lot of people in the sea food industry when they hear about a fish kill now."

-- Margot Roosevelt

Oil And Compost Could Prove A Good Mix In The Gulf

http://www.jgpress.com/archives/_free/002118.html

Oil And Compost Could Prove A Good Mix In The Gulf

BioCycle July 2010, Vol. 51, No. 7, p. 20

EPA bioremediation expert says providing an “organic matrix” could allow microbes to clean up hydrocarbon pollutants in the water and along the coast.

Dan Sullivan

AS A VETERAN member of the U.S. EPA’s Environmental Response Team, Harry L. Allen III, PhD, has helped manage the Exxon Valdez oil spill, cyanide spills in Latvia and Guyana, toxic waste dumps in Haiti and the continuing toxic legacy of Agent Orange in Vietnam.

He’s wringing his hands on the sidelines, though, as one of the worst manmade environmental disasters in history makes its way to U.S. shores from deep within the Gulf of Mexico. “The EPA has no jurisdiction [over the Deepwater Horizon oil spill],” he says. “EPA is a member of an advisory committee, that’s it.” Currently the Coast Guard and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have jurisdictional oversight, he adds. “The EPA is on the sidelines here – I am making a personal effort to see if that can be changed through public acclamation.”

The oil gushing out of a pipe 5 miles below the ocean’s surface in the Gulf of Mexico is light crude, Allen explains, which in chemical terms means it is made up more of alkanes (saturated hydrocarbons) than of polyaromatic (ringed) hydrocarbons found more in asphaltic or heavy crude. The good news, he says, is that light hydrocarbons are both more biodegradable and less likely to sink and smother sensitive ecosystems, such as coral reefs. The bad news is that the overuse of both surface and subsurface dispersants inhibits both of these properties. Dispersing the oil also makes it much harder to recover by conventional means. “Over-application of dispersants to suspend the oil in the water column means that the oil may eventually sink as the oily mass gathers particulate matter,” says Allen. “Dispersion also makes the oil more available to bacteria, which require a lot of dissolved oxygen to degrade both the oil and the dispersant; this can cause dangerously low oxygen concentrations in the water column.” While dispersing the oil somewhat reduces its inherent toxicity, Allen explains, the overall toxic effect may actually be increased because the dispersed plume is spread through a much greater volume of water. In short, he says, using dispersants simply to keep the oil from forming a surface slick can actually limit the cleanup and threaten ecosystems on the ocean’s floor that may have not been in danger without the added chemicals.

“I personally told them to stop, that the surface dispersant wasn’t effective,” Allen told BioCycle from his Edison, New Jersey headquarters. “It’s not enough to affect a change in the 100,000 barrels a day that we’re now talking about. It’s so much bigger now than we had anticipated that dispersants may be doing more harm than good. My recommendation now would be to stop, but I do not think they have.”

SECRET INGREDIENT
Allen specializes in the cleanup of oil spills, hazardous waste and contaminated soils through bioremediation — the use of microscopic organisms to break down toxic chemicals. He suggests that compost could play a pivotal role in mitigating the Deepwater Horizon spill both on shore and in shallow waters. The only limitation would be that the mixture should not sink.

Compost is a rich source of bacteria and actinomyces, microscopic organisms that fall somewhere between bacteria and plants. These are equipped with complex metabolic systems that breakdown complex hydrocarbons like those found in oil, pesticides and other common petroleum-based pollutants.

“Microorganisms need some kind of growth medium,” Allen says. “The key is that you have to have suitable environmental conditions for bacterial growth and the organic matrix. Compost is the secret ingredient that allows the bacteria to work.”

The sensitivity of the affected coastal areas impedes traditional cleanup methods. “The issue here is that certain ecosystems are intolerant of mechanical or chemical activity,” he says. “The mops-and-brooms cleaning method would do more damage to salt marshes and wetlands than if you left them alone.”

Adding straight nutrients to contaminated soils to jumpstart the microbiology and allow the oil to degrade in place offers another possible scenario. But overloading of nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorous from agricultural runoff has historically been a problem for coastal areas, particularly in the Gulf of Mexico.

“In nature there are not a lot of available nutrients; they are bound up in organic matter and only release slowly as it degrades,” Allen explains. “From plant material to duck poop,” he says, what gradually gets released into the ecosystem is quickly and efficiently taken back up by plants and other organisms in a relatively tight cycle. Oil and dispersants present an additional load on the system. In order for bioremediation to work, the microorganisms need both a hospitable environment and food. That’s where compost comes in. “You not only have to have a matrix for bacterial growth, you have to add nutrients,” Allen says.

The addition of clean soil and compost bulked up with a high percentage of sawdust, bagasse (cane residue from sugar production) or other absorptive materials could act as an oil sponge while delivering enough slow-release, relatively stable nutrients for the microorganisms to break down the offending hydrocarbons, suggests Allen. Once the microbes begin doing their job, he says, the added and amended soils could be left in place or relocated.

