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Coast Guard File / EPA
An aircraft releases chemical dispersant over the oil spill from the Deepwater Horizon, off the shore of Louisiana on May 5, 2010.
During the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, which dumped nearly 5 million barrels of crude into the water, responders applied some 1.8 million gallons of chemical dispersant to break up the oil slick.
The chemicals, which were sprayed on the surface and pumped near the gushing pipe on the ocean floor, largely prevented the slick from saturating delicate coastal marshes, but they had their own environmental impact that scientists are only now beginning to understand.
A study published Tuesday provides one possible piece to that puzzle, indicating that chemical dispersants of the type used in 2010 hurt microorganism populations that are a key link in the marine food chain, with dire implications for fish and larger sea animals.
"Our study was interested in the tiny organisms that support the base of the food web," said Alice Ortmann, who led the study at Dauphin Island Sea Lab in Alabama. "These are the small things support all the big things in the ocean."
The research conducted in a controlled lab setting showed that dispersants and dispersed oil "significantly reduced" the growth of phytoplankton and ciliates — essentially, fish food.
It also showed that oil that was left alone — and thus degraded while floating on the water's surface — was found to cause no significant damage to these organisms.
The study, published in the online science journal PLoS ONE, suggests one of the environmental trade-offs made in the disaster response.
Dispersants are soap-like agents that break up oil slicks into smaller particles. Using them introduces some toxicity — albeit far less than oil, scientists agree. But in breaking up the oil, the dispersants can expose organisms in the water, while possible sparing those on the surface, like pelicans.
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At the time of the disaster response, the large volumes of dispersants being applied sparked accusations that BP — the owner of the Deepwater operation — was trying to hide the oil from view for public relations reasons as much as out of environmental considerations.
"We are still reviewing the study, but the state can say that the use of dispersants in the volume and conditions under which it were applied were unprecedented," said Garrett Graves, chairman of the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority of Louisiana. "We did raise objections to this application of dispersants during the spill, the unknown impact on our Gulf, and that we were being used as lab rats."
That impact remains unknown, Ortmann said, because these findings were based on lab results.
"This is what we saw in our incubations," she said. "What happens out in the ocean we don’t really know yet."
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Independent studies like this one will supplement a large, long-term effort called the Natural Resource Damage Assessment administered by federal and state trustees. The assessment is an attempt to account for all the damage caused by the oil spill to the environment and human activities that depend on it.
"We’ll come up with a tab to say 'BP, you are responsible for this injury'," said Tim Zink, spokesman for NOAA, one of the federal agencies leading the effort. "The way they pay it back is through restoration projects" for shorelines, land protection and dunes and efforts to restore turtle or bird populations.
About $60 million has been disbursed for initial restoration projects, even as the effort to assess the damage continues.
A separate investigation by NOAA is looking into a dramatic spike in dolphin deaths — more than 720 from the time of the explosion in April 2010 to July 29 this year.
NOAA report on dolphin strandings/deaths
"Oil is being investigated as one of the key factors," said Tim Zink, spokesman for NOAA’s damage assessment and remediation efforts.
Meantime, studies of live dolphin populations that were in contact with the oil in the Gulf have turned up troubling findings, including pulmonary issues, chronic low weight, anemia and low levels of hormones that could affect the animals' ability to survive, Zink said.
Another recent study by a team of researchers published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in March has documented damage to coral in the vicinity of the broken well at a depth of about 4,000 feet, an ecosystem that normally would not be affected by oil spills.
"The sheer magnitude of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and its release at depth make it very different from a tanker running aground and spilling its contents," said Haverford College chemistry professor Helen White, lead author of the study, who was cited in a report on the Penn State website.
The Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the largest in U.S. history, occurred in one of the continent's most productive ecosystems. It dwarfed the 11 million gallons spilled by the Exxon Valdez tanker in Prince William Sound in 1989.
"Fully understanding the short and long-term impacts of the explosion, oil and natural gas released, dispersants, and other factors is likely to take several years," said Graves.
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Leave a Comment:
I never understood DISPERSING the oil. I would think you would want it to ball up on itself into one easy to suck up clump.
Now if I was an oil company exec I would STILL have crews out there trying to recover and recycle all the FREE EASILY ACCESSIBLE oil that I didnt have to drill for. EASY MONEY!!
tunatofu
Dispersing the oil causes the oil to start to degrade immediately instead of waiting years for it to dissolve into its components. In fact the main reason the oil slick disappeared so quickly and the cleanup went much faster is because the this product was pumped with the oil as it flowed away from the well. Anyone now stating it was a wrong to use this product is a fool. It may not be as "environmentally friendly" as plain water, but its far more environmentally friendly than the crude oil it dissipated, still by far the lesser of 2 evils.
