Offshore Energy

 

'We Are Much Less Safe.' 4 Lessons From Deepwater Horizon. According to The Washington Post, “The academics, scientists and former politicians tasked with investigating the Deepwater Horizon explosion in 2010 were given two instructions: Figure out how this happened and how to keep it from happening again. Eleven men died when BP PLC’s Macondo well blew up, creating a fireball that sank the Deepwater Horizon oil rig about 80 miles from the Louisiana coast, spilling more than 500 million gallons of oil for nearly 90 days (Energywire, Dec. 19, 2019). The bipartisan National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling sent a host of recommendations to President Obama nine months later. Many of the strategies meant to create a safer offshore oil and gas industry were enacted. Agencies issued new regulations. Industry strengthened its safety culture and resources. The Interior Department created bureaus to regulate U.S. offshore oil and gas development. ‘You could write books about all the efforts put in place [since Macondo],’ said Erik Milito, president of the National Ocean Industries Association. But ahead of Monday’s 10-year anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe, some commissioners and experts say the United States is not prepared for what could be next. ‘Are we safer today than we were 10 years ago? The answer would be ‘no,’ said Terry Garcia, one of the commissioners and a former assistant secretary of Commerce for oceans and atmosphere at NOAA. ‘I think you could even argue we are much less safe and the conditions for a similar occurrence or of even greater magnitude is possible.’” [The Washington Post, 4/16/20 (=)]

 

Reviving The Gulf: 'It Could All Go To Hell Pretty Quickly'. According to E&E News, “Louisiana officials want to do something bold: build a 5.5-mile channel that would reconnect the Mississippi River to a dying coastal swamp not far from New Orleans. Ten years after the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig on April 20, 2010, Louisiana is one of five states reaping the benefits of a $20.8 billion settlement with BP PLC, the largest in U.S. history. If all goes as planned, the $200 million project will not only revive the Maurepas Swamp but provide a natural buffer from deadly hurricanes. The restoration project is one of hundreds all along the Gulf Coast, after Louisiana and four other coastal states — Alabama, Florida, Mississippi and Texas — joined the U.S. government in suing BP for damage caused by the nation’s biggest environmental disaster. ‘We’re doing great things, finally,’ said David Muth, director of the National Wildlife Federation’s Gulf of Mexico Restoration Program. ‘But we still have a long ways to go, and it could all go to hell pretty quickly.’ Ultimately, Muth said, the environmental gains from the BP settlement money will be ‘squandered’ if the nation doesn’t respond more quickly to climate change. ‘There’s still a window of opportunity, but I’m also very cautious because it could all go wrong,’ he said. As the recovery efforts have continued, so has the pollution, adding to the environmental damage and heightening the health risks to humans and wildlife. In the last decade, there have been 18,602 additional oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico, although most have been minor, according to SkyTruth, an environmental watchdog organization that relies on federal records and satellite imagery to monitor spills. The most spills in a single year — 2,635 — came in 2013.” [E&E News, 4/16/20 (=)]

 

Ocean Group: Little Has Changed Since Deepwater Horizon Blowout. According to Florida Today, “Transocean proudly announced in 2010 it had drilled the deepest oil and gas well in history, more than six miles deep. But soon thereafter, the BP Deepwater Horizon would become among the deadliest and dirtiest as well. When the rig exploded on April 20, 2010, while drilling the Macondo Prospect in the Gulf of Mexico, 11 men were killed, a fireball could be seen for miles, and an estimated 210 million gallons of oil gushed up like a geyser from the gulf floor, then lapped up on Florida’s chalky white beaches, killing fish, sea turtles and countless other marine life. On Tuesday, Oceana, a nonprofit group, released a report to concluding a similar disaster could happen again, because little has changed in terms of industry oversight and plans for expanded oil and gas exploration. ‘Offshore drilling is still as dirty and dangerous as it was 10 years ago,’ said Diane Hoskins, Oceana campaign director, in a prepared statement. ‘If anything, another disaster is more likely today as the oil industry drills deeper and farther offshore. Instead of learning lessons from the BP disaster, President Trump is proposing to radically expand offshore drilling, while dismantling the few protections put in place as a result of the catastrophic blowout.’ Oceana says decades of ‘poor safety culture and inadequate government oversight’ set the stage for the disaster.A decade later, the report outlines, these conditions have not improved and that expanding this industry to new areas puts human health and the environment at risk. Before the novel coronavirus disrupted the nation’s economy, fishing, tourism and recreation in East and West Coast states supported more than 2.6 million jobs and contributed nearly $180 billion in GDP, Oceana’s report says.” [Florida Today, 4/16/20 (=)]

 

Sea-Level Rise

 

Rising Seas Could Make U.S. Coastal Flooding A Daily Peril By 2100. According to Reuters, “Many coastal areas of the United States could see floods that now happen about twice a century occur almost daily by the turn of the century, as ocean levels rise because of planetary warming and ice melt, scientists warned on Thursday. By 2050 - just 30 years from now - almost 70% of 200 coastal areas studied could see such major floods at least once a year, said Sean Vitousek, a researcher with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) in California. For low-lying cities such as Miami or Honolulu, current ‘nuisance’ flooding - which temporarily blocks roads or backs up through stormwater drains - could soon become the norm, requiring residents to adapt or even leave, he said by phone. Without efforts to curb climate-changing emissions or put in place new protective measures, flooding ‘will continue and get worse until it almost makes some areas impractical to live in because it’s happening so frequently’, Vitousek said. ‘When what we consider now as the extreme happens at every high tide - that’s no joke,’ the oceanographer and engineer told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. Vitousek’s research, carried out with colleagues at the USGS, the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of Hawaii, looked at historical records of sea level fluctuations from 200 tidal gauges around the U.S. coastline. Those records were paired with models of expected sea level rise driven by climate change, to predict how often flooding was likely to occur in each location in coming decades.” [Reuters, 4/16/20 (=)]

