by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Oct 25, 2012 | Toxification
By Leo Hickman / The Guardian
Oil companies operating in the North Sea have been fined for oil spills on just seven occasions since 2000, even though 4,123 separate spills were recorded over the same period, the Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc) has confirmed.
The disclosure came as Decc said on Thursday that the government had offered a “record-breaking” 167 new licences to oil and gas companies seeking to drill in the North Sea. A further 61 “blocks”, or licences, are under environmental assessment.
Total fines resulting from prosecutions between 2000 and 2011 came to just £74,000 and no single oil company had to pay more than £20,000.
Two companies received fines of £20,000: BP, for causing 28 tonnes of diesel to spill into the sea in 2002 from the Forties Alpha platform, and, a year later, Total E&P, for causing six tonnes of diesel to enter the sea during a transfer between fuel tanks on the Alwyn North platform.
Information about the fines was released by Decc after a freedom of information request and further inquiries by the Guardian.
The smallest fines over this period were those imposed on two companies, Venture North Sea Oil and Knutsen OAS Shipping, of £2,000 each, after 20 tonnes of crude oil was spilt during a tanker transfer on the Kittiwake platform.
In total, 1,226 tonnes of oil were spilt into the North Sea between 2000 and 2011, according to Decc’s archives. Decc said there is no “volume threshold” determining whether a company will be prosecuted over a spill at sea, although a spill of less than five tonnes is unlikely to go to court.
A tonne of crude oil is broadly equivalent to seven barrels, or, more precisely, 1,136 litres.
Decc said its inspectors, all of whom have enforcement powers, judge each case separately to assess the circumstances and the seriousness of the alleged offence.
Slightly different arrangements exist in Scotland from those in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, for pursuing a prosecution.
A Decc spokesman said: “The UK has one of the toughest and most successful oil and gas regimes in the world and we work closely with industry to ensure the highest standards of environmental protection are in place and enforced.
“There are a number of enforcement options available to Decc, with court action reserved for serious offences. On the rare occasions legal proceedings have been deemed necessary, it is for the court to decide the level of fines to hand down.”
Environmental campaigners said it was worrying that Decc viewed itself as operating the global gold standard of offshore regulation, especially as oil companies were now pressing for permission to drill in extreme and vulnerable environments such as the Arctic.
Vicky Wyatt, a Greenpeace campaigner, said: “Ministers and oil companies can spout all the carefully crafted quotes they like to tell us how safe drilling at sea is. But while they’re spouting these words, their rigs are all too often spouting oil into our oceans. The government should hit these companies who pollute the oceans in this way with meaningful fines.
“A few grand is not even a slap on the wrist for companies who pocket millions of pounds every hour.
“It’s both staggering and wrong that some of these companies are now also drilling in the fragile and pristine Arctic, where a similar oil leak would be catastrophic.”
Read more from The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/oct/25/oil-companies-north-sea-spills
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jul 19, 2012 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Toxification
By University of Central Florida
The largest oil spill on open water to date and other environmental factors led to the historically high number of dolphin deaths in the Gulf of Mexico, concludes a two-year scientific study released today.
A team of biologists from several Gulf of Mexico institutions and the University of Central Florida in Orlando published their findings in the journal PLoS ONE.
For the past two years, scientists have been trying to figure out why there were a high number of dolphin deaths, part of what’s called an “unusual mortality event” along the northern Gulf of Mexico.
Most troubling to scientists was the exceptionally high number of young dolphins that made up close to half of the 186 dolphins that washed ashore from Louisiana to western Florida from January to April 2011. The number of “perinatal” (near birth) dolphins stranded during this four-month period was six times higher than the average number of perinatal strandings in the region since 2003 and nearly double the historical percentage of all strandings.
“Unfortunately it was a ‘perfect storm’ that led to the dolphin deaths,” said Graham Worthy, a UCF provosts distinguished professor of biology and co-author of the study. “The oil spill and cold winter of 2010 had already put significant stress on their food resources, resulting in poor body condition and depressed immune response. It appears the high volumes of cold freshwater coming from snowmelt water that pushed through Mobile Bay and Mississippi Sound in 2011 was the final blow.”
The cold winter of 2010 was followed by the historic BP Deepwater Horizon disaster in April 2010, which dumped millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, likely disrupting the food chain. This was in the middle of the dolphins’ breeding season. A sudden entry of high volumes of cold freshwater from Mobile Bay in 2011 imposed additional stress on the ecosystem and specifically on dolphins that were already in poor body condition.