I am no chemist or marine biologist, so I was wondering how does this oil get broken down? Do small critters in the seas digest them and break them down? I am sure that would impact the life of those creatures. I am sure BP wanted the sight of this oil leak to go away as soon as possible. It was really bad PR. Dispersents were the quickest. They really never made the stuff go away or broke it down. It hid it from the naked eye. What needs to be done is collect as much of the oil as is possible. Then use it or dispose of it in an enviromenntal clean manner. I am sure BP collected oil that was economical or they were able to collect and use it without any great monetary loss. The stuff that was totally uneconomical to collect they decided to disperse. Another thing, who owned the Corexit that they used? Was it something BP had sitting in its own warehouse and needed to find a place to get rid of it? This whole thing was business sleaze and how to make a buck out of a nightmare.
"This is what we saw in our incubations," she said. "What happens out in the ocean we don’t really know yet."
___________
Translated, means:
"We needed a certain answer to bolster our preconceived idea, so we set up the conditions to reach that certain data and, Lo And Behold, it proves we were right."
You can set up an experiment to prove anything and statistics can prove Rhode Island is bigger than Texas.
So here they are basically saying "we'll skew our findings to make sure that BP gets all the blame".
BP does the best it can with what's available to appease all those demanding they clean it up immediately, only to later be told they should have left it be. They use the best method offered by scientists and now scientists want BP to take all the blame for their shortsightedness.
They did it. They get the blame.
I agree in this case BP was forced to REACT to many demands to 'fix' the problem. What they should have done is and a contingency plan for this type of disaster, then they could have just implemented a plan that everyone already agreed to...
Just like taking a poll........... To get the answer you want, you have to ask the right quetions.
The micro organisms refused to answer reporters questions, as has become their habit.
They have a lobby group for that. ;)
Take a controlled amount of sea water in a swimming pool with a certain population of microorganisms. Add a set amount of crude oil, then a certain amount of dispersants. The resut will BEGIN to approximate the actual conditions. EXCEPT, one must allow for a certain exchange of fresdh, uncontaminated sea water, containing fresh microorganisms being cnstantly introduced due to the dynamic action of currents, etc.
You can barely approximate the actual conditions, so the data will be only minimally accurate at best.
And BP asked to release a certain level of dispersants at the wellhead and were ORDERED by the Coast Guard to use twice or three times that amount.
This is all followup to excuse the armed robbery that was perpetrated upon BP in the hysterics of the moment.
If its worth doing, its worth overdoing.
I used that argument with my boss over my pay. He didn't buy it..... :(
How much money was spent on this to be able to say, "could, if, maybe, it's possible, reasonable to expect, ect. Surely there are better uses for this tax money.
In part this is an experiment that we perform routinely on daily basis. It is the physical process we use when washing the dishes or taking a bath, but readily demonstrated by what happens when we mix oil and vinegar for our salad. From this we can devise simple experiment.
In a bottle put a few tables' spoons of olive oil, with a few more tables' spoons of water in clear bottle. We already know what happens depends on the density of oil, the water and the oil separate and even after being shaken they will again separate. If we look at the shaken mixture, the tiny droplets of oil merge with others and eventually all separate. If you wanted to visualize this you could remember the '50s Lava Lamp, the glob in the middle is waxy oil that changes density when heated, is rises to the top, cools and falls back down. If you were able to shake the lamp the little globs would eventually gather separate and the lamp would operate normally. This is what is meant by the word immiscible, or the old phrase "oil and water don't mix", not exactly correct, (if fact they do "mix" but they separate later, the word "mix" does not mean dissolve.)
If we add dishwashing detergent to the little experiment, shake the mixture, and again wait for the bubbles to go away, it looks like it just after the original as shaken but it won't separate, the oil has been dissolved in the water. So what has gone on between the water, the oil and the detergent?
The explanation is "physical" but on such tiny scale that looks "chemical", hence the term for this domain is "physical chemistry", and implies more of physical explanation than a chemical one. Down at the scale of individual molecules, water, oil and detergent the electrical properties of each are differ.
Water is a dipolar molecule, because the two hydrogen atoms stick out at an angle, the electron charges circulating spend more time on the one side of the water molecule than the other, giving it net charge overall.
Oil molecule is a long chain of carbon atoms surrounded by hydrogen atoms, so many that it non polar molecule (small or tiny charge), preferring to stick together with other non-polar molecules, and floating or sinking to show a separating layer.
The detergent molecule is designed to have one end as polar (charged) but the other end as non-polar. The detergent molecule hooks up to the water molecule allowing it to be dispersed in the water on one end, with the other end sticking to the oil molecule allowing the oil to be dispersed molecule by molecule in the water.
The resulting emulsion is differs from oil droplets and from water. While a water organism, will likely have some barrier to ingesting oil drops, the drops being too large, or filtered out, the detergent emulsion however is already down to the molecular level, and when taken in by the organism chokes on the oil or the detergent while taking in what looks like water.
This a very basic understanding, but what of it applies to nature? It could be that the highly dispersed detergent emulsion enter the food chain more easily, choking organisms it no coping mechanism die too rapidly. Whereas if the oil remains in larger and fewer droplets that slowly enters the food chain, the organism survive, reproduce and slow ameliorate the contamination. In the end nature will do its best to survive if we can give it a hand.
Several things should be tried.
Coagulants could be considered that facilitate oil drops to coalesce, either floating to be gathered or sinking to bottom to employ biology in reducing the problem.
