Frequently Unanswered Questions; Observations of an On Scene Commander Monitoring the Deepwater Horizon Spill

These are my personal observations after a full week spent constantly tracking, from afar, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill response operation in the Gulf of Mexico. My basic point is that in spite of massive coverage of this incident, there are enormous uncertainties about it all, and a lot of conflicting information floating around. Some of these issues and problems have been reported on here and there on TV and the web, but they really are quite fundamental, in my opinion.

For instance, BP claims the oil on the surface is just a fraction of a millimeter thick. But Ed Overton, who, like me, was on Daily Planet the other night talking about the spill, showed us an oil sample that he says is like roofing tar. If they're both right, what could be happening is that Ed's sample is oil that has weathered for a week, when all the lighter, volatile ends have evaporated, etc. But Ed isn't even sure his sample came from the Deepwater Horizon site, or at least he wasn't sure as of two days ago. Then there are the odd reports of tarballs washing ashore; can anyone say for sure that they come from the Deepwater Horizon site? What do the official authorities have to say about all this? They seem to be completely mum on the subject.

Another thing is, they talk about the size of the spill, in terms of area covered, etc. But what really is the thickness of the slick, and how continuous is it? Shots I've seen show windrows of an orangy substance, a type of emulsion, but nothing like the EVOS thick black crude we all remember. NOAA does show maps and graphics with locations of various concentrations of oil on them, plus there are the satellite shots, but it is extremely difficult to get a handle on this spill, from this vantage point at least. People have this image of a huge mass of thick black crude inexorably moving towards shore. Somehow I don't think it's really like that. What you probably have instead are pockets of oil that have weathered at different times and therefore to different extents, but collectively cover a huge area.

Yet another thing is that as I said in my Daily Planet interview on Friday evening, the model I ran predicts that 95% of the leaked oil should either disperse or evaporate naturally within five days. Well, if that's the case, how come the spill can be said to have possibly tripled in size in one day, as at least one scientist believes? Is more leaking out, or is it getting spread around more because of the high winds, and is emulsification adding to it? Or maybe the model is wrong. Who knows? If the authorities know, they should share their information with us.

Then there's the matter of recovery of the oil at sea. How much of what they have cleaned up to date is water and how much oil? I suspect it's mainly water. And what's their recovery rate?; I suspect it's in the single digits, percentage-wise, maybe even as low as 1 percent ( or lower, but let's be generous! ). And speaking of one percent, that's the figure that appeared in the confidential document released the other day with respect to the percentage of the spill area over which dispersants had been applied. ONE PERCENT! That's incredible. Now the authorities are considering using dispersants at the wellhead; how effective is that going to be, given the volumes of oil involved and the 24 hour nature of the flow? And as for the test burn conducted mid-week, somewhere between 75 and 100 barrels of oil were burned in one hour. Fat lot of good that response operation is going to do, in other words.

Personally, I think at this stage consideration should be given to winding down the offshore recovery effort; let's face it, it's just not working. Resources could be better spent trying to stem the flow of oil from the seabed, protecting the shoreline, and cleaning up oil that does hit the beaches. But those protective booms that we see along the shoreline are worse than useless in bad weather; they shouldn't even be out there in the conditions they're now experiencing. And if they are out there, they should be taken ASAP in instead of getting ripped to shreds.

Also, while this spill has the potential to be the worst ever, so far it is not. It looks like it might cause enormous damage, but anything can happen. Pundits are already predicting massive devastation along the Eastern Seaboard, before the spill has even hit the Gulf Coast! It all depends on the winds and the currents, things over which we have absolutely no control.

Lastly, a big unknown is oil underwater. How much is there floating around below the surface, I wonder? Where is it, where is it headed, and what is its fate? Somehow, I shudder to think. Out of sight, out of mind, I guess.