Wondering About BP's Motives

Here is a darkly-cynical article that I still find quite inadequate when guessing about BP's motives for their strange response to this oil spill:

In a shocking interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper on June 29th, Allegiance Capitol Corporation V.P. Fred McCallister said that BP is deliberately sinking oil with the toxic chemical disbursant Corexit, to hide the size of the oil spill. By sinking the oil before it can be collected, BP won’t have to pay fines on it.

McCallister said, “Everybody in Europe, where the standard practice is to raise the oil and collect it, is scratching their heads, and quite honestly laughing at what’s happening in the Gulf.” He added, “Everyone is looking at us and wondering why we’re allowing this to happen.”

McCallister is set to appear before a Senate investigative panel on Thursday and testify that BP’s only interests regarding the Deepwater Horizon spill is protecting their own financial interests. His statements explained why BP has been refusing offers of help from additional foreign skimmers.

BP’s fear is that independent skimmers would be able to count the number of gallons collected, and thus provide the US government with data to assess spill rate financial penalties against BP, according to McCallister.

Well, of course BP has been using Corexit to hide the size of the oil spill! Like, duh! But the mystery is why. Government fines, no matter how big, just seem inadequate as an explanation for their behavior. Oil is valuable, and even recoverable, given enough time to collect it, and enough ships. But BP would rather emulsify it, and bury it, and even burn it, than try to corral it. Was it because there weren't enough oil tankers around? Unlikely: they could rent some ships from other oil companies if that was the hang-up. No, it's something else.... Something else....

In any event, the article's stab at guessing at BP's motives became invalid by the end of May anyway, when much more reliable estimates finally became available (despite BP's resistance) regarding well-flow rates. So it sort-of makes sense for BP's early response, but not its current response.

And who cares about snickering Europeans anyway? This is no Amoco Cadiz, or Exxon Valdez. It's a Super-Ixtoc disaster!

So why is BP doing what it's doing? I think it's more complicated situation than we know as yet, and we still don't have enough information for an authoritative guess. But that's why the blogger is here: to guess, even in an information void.

Oceans are surprisingly-empty of life, at least, when compared to land. Even though oceans cover 75% of the world's surface, nine out of ten living organisms are land-based. The reason oceans are so devoid of life is that ocean life is restricted by the availability of iron and phosphorus in the seas. They just don't have enough fertilizer! And if too much fertilizer becomes available, exploding plankton blooms get suffocated anyway by lack of oxygen. Can't win in the oceans!

Nevertheless, there are oases of life in the oceans, in shallow waters, particularly in those places where upwelling waters bring up minerals from below. Even though the Deepwater Horizon is in deep water, it is located on the edge of prolific shrimp and oyster habitats in shallow water.

I think BP decided to use Corexit to bury emulsified oil under the water's surface in order to try and preserve sensitive, shallow fishing habitats. It was a deliberate effort to try to save the shallow-water based bottom of the food chain pyramid - the plankton, shrimp, birds, etc. - by deliberately sacrificing the deep water habitats, the top of the food chain pyramid, where whales and squid go. The calculation is based on money, of course, but ultimately it's based on life-viability. And no one wants to talk about it, because...well, because it's whales.

If that was the calculation, then I'd have to agree. Better to save the base of the food chain and sacrifice the top. Under those circumstances, we'd want desperately-cynical BP to succeed. But it's a desperate "Hail, Mary" maneuver, with no guarantee of success.

Nevertheless, there is so much oil coming out of this well that desperate, calculating BP will likely lose both ends of the bet. Everything is going to get ruined: top and bottom of the food chain.

Alternatively, maybe I give BP too much credit. Perhaps BP really is being run by idiots. Goodness knows, that explanation has sufficed for explaining much of human history!

Dead zones are already present near the Deepwater Horizon site and it isn't even the oil, or only the oil - it's the natural gas:

Scientists are confronting growing evidence that BP's ruptured well in the Gulf of Mexico is creating oxygen-depleted "dead zones" where fish and other marine life cannot survive.

In two separate research voyages, independent scientists have detected what were described as "astonishingly high" levels of methane, or natural gas, bubbling from the well site, setting off a chain of reactions that suck the oxygen out of the water. In some cases, methane concentrations are 100,000 times normal levels.

Other scientists as well as sport fishermen are reporting unusual movements of fish, shrimp, crab and other marine life, including increased shark sightings closer to the Alabama coast.

Larry Crowder, a marine biologist at Duke University, said there were already signs that fish were being driven from their habitat.

"The animals are already voting with their fins to get away from where the oil spill is and where potentially there is oxygen depletion," he said. "When you begin to see animals changing their distribution that is telling you about the quality of water further offshore. Basically, the fish are moving closer to shore to try to get to better water."

Such sightings – and an accumulation of data from the site of the ruptured well and from the ocean depths miles away – have deepened concerns that the enormity of the environmental disaster in the Gulf has yet to be fully understood. It could also jeopardise the Gulf's billion-dollar fishing and shrimping industry.

In a conference call with reporters, Samantha Joye, a scientist at the University of Georgia who has been studying the effects of the spill at depth, said the ruptured well was producing up to 50% as much methane and other gases as oil.

The finding presents a new challenge to scientists who so far have been focused on studying the effects on the Gulf of crude oil, and the 5.7m litres of chemical dispersants used to break up the slick.

Joye said her preliminary findings suggested the high volume of methane coming out of the well could upset the ocean food chain. Such high concentrations, it is feared, would trigger the growth of microbes, which break up the methane, but also gobble up oxygen needed by marine life to survive, driving out other living things.

Joye said the methane was settling in a 200-metre layer of the water column, between depths of 1,000 to 1,300 metres in concentrations that were already threatening oxygen levels.

...Even without the gusher, the Gulf was afflicted by 6,000 to 7,000 square miles of dead zone at the mouth of the Mississippi river, caused by run-off from animal waste and farm fertiliser.

..."Things are changing, and what impacts there are on the food web are not going to be clear until we go out and measure that," said Joye.

And where will the oil go? I'm surprised that it hasn't plastered the Florida Keys yet. The surface oil almost certainly will end up plastering the northern Gulf beaches. The Gulf of Mexico just isn't large enough to fully dilute it (Taylor's dispersion coefficients for long distances and times). And that emulsified oil is probably still there in the northern Gulf, killing everything it comes in contact with. And waiting to make its full effects known.

This oil spill crisis has just started.....