Page 10. MAINE COASTAL NEWS October 2017 Waterfront News


Dispersants Improved Air Quality for Responders at Deepwater Horizon A study published Aug. 28, 2017, in the


Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences adds a new dimension to the con- troversial decision to inject large amounts of chemical dispersants immediately above the crippled oil well at the seafl oor during the Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2010. The dispersants likely reduced the amount of harmful gases in the air at the sea surface— diminishing health risks for emergency re- sponders and allowing them to keep working to stop the uncontrolled spill and clean up the spilled oil sooner. In the midst of the Deepwater Horizon


crisis, offi cials made the unprecedented and controversial decision to inject more than 700,000 gallons of chemical dispersant over 67 days immediately above the oil rig’s severed wellhead at the bottom of the ocean. The objective was to break up petroleum that surged uncontrollably from the wellhead into smaller droplets in the deep sea, with the goals of diminishing oil slicks and reducing the amount of harmful gases arriving at the ocean surface. Proponents said the dispersants did


help dissipate oil slicks on the sea surface, causing less oil to taint shoreline beaches and marshes. Opponents said the dispersants themselves were toxic, may have caused environmental damage, and were not eff ec- tive at reducing the already small droplets forming at the wellhead. To this debate, the new study demon-


strates a benefi cial eff ect of dispersants: The subsea dispersant injection likely allowed emergency responders literally to breathe easier. By breaking up petroleum into smaller droplets that dissolved faster in the deep ocean, the dispersants decreased the amounts of volatile toxic compounds that rose to the surface and outgassed into the air. That dramatically improved the air quality for responders and presumably reduced the number of days when the air quality was too poor and responders had to don respirators and/or had to suspend cleanup eff orts. The research team included: Jonas


Gros, Scott Socolofsky, Anusha Dissanay- ake, and Inok Jun (Texas A&M University); Lin Zhao and Michel Boufadel (New Jersey Institute of Technology); Christopher Reddy


Continued from Page 9.


(Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution); and J. Samuel Arey (Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology). The research was funded by the Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative and the National Science Foundation.


Dispersants have been applied to oil


slicks on the ocean surface for half a century to break petroleum into smaller droplets that dissipate into waters of the open ocean so that less oil reaches ecologically sensitive coastlines. But, they had never been used at the unprecedented depth of 5,000 feet beneath the surface, where an estimated 7,500 tons per day of oil and 2,400 tons per day of natural gas were jetting from the ruptured wellhead near the seafl oor. This fl ow rate is equivalent to 57,000 barrels per day of oil and 92 million cubic feet per day of gas being produced at standard conditions at the sea surface. During the period studied by the authors, 19,000 barrels per day of oil were also captured by an inverted funnel, or “top hat,” that was placed directly above the wellhead, which decreased the amount of oil that escaped into the sea. “U.S. government and industry re-


sponders had to make a crucial decision. They were facing an enormous oil spill, gushing uncontrollably from a wellhead at the seafl oor—at a depth where no oil spill had ever happened before,” Reddy and Arey wrote in an article in Oceanus magazine. “They were pitted in a high-stakes battle against big unknowns.” Offi cials made a crucial decision to


proceed with the subsurface injection of Corexit EC9500A, a dispersant that roughly resembles a mix of food-grade mineral oil, windshield-wiper fl uid, and household dish detergent. Aerial photographs and anecdotal


accounts suggested that the deep-sea dis- persant injection may have helped dissipate the oil slicks at the surface and improve air quality around responder boats working near the disaster site. But in the heat of the crisis, offi cials did not take the time to de- sign and implement robust experiments to measure the detailed eff ects of the injection. In the new study, scientists built and tested a mathematical model that simulated


Capt. Noell T. Redman Passes Over the Bar Our happiness and our muse, his wife


gifted in all aspects of life, as he held great achievements in athletics, as a fi sherman, hunter, father and husband. His talents were truly refl ected in his self-owned and oper- ated business of 24 years, Redman Marine Fabricators. Within his business he tackled great feats, such as designing a radar arch for jet skis and a custom windshield for Southport boats as well as his other standard designs. More of an artist than a fabricator, he translated his high “Redman standards” into all aspects of his life. Something his family became very familiar with as there were many times he would come home from a hunting trip and tell us he “passed up a deer because it was too small. There’s something bigger in there.”


describes him as “the most kind-hearted man, willing to give anyone the shirt off his back if they needed it. He had a love for his family greater than any love.” Some of his fondest childhood memo-


ries that he shared with his family were of camp at Branch Lake with his cousins and his Uncle Danny and Aunt Lois. A place that he loved so dearly, he continued to take his family to the same lake nearly every sum- mer.


