[Top News] from [REUTERS]
[Environment News][U.S. | Politics | Green Business | Gulf Oil Spill]
Matthew Bigg - Analysis
VENICE, Louisiana
Sat May 22, 2010 1:18pm EDT
Experts say plan to keep oil off Louisiana coast is flawed
｛専門家によると、ルイジアナ海岸への原油の不着岸計画が駄目になった｝
(Reuters) - Louisiana authorities are desperate to start building sand levees to keep a massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill from swamping their coast, but experts have serious doubts about the $350-million project.
The plan would reinforce and extend barrier islands in the Gulf by taking sand from the sea floor and placing it to form walls extending around 40 miles on each side of the Mississippi River, state and local leaders said.
The resulting berms -- which are narrow ledges or shelves -- would then snag oil gushing from the uncapped BP Plc well before it entered into the coast's fragile wetlands, where it could do great harm to fishing grounds and wildlife.
Scientists, environmentalists, engineers and other experts who have studied the Gulf coast said the plan could not be implemented fast enough to stop the encroaching oil from the uncapped well.
"There are two major problems: where we would find the sand? How would we mobilize in time to make this effective?" said Robert Dalrymple, professor of civil engineering at Johns Hopkins University.
Some experts also complained of being excluded from the Louisiana plan and said it was being conducted hastily.
"The scientific community has been ostracized by the way the whole thing has been approached," said Gregory Stone, professor of oceanography and coastal sciences at Louisiana State University.
"I applaud the concept. My concern is that we are doing this haphazardly and it comes around and bites us and that has longer term implications," said Stone, who said sandbags and protective booms would make a better stopgap measure.
A little over a month after the well blowout and rig explosion that killed 11 workers, sheets of rust-colored heavy oil have already come ashore in dozens of places along Louisiana's coast and in Alabama and Mississippi.
Fears that more is on its way reinforces the state's view that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers should immediately grant permission for the plan to start, Governor Bobby Jindal said.
"There is no reason for delay. Every day that goes by without this permit being issued, without these dredgers being out there, is another day we are losing in terms of fighting this oil off of our shores," he said earlier this week.
The U.S. Coast Guard would build the levees and London-based BP would be made to fund it, said Jindal, adding that dredgers were being prepositioned, surveys being conducted and water sampling already was under way.
Given the pressure on various governments to respond decisively to the political storm the spill has provoked, it appears that it will be difficult to reject Jindal's appeal, especially when he is backed by local officials.
The Corps said in a statement on Friday it "understood the importance and significance of this emergency permit request" and was treating it as a top priority, soliciting comments from other agencies as required by law.
DOUBTS
Experts in Louisiana said the plan puts them in a bind: reinforcing barriers such as the Chandeleur Islands is a long-term goal of coastal restoration and it would not be right to express doubts at a time when an environmental peril looms.
But they still have reservations:
* The berms could restrict the flow of Gulf water into the Delta, but too little is known about how that might impact the region's ecology.
* The new levees would be vulnerable to tropical storms. Hurricane Katrina in 2005 washed away 80 percent of the Chandeleur Islands, a barrier chain in the Gulf, said Abby Sallenger, an oceanographer at the U.S. Geological Survey.
* The massive works project could threaten marine life such as sea turtles.
* The state has made insufficient use of the vast array of coastal research and the models used to compute the impact of projected man-made interventions to protect it from erosion.
State leaders say levees could be erected in a few days to join some barrier islands, increasing protection -- and any protection is better than none.
But completing comparable projects in Maryland, Delaware and New Jersey has taken years and required many millions of cubic feet of sand, Dalrymple said.
Given the complexity of the Delta marshlands, oil would likely get in anyway.
"There's no real way of keeping it (oil) out of the marshes using any kind of barrier except very locally in quiescent bayous," said Paul Kemp, director of the National Audubon Society's Gulf Coast Initiative.
"There is a lot of consternation and part of it is that we know so little about this plan and what do know shows a lack of thought," Kemp said.
(Editing by Paul Simao)
[Environment News][U.S. | Politics | Green Business | COP15 | Gulf Oil Spill]
Matthew Bigg
VENICE, Louisiana
Sun May 23, 2010 1:21am EDT
U.S. environment chief to visit Gulf, spill spreads
｛米環境保護庁長官、メキシコ湾の流出原油の拡散状況を視察｝
(Reuters) - The top U.S. environmental official was to visit the Gulf Coast on Sunday as energy giant BP Plc scrambled to contain a widening oil spill.
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson planned to return to the Gulf to monitor the EPA's response, while Interior Secretary Ken Salazar was to travel to the BP Command Center in Houston to get an update from the federal science team working on the problem.
The two Cabinet members' missions underscore the rising political and economic stakes for the Obama administration in dealing with the environmental disaster, which grows worse as oil gushes from a ruptured well on the sea floor.
Salazar was also to address the media the day after U.S. President Barack Obama blamed the spill on "a breakdown of responsibility" at BP. Obama also unveiled a commission to investigate the disaster.
