http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/oil-spill-cleanup-illusion-180959783/
[Disclosure: I am quoted in this article.
images and links in on-line article]
Why We Pretend to Clean Up Oil Spills
Six years after Deepwater Horizon spewed oil into the Gulf of Mexico, we
still have no idea what we're doing
By Andrew Nikiforuk, Hakai Magazine
smithsonian.com
This article is from Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science
and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at
hakaimagazine.com.
When the Deepwater Horizon well operated by BP (formerly British
Petroleum) exploded and contaminated the Gulf of Mexico with at least
650 million liters of crude oil in 2010, blue-smocked animal rescuers
quickly appeared on television screens. Looking like scrub nurses, the
responders treated oil-coated birds with charcoal solutions,
antibiotics, and dish soap. They also forced the birds to swallow
Pepto-Bismol, which helps absorb hydrocarbons. The familiar, if not
outlandish, images suggested that something was being cleaned up.
But during the chaotic disaster, Silvia Gaus poked a large hole in that
myth. The German biologist had worked in the tidal flats of the Wadden
Sea, a region of the North Sea and the world’s largest unbroken system
of intertidal sand and mud, and critical bird habitat. A 1998 oil spill
of more than 100,000 liters in the North Sea had killed 13,000 birds
inWattenmeer national park, and the scientist had learned that cleaning
oil-soaked birds could be as harmful to their immune systems as the oil
accumulating in their livers and kidneys. Kill, don’t clean, she advised
responders in the 2010 BP spill. Gaus then referred to scientific
studies to support her unsettling declaration. One 1996 California
study, for example, followed the fate of brown pelicans fouled by oil.
Researchers marked the birds after they had been “cleaned” and released
them into the wild. The majority died or failed to mate again. The
researchers concluded that cleaning brown pelicans couldn’t restore them
to good breeding health or “normal survivability.” Another study from
1997 observed that once birds affected by an oil spill had been cleaned,
they fared poorly and suffered higher than expected mortality rates.
And, consider the 2002 sinking of the MV Prestige. The tanker split in
half off the coast of Spain, spilling more than 70 million liters of
highly toxic bunker fuel that coated more than 600 beaches with oil. The
catastrophe killed some 300,000 seabirds. Although response teams
diligently cleaned thousands of animals, most of the birds died within a
week. Only a few hundred ever made it back to the wild. In fact, said
Gaus, studies indicate that, in general, the post-treatment survival
rate of oil-soaked birds is less than one percent.
Not all bird cleaning is futile. Rescuers saved thousands of penguins
following the MV Treasure spill off South Africa in 2000, for example.
Success stories, however, are rare. In the Gulf of Mexico, the giant BP
spill probably killed nearly a million birds. Gaus’s comments
highlighted two uncomfortable realities: cleaning oily birds is a risky
business, and the marine oil spill cleanup can often do more harm than good.
In many respects, society’s theatrical response to catastrophic oil
spills resembles the way medical professionals respond to aggressive
cancer in an elderly patient. Because surgery is available, it is often
used. Surgery also creates the impression that the health care system is
doing something even though it can’t change or reverse the patient’s
ultimate condition. In an oil-based society, the cleanup delusion is
also irresistible. Just as it is difficult for us to acknowledge the
limits of medical intervention, society struggles to acknowledge the
limits of technologies or the consequences of energy habits. And that’s
where the state of marine oil spill response sits today: it creates
little more than an illusion of a cleanup. Scientists—outside the oil
industry—call it “prime-time theater” or “response theater.”
The hard scientific reality is this: a big spill is almost impossible to
contain because it is physically impossible to mobilize the labor needed
and current cleanup technologies in a timely fashion. When the city of
Vancouver released a study in 2015 on the effectiveness of responses to
large tanker or pipeline spills along the southern coast of British
Columbia, the conclusion was blunt: “collecting and removing oil from
the sea surface is a challenging, time-sensitive, and often ineffective
process,” even in calm water.
Scientists have recognized this reality for a long time. During the
1970s when the oil industry was poised to invade the Beaufort Sea, the
Canadian government employed more than 100 researchers to gauge the
impacts of an oil spill on Arctic ice. The researchers doused sea ducks
and ring seals with oil and set pools of oil on fire under a variety of
ice conditions. They also created sizable oil spills (one was almost
60,000 liters, a medium-sized spill) in the Beaufort Sea and tried to
contain them with booms and skimmers. They prodded polar bears into a
man-made oil slick only to discover that bears, like birds, will lick
oil off their matted fur and later die of kidney failure. In the end,
the Beaufort Sea Project concluded that “oil spill countermeasures,
techniques, and equipment” would have “limited effectiveness” on
ice-covered waters. The reports, however, failed to stop Arctic drilling.