A slight twist of the same solution may be possible in the ocean. “EPA is against any sinking agents because they tend to smother, and they degrade very slowly on the bottom,” Allen explains. “We’ve prevailed in making a policy that sinkers are not good.” But floating material such as compost made up of enough ground woody vegetation so as to not sink could provide a suspended “biodegradation mat” and the necessary combination of organic matrix and nutrition to begin breaking down the oil, he says. The suspended mat could eventually be skimmed up and removed to land to fully compost on a “biopad,” with assurances in place that the polluting hydrocarbons did not find their way back to surface or ground water.

“We’ve been decommissioning oil wells and oily waste generated by that process for years,” he says. “We take the oil and debris into a passive treatment system [biopad] and allow it to degrade on its own with some help by mixing in compost and nutrients. Then we apply it to land treatments — oil-tolerant grasses — where we can be assured that it won’t erode away back into the water. We’ve found that if you supply a rich source of [compost] material to a system that as soon as it is exposed to the substance you want to have degraded, it gets working right away.

Is Using Dispersants on the BP Gulf Oil Spill Fighting Pollution with Pollution?

It remains unclear what impact chemical dispersants will have on sea life--and only the massive, uncontrolled experiment being run in the Gulf of Mexico will tell

By David Biello

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=is-using-dispersants-fighting-pollution-with-pollution

Is Using Dispersants on the BP Gulf Oil Spill Fighting Pollution with Pollution?

Roughly five million liters of dispersants have now been used to break up the oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico, making this the largest use of such chemicals in U.S. history.

..

Nevertheless, just 20 ppm of COREXIT 9500—or one drop in 2.5 liters of water—inhibits growth of Skeletonema costatum, a Gulf of Mexico diatom, according to toxicology test data presented in the 2005 NRC report. It appears to inhibit the phytoplankton's ability to perform photosynthesis, specifically blocking part of the biochemistry that enables the photosystem II complex, Villalobos says. "Skeletonema seems to fall among the most sensitive ones," he says. "Like many aquatic plants, these are organisms that are resilient, that tend to come back even though you wipe them out in some cases chemically."

Oil reserves in Gulf of Mexico's deepwaters

http://environment.nationalgeographic.com/environment/global-warming/end-cheap-oil/#page=4

[Oil deposits in the Gulf of Mexico]

"Geologists once doubted oil could be found this far from shore. Twenty years ago, as drilling marched seaward across the shallow continental shelf, the oil-bearing sandstone layer seemed to be petering out. Scientists concluded that the sand deposited tens of millions of years ago by great rivers had not spread all the way out on the shelf. But they were mistaken. The sand—and oil—was there all right.

The sand had spilled off the edge of the shelf and down the steep continental slope to the deep-ocean floor. There it had pooled in apron-like deposits that turned into porous rock—perfect for capturing oil oozing from still deeper rock layers. In the 1990s, as hints of these deposits began showing up in seismic data, the vanguard of oil production stepped off the continental shelf, into waters thousands of feet deep. Now giant new fields, the biggest of them Thunder Horse [BP's Deepwater Horizon is / was located here], beckon at 6,000 feet (1,829 meters) and more. At still greater depths approaching 10,000 feet (3,048 meters), says geophysicist Roger Anderson of Columbia University, "there have been a whole series of finds," although they have yet to be exploited.

All in all, oil experts estimate that the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico will yield more than 25 billion barrels of oil. That's twice as much as in Alaska's giant Prudhoe Bay field, and far more than in any untapped U.S. prospect, including the controversial Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. "There's a major consensus that there's more oil there than you'd ever find in ANWR," says Anderson. With the boost from deepwater wells, offshore oil should increase from a third of U.S. oil production now to more than 40 percent by 2008, before tapering off. But it will still barely ease the American thirst for oil."

Bioremediation of Oil Spills - Oxygen requirement

http://biofuelsdigest.com/bdigest/2010/05/27/bioremediation-the-gulf-of-mexico-oil-leak-and-obama-weve-got-to-start-cultivating-solar-and-wind-and-biodiesel/

Bioremediation, the Gulf of Mexico oil leak,

In the Gulf of Mexico, bioremediation technologies have come into increased focus as the BP oil leak continues to gush, with up to 7 million barrels of oil now floating in the Gulf after an explosion at an offshore drilling platform in April. According to BioremXL, “bio-remediation transforms the contaminant into food for bacteria that, given the proper conditions, happily consume it. Most bio-remediation products typically become water-logged and sink to the bottom of the lake, stream, ocean, etc. where bacteria cannot grow due to lack of oxygen and sunlight, sometimes having the reverse effect of actually causing even more environmental damage by trapping the oil in an inaccessible place for many years to come.”

UniRem is touting its PRP (Petroleum Remediation Product), which creates miniature spheres comprised of bee’s wax and soy wax to naturally encapsulate oil so that bacteria can consume and transform it into organic matter. These miniature spheres (100 microns in diameter) float at the top of the water where the oil, oxygen, and sun are.

...

Evan Nyer of Arcadis cautions, “The key to bioremediation of the oil spill is Bacteria, nutrients, and oxygen. There are two schools of thought on the bacteria. One is that someone will make a “super bacteria” that is capable of eating all of the oil in the spill. I am sure that are several companies that are currently offering BP their super bacteria at a reasonable price. My thoughts on bacteria are that they are ubiquitous (everywhere) and that they can double in number every 30 minutes under the right environment conditions. The main things that limit that rate of growth are nutrients (Nitrogen and Phosphorous) and a final electron acceptor (oxygen). So – bacteria are not limiting the rate of bioremediation of the spill.