 

Climate Change Turns The Tide On Waterfront Living. According to The Washington Post, “George Homewood, Norfolk’s planning director, has chosen the city’s affluent Larchmont neighborhood for our walking tour on this unseasonably warm December day. He pauses in the middle of Richmond Crescent, where repeated tidal flooding has cracked and buckled the asphalt, and wetlands grasses fringe the street. Nodding toward a new house that towers 12 feet above sea level, he poses the hard questions that cities and counties are only beginning to acknowledge as waters along the U.S. coasts continue their inevitable invasion. Will the city be better off if people live in that house for another 30 to 50 years but are unable to get in or out during high tides or lingering storms? How long, he asks, does the city maintain the street? Or keep the storm-water and sewer systems operating? What happens years from now, when emergency services can’t get to these homes because the street has flooded? ‘At some point, the investment in infrastructure can’t be sustained,’ he says. ‘That’s the bottom line.’ Hurricanes get the headlines, but on this street, it will be the repeated jabs of flooding day after day from climate change, with its rising tides and increasingly stronger storms, that will force the city to make tough choices. By 2040, projections by the Virginia Institute of Marine Science show, the river will overflow its banks and flood this street twice daily during high tides. Norfolk plans to protect the city with $1.8 billion in storm-surge barriers and flood walls, but those projects — if built — won’t stop the rising tides in Larchmont. The water will come. This is where Norfolk will eventually begin its retreat.” [The Washington Post, 4/13/20 (=)]

 

Alarms Ring As Greenland Ice Loss Causes 40% Of 2019 Sea Level Rise. According to Phys.org, “The kilometres-thick icesheet that covers Greenland saw a near-record imbalance last year between new snowfall and the discharge of meltwater and ice into the ocean, scientists have reported. A net loss of 600 billion tonnes was enough to raise the global watermark 1.5 millimetres, about 40 percent of total sea level rise in 2019. The Greenland icesheet—which, until the end of the 20th century accumulated as much mass as it shed—holds enough frozen water to lift the world’s oceans by seven metres. Almost as alarming, however, as the icesheet’s accelerating disintegration are the forces driving it, the authors reported this week in The Cryosphere, a peer-reviewed journal published by the European Geosciences Union. More than half the dramatic loss in 2019 was due not to warmer-than-average air temperatures but rather unusual high-pressure weather systems linked to global warming. These anticyclone conditions blocked the formation of clouds over southern Greenland, causing unfiltered sunlight to melt the icesheet surface. Fewer clouds also meant less snow—100 billion tons below the 1980-1999 average. In addition, the lack of snowfall left exposed darkened, soot-covered ice which absorbs heat rather than reflecting it, as pristine white snow does. Conditions were different, but no better in the northern and western parts of Greenland, due to warm, moist air pulled up from lower latitudes, the study showed. All of these factors led to accelerated melting and runoff, creating torrential rivers cutting through the ice toward the sea. ‘These atmospheric conditions are becoming more and more frequent over the past few decades,’ said lead author Marco Tedesco, a scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. ‘This is very likely due to the ‘waviness’ in the jet stream,’ a powerful, high-altitude ribbon of wind moving from west to east over the polar region, he said.” [Phys.org, 4/16/20 (=)]

 

Fisheries & Marine Life

 

With Fishing Fleets Tied Up, Marine Life Has A Chance To Recover. According to Bloomberg, “Plummeting global demand for fish and seafood as a result of the coronavirus crisis is likely to create an effect similar to the halt of commercial fishing during World Wars I and II, when the idling of fleets led to the rebound of fish stocks. The closure of restaurants and hotels, the main buyers of fish and seafood, together with the difficulties of maintaining social distancing among crews at sea have caused hundreds of fishing vessels to be tied up at ports around the world. Marine scientist have already started investigating the effects this will have on marine life. ‘Studies after the first and second world wars showed a spectacular recovery,’ said Carlos Duarte, a research chair at the Red Sea Research Center in Saudi Arabia. ‘We are hoping that this unintended closed season between February and June or July will accelerate the recovery of fish stocks and allow us to reach conservation objectives faster.’ The Covid-19 outbreak has decimated the restaurant trade and wreaked havoc with food supply chains. Demand and prices have collapsed in Asia, home to some of the world’s largest seafood and fish markets. In Spain, which has the largest fleet in the European Union, half of the ships are staying at port. The EU enacted emergency measures last month to allow member states to give financial aid to help the fishing and aquaculture industries through what it called a ‘dramatic slump’ in demand for seafood. The downtown adds to uncertainty for EU members such as Spain and France over future access to U.K. waters as a result of Brexit.” [Bloomberg, 4/17/20 (=)]

 

 

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