It’s been called the worst environmental disaster in United States’ history.
The oil spill that resulted from the April 20th explosion and sinking of BP’s Deepwater Horizon offshore oil drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico spawned a wide-reaching response that is expected to continue for years.
Seeing it on television, Jeff Pearce, a consultant and former vice president and general manager for Elastec/American Marine–one of the nation’s largest manufacturers of oil spill containment equipment–says he naturally thought its destruction was a tragedy.
“But we didn’t think much about it, because they have so much safety precautionary redundant systems that you just think what a shame that thing went down,” he says.
But as events unfolded, “It was kind of a big surprise,” he says. “We weren’t expecting it. When she went down, we wondered why it was such a long period of time before everyone realized we had a real problem.”
The response eventually involved the efforts of federal, state, and local officials, as well as academics, companies providing goods and services, and volunteers.
BP is required by the 1990 Oil Pollution Act to fund the cost of the response and cleanup operations. By most estimations, the consequences will unfold for years to come.
At Elastec/American Marine, the phones were ringing off the hook after the news broke.
“A couple of vendors in New Orleans bought all of our stock,” says Pearce. “I thought maybe they knew something we didn’t know. We had miles of containment boom stock that was gone as soon as the word got out.”
The need was immense. According to statistics on RestoreTheGulf.gov, which is tracking the federal government’s coordinated response, approximately 3.02 million feet of containment boom and 8.29 million feet of sorbent boom had been deployed to contain the spill by the end of July.
When Elastec/American Marine ran out of boom, company officials started bringing back fire-resistant boom it had previously sold overseas.
“Anything they could find anywhere to burn or contain the oil; the scurry was on,” notes Pearce. “We thought this was kind of big, but we still didn’t think it was anything like the Exxon Valdez oil spill. But then the fixes didn’t work. The four-story box, the top kill–all of these things kept failing.”
As of early August, it appeared that success was imminent. But everyone involved in the clean-up continued to hold their collective breath because, while the majority of the spill appeared to be contained, hurricane season had the potential to whip up a weather event that could have added more challenges to the effort.
And, while the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and United States Geological Survey (USGS) announced in early August that nearly 70% of the spilled oil dissolved naturally or was burned, skimmed, dispersed, or captured, that still left about 52.7 million gallons left to address. And that’s only what is observed on the surface.
Assessing Damage
Going forward, the primary concern will focus on water quality and sediments that may affect marshes and coastlines.
After the oil spill manifested southeast of Venice, LA, the USGS began to establish baseline conditions in water chemistry, bottom sediments, and aquatic invertebrates prior to landfall of the oil spill.
Scientists have collected samples in Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida at dozens of locations on barrier islands and coastal wetlands that had been unaffected by the oil spill but are critical to fish and wildlife.
USGS scientists also began taking the following actions:
- Assessing the impact on wetlands and coasts by collecting satellite imagery
- Developing maps showing NOAA projections of spill trajectory with respect to Department of Interior (DOI) lands
- Collecting soil and water samples to determine toxicity sources and levels
- Conducting tests to determine cause of mortality of wildlife
- Developing models depicting the interaction of local tidal and current conditions with seafloor bathymetry to carry oil over barrier islands
- Providing decision support tools to help DOI land managers mitigate the effects of the oil spill and assist in restoration efforts
“Based on our experience and lessons learned following the impacts of the Exxon Valdez oil spill, the USGS decided it was prudent and necessary to collect water and sediment samples before the oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill made land fall,” says Charles Demas, director of the USGS Louisiana Water Science Center.
The USGS sampling efforts extended from the east coast of Texas to the Atlantic coast of southern Florida.
“These “˜pre-oil’ water and sediment samples were collected to provide baseline information and data at the land-water interface to determine pre-existing chemistry, benthic invertebrate presence, and bacteria–especially hydrocarbon decomposing species,” adds Demas.
The USEPA has been collecting and analyzing water and sediment samples along beaches to assist states and other federal agencies and is posting the results on its Web site at www.epa.gov/bpspill.
EPA took baseline samples prior to the oil reaching selected bays and beaches in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Texas to determine typical water quality and sediment conditions.
Water sampling continued once the oil reached the shore to document water-quality changes. Samples are being analyzed for 22 chemicals that are components of oil. To reach a level of concern, only one of the 22 chemicals would need to be present at an elevated level.