“When we put the pieces together, it appears that the dolphins were likely weakened by depleted food resources, bacteria, or other factors as a result of the 2010 cold winter or oil spill, which made them susceptible to assault by the high volumes of cold freshwater coming from land in 2011 and resulted in distinct patterns in when and where they washed ashore,” said Ruth Carmichael, a senior marine scientist at the Dauphin Island Sea Lab, an assistant professor of Marine Sciences at the University of South Alabama and the lead author of the study.
The majority of perinatal strandings were centered on the Mississippi-Alabama coast, adjacent to Mobile Bay, the 4th largest freshwater drainage in the U.S. The onshore movement of surface currents during the same period resulted in animals washing ashore along the stretch of coastline where freshwater discharge was most intense.
Others who contributed to the study include: William M. Graham and Stephan Howden from the University of Southern Mississippi, Stennis Space Center and Allen Aven from the Dauphin Island Sea Lab and the University of South Alabama.
Worthy is the Hubbs Professor of Marine Mammalogy. He received his PhD in 1986 from the University of Guelph in Canada and then completed post-doctoral training at the University of California at Santa Cruz, where he studied elephant seals, bottlenose dolphins and California sea lions. He spent 11 years as a faculty member in the Department of Marine Biology at Texas A&M University at Galveston and served as the State Coordinator for the Texas Marine Mammal Stranding Network.
Worthy and his team at UCF have been studying dolphin populations in the Pensacola and Choctawhatchee bays for years.
From University of Central Florida News: http://today.ucf.edu/study-points-to-causes-of-dolphin-deaths-in-gulf-of-mexico/
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jun 27, 2012 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Toxification
By Claudia Adrien / University of Florida
The BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill temporarily worsened existing manmade problems in Louisiana’s salt marshes such as erosion, but there may be cause for optimism, according to a new study.
A study appearing online Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found the 2010 spill killed off salt marsh plants 15 to 30 feet from the shoreline and this plant die off resulted in a more-than-doubled rate of erosion along the marsh edge and subsequent permanent marsh habitat loss. Vegetation farther from shore was relatively untouched by the incoming oil.
“Louisiana is already losing about a football field worth of wetlands every hour, and that was before the spill,” said Brian Silliman, a University of Florida biologist and lead author of the study. “When grasses die from heavy oiling, their roots, that hold the marsh sediment together, also often die. By killing grasses on the marsh shoreline, the spill pushed erosion rates on the marsh edge to more than double what they were before. Because Louisiana was already experiencing significant erosive marsh loss due to the channelization of the Mississippi, this is a big example of how multiple human stressors can have additive effects.”
Marshes are the life’s blood of coastal Louisiana because they act as critical nurseries for the shrimp, oysters and fish produced in these waters while helping to sequester significant amounts of carbon. They also protect coastlines from flooding and guard estuarine waters from nutrient pollution.
But the marshes have been suffering for decades as a result of the channelization of the Mississippi River, which has starved them from needed sediments to deter erosion.
Then came the oil spill.
Researchers observed minimal oil on the surfaces of grasses located more than 45 feet from the shoreline, indicating that significant amounts of oil did not move into interior marshes.
Instead, the researchers found that the tall grasses along the marsh edge acted as wall-like trap to incoming oil slicks, concentrating oil on the marsh edge. This concentration of oil on the shoreline protected interior marshes from oiling but worsened already extreme erosion on the shoreline. As oiled plants died, their roots that hold tight to the sediment perished as well. Already eroding sediment was now exposed to wave action without the effect of the gripping plant roots.
The result: elevated erosion rates for 1.5 years that averaged more than 10 feet of shoreline loss per year — double the natural rate for this area.
The encouraging results, Silliman said, included significant declines in the oil concentration on the marsh surface over 1.5 years and that unaffected, healthy marsh plants in the marsh interior quickly grew back into marsh die-off areas that had not yet been lost due to heightened erosion.
When the new marsh plant growth grew into the erosive edge of the marsh, Silliman said, the recolonization of the area by the gripping plant roots shut down the oil-elevated erosion rates and returned them to those seen at marsh sites where oil coverage did not occur.
The researchers also found that polyaromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, a carcinogenic byproduct of oil, was 100 percent greater at the Barateria Bay testing site than in reference marshes. This finding provides chemical evidence to support their visual observations that marshes in the affected areas were laden with oil while those in reference areas did not receive significant oiling.
By adding Biochar, a charcoal-based substance, to marshlands, Silliman’s team is also using new bioremediation tactics to try to break down PAHs into organic material. If this method is successful, he said, it could be used to supplement naturally occurring microbes in the marsh mud that already oxidize the oil carcinogen. The team is soon to publish those findings.
“This is a new idea applied toward cleaning up PAHs,” said UF chemistry professor Andrew R. Zimmerman, a co-author on the paper. “It’s possible there’s a bunch lurking at the bottom of the bay.”
