A Sea in Flames

by Carl Safina

  For the people, it might be. “Our ancestors had seen the hunger for oil when the Yankee whalers came in the nineteenth century,” says village council vice president Steve Oomittuk. “They came for the whale oil and wiped out the whales.” Whole villages that had relied on whales for food disappeared, Oomittuk says. He adds, “Then six years ago we saw the hunger for oil coming back. We started to think, ‘This time we will go extinct.’ ”

  But a whale might think, “Thank God for petroleum.” Without it, as Oomittuk implies, we would have destroyed the whales. And thank heaven even more for the power of the sun, the wind, the tides, the heat in the heart of the Earth, the oils in the algae that feed the whole sea, these eternal energies that drive our world and all its life. Without them, we might have overheated the planet and acidified the ocean. But I’m getting way ahead of the story; we’re not there yet. Not even close. As the whalers were stuck in their remorseless havoc, so we have stuck ourselves, with oil.

  As we burn the easy oil and tap the deep oil to the limits of technology, sources that hadn’t been worth it are getting attention. Enter: “oil-sands,” “tar sands,” “shale oil,” and other relatively meager sources that are now worth money. Of Canada’s northern Alberta—a province I remember as beautiful when it was younger—I read that as the Athabasca River and several of its tributaries flow past facilities gouging at oilsands (one ugly word), heavy metal neurotoxins like lead and mercury are entering the water at levels hazardous to fish. Add to them cadmium, copper, nickel, silver, and seven other metals considered priority pollutants by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. First, workers bulldoze the trees and strip the soil. “As soon as there was over 25 percent watershed disturbance we had big increases in all of the contaminants that we measured,” one scientist tells us. What’s he mean by “big increases”? In places, cadmium levels ranged between thirty and two hundred times over the guideline set by the Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment to protect marine ecosystems. Silver levels were thirteen times higher than recommended at one site, and copper, lead, mercury, nickel, and zinc were five times the suggested limit.

  And then there’s “fracking,” wherein engineers actually pump fluids at high pressure to shatter rock formations up to several miles underground to get the gas they contain. This practice is increasing because the resources are getting depleted. It’s a long way from tapping surface seeps. In the East, the big target is the Marcellus Shale, which underlies states from Virginia to New York and into Canada. Its recoverable gas has been estimated at 49 trillion cubic feet, about two years’ total U.S. consumption, worth about $1 trillion.

  If you’ve already heard of fracking, here’s a new vocabulary word: “proppant.” In a sentence: “Proppant, such as grains of sand of a particular size, is mixed with the treatment fluid to keep the fracture open when the treatment is complete.” This is all injected deep into the Earth. In shales they use oil-based drilling fluids when they’re getting down to the reservoir, and then the fracturing fluids pumped down contain a multitude of sins—proppants, gels, friction reducers, breakers, cross-linkers, and surfactants similar to those in cosmetics and household cleaning products. These additives are selected to improve the “stimulation operation” and the productivity of the well. The fluids are 99.5 percent water, but it’s the other .5 percent that matters. The New York State environmental impact statement for drilling to frack the Marcellus Shale has six pages of tables listing the many components of fracturing fluids.

  You can begin to imagine the above-ground mess and risk of all this fluid. Then there is the little issue of drinking water. Experts say it’s not a problem. The New York State environmental impact statement reads, “Regulatory officials from 15 states have recently testified that groundwater contamination from the hydraulic fracturing procedure is not known to have occurred despite the procedure’s widespread use in many wells over several decades.”

  The Environmental Impact Statement says that there is a vertical separation between the base of any aquifer in New York (850 feet) and the target shales (below 1,000 feet, although it also, confusingly, gives this depth as above 2,000 feet). It says the rock between the target shales and the aquifers is impermeable, so it should be an effective migration barrier.

  Go ahead and take a big sigh of relief.

