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Oil Dispersants Used During Gulf Spill Degrade Slowly In Cold Water
MTorrice writes "During the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, clean up crews applied millions of liters of dispersants to break up the oil. At the time, the public and some scientists worried about the environmental effects of the chemicals, in particular how long they would last in the deep sea. According to a new Environmental Protection Agency study, the key active ingredient in the dispersants degrades very rapidly under conditions similar to those found at the Gulf surface during the spill. Meanwhile, in the much colder temperatures found in the deep sea, the breakdown is quite slow. The chemicals' persistence at deep-sea and Arctic temperatures suggests more research is needed on their toxicity, the researchers say."
They were screwed either way. If they hadn't used them, there'd be a congressional inquiry asking why we didn't bring all the technology we possibly could to bear on this horrible accident. There's always a line of people who are salivating to second-guess whatever decision gets made. I'm guessing there are a lot of pelicans who, if they could talk, would be praising the use of the dispersants.
Another study recently concluded that things such as water and gasoline evaporate less quickly when they're kept very cold. Also, oils, molasses, and other liquids get thicker and move more slowly. This is now summed up as the Santa Clause law of nature, that is, when things are as cold as Santa's nose on a North Pole night, they tend to happen more slowly.
The converse side of this is that when things warm up from North Pole temperatures, they happen much more quickly. This is why Santa and his militant reindeer army are able to very quickly deliver AR-15's and lots of ammo to all the good little American boys and girls on Revolution Eve.
It never gets cold in the Gulf of Mexico.
So, that means global warming is helping dispers these chemicals quicker? So with global warming we are able to clean up oil spills easier and more environmently friendly!
Who knew?
The use of dispersants (really, the term should be "submergants") just caused the oil to sink to the sea floor. This in no way mitigates the actual problem, and may in fact compound it over time. However, it did allow the EPA, the Obama administration, and BP to rehabilitate their severely tarnished images, because this was a problem that you couldn't see easily.
Gulf seafood is off the menu for millions of people now, and into the foreseeable future, because these "dispersants" just happen to be extremely toxic to humans.
Unfortunately, we appear to have learned nothing and will probably use this kind of sweeping under the rug tactic when future spills happen.
It never gets cold in the Gulf of Mexico.
It does near the bottom of the ocean.
Water has its highest density at approximately 4 degrees C - just a tad above freezing. Water at higher OR lower temperatures rises above it, and water at that temperature sinks to the bottom.
Then it tends to sit there: Friction with the ocean bottom causes ocean currents to be very slow, so there's little mixing from turbulence. With all the water around it at the same temperature there's negligible mixing from convection. If there's a local, non-extreme, heat source, the warmed water rises by convection and slowly sucks in 4-ish degree water from around it. Heat transfer is mainly by conduction (which is slow) and diffusion (which is in the years-per-inch range).
So the surface temperature doesn't mean much. Even at the bottom of the gulf (except very close to volcanic vents and the like) the bottom water is quite cold.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
When will we come to the place where we realize that the Earth doesn't need us to clean up from stuff that it already produces, in the places it produces it? Millions of gallons of crude seep from the Gulf floor every day. Nature/bacteria takes care of it.
Seeps are one thing. Blowouts are more than a tad faster. Nature takes a while and a big, concentrated, spill can cause a lot of havoc before nature gets around to clearing it.
Granted we need to avoid making it worse while trying to make it better. For instance: The attempt to clean the shore after the Exxon Valdez spill washed away the local biosphere as well. Several years later the "cleaned" sections were still barren while the untouched sections had recovered very well. I recall a great picture of a boundary between the two. Think "washed down to bedrock and gravel" or "cold, rocky desert".
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I'm not sure why such a negative spin is being attached to these stories.
As our press release clearly stated, new Corexit Ice(tm)(r), in 'fresh blast' or 'glacial menthol' scents, works harder, longer(tm) to protect pristine arctic environments. Apparently, eco-fascists want penguins to die, oil-soaked, when our competitor's inferior dispersants break down quickly under cold weather conditions...
Chemical reactions slow down at colder temperatures
I learned that 40 years ago
Why do you think they invented refrigerators
But I agree, BP used it to make the spill appear less severe on the surface.
http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2012/12/chemical-dispersant-made-bps-gulf-oilspill-52-times-more-toxic
Dispersants are basically soap -- the chemicals in Corexit and similar dispersants are the same as you'll find in bottles of Mr Muscle and other household cleansers living under the kitchen sink. They work by breaking bulk oil into small droplets which increases the effective surface area of the oil and gives the bacteria that normally degrade oil a better opportunity to do their job properly. They don't cause the oil to submerge, a neat trick if it could be achieved given that crude oil is a lot denser than seawater.