The Democratic president, in his weekly radio and Internet address on Saturday, said offshore drilling could go forward only if there were assurances that such accidents would not happen again.
The spill has raised major questions about Obama's earlier proposal to expand offshore drilling as part of strategy to win Republican support for climate change legislation.
Analysts say mounting ecological and economic damage could also become a political liability for Obama before November's congressional elections.
POLITICAL PRESSURE
While also promising to hold Washington accountable for proper oversight of the industry, Obama ramped up pressure on companies linked to the spill: BP, Halliburton and Transocean Ltd
"First and foremost, what led to this disaster was a breakdown of responsibility on the part of BP and perhaps others, including Transocean and Halliburton," Obama said in his toughest remarks yet on companies linked to the spill.
"And we will continue to hold the relevant companies accountable," he said.
BP stocks have taken a beating in the markets in the month since the well blowout and rig explosion that killed 11 workers and touched off the spill. Its share price shed another 4 percent on Friday in London, extending recent sharp losses.
Sheets of rust-colored heavy oil are clogging fragile marshlands on the fringes of the Mississippi Delta, damaging fishing grounds and wildlife.
Many believe it has already become the worst U.S. oil spill, eclipsing the 1989 Exxon Valdez accident in Alaska.
In his executive order announcing former Democratic Senator Bob Graham and former EPA chief William Reilly would co-chair the commission, Obama also made his first reference to the possibility of a criminal probe.
BP made no immediate comment on Obama's suggestion that it was to blame for the deep-sea disaster. But the company's chief executive, Tony Hayward, said he welcomed the establishment of the commission and pledged to work with its co-chairmen.
BP and the EPA are locking horns over the dispersants the company is using to try to contain the spill.
The spill has hurt fishermen because federal authorities have closed a wide slew of Gulf waters to fishing. Wildlife and migrating birds have also suffered.
BP on Friday revised downward an earlier estimate that one of its containment solutions, a 1-mile-long siphon tube inserted into the larger of two seabed leaks, was catching 5,000 barrels (210,000 gallons/795,000 liters) of oil per day.
Its latest figures show 2,200 barrels a day.
The company's next planned step is a "top kill" -- pumping heavy fluids and then cement into the gushing well to plug it.
Many scientists dismiss an original 5,000 bpd estimate of the total leaking oil -- often defended by BP executives -- as ridiculously low and say it could be 70,000 barrels (2.9 million gallons/11 million liters) per day or more. (Writing by Ed Stoddard; Editing by Mohammad Zargham and Doina Chiacu)
[Environment News][U.S. | Politics | Green Business | Gulf Oil Spill]
Matthew Bigg - Analysis
VENICE, Louisiana
Sat May 22, 2010 1:18pm EDT
Experts say plan to keep oil off Louisiana coast is flawed
｛専門家によると、ルイジアナ海岸への原油の不着岸計画が駄目になった｝
(Reuters) - Louisiana authorities are desperate to start building sand levees to keep a massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill from swamping their coast, but experts have serious doubts about the $350-million project.
The plan would reinforce and extend barrier islands in the Gulf by taking sand from the sea floor and placing it to form walls extending around 40 miles on each side of the Mississippi River, state and local leaders said.
The resulting berms -- which are narrow ledges or shelves -- would then snag oil gushing from the uncapped BP Plc well before it entered into the coast's fragile wetlands, where it could do great harm to fishing grounds and wildlife.
Scientists, environmentalists, engineers and other experts who have studied the Gulf coast said the plan could not be implemented fast enough to stop the encroaching oil from the uncapped well.
"There are two major problems: where we would find the sand? How would we mobilize in time to make this effective?" said Robert Dalrymple, professor of civil engineering at Johns Hopkins University.
Some experts also complained of being excluded from the Louisiana plan and said it was being conducted hastily.
"The scientific community has been ostracized by the way the whole thing has been approached," said Gregory Stone, professor of oceanography and coastal sciences at Louisiana State University.
"I applaud the concept. My concern is that we are doing this haphazardly and it comes around and bites us and that has longer term implications," said Stone, who said sandbags and protective booms would make a better stopgap measure.
A little over a month after the well blowout and rig explosion that killed 11 workers, sheets of rust-colored heavy oil have already come ashore in dozens of places along Louisiana's coast and in Alabama and Mississippi.
Fears that more is on its way reinforces the state's view that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers should immediately grant permission for the plan to start, Governor Bobby Jindal said.
"There is no reason for delay. Every day that goes by without this permit being issued, without these dredgers being out there, is another day we are losing in terms of fighting this oil off of our shores," he said earlier this week.
The U.S. Coast Guard would build the levees and London-based BP would be made to fund it, said Jindal, adding that dredgers were being prepositioned, surveys being conducted and water sampling already was under way.
Given the pressure on various governments to respond decisively to the political storm the spill has provoked, it appears that it will be difficult to reject Jindal's appeal, especially when he is backed by local officials.
