Genuine Lyin'
Socialist Weasel

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

Oil Swell That Doesn't End Swell
16 May 2010

Where is the oil in the Gulf catastrophe?

Where is it going?

What is it doing to the environment?

Can it be stopped?

How much more damage will be done?

How bad will the damage be, and for how long?

Can any of it be averted or fixed?

The answer to this, and hundreds of other questions, is “we don't know.”

There's no point in asking British Petroleum. Those slimy bastards have lied to us every chance they've had, sometimes defying their own best interests in the process. They lied about the volume of the spill, they lied about the video that provided the proof they were lying, and they've been lying constantly about getting the situation under control. They're far too busy trying to evade responsibility to be of much use. When all is said and done, their executive officers have all the integrity and reliability of a crack-whore snitch.

The US government isn't of any great use. In their mad drive to privatize all public services – the military, the diplomatic corps, mass transit, etc – the Republicans worked hard to make the government ineffectual and reliant on corporations for the power to hold office. So the government officials are stepping carefully, because they don't want to offend their corporate masters. Obama might be a /reluctant/ whore, and that's about the best the American people can hope for.

The mainstream media is of limited use. There are lots of happy pieces out there that basically say it isn't all that bad. AP uncritically ran a piece, an interview with BP's head madam, stating that it really was, in comparison to the amount of water in the Gulf “ocean,” really just a tiny little spill. (A fortnight ago, I noted that the oil in the Santa Barbara channel for the oil spill was less than one part in a million. That didn't help the Santa Barbara beaches.) Diane Sawyer chirped that the problem could be resolved in a matter of weeks and damage minimized. Rush Limbaugh and Faux News, of course, are reacting with the usual blend of fascism and psychosis, and are annoyed that the spill is distracting people from the Message, which is that business is your friend, and has only your best interests at heart.

But there are a lot of independent experts studying the situation, and they are willing to discuss, in detail, what they are finding.

Unfortunately, what they know is pretty limited. There have been hundreds of oil spills over the past few decades from those hundreds of “safe, fool-proof” off-shore platforms, but nothing quite on this scale.

We might be getting a handle on the scale. From BP's initial estimate of 1,000 barrels a day (that would be five or six oil tanker trucks a day), we went, after a week, to 5,000 barrels a day. Within two weeks of that, independent analysts were saying that it looked more like 25,000 barrels a day to them. There was a 4,000 square-mile lake of oil above the blowout site, which, if a circle, would be about 40 miles across and a couple of feet deep. It's easily visible from space. That's about 135 oil tanker trucks a day, each and every day for a month.

Then, under intense pressure, BP released videos of the main blowout. Horrified independent analysts placed their estimates at between 52,000 barrels a day and 83,000 barrels a day. The top end was the equivalent of an Exxon Valdez type of accident every four days.

That led to a question: where was all that oil? You might think that a lake of oil forty miles across was a pretty significant amount of oil, and you would be right, but experts felt that only accounted for about 10% of the oil that had been spilled, even if you assume it's “only” 52,000 barrels a day.

The National Institute for Undersea Science and Technology found some of it. They reported discovering at least three huge plumes of oil at roughly mid-depths in the Gulf. The largest was roughly tubular in shape, up to a mile wide and ten miles long. The plumes ranged from just below the surface to 4,000 feet deep.

The discovery was disquieting, because it means the vast majority of the oil isn't at the surface, where the currents are fairly well understood, or on the bottom, where it would be likely to stay put, but in the lower levels where the currents are basically unknown. Some of it may be heading for the Mexican coast above the Yucatán, and some may sweep down toward Cuba. However, the oil in higher waters may “drag” the lower levels in unexpected directions. There's enough oil in the water now that it may even have an effect on the currents.

While it explains in part why the coastline has been spared the onslaught of oil, it's an ominous turn, in that it means that vast areas of the Gulf have been effectively sterilized, and that nobody has any good guesses as to where the oil will go next, or what it will do. They were hoping the oil would stay at the surface and that the warm water would cause the volatiles to evaporate, leaving people along the Gulf Coast to enjoy the warm benzene breezes off the Gulf, known as the “best-case scenario”.

Researchers Vernon Asper and Arne Dierks suggested the plumes were "perhaps due to the deep injection of dispersants which BP has stated that they are conducting."

There's a lot of disquiet about those dispersants, a toxic stew of chemicals designed to break the oil up into micro-globules. BP has dumped some half a million gallons into the Gulf since the blowout began. Quite aside from the fact that they are moderately poisonous, carcinogenic, and volatile, there is the fact that the intended result, while cosmetically prettier, might be a disaster for marine life all the way from Deepwater Horizon to Greenland, since fish will be inhaling those micro-globules of oil. It should affect them in much the same way that inhaling cement dust would affect us.

Now loaded with carcinogens and mutagens, the oil and dispersant mix will result in fish that are inedible, dying, and prone to mutated offspring if they are capable of reproducing at all.

The EPA and environmentalists are very reluctantly going along with this, simply because it's the better of the two scenarios. Yes, things are that bad. The dispersants, toxic as they are, are less toxic than the oil, and biodegrade faster.

But the discovery of the plumes has a more frightening aspect. If they do interfere with the ocean currents, that will exacerbate climate change, since those currents are major drivers in the pattern of climate for North America and Europe. Diane Sawyer reported that the blowout has released vast amounts of methane (she thought it was good news because someone told her it would somehow choke off the flow of oil), which is a major greenhouse gas that, cubic meter for cubic meter, captures more solar radiation than CO2. The good news, such as it is, is that while CO2 remains in the atmosphere for decades, methane recombines into non-greenhouse properties win a matter of weeks and months.

There's little reason to suppose that the flow of oil will stop any time soon. BP was so busy fighting hard against equipment and regulations that would have prevented the blowout that they forgot to make any serious contingency plans on what to do if there was a really major blowout.

After all, who could have foreseen trouble when you are using untested equipment to drill the deepest oil well in the history of the world? What could possibly go wrong?

So they tried a couple of caissons, which failed because nobody stopped to consider that methane, expanding rapidly from a pressure of many thousands of atmospheres, would do what gases do when they expand suddenly, and drop in temperature, and form methane hydrate, aka ice. And an effort to SIPHON the blowout, which sounded pretty idiotic on the face of it, had exactly the results you might have expected. So now they're going to try piling junk into the hole to stop it up. Other suggestions have included nuclear weapons and prayer, not necessarily in that order.

In the middle of all this, the Republicans, the party of “Drill! Baby! Drill!” announced they would be holding their 2012 convention in the Gulf coast city of Tampa, Florida. I'm sure I'm not the only person to be severely tempted by the hope that the oil spill would really smear Tampa before realizing just what I was asking for. It's bad enough that we have people already running loose in the country hoping for a major terrorist attack on the theory that it would politically hurt Obama, without dropping to their level.

So no, I don't really want to see Tampa get smeared. But BP and Dick Cheney took that decision out of our hands years ago. And oil damaged surroundings or no, that's something the Republicans will have to consider between now and that convention.

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Zepp was born in Ottawa, Ontario, and spent his formative years living in various parts of Canada from Halifax to Victoria, and then the UK, South Africa, and Australia before moving to the United States, where he has lived for 40 years. Aside from writing, his interests include hiking, raising dogs and cats, and making computers jump through hoops. His wife of 25 years edits his copy, and bravely attempts to make him sound coherent. Zepp lives on Mount Shasta.