EPA points out that water and sediment sampling locations are not necessarily representative of widespread coastal conditions. Additionally, in areas where contaminant levels exceed benchmarks, historical contamination may exist in some sampling locations and may not be related to the BP oil spill.In sediment samplings taken at the end of July along the Gulf Coast, EPA did not find elevated levels of chemicals usually found in oil. However, there were still sites at beaches and marshes along the coastlines where oil was being reported and sampling was pending.
At some sampling locations, EPA indicated there may be risks to aquatic life from pollutants in sediment. These levels have a higher potential for serious impacts to sediment-dwelling organisms and are classified as unhealthy, according to the agency. EPA does not know whether the sediment contamination resulted from the BP oil spill or was already present.
Samples collected in mid-July did not detect the present of four of the chemicals associated with dispersants (2-Butoxyethanol, 2-Ethylhexyl Alcohol, Propylene Glycol, and Di[PropyleneGlycol]ButylEther).
The Gulf coast states of Florida, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and Texas are conducting their own water-quality samplings as well. For example, from late April to late July, Florida officials were establishing baseline water-quality and sediment conditions throughout the state in an effort to document the harm caused by contaminants originating from the compromised well.
The Florida Department of Environmental Protection’s Division of Coastal and Aquatic Managed Areas and Division of Environmental Assessment and Restoration collected water and sediment samples for baseline and impact for PAH (polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons), TRPH (total recoverable petroleum hydrocarbons), and VOC (volatile organic compounds). The state has also been looking for visible indicators of oil presence, such as such as tar balls, sheen, and mousse, to determine water-quality impact. In offshore areas of the Pensacola coastline, plumes of oil were reported, and samples were captured to characterize the pollutants’ chemistry.
“What we’re trying to document is that before we got impacted, we had a fairly pristine environment, and in most cases, those types of samples come back below detectable limits,” says Lee Edmiston, director of the Division of Coastal and Aquatic Managed Areas. “Once Florida started getting impacted in the Panhandle by product from the Deepwater Horizon, we started sampling with regard to contamination levels in water and sediment along the beaches and offshore.”
The majority of samples show below detectable limits, even those taken near tar balls. Samples are yielding data to be used not only to determine the levels of contamination, but also by public health entities to determine if beaches need to be closed.
Edmiston says the next line of action is the preassessment sampling.
“That is to determine what type of injury different habitats may have sustained. Once that is determined, then you start the assessment sampling, which basically looks at the impacts to the water, the sediment, or marsh or seagrass,” he says.
“Next, you develop a restoration plan to restore the areas to what they were like before the impact. That’s why the baseline sampling is important,” he adds. “You know what the environments were like before impact, and then you see what the environments look like after, and then you have a goal for restoration.”
At the end of July, there was still a great deal of reconnaissance, response, and clean-up going on.
“There is still material washing up,” says Edmiston. “Not like we had before, but there is still product out in the Gulf of Mexico. Although the baseline is primarily finished, the public health sampling, the preassessment sampling, and the shoreline cleanup assessment teams are out there looking for product.”
Of particular note is oil product that may have washed up and been covered by sand during high tide.
“They are looking at potential ways to remove that,” says Edmiston. “They’re also looking at how fast it naturally degrades. Some more detailed studies will happen after the product quits washing ashore.”
Edmiston says there also is work that needs to be done offshore.
“There are large sand resources offshore the state uses for beach renourishment, and we haven’t really looked to see if those have been oiled or contaminated,” he says. “If you’re going to renourish the beach, the last thing you want to do is pump sand that has oil in it onto the shore.”
Another understudied area is offshore reefs, says Edmiston.
“The concentration at this point is looking at the onshore impacts, but as we get further away from product moving ashore, those types of things will need to be looked at to determine some of the impacts to the fisheries.
“It may take years to determine,” he adds. “You don’t know what’s happened with regard to larval fish species and fish eggs. Those will be looked at with federal and state resources.”
Edmiston says short-term and long-term studies will take place depending on the extent of what is found. In addition to water and sediment sampling, there also is seafood safety sampling.
“The state and feds will be working closely together to look at the impacts of the dispersed oil and the supposed underwater oil,” he says. “That could potentially go on for quite a long time.”
For university researchers, the BP oil spill is providing a new chapter to the textbook approach to assessing and addressing an environmental disaster of such a wide magnitude.
