UGA Oil Spill Blog

Hide and seek

By Samantha Joye | Published: June 6, 2010 12:17am

June 5th, 18:34. The plume was hiding. We anticipated that the flow trajectory of the oil and gas discharging from the leaking riser pipe would change after the pipe was cut but it was tough to predict which way the flow would go. We had a day and a half of ops remaining and our goal was to find the plume, revisit several stations to see how they had changed over time, and sample two control sites well away from the plume.

BP's spill response plans severely flawed

The lengthy plans approved by the federal government last year before BP drilled its ill-fated well vastly understate the dangers posed by an uncontrolled leak and vastly overstate the company's preparedness to deal with one.
Associated Press June 9, 2010

Houston firm has an idea

By MONICA HATCHER
HOUSTON CHRONICLE June 7, 2010,

The federal government said Friday it is forming a new technology assessment program to examine the best proposals, after learning BP had only evaluated a handful of thousands of ideas submitted to its hot line

Houston-based Thrustmaster of Texas said it's had trouble finding an ear for its proposal to provide improved surface skimming technology.

“The biggest challenge is to find somebody, an audience, to explain it to so they understand what we have to offer and assess it and make a decision,” said Joe Bekker, president of Thrustmaster. It designs and manufactures thrusters used to steady rigs and vessels in waters too deep for anchoring.

Bekker said Thrustmaster engineers had designed a skimming system using a tanker capable of gulping 450,000 barrels of oily water mixture per day.

So far, response crews using 135 skimming vessels have collected just shy of 370,000 barrels of oily liquids since the cleanup operations began more than a month ago.

A quantum leap?

The system Thrustmaster proposes would use a tanker more than 450 feet long, equipped with the company's thrusters to push it laterally over the water, sucking up the oily surface with three massive skimming devices.

Large separators onboard would remove 99 percent of the oil from the water, which then would be dumped back into the Gulf.

Opinion: Gulf spill is an outcome of our addiction to oil

By By Sylvia Zhang
Gunn High School Palo Alto, CA
Offshore drilling is not something we should promote. Although many see it as an opportunity for energy independence, it is actually a distraction from renewable energy sources. It all comes back to the United States' addiction to oil. If it were not such a profitable sector, would companies such as BP invest in risky ventures like offshore drilling? I doubt it. We could stop offshore drilling by switching to renewable energy sources.
Mercury News. com Palo Alto CA

Cleanup to Take Years, says Thad of the many ribbons

Old Thad admitted today that the coastguard had never anticipated that oil would spread across such a broad area and break up into hundreds of thousands of patches as the current spill has done. “We’re no longer dealing with a monolithic spill,” Ad. Thad proclaimed. "We’re dealing with an aggregation of hundreds of thousands of patches of oil. And we need to adapt to meet that threat.”

Allen was on hand at the White House today to brief President Obama directly on the latest regarding the disaster and how to contain the spread of the oil. Afterwards, Obama reiterated the message that Allen offered in the spirit of transparency: The environmental nightmare in the Gulf is going to be around for a long, long time. “Even if we are successful in containing some or much of this oil, we are not going to get this problem completely solved until we actually have the relief well completed. And that is going to take a couple more months,” Obama told reporters.“We also know that there’s already a lot of oil that’s been released, and that there is going to be more oil released no matter how successful this containment effort is,” the President added.

Read more here...

Long road to oil cleanup

By JAY REEVES and RAY HENRY Associated Press Mon Jun 7

GULF SHORES, Ala. – A wellhead cap at the bottom of the Gulf is slowly pinching off a geyser of oil spewing from the earth, but there's no containing much of the crude that's already escaped, a reality becoming increasingly evident on the region's beaches. The battle to contain the oil is likely to stretch into the fall, the government's point man on the spill warned. The cap will trap only so much of the oil, and relief wells being drilled won't be completed until August. Meanwhile, oil will continue to shoot out.

"Just batten down the hatches." Jimmy Buffett tells Florida beachgoers to stay upbeat.

Musician Jimmy Buffett, wearing his Margaritaville-brand flip-flops, stood Saturday on a pier at tar-ball blotched Pensacola Beach and led a pro-beach rally, urging Floridians to "not get a 'sky is falling' attitude" over the looming oil slick. Buffett said he has survived hurricanes, getting shot at in Jamaica and a plane crash, and he insisted he's ready to ride out the oil-spill disaster that in the last two days has hit the white sand beaches of the Florida Panhandle.