image:
http://public.media.smithsonianmag.com//filer/e6/ab/e6abfc02-74f4-427e-b93a-ac35e151869b/2500x266-anthropocene-banner.png
The Age of Humans
Why We Pretend to Clean Up Oil Spills
Six years after Deepwater Horizon spewed oil into the Gulf of Mexico, we
still have no idea what we're doing
image:
http://thumbs.media.smithsonianmag.com//filer/1b/d4/1bd4d076-95fe-4f9d-9c3d-9a63aa0452ae/header-oil-spill-mythology.jpg__800x600_q85_crop.jpg
Oil spill 1
After the Deepwater Horizon oil blowout in 2010, rescuers rushed to save
birds, like this pelican. In the end, it didn’t really matter, most
birds died. (Louisiana Governors Office / Alamy Stock Photo)
By Andrew Nikiforuk, Hakai Magazine
smithsonian.com
an hour ago
2
2
0
0
1
0
16
2
2
0
1
0
16
This article is from Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science
and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at
hakaimagazine.com.
When the Deepwater Horizon well operated by BP (formerly British
Petroleum) exploded and contaminated the Gulf of Mexico with at least
650 million liters of crude oil in 2010, blue-smocked animal rescuers
quickly appeared on television screens. Looking like scrub nurses, the
responders treated oil-coated birds with charcoal solutions,
antibiotics, and dish soap. They also forced the birds to swallow
Pepto-Bismol, which helps absorb hydrocarbons. The familiar, if not
outlandish, images suggested that something was being cleaned up.
But during the chaotic disaster, Silvia Gaus poked a large hole in that
myth. The German biologist had worked in the tidal flats of the Wadden
Sea, a region of the North Sea and the world’s largest unbroken system
of intertidal sand and mud, and critical bird habitat. A 1998 oil spill
of more than 100,000 liters in the North Sea had killed 13,000 birds
inWattenmeer national park, and the scientist had learned that cleaning
oil-soaked birds could be as harmful to their immune systems as the oil
accumulating in their livers and kidneys. Kill, don’t clean, she advised
responders in the 2010 BP spill. Gaus then referred to scientific
studies to support her unsettling declaration. One 1996 California
study, for example, followed the fate of brown pelicans fouled by oil.
Researchers marked the birds after they had been “cleaned” and released
them into the wild. The majority died or failed to mate again. The
researchers concluded that cleaning brown pelicans couldn’t restore them
to good breeding health or “normal survivability.” Another study from
1997 observed that once birds affected by an oil spill had been cleaned,
they fared poorly and suffered higher than expected mortality rates.
And, consider the 2002 sinking of the MV Prestige. The tanker split in
half off the coast of Spain, spilling more than 70 million liters of
highly toxic bunker fuel that coated more than 600 beaches with oil. The
catastrophe killed some 300,000 seabirds. Although response teams
diligently cleaned thousands of animals, most of the birds died within a
week. Only a few hundred ever made it back to the wild. In fact, said
Gaus, studies indicate that, in general, the post-treatment survival
rate of oil-soaked birds is less than one percent.
image:
http://thumbs.media.smithsonianmag.com//filer/ec/f8/ecf8a007-688b-4249-8dcf-f3c17724ee9d/soldiers-oil-spill-mythology.jpg__800x450_q85_crop_upscale.jpg
After the tanker MV Prestige split in half, spilling more than 70
million liters of oil off the coast of Spain in 2002, it continued to
leak oil from its resting place on the seabed. Thousands joined the
cleanup effort, including these soldiers.
After the tanker MV Prestige split in half, spilling more than 70
million liters of oil off the coast of Spain in 2002, it continued to
leak oil from its resting place on the seabed. Thousands joined the
cleanup effort, including these soldiers. (age fotostock / Alamy Stock
Photo)
Not all bird cleaning is futile. Rescuers saved thousands of penguins
following the MV Treasure spill off South Africa in 2000, for example.
Success stories, however, are rare. In the Gulf of Mexico, the giant BP
spill probably killed nearly a million birds. Gaus’s comments
highlighted two uncomfortable realities: cleaning oily birds is a risky
business, and the marine oil spill cleanup can often do more harm than good.
In many respects, society’s theatrical response to catastrophic oil
spills resembles the way medical professionals respond to aggressive
cancer in an elderly patient. Because surgery is available, it is often
used. Surgery also creates the impression that the health care system is
doing something even though it can’t change or reverse the patient’s
ultimate condition. In an oil-based society, the cleanup delusion is
also irresistible. Just as it is difficult for us to acknowledge the
limits of medical intervention, society struggles to acknowledge the
limits of technologies or the consequences of energy habits. And that’s
where the state of marine oil spill response sits today: it creates
little more than an illusion of a cleanup. Scientists—outside the oil
industry—call it “prime-time theater” or “response theater.”