University of Georgia marine scientist Samantha Joye is an expert in biogeochemistry: the cycling of nutrients, metals, and organic materials between the living and non-living components of the ecosystem as well as microbial ecology, metabolism, and physiology. She has conducted research in the Gulf of Mexico for about 15 years and was onboard a NOAA-funded research vessel coordinating a research mission 8 miles away from the Deepwater Horizon when the oil rig exploded.
Joye points out in her Gulf Oil Blog that there is a natural seepage of oil in the Gulf of Mexico of about 1,000 barrels a day due to routine oil and gas operations. The BP oil spill was 40 times that rate and spread across the entire Gulf of Mexico rather than isolated in a single area.
How weather events, such as hurricanes, could impact the situation is unknown, says Joye. One concern is that the VOC found in oil could wash ashore with a storm and pollute shallow wells or surface water used for consumption.
“Certainly, having oil-laden seawater pushed inland by a storm surge is not a scenario anyone wants to see,” Joye writes in her blog. “Surface waters could be polluted and so could groundwaters.”
Distribution of VOC in the compounds of surface slicks would determine the magnitude of any storm-related problem, she writes.
“The VOC content of the surface slicks is something that is being tracked carefully, and people living along the shoreline would be warned, as needed, if a storm comes through the region,” she adds.
The Dead Zone
Even before the oil spill, the well-being of the Gulf of Mexico has been a focus of concern.
High concentrations of nitrates being discharged from the Mississippi River have created hypoxia–and thus a dead zone–in the Gulf. The Gulf of Mexico was the first area to be named a dead zone by Nancy Rabalais, dubbed the “Queen of the Dead Zones” in the scientific community. She’s a professor and executive director of the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium and works in conjunction with her husband, Eugene Turner, a Louisiana State University professor.
In her July report, Rabalais declared the 2010 Gulf dead zone “one of the largest ever” since her team started routine mapping in 1985. She describes it as the size of the state of Massachusetts. The area of hypoxia, or low oxygen, in the northern Gulf of Mexico covers 7,722 square miles west of the Mississippi River delta and extends far into Texas waters.
Rabalais explains that nitrogen and phosphorus delivered from the Mississippi and Atchafalaya rivers stimulate high rates of algal growth as phytoplankton. When these algae, or fecal material from their consumers, settle to bottom waters, decomposition of this organic matter by bacteria consumes dissolved oxygen. There is little chance for oxygen from the surface layers to penetrate to the bottom, because of a strong layering of fresher, warmer water over the colder, saltier Gulf of Mexico water during the summer. The result is oxygen depletion, with concentrations so low that many types of fish, shrimp, and crabs must flee the area or suffocate. The remaining animals that live in the sediments die if the oxygen continues to fall toward zero.
The Gulf dead zone’s size is being used as a benchmark against which progress in nutrient reductions in the Mississippi River system can be measured. The Mississippi River/Gulf of Mexico Nutrient Management Task Force supports the goal of reducing the size of the hypoxic zone to less than 1,900 square miles, requiring substantial reductions in nitrogen and phosphorus reaching the Gulf.
The five-year average of 7,594 square miles is far short of where water quality managers want to be by 2015, notes Rabalais. This summer’s distribution of the usual continuous band of low oxygen along the coast was a patchwork of several areas, which scientists believe has resulted from recent tropical storm activity.
“Hurricane Alex crossed mid-Gulf earlier in July and stirred up water everywhere, mixing oxygen into the bottom layer. Low-oxygen conditions subsequently returned. Later, Tropical Depression Bonnie scattered workers and ships away from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill area and threatened the beginning of the summer’s shelf-wide hypoxia mapping cruise,” she adds.
Much of the area where hypoxia occurs on the Louisiana coast had been exposed to oil from the Deepwater Horizon leak.
Up to and through the time of the research cruise, there were documented areas of oil sheen seen in satellite imagery west of the Mississippi River. While crew members and scientists were on the lookout for signs of oil, they only found thick oil in the crook of the delta west of Southwest Pass. Surface water samples intended for hydrocarbon analyses were collected at most stations.
High biological productivity seen in surface waters to the west of the river was not unusual considering the prediction of size for 2010 and the continued flux of fresh water and nutrients from the river, Rabalais writes.
“It would be difficult to link conditions seen this summer with oil from the BP spill in either a positive or negative way,” she notes.
Slicks were not continuous over large areas for extended periods of time, which would be necessary to see the localized effects of toxicity or oxygen drawdown.
