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Gulf Coast Oil Spill
Avoidable mistakes blamed for making hard job even harder
by David A. Fahrenthold and Joel Achenbach
The fight against the gulf oil spill is already writing lessons for future cleanups. Unfortunately for the gulf coast, outside experts say, many are lessons in what not to do.
Since the Deepwater Horizon
rig exploded April 20, outsiders watching the cleanup say, the fed- eral government and BP have made key mistakes that delayed or distracted the effort to stop the spill. Some were probably inevi- table: BP engineers and govern- ment officials were forced to im- provise in the face of mounting disaster.
But other missteps — seen with the calm and clarity of hindsight — look as if they could have been avoided. Officials used “dispersants” to break up the oil. But some experts think that those chemicals caused much of the oil to remain below the water’s surface, out of reach of standard cleanup techniques. The first attempt to place a “dome” over the well failed because of a well-known problem called hy- drate crystals. The government and BP repeatedly under-estimat- ed the oil’s flow, and BP was not ready to capture all of the oil be- ing siphoned up from the well. In all, it appears that the mis-
takes have made it harder to fight what President Obama has called a “war” on the oil. “There have been days where
we’ve actually recovered more oil through containment and recov- ery than what came out. I think there are probably days that we didn’t,” Coast Guard Admiral Thad W. Allen said Thursday, when asked whether the war on the oil was being won. “I don’t think I could come up with a com- bination of win and loss days.” BP spokesman Toby Odone said
Thursday that his company faced a daunting problem: a huge leak involving broken machinery at the crushing depth of 5,000 feet. “We didn’t know what state the blowout preventer was in, what state the well was in, what state the riser was in, so there’s been a lot of learning,” Odone said. “We’ve learned. I don’t know if we’ve made mistakes. I think we’ve tried things and we’ve learned from that.” In response to a question about
mistakes, Allen said in a state- ment Thursday night, “We have marshaled the largest response in our nation’s history, and we have continued to adapt and evolve this response at every turn.” So far, statistics of the cleanup
effort indicate, at best, mixed suc- cess. A flotilla of vessels have skimmed 21.9million gallons of oily water from the gulf, and 5.2 million gallons have been burned.
BP has siphoned 202,000 bar- rels (8.5 million gallons) to the surface using a “cap” over the leak. That rate increased Wednes- day, when a second specialized ship arrived to help with the task. Also, on Thursday Allen said a re- lief well, being drilled to plug the well far beneath the sea floor, was ahead of schedule.
But the oil is still spreading faster than it can be cleaned from beaches and marshes. On Thurs- day, the Coast Guard said oil was on about 72 miles across the Gulf Coast, up from 68 on Sunday. “I would give them a C-plus or
B-minus, especially at the begin- ning. I think it’s getting better now. I think they fell into the trap of following standard steps — the usual procedure you would follow to deal with a situation like this — and the situation was not quite usual,” said Tadeusz Patzek, a pro- fessor of petroleum engineering at the University of Texas. “They used up precious time doing things that were not successful.” One of the most-criticized deci- sions was to use dispersants un- der the surface of the gulf. The point, according to the fed-
eral government and BP, is to break the oil into smaller drop- lets, to promote consumption by oil-eating microbes. This week, federal officials said they stand by the decision, although they have directed BP to limit use of the un- dersea dispersants to 25 percent of what it was originally. But biologists and petroleum engineers say that by keeping sunken oil below the surface, dis- persants have made the country’s arsenal against oil spills — skim- mer boats, controlled burns, con- tainment boom — less effective. And scientists worry that under
the surface, the oil may cause un- seen harm to species as varied as plankton and whales. One new survey, by James H. Cowan Jr. of Louisiana State University, indi- cated a 300-foot-thick “cloud” of oil, 35 miles away from the leak.
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FRIDAY, JUNE 18, 2010 Experts see how-not-to book emerging from oil spill cleanup
William K. Reilly, the former head of the Environmental Pro- tection Agency and the co-chair- man of Obama’s commission on the spill, said he was troubled by how little is known about the dis- persants’ effects on the environ- ment.
“I suspect that a lot of the pres- sure to use dispersants is cosmet- ic,” Reilly said, meaning that they help keep the oil out of sight. He said that he had not allowed them to be used after the Exxon Valdez
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spill in 1989. “When the salmon fry came out of the hatcheries, they swam under the oil — which was on the surface — rather than through the oil.” In addition, outsiders have said BP and the government greatly misjudged the amount of oil flow- ing from the well. Eight days after the explosion, they produced a combined estimate of 5,000 bar- rels (210,000 gallons) a day. Now, latest government esti- mate is that the flow is more like
35,000 to 60,000 barrels (1.47 mil- lion to 2.52 million gallons) a day. And when the cleanup effort be- gan using the new “cap” to siphon oil and gas away, it became obvi- ous that there was more of it than BP’s ships could take. Vessels are being brought in from other parts of the world and are expected to arrive by the end of June. “They seriously underesti-
mated the nature of the blowout and the rate of the well,” said Nan- sen Saleri, chief executive of
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Quantum Reservoir Impact, an oil technology consulting firm. “Of course, they don’t have the proc- essing and handling capacity at present.”
Another misstep occurred early in the crisis, when BP tried to low- er a containment dome onto the collapsed riser pipe. Within mo- ments of being lowered over the pipe, hydrates formed and clogged the pipe leading from the top of the dome.
BP has acknowledged that its
engineers were surprised by the amount of hydrates that formed. “We’re all kind of Monday morning quarterbacking here,” said Bruce Bullock of Southern Methodist University. But he said the dome effort was clearly “a mistake. The hydrate problem at that depth and that temperature has been so obvious for so long, that it shouldn’t have been under- estimated.”
fahrenthold@washpost.com,
achenbachj@washpost.com
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