“Nutrients – during the cleanup efforts in Alaska, studies found that adding nutrients to the shoreline spill areas helped to clean up the oil in those areas. Of course these were in areas that had great wave action which provided the oxygen that the bacteria required. Limited nutrient addition may be able to help the clean up in certain areas.

“Oxygen – this is probably the limiting factor in the rate that the bacteria can eat the oil. The ocean and shore areas have limited ability to transfer oxygen into the water. The maximum oxygen concentration in water is 8 mg/l and we are talking about 100s or 1000s of mg/l of oil contaminant (the dispersants they are using also have to be degraded by the bacteria and add to the oxygen demand of the entire process). So the oxygen must be constantly replenished. This only happens at the air/water interface at the surface of the ocean. Anything that creates surface area and mixing will increase the rate of oxygen transfer. That is why a storm is good news/bad news. It will transfer huge amounts of oxygen, but the waves can help spread the spill. (The sulfate in the ocean can replace the oxygen in the bioremediation, but the bacteria that use sulfate require a very reducing environment and the ocean is not a reducing environment.)

“Tar Balls – In the end the bacteria can only degrade the lower molecular weight compounds from the crude oil. The tar balls cannot use bioremediation.”

------------------------------------------------------------------

Diatoms can provide the oxygen required by bacteria.

Anaerobic bacteria can use sulfur, but deep seas do not support anaerobic bacteria and they are in fact not desirable in deep sea.

Gulf Oil Spill - Oil-eating microbes a possible solution

http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/06/17/1687142/oil-eating-microbes-a-possible.html

Oil-eating microbes a possible solution

Can naturally occurring, oil-eating microbes help clean the waters and shores of the Gulf of Mexico? Scientists, BP and government officials are moving toward trying it.

BY FRED TASKER

FTASKER@MIAMIHERALD.COM

One scientist compares them to the yellow chompers in the Pac-Man video game -- hungry, single-minded little microbes fueled by the same fertilizer that farmers use on soybeans, gobbling hydrocarbons from the oily waters, marshes and shores of the Gulf of Mexico.

Can the naturally occurring microbes help clean up the oil spill?

Yes, experts say. At least in part, with some risk.

Officials are taking note. Gov. Charlie Crist on Thursday visited a Sarasota company that sells microbes that eat oil. BP says it's open to using them. And the federal government this week is contacting its pre-approved list of more than a dozen companies to see how quickly they can ramp up production.

Scientists call the process bioremediation.

``You take natural oil-eating microbes in the water and give them fertilizer to make them multiply and degrade the oil faster. Oil is a natural product. It's inherently biodegradable,'' said Terry Hazen, microbial ecologist in the Earth Sciences Division of the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in California.

Oil-eating microbes -- with names like Alcanivorax borkumensis -- are some of the smallest living things on earth, but they can have a powerful impact. The bacteria occur naturally in water and, when they come in contact with oil, they eat it, producing the byproducts carbon dioxide and water.

When fertilized with nitrogen and phosphorus, they grow in size and multiply and their appetites become prodigious.

HOW IT'S USED

Still, scientists caution that bioremediation is only a partial solution. It's best used on sandy beaches and in salt marshes after the thickest oil has been removed by bulldozer and shovel. It's never been tried before in deep water or open ocean.

And it runs some risk of damaging the very waters it's meant to rescue. Some scientists say it may be better at times to let nature take its course.

Jay Grimes, a microbiologist at the University of Southern Mississippi, is a fan of the process: ``It could help a lot. It was used in the Alaska oil spill'' from the Exxon Valdez in 1989. ``It worked very well on the rocky shores.''

Bioremediation can't do the whole job, said Chris Reddy, marine chemist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts.

``The idea that microbes can come in and clean house from A to Z is not likely,'' he said. ``What they can do -- on their own time -- is eat some compounds and play an important role in the cleanup.''

BP says it's looking into bioremediation. ``Potentially we could do it, but we would need approval from the EPA,'' spokesman Tristan Vanhegan said Wednesday. ``Typically it's not done until the oil has stopped flowing.''

The federal government is working on possible bioremediation efforts. The EPA has created a National Contingency Plan Product Schedule listing more than 20 biological agents approved for use in encouraging microbes to attack oil spills. And the USDA's Natural Resources Conservation Service is contacting the companies that make them to see how quickly they can ramp up production.

And there's yet another oil-eating product, called Munox, made by Osprey Biotechnics of Sarasota, that has interest from Florida officials. Munox isolates natural microbes from nature, ferments them and adds proprietary ingredients to turn them into a concentrated liquid form to spray on oil spills.

But there's a danger. Add too much fertilizer and you can create blooms of algae that use up all the oxygen in the surrounding water, creating ``dead zones.'' There's already a 6,000-square-mile dead zone in the Gulf off the mouth of the Mississippi River, created years ago by the same fertilizers washing down from upriver farms.

``It's pretty big and pretty scary,'' said Jim Spain, professor of environmental engineering at Georgia Tech.