  Now get worried again. The big case everybody cites is Pavillion, Wyoming, where gas fracking has been happening for a while. After several years of complaints by residents, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency sampled nineteen drinking-water wells and, in August 2010, confirmed in eleven the presence of 2-butoxyethanol phosphate (probably from frac fluids), plus adamantane compounds (definitely from fracking) in four wells, and methane in seven. This is the first confirmed case of frac fluids getting into groundwater. It’s possible that the fluid contaminants got into the wells—into people’s drinking water—from surface spills; but the methane is conclusively from the underground reservoir. The final EPA Pavillion report is recent and is the smoking gun for opponents of fracking.

  And now a dash of good news, a step toward the techno prep that was needed in the Gulf all along: ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and Royal Dutch Shell announce plans to voluntarily contribute $250 million each to build what they should have had warehoused already: modular containment equipment that would be on standby, capable of capping a blow-away well or siphoning and containing up to 100,000 barrels of oil daily in the next leak or spill. (BP is not included initially but will join in September 2010.)

  Ulterior motive: the companies want Obama to lift his ban on deep exploratory drilling. They also realize that the gushing hemorrhage of bad publicity is detrimental to their stranglehold on what should be a national discussion about our energy future.

  “It’s doubtful we will ever use it, but this is a risk-management gap we need to fill in order for the government and the public to be confident to allow us to get back to work,” the oil spokesman says. It could be sixteen months before the system is completed, tested, and ready to be used. In a blowout, it could still take weeks to stop the flow. Drawings of the proposed system show a cap and a series of undersea pipes and valves and a piece of equipment that would pump dispersant. Lines would be hooked up to vessels on the surface.

  If it doesn’t work, there’s still no good plan for capturing oil.

  The oil companies say this initiative is the product of four weeks of intensive efforts involving forty engineers from the four companies. And, of course, they want to deflate the momentum for a series of congressional bills that aim to bring more safety, more oversight, and more unwelcome lawmaker meddling.

  One bill they don’t like, for instance, would force companies to drill a relief well alongside any new exploration well. Oil executives argue that this would double the risk because a relief well would be just as likely to blow out. They don’t mention that this would be true only if they drilled the relief well all the way into the hydrocarbon zone—or that they don’t like the fact that it would cost them a bundle more.

  But what about that slippery and elusive bigger picture?

  In 1969, Senator Gaylord Nelson was so moved by seeing the devastation following the oil blowout off Santa Barbara that he called for a national day to discuss the environment. After the resulting establishment of Earth Day the following year, Republican President Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency and signed the National Environmental Policy Act and the Clean Air Act into law. Congress followed that burst of legislation with the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Coastal Zone Management Act, the Toxic Substances Control Act, and other giant strides of high-minded lawmaking that invented environmental protection and put the United States ahead of any nation on Earth.

  Though the Gulf eruption far exceeds Santa Barbara’s ten-day, 100,000-barrel blowout, when President Barack Obama pushes for clean energy, Republicans accuse him of trying to exploit the Gulf tragedy for political gain. Liberals fault him for failing
to specifically push for a cap on carbon dioxide emissions.

  Santa Barbara’s leak originated much closer to shore, covering miles of California beaches with thick crude oil. Pictures of dead seals, dolphins, and thousands of birds horrified the country. I myself had never imagined a bird coated in oil, and in my mind I still see vividly the television image that shocked me. Santa Barbara’s psychological effect was huge. And the country was more cohesive. We hadn’t yet had thirty years of anti-government propaganda and deregulatory chaos, so we set our government to work passing laws to address the problems.

  That was then, this is now. South Carolina republican senator Lindsey Graham worked on a climate-change bill for months before pronouncing it hopeless. And now, in July’s last week, legislation to reduce climate-warming greenhouse gases from fossil fuels implodes in the Senate, derailing the year’s top environmental goal. Not even this disastrous blowout could create a national consensus to move America off dirty fossil fuels and into clean, eternal energy.