Detergents designed to disperse, but additionally designed to degrade releasing a modified oil molecule less harmful, or more attractive to bioremediation.
The best way to reduce the cost would be to have the chemical makeup of the chemicals used known to the scientists, right now dispersing and fracking chemicals make a "proprietary" product. You could argue that because the effects of using these chemicals are being wide dispersed onto the public space, into the food chain, water supplies and spread across the landscape causing unknown harm that those companies take out huge insurance policies to assure the public that corporations will be taking on the future liabilities in a "Planetary Mortgage agreement". Awarding a license to pollute to a global monopoly needs some form of assurance.
In addition to corporations ownership of these protective liabilities, it strongly advised that enablers, politicians, etc. also become insured using a "Planetary Mortgage Agreement", it seems that fitting we would have a biological hemp arranged at the necks of the extended political family that could be slowly tighten from time to time to serve the people rather them themselves.
I knew hemp was going to be involved in this one somehow. ;)
The only oil that i know of that is good for marine life, is a little veg. oil in the bottom of skillet, with a little garlic salt and lemon. I wounder how many years will go by before the extent of the gulf spill damage is known and not a guesstimate.
Answers won't be known in our lifetime, which is what they want.
But we made sure to to srite a doom and gloom story anyway. Kind of like saying something causes cancer in mice but there isn't any proof it causes cancer in humans. Or like saying eggs and butter is bad for you and then years later new studies say they are good for you.
Apologist.
Environmental disasters.............courtesy of your friendly big oil companies...................the gift that keeps on giving............
Like military members during DADT who once they got out then denounced that which they "volunteered" to be part of even though they "KNEW" in advance that what they were doing was against, what the organizations stood for when they joined. Like the illegals who come here and won't learn English.
Who cares? Pathetic pretenders who want to be able to shop for their next boyfriend on a sponsored camp-out. Disgusting. And then there are the predators who want to lead those troops with their victims parents' approval!!! Really? Oh, and lastly there is the agenda to nurture our society into believing that there is no right or wrong, Male or female role, or any other path that a society should follow. Instead we should all just Mardi Gras our way through life without having to answer to anyone for our actions.
Who cares!!!!! There's money to be made!!! Full speed ahead!!!!!!!!
Do you really believe the seafood from the Gulf is safe to eat?
No Way, No How!
I miss the shrimp, crab & oysters that used to come from a relatively clean environment. So sad for the people that depend on the industry for their livelihood.
That said, I haven't & won't be buying any time soon.
JB.. no way in hell will I buy shrimp or any other seafood from that region... hell I am terrified now of eating the radioactive fish in the Pacific... Thanks TEPCO... this crap they sprayed, and the oil that gushed will have impacts on the entire ecosystem...
I used to love fresh caught Gulf shrimp... no more...
Gotta love big oil.... you know they love you..
That is strange, I didn't even read this article. I was responding to the article about the Eagle Scout that returned his medal. LOL. I was wondering why the rest of you were talking about seafood....LOL
Sorry,,,,I'm not sure how that even got here.
The chemical dispersant kills the plankton? Does anyone remember a movie with Charlton Heston called "Soylent Green"? When the plankton died, the marine life that fed on it died too. Eventually, the only food source people had was "Soylent Green", which was made up of dead people. Wow, life imitating art!
Only 34 comments? How sad.
and to bring to ruin, those ruining the earth.
Who's bright idea was it that the solution to spilling a whole lot of toxic chemicals into the Gulf was not to pick them up but rather to dump a whole lot of other toxic chemicals into the Gulf?
"they were just beginning to understand"....hmmmm, I have only had a couple of years of college but I figured out that putting all those chemicals in the water would hurt the marine life....c'mon now...having grown up on the Gulf, I am so sad that they have destroyed it....the good fish I used to get as a kid when the mullet fishermen brought their nets up to the beach, the shrimp.....cold, fresh root beer with smoked mullet....too bad...those days are gone.
Nothing is the same since you were a kid.
Let me rewrite your headline...
Study: Dispersants used in Gulf oil spill could not damage marine food web
...they both mean the same thing, ie, we don't know if dispersants effect the marine food web.
I'm so sick of the GREED and STUPIDITY, I can puke! They KNEW all along the CHEMICALS BP was using WOULD destroy the Marine life, BUT because our GOVERNMENT is OWNED by Big Oil and Big Business, they are too much of PUNKS to STAND UP for what is RIGHT!
These bastards have so much money, once they destroy our environment, they can leave and buy the BEST LAND ON THIS PLANET! Yet, STUCK ON STUPID AMERICANS vote their REPRESENTATIVES to office, who APPROVE of Big Oil and Big Business!
It's just NASEATING, HOW STUCK ON STUPID TOO MANY AMERICANS ARE!
They knew beforehand that there was no studies on how the dispersants would effect the oceans ecosystems. They blindly used tons and tons of this stuff, without knowing the effects it would cause. These people are idiots!!!
Bottom line people...DON"T EAT GULF SEAFOOD !! Regardless what the lying government and Governor Bobby Jindal tells you.
And Joe Barton had the gall to aoplogize to BP....