The Corps said in a statement on Friday it "understood the importance and significance of this emergency permit request" and was treating it as a top priority, soliciting comments from other agencies as required by law.
DOUBTS
Experts in Louisiana said the plan puts them in a bind: reinforcing barriers such as the Chandeleur Islands is a long-term goal of coastal restoration and it would not be right to express doubts at a time when an environmental peril looms.
But they still have reservations:
* The berms could restrict the flow of Gulf water into the Delta, but too little is known about how that might impact the region's ecology.
* The new levees would be vulnerable to tropical storms. Hurricane Katrina in 2005 washed away 80 percent of the Chandeleur Islands, a barrier chain in the Gulf, said Abby Sallenger, an oceanographer at the U.S. Geological Survey.
* The massive works project could threaten marine life such as sea turtles.
* The state has made insufficient use of the vast array of coastal research and the models used to compute the impact of projected man-made interventions to protect it from erosion.
State leaders say levees could be erected in a few days to join some barrier islands, increasing protection -- and any protection is better than none.
But completing comparable projects in Maryland, Delaware and New Jersey has taken years and required many millions of cubic feet of sand, Dalrymple said.
Given the complexity of the Delta marshlands, oil would likely get in anyway.
"There's no real way of keeping it (oil) out of the marshes using any kind of barrier except very locally in quiescent bayous," said Paul Kemp, director of the National Audubon Society's Gulf Coast Initiative.
"There is a lot of consternation and part of it is that we know so little about this plan and what do know shows a lack of thought," Kemp said.
(Editing by Paul Simao)
[Environment News][U.S. | Politics | Green Business | COP15 | Gulf Oil Spill]
Matthew Bigg
VENICE, Louisiana
Sun May 23, 2010 1:21am EDT
U.S. environment chief to visit Gulf, spill spreads
｛米環境保護庁長官、メキシコ湾の流出原油の拡散状況を視察｝
(Reuters) - The top U.S. environmental official was to visit the Gulf Coast on Sunday as energy giant BP Plc scrambled to contain a widening oil spill.
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson planned to return to the Gulf to monitor the EPA's response, while Interior Secretary Ken Salazar was to travel to the BP Command Center in Houston to get an update from the federal science team working on the problem.
The two Cabinet members' missions underscore the rising political and economic stakes for the Obama administration in dealing with the environmental disaster, which grows worse as oil gushes from a ruptured well on the sea floor.
Salazar was also to address the media the day after U.S. President Barack Obama blamed the spill on "a breakdown of responsibility" at BP. Obama also unveiled a commission to investigate the disaster.
The Democratic president, in his weekly radio and Internet address on Saturday, said offshore drilling could go forward only if there were assurances that such accidents would not happen again.
The spill has raised major questions about Obama's earlier proposal to expand offshore drilling as part of strategy to win Republican support for climate change legislation.
Analysts say mounting ecological and economic damage could also become a political liability for Obama before November's congressional elections.
POLITICAL PRESSURE
While also promising to hold Washington accountable for proper oversight of the industry, Obama ramped up pressure on companies linked to the spill: BP, Halliburton and Transocean Ltd
"First and foremost, what led to this disaster was a breakdown of responsibility on the part of BP and perhaps others, including Transocean and Halliburton," Obama said in his toughest remarks yet on companies linked to the spill.
"And we will continue to hold the relevant companies accountable," he said.
BP stocks have taken a beating in the markets in the month since the well blowout and rig explosion that killed 11 workers and touched off the spill. Its share price shed another 4 percent on Friday in London, extending recent sharp losses.
Sheets of rust-colored heavy oil are clogging fragile marshlands on the fringes of the Mississippi Delta, damaging fishing grounds and wildlife.
Many believe it has already become the worst U.S. oil spill, eclipsing the 1989 Exxon Valdez accident in Alaska.
In his executive order announcing former Democratic Senator Bob Graham and former EPA chief William Reilly would co-chair the commission, Obama also made his first reference to the possibility of a criminal probe.
BP made no immediate comment on Obama's suggestion that it was to blame for the deep-sea disaster. But the company's chief executive, Tony Hayward, said he welcomed the establishment of the commission and pledged to work with its co-chairmen.
BP and the EPA are locking horns over the dispersants the company is using to try to contain the spill.
The spill has hurt fishermen because federal authorities have closed a wide slew of Gulf waters to fishing. Wildlife and migrating birds have also suffered.
BP on Friday revised downward an earlier estimate that one of its containment solutions, a 1-mile-long siphon tube inserted into the larger of two seabed leaks, was catching 5,000 barrels (210,000 gallons/795,000 liters) of oil per day.
Its latest figures show 2,200 barrels a day.
The company's next planned step is a "top kill" -- pumping heavy fluids and then cement into the gushing well to plug it.
Many scientists dismiss an original 5,000 bpd estimate of the total leaking oil -- often defended by BP executives -- as ridiculously low and say it could be 70,000 barrels (2.9 million gallons/11 million liters) per day or more. (Writing by Ed Stoddard; Editing by Mohammad Zargham and Doina Chiacu)
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