  Lois Capps, now a Democratic congresswoman representing Santa Barbara and the central coast, was a young stay-at-home mother in 1969. She reminds us that Gaylord Nelson’s speech came eight months after the January 1969 blowout. The resulting Earth Day didn’t happen until April 1970. Not until 1981 did Congress impose a ban on offshore drilling along most of the nation’s coastal waters, an action rooted in the memories of the Santa Barbara spill, more than a decade earlier. (That congressional moratorium endured for a quarter century; Congress lifted it in 2008.) “It doesn’t happen overnight,” Capps says.

  Agreed, but it’s now been 40 years—14,600 nights—and we still don’t have a clean, eternal-energy economy. My friend Sarah Chasis, who started working at the Natural Resources Defense Council while I was still a college undergrad, says, “I think we’re going to see a really significant response to what happened in the Gulf play out over time. I think it’s going to affect people’s thinking and the way they approach issues for a long time.”

  I’d like to think so. An Associated Press poll in June 2010 found that 72 percent of Americans rate the environment as “extremely important” or “very important,” up from 64 percent in May and 59 percent in April. But that’s the problem. We care when it’s headlined, but it’s toast when it’s redlined.

  We’re better than we were in 1969 on important issues like civil rights, women’s equality, even on the environment. But that’s mainly because of what was accomplished then. Since then, we’ve increasingly given our economy and our government to the kinds of people who care more about themselves than they do about our economy or our government. They’ve stagnated our energy policy, shipped our manufacturing jobs overseas, and racked up enormous national debt. Why? What was accomplished for America? Mainly, very rich people became extremely rich. Which would be fine, but the widening gap in the middle is very harmful to most Americans. And that gap is where moderation would lie, and from where a sane, enduring, future-forward energy policy would emerge. Thoughtful planning doesn’t come from people who think only of themselves and only of today, traits shared by both the needy and the greedy.

  In the deep earth’s wings, the relief wells continue grinding along toward their seven-inch target, the intention still being to “kill” the well at its bottom.

  On July 22, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reopens commercial and recreational fishing in 26,388 square miles of Gulf waters, or about one-third of the 83,927 square miles of Gulf of Mexico federal waters that had been closed to commercial and recreational fishing—which itself had been over a third of all of the Gulf of Mexico federal waters.

  Fishing means seafood means consumer confidence. So to rebuild consumer confidence, the government hires people to sniff seafood for oil. We’re told the sniffers’ identities will be kept secret to prevent harassment. That seems ludicrous, but then again, this is the blowout. So only the nose knows.

  Inanity 101: A professor shows us how to sniff seafood: “Take small bunny sniffs,” she says. No, really.

  After the first clean samples, the professor demonstrates with a bowl of shrimp intentionally tainted with a small amount of ammonia. One small bunny sniff, and the verdict?

  “It’s pungent and putrid. It smells bad. Eww.”

  Well, you put ammonia in it. You didn’t even put actual petroleum in it.

  “I didn’t want to use the actual oil with some of the volatile hydrocarbons that are in there just, you know, for safety purposes.”

  Oh, puleeez! We who run our lives with gasoline and heat our homes with oil and methane and propane will have our safety compromised by a bunny whiff of oil? We live in the stuff.

  The whole idea of sniffing as a test of seafood safety seems iffy. But a deputy from NOAA seeks to reassure us by saying, “If you think about your ability to detect something in your refrigerator, if it has an off odor, you can detect it at very, very low levels.”

  So scientific. Don’t you feel confident now?

  We’re told that if the sniffers don’t find oil, the samples they’ve sniffed will get chemically analyzed. I hope so, because I have zero confidence in sniffing as a way to ensure the safety of massive quantities of seafood.

  And get this: we’re told that the sniffers will “detect whether a sample is normal by testing it against a baseline of seafood caught before the spill.” In other words, seafood that’s been frozen for more than three months will be sniff-compared with fresh-caught seafood, to see which smells better.

  We’re told, “The experts can detect contamination of one part per million. Newer, less experienced state screeners, up to ten parts per million—that’s a single drop in a gallon of water.” We’re told, “You have known experts who are in the room who, in fact, can help direct the trainees towards this sort of smell you should be getting. You might get it in your tongue. You might get it in the back of your nasal cavity. You might feel it right here.”