Rabalais had accidentally surfaced from a scuba dive into a surface oil slick in May and had seen miles and miles of phytoplankton-thick waters before the slick moved in.
“The Mississippi River nutrient-enhanced growth of phytoplankton is what fuels the hypoxic zone, and has for many years,” she says.
In her June report, Rabalais said it was unclear what impact the Deepwater Horizon oil spill will have on the size of the dead zone since there are numerous factors at work.
“The oil spill could enhance the size of the hypoxic zone through the microbial breakdown of oil, which consumes oxygen, but the oil could also limit the growth of the hypoxia-fueling algae because of its toxicity, or because a surface sheen reflects light,” she says. “It is clear, however, that the combination of the hypoxic zone and the oil spill is not good for local fisheries.”
Several of the studies of the effects of oil and dispersant are being funded by BP, which has awarded $25 million in grants to Louisiana State University ($5 million), the Florida Institute of Oceanography ($10 million), and the Northern Gulf Institute ($10 million). The grants are part of a $500 million commitment to the Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative, an open research program studying the impact of the Deepwater Horizon disaster on the environment and public health of the Gulf region. Initial studies will establish baseline data for subsequent research.
Keeping Up With Demand
Meanwhile, many companies that manufacture equipment to mitigate environmental problems could scarcely keep up with the demand, which not only originated in the Gulf of Mexico, but manifested itself in Michigan and China as well.
Such was the case with Elastec/American Marine. The company, with manufacturing facilities in Florida and Illinois, is one of the larger players in oil spill equipment manufacturing, including skimmers, containment boom, fire boom, and dispersant application equipment.
The company’s product line also includes incinerators, vacuum systems, portable tanks, pumps, specialized vehicles, trash and garbage collection boats, hydraulic power packs, fumigation tarps, turbidity curtains, and floating containment systems.
After the severity of the oil spill crisis became apparent, there was an intense campaign to fill an immense need for floating oil boom, says Pearce.
“They needed as much of that as they could get as quickly as possible, so not only were all the companies like ours making this routinely going into action, but there were companies that never even saw this stuff going into action,” he says. “A lot of people who were making furniture two weeks previous to that were trying to make oil boom.”
The problem was that there was no guarantee the new players would manufacture oil boom that would work correctly to mitigate environmental problems.
“With some of the big players like BP, if they tried to buy what they needed, they’d get all kinds of junk they couldn’t use,” says Pearce.
Elastec/American Marine kicked into a round-the-clock production mode, making 408,000 feet of boom for BP from late April to late July. BP sent inspectors to the company to ensure the oil boom was of the needed quality.
“Parallel to that, we’ve also been involved in the burning of the oil on the water, which is a great way to get rid of fresh oil before it gets a chance to get up on the beach or into the wetlands,” says Pearce, adding that the company has been working on that for years with a product called Hydro-Fire Boom, a fire-resistant boom.
“They’d spot these big pools out in the ocean around ground zero, where the fresh oil was bubbling up, and take the Hydro-Fire Boom and sneak up on it with two boats in a half circle and ease ahead and let it build in back of the boom and set it on fire. It was very effective in burning 98% of the fresh oil,” he says.
However, when the oil takes on an orange color, that indicates it’s been emulsified, or mixed with water. Then it can no longer be burned, but must be captured in other ways, Pearce says.
While the quality of the oil boom in the Gulf determines its effectiveness, even the best products are dependent on weather conditions, Pearce points out. “If you’re lucky enough to be working on a project in a reservoir, which is like a bathtub, you don’t have much wind or current to deal with. If you put a turbidity curtain in there, it’s going to be 99.9% effective in isolating the area,” he says.
The company has a computer model that shows how the effectiveness of a turbidity curtain decreases as different variables are ramped up, such as current, wind, and depth.
“It’s a wonderful invention in the right conditions, and it’s a waste of time in rough water, high currents, and fast-moving rivers,” says Pearce. “It’s the same story with the oil boom.”
If the freeboard–the vertical height of the oil boom above the water line, which prevents oil from washing over the top–remains above water and the oil is floating as it does under normal conditions, the barrier is wholly effective, Pearce adds.
Other technologies have the potential for dealing with oil in different ways. AbTech Industries’ Smart Sponge absorbs oil, then it turns it into a solid, and can be treated as a solid waste, explains Glenn Rink, company president.
