Gulf Watchers Sunday - BP's Big Geology Lie... Blowout Then, Leaks Now? - BP Catastrophe AUV #552

Did BP knowingly lie about the Gulf geology in order to save money? There is oil out there, but where is it coming from? The water can kill you, but the air's just fine. Feinberg is dubious (still) about claims of illness. Bulls*it about drilling in the Gulf. BP has Ghaddafi troubles.

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I love the smell of legal wrangling in the morning... smells like BP bullshit... But it's not just the legal wrangling I find interesting. This, in my opinion, might shed some light on the reports of fresh oil in the area of the Deepwater Horizon. I've been looking for a reason for the new slicks, especially away from the wellhead, and this has some tantalizing possibilities as an explanation... It is also abjectly terrifying, because there is no easy fix. Indeed there may be no fix at all. Did BP feed Halliburton false information about subsea geological formations in order to save money? Well, that's the subject of a pair of lawsuits filed Friday by the oil-services giant Halliburton, which was tasked with cementing the Macondo wellhead just prior to the explosion and blowout of the Deepwater Horizon. Halliburton is charging that BP willingly and knowingly withheld geological information about the location, depth, and size of oil and gas production zones that was critical to a secure cement job. The final cement job in the well is supposed to push cement at least 500 feet above the deepest formation that has hydrocarbons. Halliburton claims BP failed to inform it of several formations in an effort to save money on changes to the well design that would have been needed. Without knowing the proper locations of the formations, Halliburton says, the company wasn’t able to design a cement mix appropriate for the conditions. In a Texas state court filing, Halliburton claims “profit and greed” were behind BP’s alleged misinformation. Halliburton contends that BP has continually misrepresented its role in the blowout, and the public statements, reports to investigators, and manipulation of facts in its own internal documents (known as the Bly Report) attests to said misrepresentation. The complaint can be read here. “In essence, the Bly Report categorized (Halliburton’s) primary cement job as a root cause of the blowout purportedly lending support to the allegations against HESI in the hundreds of lawsuits that comprise the blowout litigation,” the court filing says. “The motive behind BP’s intentional nondisclosure of this upper hydrocarbon-bearing zone is apparent — profit and greed,” Halliburton says. “Had BP disclosed the higher hydrocarbon zone to HESI, HESI would not have pumped the cement program unless and until changes were made to the cement program, changes that likely would have required a redesign of the production casing. Such changes would have cost BP millions of dollars on a well that was already painfully over budget and behind schedule.” BP says that Halliburton is attempting to “divert attention from its role in the Deepwater Horizon incident and its failure to meet its responsibilities.” “Multiple independent investigations have identified serious problems with the cementing of the well as a potential contributory factor to the Deepwater Horizon disaster — not only BP’s own investigation,” the BP statement said. “BP has accepted its responsibility for responding to the spill and is accordingly paying costs and compensation. In contrast Halliburton has refused to accept any responsibility or accountability.” Wow. That, in my opinion, is a rather weak response, considering the massive amount of legal muscle they are able to muster...it was the end of August/early September - is the legal department still on holiday? And although I hate to even consider the possibility of siding with Halliburton on absolutely anything... I hope they go at BP with legal guns blazing. At least we might be able to uncover some kernels of truth after the firefight... This might hold some answers - or at least be a beginning - to understanding why we are seeing oil again in the area around the Macondo. If the cement job was badly placed initially - too low, too high, or just way off - and parts under pressure have subsequently eroded, this could account for MC252 oil emerging at distances away from the capped wellhead. Damn. I don't want to even consider that. That gets into the feelings of deja vu from last summer of a compromised well casing and problems deep in the formation. I don't want to go there. At all. Okay. On to the next story, which ties in with this one rather well, I think...

Addendum/editorial comment... If BP lied about the geology to save money, which of the other BP platforms in the Gulf - Atlantis, Pompano, Matterhorn, Thunderhorse - are compromised to some degree? How long will it be until another human/environmental disaster? I want their collective hides on the wall of my garage...