  I feel like I’m back in the Middle Ages. And while we’re sniffing, I’d like to know why we aren’t using dogs. Do we have agency experts sniffing for dope and bombs in airports? Do expert hunters chase rabbits with their expert noses to the ground? C’mon.

  We’re told, “NOAA officials are on high alert to prevent any seafood containing oil from being caught and sold.” The professor says, “Believe me, I don’t believe someone would go ahead and attempt to eat something that is tainted, because it is very aromatic and it’s quite unpleasant.”

  Really? Is that all you’ve got? Sorry; I have a lot of respect for professors, but I don’t believe her. If tainted food always smelled bad, people wouldn’t get sick from eating tainted food.

  We’re told that in addition to using sniffers, the agency sends hundreds of samples to a lab in Seattle for chemical analysis. So far, just one sample came back tainted. That, I believe. I’d reserve small bunny sniffs for detecting, say, carrots.

  Despite splotches of brown crude that continue washing up here and there, Louisiana plans an early August opening of state waters east of the Mississippi to catching fish like redfish, mullet, and speckled trout. Shrimping season will begin in mid-August. But oysters and blue crabs will remain off-limits. “I probably would put oysters at the top of the concern list and I don’t think there’s a close second,” says Dauphin Island Sea Lab director George Crozier.

  What about seafood in general? The oil contaminants of most health concern, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs (which can cause cancer), also show up in other everyday foods, such as grilled meat. A NOAA spokesman says the levels in Gulf seafood “are pretty typical of what we see in other areas.” That’s because they’re common in oil, vehicle exhaust, food grown in polluted soil, tobacco smoke, wood smoke, and meat cooked at high temperatures. NOAA found that Alaskan villagers’ smoked salmon contained far more PAHs than shellfish tainted by the Exxon Valdez spill. Live fish metabolize PAHs rather than store them.

  For instance, the highest level of the PAH naphthalene found in fish fro
m recently reopened Florida Panhandle waters was 1.3 parts per billion, well below the federally considered safe limit of 3.3 parts per billion. Federal regulators say they’re sure the fish will be safe. They say that of the more than 3,500 samples taken from the Gulf during the spill, none contained enough oil or dispersant to be harmful to people.

  In fact, regulators did not turn up a single piece of seafood that was unsafe to eat—even at the height of the eruption. Unlike certain contaminants, such as mercury, which accumulates in fish, fish quickly metabolize the oil’s most common cancer-causing compounds. Crabs and oysters metabolize these chemicals more slowly. So far, shellfish testing is just beginning, and many shellfish areas remain closed.

  It’s not appetizing to think about eating a fish that’s been neutralizing cancer-causing chemicals, no matter how promptly and efficiently. But I’m confident that an occasional meal, or a bit more, would be safe. Safety is a relative term, of course. I drive a car—the most dangerous thing most of us do routinely. We live in a world of hazards, including some pretty awful artificial chemicals and food containing God knows what. On the other hand, we have higher average life expectancies than ever in history, especially if you subtract people who eat too much and who smoke.

  So if the feds say the seafood is safe, I would be willing to put a little initial squeamishness aside. Others have their own analysis. “It tastes like fish,” a fisherman says. “I’m not dead yet. If the government tells me it’s unsafe, I won’t eat it. But I’m not going to worry about it. They’re the experts, I’m just a fisherman.” A tourist finds a different source of confidence. “Restaurants aren’t going to sell the shrimp if they’re bad,” she says. “These are decent American people down here. They’re not going to lie about it.”

  You’d think anyone in the fish biz would be delighted at the openings, but some think it absurd to open fishing grounds so soon. Some fishermen and their families worry that if any seafood diners wind up with a tainted plate, it will be a knockout blow. “I wouldn’t feed that to my children without it being tested—properly tested, not these ‘Everything’s okay’ tests,” says a shrimp boat owner from Barataria, Louisiana. She and her husband are sufficiently skeptical of the government’s assurances that they will not go shrimping when the season opens, at least not initially. Gotta respect them for that.