People And The Environment | Swampy's Weblog

27Jun/100

The Gulf Spill is Everybody’s Problem

Migrating Snow Geese At The Montour Preserve
photo credit: audreyjm529

I did my first post on the Gulf Oil Spill on May 19th. Its really sad to say that things have gone from bad to worse as time has worn on. Everything that is going on down there is a Gong Show of more than Katrina proportions. Just as much, if not more, time and energy is being spent on controlling the spin and concealing the truth rather than real attempts at controlling the oil. Several things have become painfully clear.

Nobody has a clue – the sheer scale of the spill defeats the imagination. There doesn't seem to be any practical way of stopping the flow or containing the damage.
The government is so in bed with BP that it isn't possible to distinguish ventriloquist from dummy.
The media would generally prefer to do human interest stories than do any hard digging. This is playing completely into the hands of the spin-masters.
The situation is so fucked up that facts are breaking loose and escaping into the wild despite the best attempts at spin control.

The Gulf culture and environment are screwed for the foreseeable future, and that time-frame is measured in centuries, not decades. People on the coast know this. They see what's happening and they don't trust anybody from the oil industry or the government who tells them that things aren't as bad as they think. Beaches can be scrubbed but once oil gets into a marsh the ecological game is over.

If you want to see the effects of oil on a marsh you only have to go to the Persian Gulf and look at the results of that spill. No real effort was made to clean that up. The marshes are dead. Period.

One factor has been favorable so far, and that's the weather. Things haven't gotten a lot worse simply because there hasn't been much in the way wind or wave action.

On the bright side, we're all learning a lot more about ecology and the way natural systems interconnect. We can all see now that national boundaries and national ownership of resources are simply fictions. We are all going to be effected.

In my first post, I made a big deal out of the possibility of the oil getting out into the Gulf Stream and being carried up as far as the arctic. That would certainly be a disaster but we are already being adversely impacted by the spill. It turns out that the tuna our fishermen in Nova Scotia catch are bred in the Gulf of Mexico. Almost all the waterfowl that spends summers in Canada's lakes and north lands, pass through the marshes of the Gulf on both of their migrations. So BP may have managed to wipe out our Snow Geese and Gray Geese.

The Gulf of Mexico is a major stop-over and recovery point for birds during their long flights. Without that haven to rest in and refuel most of them will starve. So, this isn't just an American spill. We're all in it together.

Canadians shouldn't feel too superior, though. We have our very own ecological disaster just waiting to happen. If a big iceberg should happen to clobber the control deck of the Hibernia field it will dump a million barrels into the North Atlantic instantly, and probably start another gusher like what is happening in the Gulf right now.

The thing of the whole thing with offshore oil is this:

We can't stop because ultimately the present population of the world can only be sustained with oil.
Nobody knows how to fix things when something goes wrong.
The disaster caused by even one major spill are impossible to calculate.

It's a recipe for doom and the more wells that are punched down, the more likely it is that there will be some catastrophe like this one.

For an excellent analysis of the linkage between oil and government and how things got this bad, I recommend this Rolling Stone article. For insight into the true effects of the spill on communities in the Gulf read this article by Naomi Klein in Common Dreams.

Bluefin Tuna And The BP Oil Spill (gcaptain.com)
Does oily horror await birds flying south? (theglobeandmail.com)
Gulf oil spill a threat to Arctic birds, says WWF (calgaryherald.com)
Is 'Nuclear Option' Last Resort on Gulf Spill? (americanpowerblog.blogspot.com)

Tagged as: BP, Canada, Gulf of Mexico, Gulf Oil Spill, Naomi Klein, Nova Scotia, Oil spill, United States No Comments

17Jun/100

A Bit of Perspective on the Gulf Oil Spill

: Image via Wikipedia

Last week we decided to cut our TV back to the basic channels. Television had become to big an expense in terms of money and time both. One of the immediate side-effects of this decision is that we are no longer exposed to the twenty-four hour news cycle of cable news. Now we have time to think about the little bit of news that still trickles in and do some research on our own about things that interest us.

The spill in the Gulf of Mexico is a big concern to me, but, having time to reflect has meant that a lot of things have occurred to me that wouldn't have had a chance to blossom as long as I was watching on a minute by minute basis.

I don't know why we call what is going on in the Gulf a spill. Big puking hole in the ground describes it better. An even better description might be: big oil company that the government depends on loses control of a well; company and government work today to cover it up and manage PR; people on the Gulf get screwed. That about sums it up.

Anyway, I've been doing a lot of research and number crunching today and I want to share the fruits of my labors with you. So here goes.

First off, this is not the biggest spill in history (yet). During the Gulf War in 1991, Iraqi forces opened all the valves at a tanker loading terminal in the Persian Gulf to prevent an attack that they thought was coming from the Marines. The size of that spill was 5,714,286 barrels. The present gusher amounts to 2,065,00 barrels, just around half as big. But it's still flowing and it doesn't look like it is going to be controlled anytime soon, so it will probably be the champ in the end. Here's a neat graphic I found on the CNN website. There's no indication of where it came from, so I guess it was an in-house effort. If not, I apologize to the original source for not citing them.

Take special notice of the outer circle. It portrays the daily US oil production in barrels. In case you missed the mouse-over it amounts to 4,950,000 barrels/day or around 210 million gallons. We're going to be using that as a comparison in a lot of what is coming up, so keep it roughly in mind.

Estimates of the volume from the blowout are starting to firm up now in spite of BP's stonewalling, and it looks like the daily flow will probably clock in at 2.5 million gallons per day.

That is surely a lot of oil and a righteous bloody mess. But, how does the figure compare with usage in other contexts, like for instance the military context. These figures will blow your socks off.