Until Tropical Storm Lee shut down activity in the Gulf for a few days, there was still evidence that there is oil coming to the sea surface from somewhere near the capped Macondo wellhead, if not from it. The most recent sighting was on Tuesday from a flyover by On Wings of Care. The pilot of the flight, Bonny Schumaker, reported the location of the slick as approximately 16.5 statute miles northeast of Macondo 252 (MC252: N28°44.20', W088°23.23'). We notified two ships about this large area of oil today, and we gave them the gps coordinates where it could be found (waypoint #9175 below: N28° 53.426', W088° 11.022'). The first was the NOAA "Okeanos Explorer", who seemingly unbeknownst to them, was cruising alongside and then right through a line of those oily globs. The second was the "Sarah Bordelon", who told us they were sampling the oil for BP. (Can BP say it's not there when they have a ship out there sampling it?) We also reported it to the NRC after we landed, who of course reports it to the US Coast Guard (our report was incident #987845). Video from the flight is here, scroll down about halfway please... The US Coast Guard, after investigating the reports by helicopter flyover, and an inspection via ROV, said they found no indication of oil, or a leaking wellhead. Video from the ROV inspection is scheduled to be posted at www.restorethegulf.gov but don't hold your breath waiting to see it. Most of the site is mainly government boilerplate (hey, it's a gov site) and doesn't seem to be updated on a regular basis - the last "news" (and I use that term very loosely) was August 19th. The Oil Drum has had a discussion about the slick... and information from that group was helpful many times during the summer of 2010. Asked about leaks from subsea fractures, our old buddy Rockman sounded like he remains a bit skeptical: If the oil is coming from near surface fractures then they would erode almost instantaneously. Actually these wouldn’t be fractures per se. The shallow is unconsolidated mud for the most part. The oil would have been injected into the mud during the blow out and is just now leaking to the water column. This potential amount would be very tiny compared to the original spill. Also no chance at all of the reservoir flowing up to the surface in this manner. That is physically possible. But there is one possibility that could be extremely dangerous and lead to your worst nightmare: the oil is coming up the casing from the reservoir. IOW the process of pumping cement into the well bore has not isolated the down hole interval. This can happen. And if it did it might not be seen flowing from the top of the abandoned well. A hole in the casing near the surface is certainly possible. Thus the oil could be squirting into the mud and shooting up many yards away from the well. But so far I have some serious concerns about the validity and accuracy of the original reports. Sounded possible at first but as time passed and more info came in it started having a bit of a problem passing “the smell test” IMHO. Scott Miles, a chemist at LSU, conducted a chemical analysis on the samples of oil taken from the Gulf on a trip by the Mobile Press-Register newspaper on August 23rd using the "fingerprint" of the oil from the Deepwater Horizon from the Macondo well site, in Mississippi Canyon 252. “Looking at the fingerprinting, the samples were low concentration, so it is not giving a real good picture. It is possible it could be MC252. It’s south Louisiana crude for sure,” said Miles. “You can’t say 100 percent that it is from the spill itself, but they do need to get somebody out there to investigate further.” Miles said he could smell the oil in the samples as soon as he opened the jars. “The fact that it is right over the Macondo well site is pretty tantalizing,” said oil chemist Ed Overton, who was one of the first people contacted by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration after the spill began in April 2010. “There is no way to say for sure whether the well is leaking, based on what is on the surface,” he said. “Of course it is suspicious.”   Bob Cavnar, author of Disaster on the Horizon, says it is probably unlikely that the well is flowing again. Where is this oil sheen that’s been observed coming from?  I don’t think that reporters from the Times Picauyune and the Press Register are just making all this up, but I also don’t believe that the well is flowing oil.  A point to remember here: Deepwater tests demonstrated in both 2000 and 2010, that over 90% of oil introduced into the deepwater never comes to the surface.  It’s my opinion that if the well was flowing oil, you would be seeing masses of oil similiar to what I personally observed when I was on location at Macondo in July 2010.   Getting a look at the videos from ROV inspections recently would go a long way to help understand the situation. Marine Traffic has shown several ships in the area before TS Lee arrived, including the supply vessels the Wes Bordelon and Rachel Bordelon, used by the Natural Resource Damage Assessment in tracking natural oil seeps in the Gulf by collecting water/oil samples where a sheen of oil is found. The vessels also have ROV capability. From the Bordelon Marine website: We offer a full range of offshore vessels supporting a multitude of activities, including construction support, exploration, production, ROV and dive support, oceanographic research and survey mapping, as well as military and special operations support. Military and special ops support? A private company with... okay...  Well, I guess the lines can tend to be a bit blurry these days... BP has said repeatedly that the Macondo isn't leaking, but oil keeps appearing. It's there, and coming from somewhere. We need to know where, and what the hell is going to be done about it.