From University of Florida News
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | May 2, 2012 | Mining & Drilling
By Rupert Neate / The Guardian
BP is planning to start three new oil drilling rigs in the Gulf of Mexico this year. The launch of the new rigs will bring the number of BP rigs in the Gulf to eight – more than the oil giant had before the devastating Deepwater Horizon disaster three years ago.
Bernard Looney, BP’s executive in charge of new wells, said BP is expecting to spend $4bn (£2.5bn) on new developments in the Gulf of Mexico this year and hopes to “invest at least that much every year over the next decade”.
“After much soul-searching in the fall of 2010, we concluded it would be wrong to walk away [from the Gulf of Mexico],” Looney said at an offshore oil conference in Houston, Texas, on Monday. “We would have been walking away not only from our past, but from a key component of our future.”
He said the Deepwater Horizon disaster, which killed 11 people, had “challenged us to the core”, but said the company has been working hard to help prevent “such an accident from ever happening again”.
While conceding that BP was in “absolutely no position to preach”, he called on the industry to adopt broader safety standards.
Last October US regulators granted BP its first permit to drill a new well since the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, that spewed 4.9m barrels of oil into the fragile Gulf of Mexico ecosystem. The permit, for drilling in BP’s Kaskida field 250 miles south-west of New Orleans, was approved after BP’s well design met more stringent post-spill standards.
Looney did not state where the new rigs will drill, but industry figures said they expect an appraisal well in BP’s “giant” Tiber field 250 miles south-west of New Orleans. BP has long wanted to explore the area it discovered in 2009, but had been banned by regulators.
The company’s next big project, Mad Dog phase 2, is expected to start production towards the end of the decade. Looney said the field, which was discovered in 1998 and first began producing oil in 2005, holds more than 4bn barrels of oil – enough to promote it to the “super-giant” oil field category.
From The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/apr/30/bp-new-gulf-mexico-oil-rigs
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Apr 18, 2012 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Toxification
By Dahr Jamail / Al Jazeera
“The fishermen have never seen anything like this,” Dr Jim Cowan told Al Jazeera. “And in my 20 years working on red snapper, looking at somewhere between 20 and 30,000 fish, I’ve never seen anything like this either.”
Dr Cowan, with Louisiana State University’s Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences started hearing about fish with sores and lesions from fishermen in November 2010.
Cowan’s findings replicate those of others living along vast areas of the Gulf Coast that have been impacted by BP’s oil and dispersants.
Gulf of Mexico fishermen, scientists and seafood processors have told Al Jazeera they are finding disturbing numbers of mutated shrimp, crab and fish that they believe are deformed by chemicals released during BP’s 2010 oil disaster.
Along with collapsing fisheries, signs of malignant impact on the regional ecosystem are ominous: horribly mutated shrimp, fish with oozing sores, underdeveloped blue crabs lacking claws, eyeless crabs and shrimp – and interviewees’ fingers point towards BP’s oil pollution disaster as being the cause.
Eyeless shrimp
Tracy Kuhns and her husband Mike Roberts, commercial fishers from Barataria, Louisiana, are finding eyeless shrimp.
“At the height of the last white shrimp season, in September, one of our friends caught 400 pounds of these,” Kuhns told Al Jazeera while showing a sample of the eyeless shrimp.
According to Kuhns, at least 50 per cent of the shrimp caught in that period in Barataria Bay, a popular shrimping area that was heavily impacted by BP’s oil and dispersants, were eyeless. Kuhns added: “Disturbingly, not only do the shrimp lack eyes, they even lack eye sockets.”
“Some shrimpers are catching these out in the open Gulf [of Mexico],” she added, “They are also catching them in Alabama and Mississippi. We are also finding eyeless crabs, crabs with their shells soft instead of hard, full grown crabs that are one-fifth their normal size, clawless crabs, and crabs with shells that don’t have their usual spikes … they look like they’ve been burned off by chemicals.”
On April 20, 2010, BP’s Deepwater Horizon oilrig exploded, and began the release of at least 4.9 million barrels of oil. BP then used at least 1.9 million gallons of toxic Corexit dispersants to sink the oil.
Keath Ladner, a third generation seafood processor in Hancock County, Mississippi, is also disturbed by what he is seeing.
“I’ve seen the brown shrimp catch drop by two-thirds, and so far the white shrimp have been wiped out,” Ladner told Al Jazeera. “The shrimp are immune compromised. We are finding shrimp with tumors on their heads, and are seeing this everyday.”
While on a shrimp boat in Mobile Bay with Sidney Schwartz, the fourth-generation fisherman said that he had seen shrimp with defects on their gills, and “their shells missing around their gills and head”.
