by Carl Safina
For the owner of a Venice shrimp and crab processing dock, it’s the not knowing. “Will there even be a market for Louisiana seafood?” he wonders. “What is the impact on crabs and shrimp over the long haul? It’s impossible to know.”
In the short haul, part of the answer is possible to know. Keath Ladner’s Gulf Shores Sea Products has a steady customer who buys two million pounds of shrimp a year. They’ve canceled their entire order. “The sentiment in the country is that the seafood in the Gulf is tainted,” Ladner says. “People are scared of it right now.”
Dawn Nunez’s family is also in the shrimp business, but she dismisses the reopenings as premature, “nothing but a PR move. It’s going to take years to know what damage they’ve done,” she denounces. “It’s just killed us all.”
July 28 is day 100. Louisiana gets a new small oil spill just after midnight when a barge being pulled by a tugboat crashes into an inactive well in Barataria Bay, sending a mist of oil and gas a hundred feet into the air, creating a mile-long slick.
Two days later, a ruptured pipeline gushes as much as a million gallons of oil into Michigan’s Kalamazoo River, sending federal and state government officials scrambling to stop the oil from reaching the Great Lakes.
On July 30 Dr. Caz Taylor of Tulane University copies me on an e-mail saying, “We have been seeing droplets of what could be oil or dispersant (or both) in crab larvae, from Pensacola, FL, all the way down into Galveston, TX. We haven’t yet confirmed what these droplets are but if they are oil-spill related, then we have been seeing effects of the oil spill in places where oil is not visible for a while now. So the (welcome) news that the surface oil is receding does not greatly change my perception of the magnitude of the effects of the spill. There is still a lot of oil out there. If the oil and/or dispersant has entered the food web then the effects will be felt throughout the Gulf although they may take months, or longer, to manifest themselves.”
Here is what most people read in something like that: “We have been seeing droplets of oil and dispersant (both) in crab larvae from Florida to Texas. So we have been seeing effects of the oil spill even where oil is not visible. The (dubious) news that the surface oil is receding does not greatly change the magnitude of the effects. There is still a lot of oil out there. It has entered the food web and the effects will be felt throughout the Gulf for months, or longer.”
Here’s what a scientist reads: “We have been seeing droplets of what could be oil or dispersant in crab larvae, but we haven’t yet confirmed what these droplets are. If the oil and/or dispersant has entered the food web, then the effects may take months, or longer, to manifest themselves. That’s a big ‘if.’ ”
Here’s what the media actually writes and what most everyone reads: “University scientists have spotted the first indications oil is entering the Gulf seafood chain—in crab larvae—and one expert warns the effect on fisheries could last ‘years, probably not a matter of months’ and affect many species.”
Meanwhile, engineers are in the process of pumping drilling fluid that, under miles of its own weight and pressure, can push the petroleum and methane back into its genie bottle three more miles to the bottom of the well. This not only holds the pressure in, it neutralizes it.
Success arrives quietly on August 5, after they’ve followed the drilling fluid with tons of cement, which seals off the well’s walls and once again isolates the oil and gas back in its cave, where it had slept for millions of years, away from the living world.
At the end of July, BP posts a quarterly loss of $16.9 billion. BP must now coordinate the drudgery of picking up 20 million feet (3,800 miles) of boom.
With the spigot capped, talk of relief wells ebbs. Two relief wells were supposed to be completed by early August, which, in May, seemed unendurably far into the future. Now the latest tropical storm, which has again forced evacuation of offshore crews, has everything further delayed.
PART THREE
AFTERMATH
DOG DAYS
When I was a kid, we were told that oil formed from dead dinosaurs. The idea is so easy to visualize, it had persisted since the early twentieth century. But back in the 1930s, a German chemist, Alfred E. Treibs, discovered that oil harbored the fossil remains of chlorophyll; the source appeared to be the planktonic algae of ancient seas, blizzards of microscopic sea life gently falling into the depths over the ages. Covered with sediments, cooked by the geothermal energy of the planet’s hot heart, dead microscopic algae became oil.
