voda schreef:
Nog even, en er is helemaal geen ramp geweest!!!
:-(
BP Oil Is Dissipating, Easing Threat to East Coast
By Jim Polson - Jul 28, 2010 5:51 PM GMT+0200 Wed Jul 28 15:51:29 UTC 2010
Ships assist in clean up and containment near the source of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Photographer: Chris Graythen/Getty Images
Play VideoJuly 28 (Bloomberg) -- Brian Youngberg, an analyst at Edward Jones in St. Louis, talks with Bloomberg's Susan Li about the outlook for BP Plc. BP appointed U.S.-born Robert Dudley as chief executive officer and pledged to accelerate asset sales to as much as $30 billion after the Gulf of Mexico oil spill led to a record loss. (Source: Bloomberg)
Oil from BP Plc’s record spill in the Gulf of Mexico is biodegrading quickly, probably eliminating the risk that crude will go around Florida and hit the U.S. East Coast, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said.
Oil has been dissipating since BP stopped the flow from its Macondo well off the coast of Louisiana on July 15, NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco told reporters yesterday on a conference call. Crude that’s dispersed into the sea is being gobbled up by bacteria, she said.
The London-based company’s success in capping Macondo while continuing to drill a relief well to permanently plug the well eased fears that oil would get into the Loop Current, a river of warm water that joins the Gulf Stream in the Atlantic. The Loop Current has shifted seasonally to a point hundreds of miles away from the BP oil slick, NOAA Oceanographer Debbie Payton said.
“If all is good for us, by the time the Loop Current comes back intruding into the Gulf, there will be no more oil,” Payton said yesterday in a telephone interview. “It makes what was previously a very real threat to the Florida Straits null and void.”
The threat of oil reaching more shoreline also is decreasing in the northern Gulf, Lubchenco told reporters. Oil sheen, too light to be recovered by skimming boats, may strand in Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana over the next few days, she said. By this week, some 640 miles (1,030 kilometers) of shoreline in those states and northwest Florida had been tarred by Macondo oil, the government reported.
Deadly Explosion
The Macondo well spewed as much as 60,000 barrels of crude a day into the Gulf, according to a government estimate, after an April 20 drilling-rig explosion that triggered the spill. The blast destroyed the Deepwater Horizon rig and killed 11 workers.
In May, the Loop Current was flowing just south of the spill site and carried some Macondo oil toward south Florida, Payton said. The water with the oil broke off into a clockwise flow, dubbed Eddy Franklin, and remained circulating as the oil broke down, she said.
Eddy Franklin persists, now isolated from the BP slicks by two cold, counterclockwise flowing eddies, according to NOAA.
“That was a quirk,” Robert H. Weisberg, a professor of oceanography at the University of South Florida, said today in a telephone interview. “The Loop Current can go right to that wellhead. It has done it many times in the past.”
Oil Search
There’s no evidence that plumes of dispersed oil deep below the surface are far enough south to ever be caught by the Loop Current, Payton said.
“We don’t know where subsurface oil really is,” Weisberg said. “NOAA surveys made publicly available have been spotty.”
Eddy Franklin has helped intensify seasonal flow of cold water from deep in the western Gulf to the surface off Florida, called an upwelling, Weisberg said. So far, that water has been clear, he said.
Government and academic scientists are “close” to estimating how much oil remains in the Gulf and where it’s located, Lubchenco said. The agency has two research vessels in the Gulf sampling water or seafood, as well as aircraft scanning the slick and surveying sea life, she said.
“The sheer volume of oil that’s out there has to mean there are some pretty significant impacts,” Lubchenco said. “What we have yet to determine is the full impact the oil will have not just on the shoreline, not just on wildlife, but beneath the surface.”
Tropical Storm Bonnie, which passed through the region last weekend, didn’t affect the spill, the U.S. Coast Guard said July 26. Oil may continue to reach the Gulf Coast for four to six weeks from when the leak was stopped, according to the Coast Guard.
To contact the reporter on this story: Jim Polson in New York at
jpolson@bloomberg.net.