News | Where did the oil go? Baton Rouge, LA
A couple of comments on this story, before you read it:
1. There’s a photo accompanying this story which may show some oil, but I’ve been advised that whatever it is in the photo looks more like seaweed that’s floating on the water.
2. Our conditions here, and in the Gulf, are HOT. Much of what is coming ashore is in the form of tarballs, which tend to be very ugly, sticky, and messy, but which are hard balls of tar that sit on the land, do not sink into the land, and so they can be cleaned up. What this probably means is that all that missing oil is oil that has most likely evaporated before it got to shore, helped along by the hot temps. Some information here about the evaporation of light crude indicates as much as 75% of the starting mass can evaporate.
I am not in any way trying to be dismissive of the full horror and negative impact of BP’s oil spill. This was an unprecedented disaster, and it should never have happened. IMO, the fault lies entirely with BP, who made the final decisions while ignoring critical warning signs.
But I will admit to being a bit heartened by this paragraph in the following story (emphasis mine):
In a report issued Friday, NOAA did not say it had found plumes of crude that measured miles, but scientists said that oil was detected in the water column near the Deepwater Horizon well site.
My conclusions: Once they stopped the actual gushing of the oil into the water, it appears much of it evaporated fairly quickly, and most of what remains is the sticky, messy, ugly, gooey stuff that is actually the best one can hope for in a clean-up (because it doesn’t sink into anything).
First part of the story:
While BP begins preparations for a top kill of the company’s Gulf of Mexico oil well, others are trying to find out where the oil that leaked out of the well went.
Oil began to leak into the Gulf on April 20 when the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded, killing 11 workers.
The leak was stopped 87 days later when BP closed a newly designed sealing cap on July 15 that did stop the flow of oil into the Gulf.
In between those two dates, an estimated 128 million to 219 million gallons of oil leaked from the well. Some of that crude was siphoned off the well and collected by ships, and some of it was burned or skimmed. There has also been some oil that has degraded naturally.
Some of the oil has found its way to the shorelines of four of the Gulf states: Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida.
But where is the rest of the oil?
“What we’re trying to figure out is where all the oil is at and what can we do about it,” retired U.S. Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen said Monday. “There is still a lot of oil that’s unaccounted for.
The oil is “definitely out there” Allen said, but officials are having a difficult time finding it.
“It’s becoming a very elusive bunch of oil for us to find and do anything about,” Allen said Monday at a news conference.
Allen is the national incident commander, the federal government’s key point man on the response to the oil leak.
The problem is that a good amount of the oil that ended up in the water broke into “hundreds of thousands of patches” that are hard to find, he said.
One patch, which turned out to be a large slick of oil, was found Sunday several miles outside of Grand Isle and skimmers were dispatched to clean it up.
But Allen said that such large patches are the exception. Most of them now are much smaller.
“What we’re seeing is mats, patties, small concentrations that are very hard to detect from the air,” he said. “But they’re out there. If you get close to shore, you can see them.”
The tides are still delivering the oil into shorelines leaving beaches and marshes oiled, Allen said.
Allen said that another reason oil may be hard to detect is that it may be “slightly below the surface” of the water depending on the temperature and time of day.
But most people fear that the oil is far below the surface and they don’t know where it will turn up. A group of Florida researchers have maintained that there are miles and miles of oil plumes on the floor of the Gulf.
Allen said he is relying on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to find any oil that has sunk to the depths of the Gulf.
Read the rest here.