As much as 20 million gallons of oil a year naturally seeps into the Gulf through tiny fissures in the seabed. Over time, microbes have evolved that eat the oil in the water -- enough so that all the seeping oil doesn't create a sheen.

But the huge BP spill has overwhelmed existing microbes. To grow enough in size and number to cope with the spill, they need nitrogen, phosphorous and iron.

``They're like Pac-Men -- their mouths are only so big,'' Reddy said.

Scientists differ over the success of past bioremediations.

In Alaska after the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill, clean-up crews spread nitrogen and phosphorus in liquid sprays and slow-release pellets on hundreds of miles of oil-coated rocks in Prince William Sound to quicken the action of natural microbes in eating the oil, says Ronald Atlas, a microbiologist at the University of Louisville who took part in the cleanup.

Atlas says, and a 1991 EPA after-action report confirms, that the fertilizer increased the degradation of the oil three- to five-fold, with no damage to the environment.

``The beaches became visually cleaner,'' the report said.

`NUISANCE'

Terry Hazen, who studied the project, has a different conclusion. He says the bioremediation of the sound with phosphorous and nitrogen wrought severe long-term damage to its ecology.

``We took a low-nutrition environment and added lots of fertilizer,'' Hazen said. ``The phosphorous created nuisance algae.''

Bioremediation in the Gulf must be thoroughly studied and done carefully, the experts agree.

``There may be reason to use it where the oil is not degrading fast enough,'' Hazen said. ``In other cases, the best thing may be to do nothing.''

Scientists differ on whether fertilizing natural microbes can help degrade deep oil plumes as far as 3,300 feet beneath the surface of the Gulf. Georgia Tech's Spain said he fears fertilizing microbes at great depths might use up the tiny amounts of oxygen that exist there, creating even more oxygen-depleted dead zones.

Last week, Hazen and his team set out in boats to examine the plumes, taking 200 water samples in the Gulf. They found microbes already in existence and noted it might not be necessary to add fertilizer.

Grimes, the Mississippi biologist, believes microbes can help in salt marshes, where oil mixes with water and grass and can't be cleaned by bulldozers or shovels.

``The first year there's not much you can do do reverse damage to marine animals or plants in marshes,'' he said. ``But if you can speed biodegradation, you can hope the ecosystem will start to rebuild within four or five years.''

He added that it's important not to let wave action wash fertilizer into the water where it could create algae blooms.

Another potential problem is that when microbes eat oil, a byproduct is carbon dioxide -- a greenhouse gas.

In an area as large as the Gulf, could it be enough to hurt the ozone layer?

``We don't have that answer,'' Grimes said.

Gulf Oil Spill - Bioremediation

http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/articles/39086/do-we-really-need-to-clean-up-the-gulf-biodegradation

Do We Really Need to Clean Up the Gulf?Biodegradation might be crude, but it works.

By Cecil Adams on June 18, 2010

Slug Signorino

The current drama over the Gulf oil spill reminds me of an article some years ago saying that, despite millions spent on massive coastline cleanup following the E xxon Valdez disaster, contaminated areas untouched by cleanup crews reverted to their pristine pre-spill condition just as quickly as those with human help. Is this a case of letting Mother Nature alone to do what she does best, or simply not true?—Mike Hogan, Auckland, New Zealand

Apparently the good news hasn’t gotten out to kiwi country. Rush Limbaugh has already assessed the situation in the Gulf of Mexico and announced, “The ocean will take care of this on its own if it was left alone and was left out there. It’s natural. It’s as natural as the ocean water is. Well, the turtles may take a hit for a while, but so what?” Still, maybe you won’t mind getting a second opinion from me.

The basics: First, oil is mostly biodegradable. Some of it evaporates or breaks down with exposure to sunlight, and at least 20 types of marine bacteria plus several types of fungi can degrade what’s left. Surprised to learn that bacteria eat oil? Don’t be. Although oil spills from tankers and wells make the news, they account for less than 15 percent of the total petroleum entering the world’s oceans, while 47 percent comes from natural oil seeps. (The rest largely comes from petroleum use.)

That doesn’t mean oil biodegrades easily. Crude oil consists mainly of various types of hydrocarbons, some of which break down readily, others not at all. Light oils generally degrade faster than heavy ones. Very light crude might lose 60 percent of its volume due to biodegradation in four weeks, heavy crude just 10 percent. Temperature is important—warmer waters encourage bacteria growth, which is one bright spot for the Gulf.

A big factor slowing oil breakdown is that oil doesn’t contain much nitrogen or phosphorus, both of which are needed for good bacterial growth. Enter bioremediation, in which fertilizer is added to encourage naturalin which bacteria. First tried in the 1960s, it evidently works. One 2002 study showed that adding just 0.25 percent fertilizer to oil on a lab-simulated beach quintupled the natural biodegradation rate. Tests in 1994 in Delaware Bay, which is already rich with bacterial nutrients, showed fertilizer doubled the rate of oil degradation in shallow waters. The same year, scientists fighting a spill on a beach near Haifa, Israel, reported that bioremediation had reduced oil contamination 88 percent in just four weeks.