“It also has a BTU value of about 18,000,” he adds. “About 320 pounds of the solid material can create a megawatt of power per hour. Unfortunately, a lot of times down in the Gulf, they’re just collecting all of the waste and taking it away and not treating it separately as solid waste versus recyclable versus liquid. That really is a value proposition we’ve not been able to get traction on yet,” he says.
Smart Sponge is also used in other applications, such as stormwater filtration. The environmental technologies firm manufacturers products addressing water pollutants and contamination. Its polymer-based products remove hydrocarbons, sediment, and other foreign elements from still or flowing water.
Smart Sponge is a non-toxic, recyclable filtration system with an antimicrobial to promote and prolong effective and efficient filter functioning. A blend of oleophilic polymers, the Smart Sponge encapsulates, permanently bonds, and solidifies petroleum hydrocarbons and other contaminants on contact while not absorbing water. It can be manufactured to the needed shape or size.
Smart Sponge has high porosity and a very high surface area to maximize oil absorption. Each unit absorbs an average of 3.5 times its weight in oil. It is designed to remove sheen levels of hydrocarbons. Heavier concentrations of oil, mousse, or tar balls are not effectively removed by the product as they will clog the Smart Sponge filter.
Based on ASTM F716–82, Smart Sponge has achieved 10-minute absorption rates of 8.6:1 for Kuwait Light Crude and 3.4:1 for North Slope Crude.
Developed in 1996 and formerly known as Oil Aquatic Recovery Systems, Smart Sponge technologies have been used in stormwater, industrial, and military applications worldwide.
“We’re very happy with the success of the product,” says Rink. “What’s been very frustrating is the slowness of the oil industry to respond and work on new technologies and the deployment of new technologies. If you’re selling something traditional, it’s a lot easier to move.”
Like many manufacturers, Rink is taken back by the marked increase in e-mail flow and phone calls. “We’ve built tremendous relationships with a lot of the emergency response companies involved in the cleanup,” he says. “We’re continuing to develop those relationships for this spill and future spills.”
AbTech has donated products in the Gulf, committing up to $250,000 worth for various applications.
AbTech’s Smart Sponge was submitted through the process of approval and ultimately forwarded to the federal on-scene coordinator for evaluation and use where appropriate onsite. Jonathan Thatcher, the company’s chief operating officer, had spent time in the Gulf Coast working on field deployments.
“The product got attention relatively late in the game,” says Thatcher of Smart Sponge. “A lot of the media were reporting the bulk of the oil is gone or cleaned up. After that, we were out with one of the oil spill cleanup companies. They were vacuuming from the subsurface barrels and barrels of what appears to be emerged crude oil and ran out of barrels.
“They told us they’re fighting every day to keep the vacuum barges out there and operating because there’s still so much coming up. Granted, you have to find it. It’s not en masse, but it is impacting miles and miles of shoreline and marsh land.”
“Where we see the greatest value with the oil spill is filtration boxes, made in a slightly modified form, that could be used in the open sea for filtering of water from traditional mechanical devices,” notes Rink.
After the use of a mechanical separation system, such as an oil/water separator, the resulting water needs additional polishing prior to being re-released into the environment. In the oil recovery operations, there was an attempt to skim as much oil as possible to send to the refineries.
“But then they were taking that contaminated water and basically re-injecting it into the deep wells about 7,000 feet down,” says Thatcher. “That’s an incredibly expensive proposition, and to truck away all of that is not a cheap alternative for them.
“The Smart Sponge technology treats the water onsite. It can be released because it removed the level of hydrocarbons down to less than 29 ppm, and depending on what you want to engineer, you can go to less than 5 ppm, which is undetectable.”
No sooner did operations with the Gulf start to wind down than another problem popped up in Michigan: On July 26, a 30-inch pipeline burst in Talmadge Creek–which feeds into the Kalamazoo River–sending an estimated 800,000 gallons of crude oil into the waterway. The EPA oversaw the deployment of more than 105,000 feet of boom.
“That’s turning into a nasty spill as well,” notes Pearce of Elastec/American Marine. “We’ve got a crew in Michigan, and we’ll be offering equipment and oil boom and skimmers to deal with that.”
Pearce points out that the total number of gallons of oil that ended up in the Gulf will probably remain unknown. “It snuck up on us, and next thing you know, it’s become probably the worst oil spill the United States has ever had.”