Study maintains BP cleanup workers not exposed to dangerous levels of chemicals. In a report from a study done by the San Francisco-based company ChemRisk, published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, found that benzene levels in the study samples were 32-fold lower than federal limits, while toluene was 510-fold lower, ethylbenzene was 360-fold lower and xylene was 77-fold lower. The findings are consistent with results of smaller-scale studies by an arm of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the Department of the Interior, and should lay to rest claims by cleanup workers that they were exposed to dangerous levels of cancer-causing benzene, Dennis Paustenbach, president of ChemRisk and a co-author of the study, said in an interview. “You’d be getting far more benzene when you’re filling up your gas tank,” he said. Tom Mueller, a BP spokesman, said “extensive” worker monitoring by multiple parties from the beginning of the response have shown consistently low exposure levels, which the ChemRisk study has again confirmed. “BP is looking forward to seeing more exposure studies published in the peer-reviewed scientific literature,” he said. Some of the offshore workers involved in the sweeping Gulf cleanup effort have filed lawsuits against BP after experiencing nausea, dizziness, vomiting and headaches during shifts. Speculation of possible benzene exposure has swirled ever since. High exposure to elevated levels of benzene may cause bone marrow damage and lead to increased risk of developing acute myeloid leukemia. But scientists with ChemRisk said symptoms experienced by the workers could be explained by heat exhaustion, stress, sea sickness, dehydration or other sickness. I'm not an idiot. I've written abstracts and research theses. But this sounds like a large pile of gobbledygook, commissioned for no other reason than to obfuscate what seems to be a real and growing problem among cleanup workers. A chunk of the abstract: Decision science tools can be used in evaluating response options and making inferences on risks to ecosystem services (ES) from ecological disasters. Influence diagrams (IDs) are probabilistic networks that explicitly represent the decisions related to a problem and their influence on desired or undesired outcomes. To examine how IDs might be useful in probabilistic risk management for spill response efforts, an ID was constructed to display the potential interactions between exposure events and the trade-offs between costs and ES impacts from spilled oil and response decisions in the DWH spill event. Quantitative knowledge was not formally incorporated but an ID platform for doing this was examined. Probabilities were assigned for conditional relationships in the ID and scenarios examining the impact of different response actions on components of spilled oil were investigated in hypothetical scenarios. Given the structure of the ID, potential knowledge gaps included understanding of the movement of oil, the ecological risk of different spill-related stressors to key receptors (e.g., endangered species, fisheries), and the need for stakeholder valuation of the ES benefits that could be impacted by a spill. Framing the Deepwater Horizon problem domain in an ID conceptualized important variables and relationships that could be optimally accounted for in preparing and managing responses in future spills. You may buy a copy of the study here, should you feel that need... ChemRisk used data made public by BP for the study but was not paid by the company for the analysis. See that table in the conference room? Look under it. There's probably something there... Hey, abstracts are usually...well, abstract. A sketch of the information in the study. I understand what they are saying here, but folks, this looks like a classic example of using a "scientific study" filled with logical information manipulated to fit an already established set of parameters that benefits only the company's bottom line. This is basically how a corporation tries to get their butts out of a financial crack... ...spill-related stressors to key receptors (e.g., endangered species, fisheries), and the need for stakeholder valuation... ------------- Framing the Deepwater Horizon problem domain in an ID conceptualized important variables and relationships that could be optimally accounted for in preparing and managing responses in future spills. Yeah, bite me... It's worth it to compare and contrast the ChemRisk study with the Earthjustice report- covered beautifully in this past Wednesday's edition of Gulf Watchers by shanesnana.