Sometimes nature doesn’t need much assistance. Following the 1978 wreck of theAmoco Cadiz off the coast of Brittany, oil was broken down quickly by local microbes, which had grown accustomed to the stuff thanks to shipping leakage. Same for the 1980 Tanio wreck in the same area—biodegradation was detectable within 24 hours. The blowout of the Ixtoc well in the Gulf of Mexico in 1979 was different. Warm water and friendly bacteria raised hopes for speedy degradation, but in this case the oil formed an emulsion, or mousse, on the surface that proved resistant to breakdown.

To answer your question: It’s true that human efforts didn’t clean up most of the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill. Some hydrocarbons degraded rapidly without assistance, possibly because bacteria in Prince William Sound had acclimated to resin emitted by pine trees on shore.

But bioremediation seemed to help. Local bacteria were found to be starving for nutrients, and once fertilizers were added to a test area they got busy. Within a couple weeks a “white window” of clean rocks appeared among the gunk-covered ones. Eventually more than 70 miles of beach were treated this way.

Later researchers questioned how much oil the process actually got rid of, though. It’s been calculated that all told, bioremediation, skimming, spraying, and scrubbing were responsible for removing less than a sixth of the spilled oil. Whom- or whatever deserves the credit, most of the Exxon Valdez spillage did eventually disappear.

Not all of it, though—biodegradation has its limits. Oxygen is key in much bacterial action, and once oil gets buried under sediment things really slow down.

Conclusion? Let’s break this down into more digestible bits. Do oil spills mostly go away on their own? Yes. Does that mean we’re better off leaving them alone? Of course not. Nobody doubts we need to plug leaks and contain spillage, and I’m persuaded bioremediation helps at least sometimes.

But other intervention may be wasteful or harmful. Excessive use of chemical dispersants may threaten wildlife. Animal rescues may be expensive PR exercises. The chief lesson from past spills is how little we know about what works. We’d better find out.

Credit: —Cecil Adams

Gulf Oil Spill - use of nutrients

http://historyrat.wordpress.com/2010/06/15/the-exxon-valdez-a-drop-in-the-ocean-compared-to-bp/

The Exxon Valdez: A drop in the ocean compared to BP

Tonight, President Obama will address the nation about the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The BP spill, as it is now known, is the largest oil spill in US history. At present, it is eight times larger than second place, the spill of the Exxon Valdez in 1989. There are a lot of differences between the two but there are also similarities.

It all started a little after midnight on March 24, 1989. The Exxon Valdez, an oil tanker, ran aground on Bligh Reef in Prince William Sound off the shores of Valdez, Alaska. The resulting spill of 11 million gallons was the largest in US History at the time. With the spill taking place in a remote part of Alaska, the cleanup efforts were initially hampered. However, the mess could have been avoided accorded to the National Response Team Report to President Bush in May of 1989.

The three factors that led to the crash were these:
1. Captain Joseph Hazelwood had too much to drink. A a result, he placed a third mate in charge of a tanker with 11 million gallons of oil
2. The ship had inadequate sonar which would have been able to detect the reef and allowed the ship to steer clear.
3. The shipmate was unqualified, not rested, and had insufficient training to maneuver such a vessel.

As a result, over 1300 miles of coastline would be effected by the spill. Much like the BP spill, several different type of attempts were made to minimize the damage. A burning was first attempted followed by a mechanical cleanup, and then the use of chemical dispersants. As a result, the damage was inevitable and thousands of animals died and the coastline was severely damaged.

By July of 1989, the Environmental Protection Agency sent this letter to Exxon about the cleanup.

United States Environmental Protection Agency
Office of Research and Development
Washington, D.C. 20460
July 26, 1989

Mr. K. T. Koonce
Senior Vice President
Exxon Corporation
P.O. Box 670
Valdez, Alaska 99686

Dear Mr. Koonce:

As part of our cooperative agreement with Exxon on the Bioremediation Project in Prince William Sound, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) agreed to provide information that would help Exxon decide on whether to use nutrients as a technique to clean up oil contaminated shorelines in Alaska this summer. As you are aware, all data to make a definitive recommendation on the efficacy of bioremediation are not available at this time. However, given the data presently available, the significant potential positive benefits, the absence of adverse ecological effects, and the limited time remaining in the summer season in Alaska, EPA would support an Exxon proposal for nutrient addition on oil contaminated shorelines. We recommend the following regarding nutrient types, pretreatment application rates, and monitoring.

1. Nutrient Application. Application of both oleophilic fertilizer and a slow release soluble fertilizer is recommended for cobble and mixed sand and gravel shorelines. Preliminary information from our field studies show that the oleophilic fertilizer enhances the removal of oil from the surfaces of cobblestone and gravel. However, there is insufficient evidence to demonstrate that oleophilic fertilizer enhances the degradation of the less accessible oil found under large cobblestones and at any significant depth in the sediment. We believe oil degradation in these areas would be optimized by the application of slow release soluble nutrient formulations in conjunction with the oleophilic fertilizer. Nutrient release from these formulations will allow penetration into the less accessible areas through tidal flushing. While we recommend simultaneous application of both types of fertilizers, we recognize that there are beach situations where, due to the physical constraints or other factors, it would be appropriate to apply either one or the other fertilizer.