Noell is survived by his wife, Dawn,


his children, Sarah, Margaret, Maximus, Monica, his mother, Paulette Rideout and her husband Bill, his brother, Thayer, his wife Susan and their children Callum and Piper. He was preceded in death by his sister, Monica. A celebration of Noell’s life was held on


Thursday, September 14, 2017 at 10:00 a.m. at the Alfred Parish Church, 12 Kennebunk Rd., in Alfred with Rev. Sara Bartlett, offi - ciating. Private committal prayers and burial will follow in Buxton. In lieu of fl owers, the family asks that


donations be made to a trust fund in Noell’s name for his children’s education at, York County Federal Credit Union, 870 Main Street, Sanford, ME 04073. The Autumn Green Funeral Home is respectfully handling arrangements.


the complex chemical and physical interac- tions among water, oil, gas, and dispersant that occurred during Deepwater Horizon. They focused on the period starting June 3, 2010, when the riser pipe was cut at the well- head by engineers, until July 15, 2010—a timespan when a large number of scientifi c observations were collected nearby in the air and ocean. To test the model’s ability to sim- ulate the real-world disaster, they compared the model predictions to the observations. Nearly all those comparisons aligned with the model’s output, indicating that the model replicated many aspects of what happened to oil and gas under the ocean surface. The research team then used the model


to conduct a key test that was never done in real life: They ran the model to see what likely would have happened if dispersants had not been injected immediately above the wellhead during the same time period. The model results indicated that deep-


sea dispersant injection had a profound eff ect on air quality at the ocean surface. The injection of the subsea dispersant caused the turbulent jet of petroleum fl uids to form oil droplets that were about 30 times smaller (by volume) than they would have been without dispersants, according to the model results. This subtle change caused many volatile petroleum chemicals to dissolve more rap- idly and become entrapped in the deep sea. According to the study, most of the highly toxic benzene and toluene in the oil were transported away in deep currents, along with other entrapped petroleum compounds that aff ected organisms on and near the sea fl oor. The benzene and toluene likely would have become biodegraded within weeks. “In 2010 when NSF began rapid re-


sponse funding for research on Deepwater Horizon, it was important to characterize the initial conditions of the spill, such as plume dynamics and ecological eff ects,” said Don Rice, a program director in the


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NSF’s Division of Ocean Sciences. “These scientists and others did just that. As the fi ndings of this study clearly demonstrate, the discoveries of basic scientifi c research and the ensuing practical applications in their wake are often utterly unanticipated.” The model showed that the dispersant


injection decreased the overall concentra- tion of all volatile organic chemicals in the atmosphere by a modest amount (about 30 percent). But it also signifi cantly reduced the amount of chemicals most harmful to humans, such as benzene and toluene. The atmospheric concentration of benzene, for example, decreased by about 6,000 times, dramatically improving air quality. Without the dispersant injection, the


model showed that benzene concentrations in the air 2 meters above the sea surface would have been 13 times higher than the levels considered acceptable to breathe during a 10-hour working day or a 40-hour work week, based on guidelines by the Na- tional Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH). However, with dispersant injection, the model showed atmospheric benzene concentrations were 500 times lower than the levels considered acceptable to breathe by NIOSH. “These predictions depend on local


weather conditions that can vary from day to day,” Reddy and Arey say. “But this one study is not the fi nal say


on the usage of dispersants,” they added. “It is another row on a ledger sheet called the ‘spill impact mitigation analysis,’ ” which assesses various strategies and tools to re- duce environmental and economic damage caused by oil spills. The debate about using dispersants


is becoming increasingly politicized and acrimonious, and the National Academy of Sciences has recently assembled a commit- tee of scientists, government offi cials, and industry to evaluate dispersants in oil spills.


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