Gulf Lawmakers Plead With Obama to Ease Drilling Ban

Bipartisan pressure is building on the Obama administration to reconsider its ban on new offshore drilling, with Gulf lawmakers decrying the moratorium as an overreaction to the BP oil spill that will compound the economic damage the disaster is inflicting on their states. Lawmakers and industry groups warn that the moratorium could cost thousands of jobs and drain hundreds of millions of dollars out of the local economy. That's on top of the billions of dollars studies predict could be lost from hits to the tourism and fishing industries along the Gulf.

Published June 04, 2010

| FOXNews.com

Who you gonna blame?

Him?

Or us?

Oil Spill: How to Help

Numerous organizations are mobilizing to lend a hand in the devastating aftermath of BP's Gulf of Mexico oil spill. For simple, safe ways to donate or volunteer to help affected areas contact one of the following well-established charities and beware of online scammers.

Published June 04, 2010

| FOXNews.com

Submitted by a reader. From May 28, 2010

As I swam back to the surface, some big fish came up to the boat — cobia, amberjacks weighing up to 60 pounds — looking for a handout. These are the fish that have made the Gulf a famously productive fishing area. But they rely on the forage fish that are now being devastated by the combined effects of oil and chemical dispersants. In a short time, the predator fish will either starve or sicken and die from eating highly contaminated forage fish.

By SUSAN D. SHAW

NEW YORK TIMES

Published: May 28, 2010

Opinion: Why efforts to stop the spill have not worked

The main reason efforts by BP to stop the gulf oil spill have not worked is because BP and all of the other oil companies that drill for oil in the golf or anywhere else for that matter never foresaw such an accident occurring and thus never laid plans for what to do now that it has. Thus, everything BP has tried up to this point has been experimental and not very likely to succeed in the first place.

S.E. Jones

Helium.com

BP places cap on well but oil continues to spew

BP managed to place a steel cap over its spewing Gulf of Mexico oil wellThursday night, but oil was still gushing from the leak. After at least several hours of maneuvering the cap, it was lifted into place about 8:35 p.m. BP officials said Thursday that they would have no comment about the operation's success or failure until Adm. Thad Allen holds a press briefing Friday morning. In a news release late Thursday, Allen called the placement of the containment cap "another positive development" in efforts to the contain the leak. "It will be some time before we can confirm that this method will work, and to what extent it will mitigate the release of oil into the environment," he said. "Even if successful, this is only a temporary and partial fix, and we must continue our aggressive response operations at the source, on the surface and along the Gulf's precious coastline."

By Jaquetta White, The Times-Picayune

June 03, 2010

What if the Oil Just Kept Flowing?

Dot Earth
New York Times 6/2/2010

The 10 largest spills in history

These ten oil spills, all massively larger than the Exxon Valdez, were all smaller news stories, either because the ships were offshore, or dropped their toxic loads in less developed parts of the world. The Valdez spilled 10 million gallons off the coast of Alaska, the smallest spill in the top ten was four times larger.
EnviroWonk.com
By Hank Green, Feb 28 2008

BP finally admits it wasn't prepared

"BP's top executive acknowledged Thursday the global oil giant was unprepared to fight a catastrophic deepwater oil spill as engineers were forced yet again to reconfigure plans for executing their latest gambit to control the Gulf of Mexico gusher. BP Chief Executive Tony Hayward told The Financial Times it was "an entirely fair criticism" to say the company had not been fully prepared for a deepwater oil leak. Hayward called it "low-probability, high-impact" accident. "What is undoubtedly true is that we did not have the tools you would want in your tool-kit," Hayward said in an interview published in Thursday's edition of the London-based newspaper."
By MELISSA NELSON and ADAM GELLER, Associated Press Writers

Making things worse

Daily Mail On-line

Place your bets. Which species dies off first?

Some folks will bet on anything - even misery. Ireland's largest bookmaker, Paddy Power, is taking wager on which species will be the first made extinct by the BP oil spill. "It's a sure bet we'll lose some marine species; the only question is which ones," the bookmaker says.

The current odds: Kemp's Ridley Turtle: 4/5; Loggerhead Turtle: 1-2/1; Gulf Sturgeon: 2-0/1; Bluefin Tuna: 6/4; Sperm Whale: 1-6/1; Elkhorn Coral: 2-0/1; Leatherback Sea Turtle: 8/1; Blue Whale: 1-6/1; Smalltooth Sawfish: 2-0/1, and Brown Pelicans: 8/1. With most of the world fixated on the upcoming World Cup, the action on BP has been modest, says the bookmaker.