2. Pretreatment. For bioremediation to provide maximum cleanup to heavily and moderately oiled shoreline, physical cleaning should precede the application of nutrients. For lightly oiled shoreline, physical cleanup is not recommended prior to nutrient application.

3. Rates of Fertilizer Application. Rates of application are an important consideration to ensure maximum effective loading of fertilizer with the minimum environmental impact. It is recommended that an oleophilic fertilizer be used at an application rate that covers oiled areas completely with a thin coating of the product (approximately 0.06 lbs/ft2 of beach area). The slow release fertilizer should release nitrogen (ammonia or nitrate) and phosphate rates of 1-10 and 0.1-0.5 mg/1/day per 100 grams of granules, respectively, for periods of up to 40 days.

4. Ecological Effects and Monitoring. Fertilizer application should be initially conducted on those oil-contaminated shorelines that are exposed to adequate flushing through the action of the tides and wind. Based on mathematical model projections for tidal mixing and dilution and our monitoring studies to date, these areas should not experience any adverse ecological effects at recommended application rates.

The potential for algal blooms from nutrient addition and direct toxicity to marine biota from the oleophilic fertilizer (during or after application) is greatest in protected, poorly flushed embayments, particularly if large portions of the shorelines are treated. When such embayments are considered for bioremediation, the mixing characteristics should be established prior to nutrient application. It is recommended that you consult with NOAA and examine bays for obstructions to mixing and flushing, such as sills at bay entrances and strong stratifications as indicated by abrupt and large pycnoclines or sags in dissolved oxygen. If the information shows adequate flushing and dilution of the fertilizers under the worst-case situation (complete and rapid transport of the fertilizers off the beaches into receiving waters), then large scale application of nutrients in these types of embayments is appropriate. If the sufficiency of flushing and dilution are questionable for controlling algal blooms and toxicity, we recommend that ecological monitoring should be carried out along with the fertilizer application. The following monitoring parameters should be considered:

*total hexane-extractable hydrocarbons in the water column
*nitrogen and phosphorous nutrients
*plankton chlorophyll
*total aromatic hydrocarbons bioaccumulated in mussels (held in cages at the low tide zone of the fertilized shorelines)
*water sample toxicity using a standard effluent toxicity test program. (This test is designed to detect any general toxicity associated with the nutrient addition operation.)

If monitoring results demonstrate any adverse environmental effect, the application of the fertilizer should be terminated immediately.

We would be pleased to work with you to provide additional details, information, etc. regarding this activity.

Sincerely yours,

Erich Bretthauer
Acting Assistant Administrator for Research and Development

In all, Exxon would be fined $1 billion for damages and the cleanup with civil court settlements totaling $2.5 billion. In 1990, the Congress and President Bush passed the Oil Pollution Act of 1990. The act “required the Coast Guard to strengthen its regulations on oil tank vessels and oil tank owners and operators. Today, tank hulls provide better protection against spills resulting from a similar accident, and communications between vessel captains and vessel traffic centers have improved to make for safer sailing.” None of this would prevent the BP spill.

The BP Spill, or Deepwater Horizon Spill, is spewing 20,000 to 40,000barrels of oil day. With no end in sight, the gushing pipe has already pumped out eight times as much oil as one tanker did 21 years ago. However, to date, the impact on shore has not been as drastic as Valdez – that may change in the next few months as seasonal winds push gulf currents ashore. At sea, it is still unknown what the damage to life in the Gulf of Mexico will be. As of the writing of this post, the spill measures 2,500 square miles far surpassing the Exxon Valdez.

As President Obama addresses the nation, the nation is looking for someone to blame. Many blame British Petroleum as safety measures designed to shut down the valve failed and attempts to block the leak have been disastrous. Some have even placed blame on Obama as his response to crisis has been haphazard at best. The impact on marine and wildlife habitats has yet to be determined and the gulf coast oil and fishing industries have been disastrous. In the weeks ahead, I’m afraid, this spill will only get worse. The BP spill makes the Exxon Valdez look puny and insignificant. I can’t even imagine the damage when the pipe does get plugged…

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The letter is available on EPA Website - http://www.epa.gov/history/topics/valdez/01.htm

Gulf oil spill could widen, worsen 'dead zone'

Gulf oil spill could widen, worsen 'dead zone' (w/ Video)

June 7, 2010

Enlarge

A NASA satellite image recorded May 24 showing areas of oil approaching the Mississippi River delta, shown in false color to improve contrast.

(PhysOrg.com) -- While an out-of-control gusher deep in the Gulf of Mexico fouls beaches and chokes marshland habitat, another threat could be growing below the oil-slicked surface.

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The nation’s worst oil spill could worsen and expand the oxygen-starved region of the Gulf labeled “the dead zone” for its inhospitability to marine life, suggests Michigan State University professor Nathaniel Ostrom. It could already be feeding microbes that thrive around natural undersea oil seeps, he says, tiny critters that break down the oil but also consume precious oxygen.

“At the moment, we are seeing some indication that the oil spill is enhancing hypoxia,” or oxygen depletion, Ostrom said. “It’s a good hint that we’re on the right track, and it’s just another insult to the ecosystem - people have been worried about the size of the hypoxic zone for many years.”