Some of the waters that made the planet’s oil still exist, like the Gulf of Mexico, which has long received the flows and nourishment of big rivers draining the continent, as the Mississippi does today. Meanwhile, the seas that produced other massive oil fields, such as the Middle East’s, are gone.
For over half a billion years, incompletely decayed plant and animal remains from countless quintillions of tiny organisms buried under layers of rock have been percolating in the pressures and boiling heat of the Earth. Since the Paleozoic era, roughly 540 to 245 million years ago, organic material has been slowly moving to more porous layers of sandstone and siltstone, accumulating there and pooling where it has become trapped by impermeable rock and salt layers. A typical petroleum deposit includes oil, natural gas, and salt water. Crude oil is a mixture of different hydrocarbons with different boiling points that facilitate their separation into materials like asphalt, heavy and light oils, kerosene, light and heavy naphtha (from which gasoline is made), gas, and other components. It gets further refined and blended with other products to make fuels, solvents, paints, plastics, synthetic rubber, soaps, cleaners, waxes and gels, medicines, explosives, and fertilizers.
Petroleum seeps to the surface in many places, most famously the La Brea tar pits in Los Angeles, which for tens of thousands of years captured mastodons, saber-toothed cats, giant ground sloths, lions, and wolves, and today continues to claim pigeons and squirrels. In the early days of Spanish California, settlers used La Brea’s asphalt for roofing.
Though the world has relied on petroleum as a major industrial fuel for only a little over a century, people have been using petroleum for over six thousand years. The Sumerians, among others, mined shallow asphalt for caulking boats and for export to Egypt, where it was used to set mosaics to adorn the coffins of great kings and queens. In about 330 B.C., Alexander the Great was impressed by the sight of a continuous flame issuing from the earth near Kirkuk, in what is now Iraq; it was probably a natural gas seep set ablaze. People being what we are, the potential for petroleum-based weapons was recognized early on. Arabs used petroleum to create flaming arrows used during the siege of Athens in 480 B.C. The Chinese, around A.D. 200, used pulleys and muscle labor to pump oil from the ground, send it through bamboo pipes, and collect it for fuel. Not until the 1800s did the West catch up to this level of oil drilling. The Byzantines in the seventh and eighth centuries hurled pots filled with oil ignited by gunpowder and fuses against Muslims. Similar bombs used at close range nearly destroyed the fleet of Arab ships attacking Constantinople in 673. Bukhara fell in 1220 when Genghis Khan hurled pots of naphtha at the city gates, where they burst into flame.
During the Renaissance, oil and asphalt from shallow pools discovered in the Far East found their way to Europe, and traders soon established routes to the West. By the 1600s, petroleum was lighting streets in Italy and Prague. By the end of the Napoleonic Wars, asphalt was being used extensively to build roads.
In the New World, natives in what is now Venezuela used petroleum to caulk boats and baskets and for lighting and medicines. In 1539, a barrel of Venezuelan oil was sent by ship to Spain to soothe the gout of Emperor Charles V. In North America, certain natives used oil in rituals and for making paints.
The modern commercial petroleum era began in 1820, when a lead pipe was used to bring gas from a natural seep near Fredonia, New York, to nearby consumers and a local hotel. In 1852, Polish farmers in Pennsylvania asked a local pharmacist to distill oil from a loc
al seep. They were hoping to make vodka, but the result was undrinkable. It burned, though, and so they invented kerosene. The invention of the kerosene lamp two years later created a mass market for commercial kerosene, and soon towns everywhere were glowing with the light of petroleum. In 1858, Colonel Edwin Drake pounded a well sixty-nine feet into the ground near Titusville, Pennsylvania. It produced a continuous flow of oil, and within a short time kerosene replaced whale oil for lighting lamps. In the 1880s, the first oil tanker began carrying oil across the ocean. By the 1970s, the seas began bearing thousand-foot-long supertankers capable of containing 800,000 tons of oil. Today oil accounts for over half the tonnage of all sea cargoes.