The hard scientific reality is this: a big spill is almost impossible to
contain because it is physically impossible to mobilize the labor needed
and current cleanup technologies in a timely fashion. When the city of
Vancouver released a study in 2015 on the effectiveness of responses to
large tanker or pipeline spills along the southern coast of British
Columbia, the conclusion was blunt: “collecting and removing oil from
the sea surface is a challenging, time-sensitive, and often ineffective
process,” even in calm water.
Scientists have recognized this reality for a long time. During the
1970s when the oil industry was poised to invade the Beaufort Sea, the
Canadian government employed more than 100 researchers to gauge the
impacts of an oil spill on Arctic ice. The researchers doused sea ducks
and ring seals with oil and set pools of oil on fire under a variety of
ice conditions. They also created sizable oil spills (one was almost
60,000 liters, a medium-sized spill) in the Beaufort Sea and tried to
contain them with booms and skimmers. They prodded polar bears into a
man-made oil slick only to discover that bears, like birds, will lick
oil off their matted fur and later die of kidney failure. In the end,
the Beaufort Sea Project concluded that “oil spill countermeasures,
techniques, and equipment” would have “limited effectiveness” on
ice-covered waters. The reports, however, failed to stop Arctic drilling.
image:
http://thumbs.media.smithsonianmag.com//filer/15/c4/15c4400c-87e8-4f67-aea8-004953992ceb/penguin-oil-spill-mythology.jpg__800x450_q85_crop_upscale.jpg
An oil spill in Cape Town’s Table Bay threatened 40 percent of an
endangered species, the African penguin population that inhabits Robben
and Dassen Islands.
An oil spill in Cape Town’s Table Bay threatened 40 percent of an
endangered species, the African penguin population that inhabits Robben
and Dassen Islands. (AfriPics.com / Alamy Stock Photo)
Part of the illusion has been created by ineffective technologies
adopted and billed by industry as “world class.” Ever since the 1970s,
the oil and gas industry has trotted out four basic ways to deal with
ocean spills: booms to contain the oil; skimmers to remove the oil; fire
to burn the oil; and chemical dispersants, such as Corexit, to break the
oil into smaller pieces. For small spills these technologies can
sometimes make a difference, but only in sheltered waters. None has ever
been effective in containing large spills.
Conventional containment booms, for example, don’t work in icy water, or
where waves run amok. Burning oil merely transforms one grave
problem—water pollution—into sooty greenhouse gases and creates air
pollution. Dispersants only hide the oil by scattering small droplets
into the water column, yet they often don’t even do that since
conditions have to be just right for dispersants to work. Darryl
McMahon, a director of RESTCo, a firm pursuing more effective cleanup
technologies, has written extensively about the problem, and his opinion
remains: “Sadly, even after over 40 years experience, the outcomes are
not acceptable. In many cases, the strategy is still to ignore spills on
open water, only addressing them when the slicks reach shore.”
The issue partly boils down to scale, explains Jeffrey Short, a retired
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration research chemist who
studied the aftermath of the 2010 BP disaster as well as the Exxon
Valdez spill in Prince William Sound, which grew at the alarming rate of
half a football field per second over two days. “Go try and control
something like that,” says Short. Yet almost 30 years after the Exxon
Valdez contaminated much of Prince William Sound, the cleanup technology
has changed little.
“What I find the most disturbing is the tendency for responsible
authorities and industry to adopt technologies mainly because of their
optics and with scant regard for their efficacy,” says Short. In
addition, chaos rules in the aftermath of a spill. The enormous
political pressure to do something routinely sacrifices any duty to
properly evaluate what kind of response might actually work over time,
says Short. “Industry says ‘we just want to clean it up,’ yet their
demonstrative ability to clean it up sucks.”
Consider, for a moment, the industry’s dismal record on oil recovery.
Average citizens may think that a successful marine oil spill cleanup
actually involves recovering what has been spilled. They may also expect
the amount of oil recovered would increase over time as industry learns
and adopts better technologies. But there has been little improvement
since the 1960s.
During the BP disaster, the majority of the oil evaporated, dropped to
the ocean bottom, smothered beaches, dissolved, or remained on or just
below the water’s surface as sheen or tar balls. Some oil-chewing
bacteria offered assistance by biodegrading the oil after it had been
dispersed. Rough estimates indicate that, out of the total amount of oil
it spilled, BP recovered 3 percent through skimming, 17 percent from
siphoning at the wellhead, and 5 percent from burning. Even so, that’s
not much better than the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989 when industry
recovered an estimated 14 percent of the oil. Transport Canada admits
that it expects only 10 to 15 percent of a marine oil spill to ever be
recovered from open water. “Even informed people are taken aback by
these numbers,” says Short.