The dead zone is believed to stem from urban runoff and nitrogen-based fertilizers from farmland swept into the Gulf by the Mississippi River. Higher springtime flows carry a heavier surge each year, nourishing algae bloomsthat soon die and sink. Those decay and are eaten by bacteria that consume more oxygen, driving out marine life and killing that which can’t move, such as coral. The dead zone can grow to the size of a small state.

With the spill overlapping a section of the dead zone, the impact on that region is unknown. As it happened, Ostrom earlier had tapped zoology major Ben Kamphuis to be on the Gulf in late May for a research cruise focused on nitrogen cycling. When the British Petroleum Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling rig blew out and sank April 20, Ostrom and collaborator Zhanfei Liu from the University of Texas at Austin quickly landed federal support to expand their inquiry.

Gulf Oil Spill

An interesting compilation of data on the Gulf Oil spill.

http://www.iglucruise.com/oil-spill-timeline

The Deepwater horizon spill is the 5th largest till date.

Gulf Oil spill - computer animation of impact

Atmospheric Research Center: Oil May Pass BDA

http://bernews.com/2010/06/atmospheric-research-center-video-oil-may-pass-bermuda/

According to the American organization ‘The National Center for Atmospheric Research’ [NCAR], due to ocean currents oil from the massive disaster in the Gulf of Mexico may pass through the Atlantic Ocean in the general area of Bermuda this summer.

The computer animation below, released yesterday [June 3] by NCAR, shows the oil passing by Bermuda.

NASA video of Gulf Oil Spill

http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/oil-spill-video.html

Two NASA satellites are capturing images of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, which began April 20, 2010, with the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig. This series of images reveals a space-based view of the burning oil rig and the ensuing oil spill, through May 24. The imagery comes from the MODIS instruments aboard NASA's Terra and Aqua satellites. The oil slick appears grayish-beige in these images. The shape of the spill changes due to weather conditions, currents and the use of oil-dispersing chemicals.

The images in this video were selected to show the spill most clearly. The full image archive is available athttp://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov. For more information and imagery about the oil spill, visit NASA's Oil Spill website. Imagery and information about the oil spill is also available on NASA's Earth Observatory Natural Hazards website.

Gulf Oil Spill - News

Justmeans news and editorial team is providing continuing coverage of the spill:

Federal mobile health care unit arrives to treat BP oil spill victims
Thursday, June 03, 2010 7:45 AM

Will BP's Failures Tank Its Competitors' Projects?
Thursday, June 03, 2010 1:22 AM

BP Deepwater Horizon Bigger Than the Exxon Valdez
Wednesday, June 02, 2010 12:42 PM

Loss of Home: Sustainable Living & the Oil Spill
Sunday, May 30, 2010 9:30 AM

BP Revisited - Not SRI, or a Buy, At Any Price?
Wednesday, June 02, 2010 7:05 AM

Social Media and the Oil Spill: Slacktivism?
Thursday, June 03, 2010 7:45 AM

Bill Tackles Oil Dependence and the Root Causes of Climate Change
Thursday, June 03, 2010 7:23 AM

BP's Deepwater Horizon: Climate Change Implications and Beyond
Wednesday, June 02, 2010 8:29 AM

Responsible Career Choices And The Gulf Oil Spill
Tuesday, June 01, 2010 9:45 PM

Oil-Damaged Waters: A Nigerian perspective on the Gulf Spill
Sunday, May 30, 2010 11:58 AM

Video of Gulf Oil Spill from underwater

ABC News went underwater in the Gulf with Philippe Cousteau Jr., grandson of famous explorer Jacques Cousteau, and he described what he saw as "one of the most horrible things I’ve ever seen underwater."

Gulf Oil Spill - Image

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=44006&src=eoa-iotd

Nearly a month after a deadly explosion at the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, the damaged well on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico continued to spill oil. In the weeks since the accident occurred, the oil slick has periodicallydrifted northeast toward the Mississippi Delta and reached the the Chandeleur Islands.

On May 17, 2010, when the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite acquired this natural-color image, a large patch of oil was visible near the site of the accident, and a long ribbon of oil stretched far to the southeast.

Oil slicks are not always visible in natural-color satellite images. A thin sheen of oil on an already dark background may be impossible to detect. On this day, however, the slick was located in the sunglint part of the image, which makes the slick stand out.

Sunglint is the mirror-like reflection of the Sun off the water. If the ocean surface were as smooth and calm as a mirror, a series of perfect reflections of the Sun would appear in a line along the path of the satellite’s northeast-to-southwest orbit. Instead, waves blur the reflection, creating a wide, washed-out strip through the ocean.

A coating of oil smoothes the sea surface relative to the oil-free water, causing it to reflect light differently. Depending on where in the sunglint area it occurs, the slick may look brighter or darker than adjacent clean water. In this image, the slick appears as an uneven shape of varying shades of bright gray-beige.

Gulf Oil Spill

http://www.triplepundit.com/2010/05/how-to-clean-up-the-oil/

How to Clean Up the Oil

By RP Siegel | May 14th, 2010 View Comments

In 1978, the oil tanker Amoco-Cadiz broke up off the coast of France, dumping 220,000 tons of heavy crude oil into the Atlantic. The spill was so large that the entire Brittany coast was impacted. Because of the tremendous costs involved, only selected sections were treated with detergents and dispersants. Ecological studies five years later showed that the untreated areas had fully recovered. But, the areas that were treated have still not recovered 32 years later. How could this be?