Petroleum didn’t really get big until the internal combustion engines of the twentieth century and the autos, tractors, trucks, and, eventually, aircraft they powered. Middle East oil ramped up rapidly in the late 1940s. Oil was discovered in Iran in 1908, in Iraq in 1927, and in Saudi Arabia in 1938. By the 1970s, the oil fields of the Middle East were producing about half the world’s oil. Between 1950 and 1970, annual world oil production surged from 500 million to 3 billion tons. Today there are more miles of petroleum pipelines than of railroads.
Saudi Arabia is now by far the world’s largest oil producer. (The United States is the Saudi Arabia of coal.) The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) has the greatest oil reserves. Its member countries include some notable enemies of the United States, and some friends the likes of which make enemies unnecessary.
In many parts of the world, depletion of land-based oil has forced drillers to the continental margins and beyond. In 1947, the first in-water oil well began operating from a wooden platform in sixteen feet of water off Louisiana.
Today one of the most innovative and promising ideas for a new liquid fuel to replace petroleum involves extracting energy from the oil in genetically engineered algae. Algae make oil that can be converted to biodiesel; they can be used to make ethanol; they can be converted to biogas; and they take carbon dioxide out of the air. It may seem surprising that algae create long-chain hydrocarbons resembling petroleum crude oil, but it shouldn’t. Energy from the oil in algae, it turns out, is pretty much what we’ve been using. Algae is, though, vastly better than petroleum in terms of risks and consequences. Unlike such other fuel sources as corn, soybeans, and sugarcane, algae do not compete with our food supply or, like palm oil, cause farmers to cut down tropical forests. And because algae absorb carbon dioxide—the main pollutant from burning fossil fuels—their use as fuel could actually help reduce global warming. Algae naturally produce about half of the oxygen we breathe. And they can produce a much larger harvest per acre than other energy crops.
ExxonMobil said in 2009 that it would invest $600 million over the next few years to produce algae fuels comparable to fuels refined from conventional crude oil. So the tiny organisms that produce petroleum may be the liquid fuel of the future—without us having to wait, say, 300 million years.
Sounds good. Why aren’t we rushing to do this? Why isn’t this a national priority?
For a very short course on oil’s influence in Louisiana politics, meet Professor Oliver Houck. In a Tulane University Law School office with well-stocked bookshelves and a small aquarium, the floor piled with documents organized for a new book he’s writing, Houck sits back casually in his swivel chair.
He sees Louisiana as a petro-state, its petro-dictators propped up by oil money spread across parties. No candidate can really stand up against oil and gas. Louisiana, in too deep, is stuck.
Houck notes, “There’s a kind of toilet mentality in states where resources are abundant. There’s no ethic of conserving. In a timber state, the feeling is there’s nothing wrong with clear-cutting. In Wyoming, it’s a crime to say something bad about coal. In Texas, you can’t say something about beef. Florida’s never been oil-dependent; it’s dependent on white-sand beaches. Oil impregnated Louisiana politics a long time ago.”
But we are a union of fifty states. Nationwide, might this blowout eventually change the mood on energy?
“In the people, yes. In Congress, no. And there’s no connection. Nationally there’s a feeling of being fed up with oil; that the oil companies can’t be trusted. I think the people would strongly support an energy bill that would go far beyond anything now in Congress. But they’re not passionate about it. So members of Congress don’t fear getting tossed out by voters based on their record on energy. And in Louisiana we have two of the most sorry-ass senators in Congress. They’re hacks. But they’re hacks with enormous power, because whatever party is in the majority is there by just a razor-thin margin. So suddenly they’re swing hacks with enormous influence.”
You will not be surprised to learn that Louisiana’s congressional representatives have tried to get rid of Houck and this law clinic. “The only reason I’m not gone,” Houck explains, “is that I’m at a private university.”