“We’ve fished here all our lives and have never seen anything like this,” he added.
Ladner has also seen crates of blue crabs, all of which were lacking at least one of their claws.
Darla Rooks, a lifelong fisherperson from Port Sulfur, Louisiana, told Al Jazeera she is finding crabs “with holes in their shells, shells with all the points burned off so all the spikes on their shells and claws are gone, misshapen shells, and crabs that are dying from within … they are still alive, but you open them up and they smell like they’ve been dead for a week”.
Rooks is also finding eyeless shrimp, shrimp with abnormal growths, female shrimp with their babies still attached to them, and shrimp with oiled gills.
“We also seeing eyeless fish, and fish lacking even eye-sockets, and fish with lesions, fish without covers over their gills, and others with large pink masses hanging off their eyes and gills.”
Rooks, who grew up fishing with her parents, said she had never seen such things in these waters, and her seafood catch last year was “ten per cent what it normally is”.
“I’ve never seen this,” he said, a statement Al Jazeera heard from every scientist, fisherman, and seafood processor we spoke with about the seafood deformities.
Given that the Gulf of Mexico provides more than 40 per cent of all the seafood caught in the continental US, this phenomenon does not bode well for the region, or the country.
BP’s chemicals?
“The dispersants used in BP’s draconian experiment contain solvents, such as petroleum distillates and 2-butoxyethanol. Solvents dissolve oil, grease, and rubber,” Dr Riki Ott, a toxicologist, marine biologist and Exxon Valdez survivor told Al Jazeera. “It should be no surprise that solvents are also notoriously toxic to people, something the medical community has long known”.
The dispersants are known to be mutagenic, a disturbing fact that could be evidenced in the seafood deformities. Shrimp, for example, have a life-cycle short enough that two to three generations have existed since BP’s disaster began, giving the chemicals time to enter the genome.
Pathways of exposure to the dispersants are inhalation, ingestion, skin, and eye contact. Health impacts can include headaches, vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pains, chest pains, respiratory system damage, skin sensitisation, hypertension, central nervous system depression, neurotoxic effects, cardiac arrhythmia and cardiovascular damage. They are also teratogenic – able to disturb the growth and development of an embryo or fetus – and carcinogenic.
Cowan believes chemicals named polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), released from BP’s submerged oil, are likely to blame for what he is finding, due to the fact that the fish with lesions he is finding are from “a wide spatial distribution that is spatially coordinated with oil from the Deepwater Horizon, both surface oil and subsurface oil. A lot of the oil that impacted Louisiana was also in subsurface plumes, and we think there is a lot of it remaining on the seafloor”.
Marine scientist Samantha Joye of the University of Georgia published results of her submarine dives around the source area of BP’s oil disaster in the Nature Geoscience journal.
Her evidence showed massive swathes of oil covering the seafloor, including photos of oil-covered bottom dwelling sea creatures.
While showing slides at an American Association for the Advancement of Science annual conference in Washington, Joye said: “This is Macondo oil on the bottom. These are dead organisms because of oil being deposited on their heads.”
Dr Wilma Subra, a chemist and Macarthur Fellow, has conducted tests on seafood and sediment samples along the Gulf for chemicals present in BP’s crude oil and toxic dispersants.
“Tests have shown significant levels of oil pollution in oysters and crabs along the Louisiana coastline,” Subra told Al Jazeera. “We have also found high levels of hydrocarbons in the soil and vegetation.”
According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, PAHs “are a group of semi-volatile organic compounds that are present in crude oil that has spent time in the ocean and eventually reaches shore, and can be formed when oil is burned”.
“The fish are being exposed to PAHs, and I was able to find several references that list the same symptoms in fish after the Exxon Valdez spill, as well as other lab experiments,” explained Cowan. “There was also a paper published by some LSU scientists that PAH exposure has effects on the genome.”
The University of South Florida released the results of a survey whose findings corresponded with Cowan’s: a two to five per cent infection rate in the same oil impact areas, and not just with red snapper, but with more than 20 species of fish with lesions. In many locations, 20 per cent of the fish had lesions, and later sampling expeditions found areas where, alarmingly, 50 per cent of the fish had them.
“I asked a NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] sampler what percentage of fish they find with sores prior to 2010, and it’s one tenth of one percent,” Cowan said. “Which is what we found prior to 2010 as well. But nothing like we’ve seen with these secondary infections and at this high of rate since the spill.”
“What we think is that it’s attributable to chronic exposure to PAHs released in the process of weathering of oil on the seafloor,” Cowan said. “There’s no other thing we can use to explain this phenomenon. We’ve never seen anything like this before.”
Read more from Al Jazeera: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2012/04/201241682318260912.html