Oil is a naturally occurring material. It is not uncommon for oil to seep up from cracks in the ocean floor. According to Terry Hazen, a PhD micro-biologist working on bioremediation in the Earth Sciences division of the DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, there are thousands of varieties of petroleum-degrading bacteria who are happy to feast on the oil and break it down into simpler and generally safer compounds. Whenever an oil spill occurs, local concentrations of these bacteria are seen to increase up to 100,000 fold.

That means that if the oil is contained and remains at sea, eventually it will be broken down. That’s an important point to keep in mind.

Eleven years after the Amoco-Cadiz, there was the Exxon Valdez incident which resulted in 11 million gallons of heavy crude entering Prince William Sound and despoiling 1300 miles of pristine coastline. ExxonMobil has spent over $7 billion to date on the cleanup with relatively little to show for it. Crews attempted bioremediationthere, providing fertilizer to encourage the bacteria to grow. Some of the oil was broken down that way, though side effects, such as eutrophication, where the water becomes oxygen depleted and unable to support life, were significant. This effect is also responsible for numerous dead zones already existing in the Gulf of Mexico, the result of fertilizer-laden water coming down the Mississippi River as it passes through the Midwestern farm belt. Hazen is concerned that these dead zones may become significantly larger as the result of the recent spill because of the bacterial growth that will inevitably occur.

This is not to say that nothing that should be done. But the options are few and many of them, such as burning or the use of toxic dispersal agents can create as much or more harm than they are trying to prevent. Unfortunately, urgency and prudence don’t seem to mix any better than oil and water do.

According to Riki Ott, marine toxicologist and author of “Not One Drop: Betrayal and Courage in the the Wake of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill,” spraying Corexit 9527A (which contains 2-Butoxyethanol) in the Gulf, as BP is currently doing, in an attempt to minimize damage to the coast, will kill the shrimp eggs and larvae and young fish that are in the water column now. The chemicals in them can linger in the water for decades, especially when used in deep water, where low temperatures can inhibit bio-degradation. The use of this chemical was responsible for the collapse of the herring fishery in Alaska after the Exxon Valdez. What is so counterproductive about this is the fact that this chemical will also kill the very micro-organisms that would otherwise naturally break down the oil. Ott’s biggest concern is the “young of the year,” the eggs and embryos and very young fish who are so much more sensitive to these chemicals. “There will be a delayed reaction,” she said, “when these fish don’t show up as adults when they’re supposed to.”

Terry Hazen feels that chemical dispersants should only be used, if at all, in a lesser-of-two-evils scenario, where their use might keep the oil from reaching particularly fragile areas or those harboring endangered species. According to Hazen, the most effective and the safest things we can do are to try to prevent the oil from coming ashore and damaging wetlands by erecting barriers and then physically mopping up as much as the oil as we can get our hands on. But where can we possibly find a mop that big?

It turns out that a number of interesting ideas have been proposed, including the use of human hair and cotton gin waste. But by far the most compelling idea I’ve heard about comes from a Michigan woman named Adria Brown. Brown’s company, Recovery I Inc., has developed and patented a product called Golden Retriever that is designed to recover oil from water. It is made from corn cobs. Corn cobs turn out to be especially effective in this task, due to the fact that they are buoyant, and the fact that they tend to spin in moving water, which exposes their entire surface to the oil which clings readily to it. The material is simply dumped into the water and then retrieved twenty four hours later using skimmers. As an added benefit, the oil can be completely recovered by centrifuge and the cobs can be reused. Brown has been working with an extensive farm network across the Midwest, led by Feeders Grain and Supply of Corning, Iowa, to acquire the needed materials in quantity. Together, they have amassed a stockpile of close to 34,000 tons of material that is ready to be deployed to the Gulf, where it can be administered using barges, that is, as soon as someone down there asks for it. Sen. Chuck Grassley has also been involved, helping to move the paperwork in Washington.

Where will the manpower come from? How about the thousands of fishermen who are now out of work and are willing to do anything they can to save their livelihood? How about paying them instead of paying expensive outside consultants with their exotic chemical cocktails? According to Ott, who was on location in Lafayette, LA, when I spoke to her, “the people down here are looking for something that is “bayou-degradable.”

We can only hope that the folks in charge of the cleanup will listen to sensible suggestions, rather that continuing to rely on rash measures, in the appearance of “doing something” about the problem.

In the mean time, we will find out in about 75 days if BP’s effort, to drill a second well to release the pressure will work. By that time more than twice the oil that came out of the Exxon Valdez will have entered the Gulf waters.

It is very difficult to find any kind of silver lining in this story. All we can hope for is that the damage can be contained to the extent possible and that maybe all Americans will stop and reconsider the impact that our way of life is having on the planet that sustains us. I know, for me personally, every time I get in my car and drive somewhere, I imagine a few drops of oil being added to the Gulf of Mexico in my name.

RP Siegel is the co-author of Vapor Trails, a story about an oil spill and the man responsible for it.