These are all figures from the public record of how much the American military machine is burning through on a regular basis.

Bases

In Iraq and Afghanistan the military consumes 90,000,000 gallons of fuel/month to run its bases. That's thirty million gallons per day. Thats for power generation, water purification, heating and I guess its also used by the Macdonalds, Starbucks and KFCs that a lot of the bases have.

Ground Troops

Apparently, it takes 22 gallons of diesel to maintain a trooper in the field. That's mainly for vehicle fuel. Lets see. There are about 65,000 troops in Afghanistan. Do the math: 1,496,000 gallons.

Planes

The military goes through three billion (with a 'b') gallons of jet fuel per year, or 8,333,333 gallons per day.

Adding it up

30,000,000 gallons for bases
1,496,000 for ground troops
8,333,333 for jets

That comes to a total of roughly 40 million gallons of assorted fuels. That figure is definitely low because it leaves out things like the bunkers and diesel consumed by non-nuclear ships.

It also doesn't take into account fuel consumed by military contractors. Or what's consumed in the manufacture of things that go bang. Still, forty million gallons is a fair lake of oil, especially when its being consumed day in day out.

How big was that spill again? Oh yeah, 2.5 mil. So the military is burning up roughly twenty times as much as is being released into the Gulf every day.

What was the daily US oil production? Two hundred and ten million. That means that the military is consuming around 20% of total domestic oil consumption to blow shit up in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Back in 2008, I published a post titled The Bail-out Versus the War in which I briefly mentioned that the amount of money needed to fix the economy was roughly the cost of the war in Iraq up to that date. Of course, a lot more has been invested since then and the war(s) have ground on.

I have to wonder what the world economy might be like if the military consumption of oil resources was cut way back. What might the price of gas be today if those billions of barrels hadn't been consumed?

One final note.

Something that has bothered me from the start of this oil spill was how tightly the information coming out of the Gulf was being managed. The media has portrayed it as BP covering up and the government trying to get the real information, yet the exercise looked a lot more like a government operation from the start and I didn't see how a private company could have that much control.

Do you really believe that the government had to wait for BP to release the video feed of the oil gushing out of the well? Even if the navy and coast guard didn't have any ROVs of their own to send down there (and I'm sure they do), there are lots of private companies in the biz who could have popped down for a quick check. Its seemed like the government has been demanding information on the one hand and not bothering to gather it on the other. More likely, they were keeping it to themselves.

Here's the last question, then I'll leave you alone for the day. Who is the largest single supplier of fuel to the Pentagon? Couldn't be BP, could it? Nahh! That would be paranoid.

(Special thanks to Tom Engelhardt and Nick Turse. Nick's article in Tom's Dispatch really opened my eyes and I heartily recommend you check it out.)

Oil Spill Esimate DOUBLED AGAIN: 2.5 Million Gallons Leaking a Day (treehugger.com)
The Spew and the Fury: Does the BP Oil Spill Really Register? (abcnews.go.com)

Tagged as: BP, Gulf of Mexico, Gulf War, Iraq, Jet fuel, Oil spill, Persian Gulf, Petroleum No Comments

8Jun/100

Gulf Spill – What Are The Dispersants Really Doing?

: Image via Wikipedia

As everybody knows, dispersants are routinely applied to oil spills in order to break up the oil before it reaches land. We are told that it is much like dish detergent in the way it works. This certainly protects the shoreline and saves a lot of higher forms of marine life like birds and otters. The question still remains, though, what becomes of the oil after it sinks beneath the surface?

I found part of the answer yesterday evening. I was watching the BBC World News and they had an oceanography story. Apparently, an oceanographic team was taking routine water samples in depths over 10,000 feet. The water was clear to light and appeared to be totally clean. However, tests conducted on the water found that it was contaminated with oil. It also smelled and tasted of oil, even though there was no visible sign of contamination. Thats all there was to the story. They didn't draw any conclusions or point any fingers about how the contamination occurred.

Because of whats going on in the Gulf of Mexico right now, my thoughts immediately turned to dispersants. Maybe the chemicals continue to work on the oil after it sinks, breaking it up into smaller and smaller particles. For the water to be transparent to light, the particles would have had to be very small, I believe they would have to be smaller than a molecule of water.

Of course, there may be some other, natural explanation for the occurrence. Oil in the ocean is funny stuff. I've seen blocks of old bunker oil that had been floating in the ocean for years. Over time all the volatile substances leach out and what remains is like a big hunk of asphalt. It seems to be pretty stable at that point and over time barnacles and seaweeds begin to attach themselves.

Another strange characteristic of crude oil is the way it forms tar balls when it lands on a sandy beach. The wave action breaks the oil up into smaller droplets when it hits the beach, and it mixes with the sand to form little round balls. The beach remains clean of visible oil. It just looks like a clean beach with little balls all over it. Actually, that might be a good way to clean things up. Channel the incoming slick away from the wetlands and towards sandy areas. Then scoop up the tar balls and truck them away. Might work.

Erin Brockovich Heading To Gulf Coast (insidesurgery.com)
Which is Worse? Washing Laundry or Spraying Corexit 9500 Dispersant on Oil Spills? (treehugger.com)
BP's solution for the spill, chemical dispersants, may make things worse (boingboing.net)
Chemical Dispersants 101: How They Work (Video) (treehugger.com)

Tagged as: BBC World News, Business, Energy, Gulf of Mexico, Marine biology, Oceanography, Oil spill, Petroleum No Comments

Older Entries »

Swampy’s Weblog Real life is just another window

The Gulf Spill is Everybody’s Problem