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Tallahassee, FL – U.S. officials say the oil in the Gulf of Mexico is clearing up - at least on the surface. BP Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles said the company may again drill in the same reservoir in which the Deepwater Horizon well exploded on April 20. Meanwhile, as Margie Menzel reports, Florida Sen. Bill Nelson is calling for a federal investigation into the use of chemical dispersants to break up the oil.
BP's "static kill" has now packed a large portion of the casing pipe of the blown well with heavy drilling mud and cement. The well, leaking since April 20, has spewed nearly 5 million barrels of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Senator Bill Nelson:
"We know now that it's not 1,000 barrels a day that was gushing. We know now that it was 62,000 barrels of oil a day. So now that is a known that the truth has been kept from us for some period of time."
U.S. officials announced Wednesday that nearly 70 percent of the spilled oil had dissolved naturally, or was burned, skimmed, dispersed or captured. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Geological Survey agreed that only 52.7 million gallons of oil are left in the Gulf - roughly 31 percent of the 172 million gallons that spewed from the broken BP well. But Nelson has called the mixture of seawater, the remaining oil, and the chemicals used to break up the oil, or dispersants, a "toxic brew."
"Now the next big unknown is how much of that oil is under the surface and what's happened to it?" he said. "Have the bacteria eaten it up? And if that's true, what about all the chemicals?"
Nelson is calling for a federal investigation into BP's use of dispersants. He says the Environmental Protection Agency had tried to limit them, but that the Coast Guard granted 74 waivers for their use in a 48-day period after the EPA order. Retired Admiral Thad Allen, who has overseen the government's coordinated response, said in a press briefing Sunday that the use of dispersants wasn't BP's decision.
"In the end it may be executed by BP through a contractor, but these are all decisions made by the federal on-scene coordinator because that's where the responsibility rests, and those are closely supervised," Allen said. "On several occasions, I've been privy to those briefs in New Orleans when decisions are being made for the following day, and I'm satisfied that we only use them when they're needed."
The Gulf looks better than many scientists had expected, including Jeff Chanton, the Winchester professor of oceanography at Florida State University.
"It seems like an awful lot of the oil has been either evaporated or degraded or dispersed in some fashion," said Chanton, "and so the effects seem...they appear to be really small. We don't know what the hidden effects are."
But Chanton cautions that we don't yet know whether fish larvae have been killed by the oil or the dispersants.
"So there may be whole years of fish that are missing," he said. "There may not be any grouper this year in this part of the Gulf. There may not be any lobsters, if their larvae have been destroyed. And so we really don't know what the effects are, but just looking at it, right this minute, I'd say things have turned out pretty good. And I feel relieved."
In addition to calling for an investigation, Nelson is introducing a bill requiring companies to disclose the contents of chemical dispersants they use in future oil spills.
"The problem is that the government agencies were allowing the testing for hazards on these chemicals that were being used in the dispersants to be done by the very companies that were manufacturing the dispersants," said Nelson. "Now, if you're a country boy, you recognize what that is, is you let the fox become the guardian of the hen-house."
The amount of oil left in the Gulf is almost five times the total spilled by the Exxon Valdez in 1989.