And Feinberg says he's "dubious" about cleanup worker claims. As a massive federal study aimed at gauging the human health effects of exposure to oil and chemicals during the cleanup of last year's Gulf oil spill gets under way, the man in charge of compensating the spill's victims reports that only 200 people have put in claims saying they were injured or sickened by the disaster. Kenneth Feinberg, who was appointed by BP and President Barack Obama to administer a spill-damage claims fund, has paid more than $5 billion to more than 200,000 victims, and he has received about 1 million claims in all. But only about 0.02 percent of them are health-related -- including those from the workers injured or killed on the rig itself. He is skeptical of some of the other claims. ------------- "I'm dubious," Feinberg said. "We have paid ($64 million) for death claims and those physically injured when the rig exploded -- for traumatic injuries, burns, broken bones. We paid those claims; they're paid. "It's these respiratory claims from the cleanup -- when I say I'm dubious, I have an open mind on this, (but) I'm just wondering whether these 30 people out of hundreds and hundreds are going to be able to provide any support medically or occupationally for the proposition that they're entitled to get paid. We'll see." After the application of more than a million gallons of Corexit to the Gulf after the spill - large quantities dispersed a great depth with no understanding of the impact ecologically - it seems no governmental entity is willing to even study the possible effects on humans, and prefers to dismiss all claims of illness connected with dispersants as anecdotal. The National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences is in the early stages of its own sweeping health survey and has committed $25.2 million for additional studies by research teams at five regional universities, including Tulane and Louisiana State. But even that is not likely to settle the question. Federal authorities and some researchers have acknowledged that those efforts started late and thus will not prove causation. Messages from Washington during the course of the months-long cleanup only promoted more fear. The Environmental Protection Agency at one point questioned BP's use of Corexit, later directing the company to use a different dispersant before ultimately asking it simply to reduce the quantities it was deploying. The same process Feinberg used after 9/11 to dismiss claims of illness from first responders then is happening again. But Feinberg said he's using the same eligibility process with oil spill claimants as he did with claims after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. He said he got 15 claims from 9/11 victims about a year after the attacks saying they had developed lung or colon cancer from exposure to carcinogens in the World Trade Center. Feinberg took those claims to two scientists at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, who said it wasn't possible to develop cancer in that short a period, so he rejected those claims. He said he's hired three experts to review the 30 respiratory oil spill claims and help him make a determination on their validity, but he said that at first glance, many appear to lack even the most basic medical records. In addition, to get paid, claimants after both the terrorist attacks and the oil spill have to prove they suffered economic loss of earnings or a disability because of their injury. "In these 30 (oil spill claims) ... I see virtually no evidence of disability," Feinberg said. "They don't have a Social Security finding or a workers' comp finding." The director of the grassroots environmental group Louisiana Bucket Brigade, Anne Rolfes, says Feinberg's methodology is seriously flawed. "This idea that we have to prove, that the little guy has to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that their condition is a result of BP's actions is really an unfair burden," she said. "If Feinberg wants to go with that, then he's really just acting as BP's wingman." "The language that was used early on was that people would be 'made whole.' That's not what this standard would do at all." BP's wingman... You hit the nail on the head, Ms. Rolfes. The records of the Gulf Coast Claims Facility show that Feinberg has paid 105 of the injury and death claims a total of $64 million, with almost all of it going to 15 claimants whose settlements averaged about $4 million each. Evidence that the toxins associated with oil spills can cause lasting problems was revealed in a Spanish study of European fishermen between September 2004 and February 2005 after a tanker spill off northwestern Spain in November 2002. Researchers found chromosomal damage and respiratory problems among their subjects, similar to some of the claims offered by Gulf fishers and cleanup workers. Nonetheless, Dale Sandler, the top epidemiologist at the National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences, said in an interview this year: "There is surprisingly little information in an organized way about what happens after an oil spill." Sandler's study of the Deepwater Horizon disaster is billed as having the widest scope of any post-spill study. The aim is to interview 55,000 people along the upper Gulf Coast who have had varying levels of exposure to crude oil and Corexit. The target groups are cleanup workers and those who had direct exposure to the oil and the dispersant.

And an interesting read, in case you want to know more about your enemy, which is always good in war of any sort. The author is the president of the "non-profit" (yeah, right...) Consumer Energy Alliance which is a shill for big oil. Just check out that website - slick, professional...and absolutely jam-packed with lies and half-truths related to energy... Myths and realities about energy production in the Gulf. Given the state of our economy and the economic benefits that await us if we resume normal operations in the Gulf, it’s important that Americans are armed with the facts about the stark reality of declining Gulf energy production. Grab the Pepto-Bismol and dive right in... (Oh, by the way... you folks at the "Consumer Energy Alliance" can bite me too...)

And BP can anticipate some continuing problems here, with connections to Libya, Libyan oil contracts, Gaddafi, the Lockerbie bomber... Diplomats feared the harassment – ‘or worse’ – of British nationals; the cancellation of lucrative contracts with firms such as BP, Shell and BG; and the end of defence deals and counter-terrorism co-operation. From the Mail UK... Devastating secret files reveal Labour lies over Gaddafi: Dictator warned of holy war if Lockerbie bomber Megrahi died in Scotland. A massive read; very interesting and not just for the BP connection. (h/t greenbird - thank you!)

PLEASE visit Pam LaPier's diary to find out how you can help the Gulf now and in the future. We don't have to be idle! And thanks to Crashing Vor and Pam LaPier for working on this!

Previous Gulf Watcher diaries:

9-02-11 06:48 PM	Gulf Watchers Block Party - Who's Your Team?	Lorinda Pike
8-31-11 01:48 PM	Gulf Watchers Wednesday -Yes; BP Did Make You Sick - BP Catastrophe AUV #551	shanesnana
8-28-11 12:14 PM	Gulf Watchers Sunday - ROVs Inspect Macondo; Workboats Still There? - BP Catastrophe AUV #550	Lorinda Pike
8-26-11 06:37 PM	Gulf Watchers Block Party - Weather Edition+*	Lorinda Pike

The last Mothership has links to reference material.

Previous motherships and ROV's from this extensive live blog effort may be found here.

Again, to keep bandwidth down, please do not post images or videos.