On TV, Congressman Ed Markey is complaining that the oil companies “basically owned and operated their regulator but [the blowout] will catalyze Congress to create legislation to end this. We cannot continue to allow their cozy complacency between regulator and regulated.” It’s so much worse than he says. Oil companies basically own the whole Gulf region.
Republican tea-bagging superstar and knucklehead Senator Jim DeMint is putting a hold on a bill that would let the commission investigating the blowout subpoena needed information. DeMint says, “When Obama says, ‘Yes we can,’ we’ll say, ‘No you won’t.’ ” He doesn’t care “what,” only “not.” DeMint appears to be doing his personal best to “shrink government,” and government could hardly get smaller than having senators like him. When men like him cast large shadows, it must be pretty late in the day.
When a certain tugboat captain—a man I’ve known for several years—comes ashore after an extended stay in the waters of the open Gulf, he’s got a few frustrations to relay.
“We were never given a big-picture speech about what we were all trying to accomplish,” he says, “where we each fit in. It was just, like, Okay, go out to here and drive around for a while.”
“Nobody really knew what they’re doing,” he continues. “It was very half-assed. The guy in charge of our task force, he’s a nice guy, but he was lost. He’s got all these shrimp boats and charter boats, and we tried to organize them into search patterns so we could know what we did. We said to the guy, ‘Do you want us to give these boats courses and legs to run searches on?’ And he’s like, ‘Sure, if you know how to do that.’ He added, ‘I have no idea; I’m a shore-based guy.’ As far as running an effective vessel group, he was overwhelmed. I don’t think he was trained. When we started talking about ‘search pattern grids’ and stuff like that, it was right over his head.
“We were towing four 50,000-barrel-capacity double-hulled barges. Our job was to be a receptacle for skimmed oil. The need for us was wildly optimistic. With 200,000-barrel capacity, we came back with about 1,000 barrels of oil-water mix.
“The oil we traveled fifteen hundred miles to help recover was mostly not recoverable. We saw little patches here, little blobs there, pancakes, palm-sized pieces, pennies, dimes, nickels everywhere. Most of the stuff is just broken up into tiny droplets. And it’s in suspension, so there’s no way you can skim it.
“So we’re constantly driving around looking for something we may be able to do something with, and almost never finding it, not really accomplishing anything. I’m sure we used more oil as fuel than the amount of oil we recovered.
“On the radio you’d hear frustration from other boats. Southerners attracted to working on boats and oil rigs have a very powerful work ethic; nobody wants to feel like they’re wasting their time.
“To compound it, every time we find a large enough mass to actually be able to do some productive skimming, they just hit it with dispersants. One day we were in water with a heavy sheen on top. The air stank of the crude, and there were millions of little blobs of what has become
known as ‘peanut butter,’ or weathered crude. It was also scattered throughout the water vertically. I couldn’t tell how far down it went. It lasted mile after mile, as far as the eye could see.
“This is my second major spill response—I was one of the volunteer idiots power-washing rocks after Exxon Valdez back in ’89—and as bad as Valdez was, the scale of this one simply takes my breath away.
“In this horrible mess was the biggest herd of dolphin I’ve ever seen, about sixty to ninety, I estimated. They stayed with us for about two hours, until I changed course. As the day progressed the oil got heavier and heavier, and by sunset I thought that the next day we’d get to do some real skimming and recovery.
“About four in the morning they called and told us all to get out of there and go north of twenty-nine degrees, ten minutes latitude. They kicked all the boats out of the area by dawn, then they bombed the whole area with dispersants from planes. I said, ‘What the hell do they want to do that for? We finally found it in a concentration we might have picked up, and these assholes go and spray it.’
“I don’t know if those dolphins were around for that or not. I don’t know if the pilots would have aborted the mission if they had spotted them in the target area. Probably not, I imagine. I only hope the dolphins somehow knew what was going to happen and got the hell out of there. I don’t even want to think about what would have happened to them if they didn’t.”