Wouldn't coagulant be more appropriate?
Oh, duh! They're called dispersants because they cause oil to be out of sight and out of mind - resting in the water column rather than causing financial and political turmoil on the surface.
But you can bet your sweet donkey you'll get your very own congressional inquiry if you're a shortstop linked to PEDs who hits too many homers. Congress critters only have so much time in session, so they have to focus on the really important issues.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
But cant this make them easy to still pick up with a proper machine to then centrifuge the oil from the chemical...just sayin?
At the time of the spill, there were 3000+ rigs in the gulf. Only about 30 of those were deepwater. No, "natural seepage" will not cause millions of gallons of gas to drift out into the ocean every year, nor will "natural seeepage" destroy the oceanfloor habitat and leave a layer of toxic oil/dispersant sludge mixed with dead marine life several feet thick as this spill has done. Is someone paying you to post this?
The Obama administration's folly (other than being helpful to BP in almost every way, including having government officials spout their bogus numbers on a whim), disallowing regulations present in much of europe (see "dead man's switch") that were removed under the Bush administration, and not doing anything to punish BP after it disobeyed the EPA and continued to spray Corexit despite being told to stop. Easy for you to say using millions of gallons of a neurotoxic carcinogen was the "next-least-bad" choice when you don't live in the area. People in the area are getting sick; marine life is hatching deformed. The toxic sludge created by corexit+oil is deadlier than either of them on their own, so please spare me this "next-least-bad" nonsense. The "obvious problem" is that we're allowing deepwater drilling when energy companies don't have any reason to give a damn when things go wrong; the government will be glad to help in PR cleanup, and they're not even obligated to pay back any claimants. There was a laptop with 10,000+ claimants' info on it that was magically "lost". Where's the government lawsuit on behalf of the people, if the government's here to help? In actuality, it's here to stand and watch while you and I get fucked.
Funny that BP's PR teams also tried to claim dispersant just soap--why is there incentive for you to repeat their nonsense? In reality Corexit and oil make a muck that falls to the ocean floor--a layer of toxic muck and dead marine life several feet thick in some places. There is NOTHING to indicate Corexit allows bacteria to "do their job properly". If you're not being paid to write this garbage, you should be, I'm sure some of that several hundred mil BP spent on PR cleanup rather than actual cleanup afterwards is still up for grabs!
..is to BP, which couldn't as easily hide the amount of oil spilled--the only thing by which it is liable. To anyone who actually lives around the area, the spraying of the neurotoxic carcinogen corexit is quite harmful. "Isn't it a good thing this study is done now?" You're waxing about how great it is we can assess what happened after the fact of a disaster, when BP couldn't even learn from the Ixtoc spill 30 years ago? That time, all the same techniques were employed with similar failures. When another spill happens, they'll flounder similarly because the point's to make money on the short term, not to worry about disasters when they arise--disasters only affect those poor nobodies on the cost and their rinky-dink fishing boats. Why should a multinational like BP care, when BP's iniquities are so sheltered by the government that the coast guard would keep away journalists from the spill, threatening several tens of thousand in fines and years in jail for any who'd come close to a cleanup site?
Several waves of deregulation came about under the Bush administration. Drilling here in the US is more unbound than in europe, where features like a "dead man's switch" (google it) are actually required. The problem here was not regulation, it was pure malfeasance and a will to cover up the damage done no matter the cost.. the cost being the several hundred million dollar PR campaign BP ran afterwards to clean up its image. The way you present this information makes it seem like BP and the obama administration are in any opposition. To the contrary, this administration sheltered BP's excesses, even parroting BP's bogus initial spill estimates to the media.
How about a congressional inquiry into why BP continued spraying Corexit after the EPA told them to stop? If there were pelicans who'd touched corexit (let alone the toxic mix that results from corexit and oil combined), they'd probably be dead right now, so spare me the bullshit.
Huge myth. Gas prices have to do with the number of refineries and their processing rates rather than how much oil we are drilling. Your entire argument's nonsense. We could open ANWR and still not see a dip in pricing. Blame crony capitalism before supply and demand.
Fox News is not. I know from this whether or not to take you seriously.