Nor are the numbers any better for small marine spills (smaller than
7,950 liters). This year, York University researchers discovered that
offshore oil and gas platforms reported a total of 381 small spills
between 1997 and 2010. Only 11 spills mentioned the presence of
seabirds, yet it only takes a dime-sized blotch of oil in cold water to
kill a bird.
Self-reporting combined with an appalling spill-recovery record
underscores how poorly industry’s preferred technologies perform in the
field. Deploying dispersants, for example, is about as effective as
cleaning oil-soaked birds and remains another example of response
theater designed to hide the real damage. During BP’s catastrophic spill
in the Gulf of Mexico, the company sprayed over 6.8 million liters of
Corexit. It was the largest volume of dispersant ever used for an oil
spill and one giant chemical experiment.
Researchers have known for decades that mixing oil with Corexit rarely
works. Short compares it to adding detergent when you’re washing dishes:
it produces a cloudy suspension that scatters through the water but
hovers close to the top. Sweden has banned its use, and the UK followed
suit, based on the potential danger to workers. That didn’t stop the
aerial bombing of Gulf of Mexico waters with Corexit—which actually
killed oil-eating bacteria—because it looked as if the authorities were
doing something. Their work made little difference. Bottlenose dolphins,
already vulnerable, died in record numbers from adrenal and lung
diseases linked to oil exposure.
“We’ve put the wrong people in charge of the job,” says McMahon, who has
charted industry’s oil spill myths for years. Corexit, industry’s
favorite dispersant, is widely believed to contain hydrocarbon, which
gives it an ominous undertone. The product was first developed by
Standard Oil, and its ingredient list remains a trade secret. Although
the oil industry boasts a “safety culture,” everyone really knows that
it operates with a greed culture, adds McMahon. Over the years, industry
has become adept at selling an illusion by telling regulators and
stakeholders whatever they want to hear about oil spills (in the past,
executives claimed that their companies recovered 95 percent of spilled
oil).
In Canada, multinational oil companies also own the corporations
licensed to respond to catastrophic spills. The Western Canadian Marine
Response Corporation, for example, is owned by Kinder Morgan, Imperial
Oil, Shell, Chevron, and Suncor while the Eastern Canada Response
Corporation is owned by Ultramar, Shell, Imperial Oil, and Suncor. In a
recent analysis on this cozy relationship, Robyn Allan, an economist and
former CEO of the Insurance Corporation of British Columbia, concluded
that letting international oil companies determine the goals and
objectives of marine spill preparedness and response was a flagrant
conflict of interest.
Large spills, which can destroy fisheries and entire communities, can
impose billion dollar cleanup bills and still not restore what has been
lost. The cleanup costs for theExxon Valdez disaster reached US
$2-billion (paid by various parties), and Exxon fought the federal
government’s claim for an extra $92-million for restoration, until the
government dropped their claim in 2015. To date, BP has spent more than
US $42-billion on response, compensation, and fines in the Gulf of
Mexico. Meanwhile, the evidence shows that nearshore and in-port spills
are four to five times more expensive to clean up than offshore spills
and that heavy oil, such as bitumen, costs nearly 10 times more than
light oils because it persists longer in water. And yet, no more than
CAN $1.3-billion has been set aside in Canada for a major oil spill—a
sum experts find woefully inadequate. According to a University of
British Columbia study, a release of 16,000 cubic meters of diluted
bitumen in Vancouver’s Burrard Inlet would inflict at least $1.2-billion
worth of damage on the local economy, which is heavily reliant on
tourism and promoting its “natural” beauty. That figure doesn’t include
the cost of a “cleanup.”
Based on the science, expecting to adequately remedy large spills with
current technologies seems like wishful thinking. And there will be no
change unless responsible authorities do three things: give communities
most affected by a catastrophic spill the democratic right to say no to
high-risk projects, such as tankers or pipelines; publicly recognize
that responding to a large oil spill is as haphazard as responding to a
large earthquake and that there is no real techno-fix; and recognize
that industry won’t adopt more effective technologies that actually
recover oil from the ocean until governments and communities properly
price the risk of catastrophic spills and demand upfront
multi-billion-dollar bonds for compensation. “If they spill, they must
lose a bloody fortune,” says Short.
Until those reforms take place, expect more dramatic prime-time theater
on oiled ocean waters. But we shouldn’t for a moment believe we’re
watching a cleanup. The only things being wiped clean are guilty
consciences.
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