Great white shark population lower than previously believed

Great white shark: Researchers have found that fewer great whites are in the Pacific ocean than previously believed. Other shark species from around the world have also suffered steep population declines like the great white shark's in recent years.

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A great white shark seen dragging buoys after taking the bait off Guadalupe Island, Mexico. Thanks to a recent study, the great white shark has been found to have a smaller population than previously thought.

Chris Ross/Chris Fischer/Courtesy of National Geographic Channel

Far fewer great white sharks are cruising the waters off of California than previously thought, according to researchers who conducted a unique shark census in the northeastern Pacific Ocean.
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"This low number was a real surprise," said Taylor Chapple, a doctoral student at the University of California, Davis when he led the great white shark study.
"It's lower than we expected, and also substantially smaller than populations of other large marine predators, such as killer whales and polar bears," said Chapple, now a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute in Germany.

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Counting the great white sharks was a hands-on activity. The researchers went out into the Pacific Ocean in small boats to places where great white sharks congregate, and lured the massive predators into photo range using a seal-shaped decoy on a fishing line.
From 321 photographs of the uniquely jagged edges of the sharks' dorsal fins, they identified 131 individual sharks.
From these data, they used statistical methods to estimate that there are 219 great white sharks in the region.
"We've found that these white sharks return to the same regions of the coast year after year," said study co-author Barbara Block, a Stanford University marine biologist and a leading expert on sharks. "It is this fact that makes it possible to estimate their numbers. Our goal is to keep track of our ocean predators."
The study, published in the journal Biology Letters, is the first rigorous scientific estimate of white shark numbers in the northeast Pacific Ocean, and represents one of the best estimates among the world's three known white-shark populations.
Great white sharks also live in the waters around Australia and New Zealand, and off the coast of South Africa.
Shark species around the globe have suffered steep declines in recent years. As many as one-third of the world's sharks and other cartilaginous fishes are threatened, and shark numbers along the United States eastern seaboard have plummeted, some species by as much as 90 percent.
Great white sharks are classified as "vulnerable" by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, but relatively little is known about the elusive species.
"This estimate only represents a single point in time," Chapple said. "Further research will tell us if this number represents a healthy, viable population, or one critically in danger of collapse, or something in-between."

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Satellite tagging studies have demonstrated that great white sharks in the northeast Pacific make annual migrations from coastal areas in Central California and Guadalupe Island, Mexico, out to the Hawaiian Islands or to the "White Shark Café," a region of the open ocean between the Baja Peninsula and Hawaii where white sharks have been found to congregate – after which they then return to the coastal areas.

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How to save the last tigers on Earth

The tiger population of India grew by 300 in the past four years. But this week 13 Asian nations are meeting to discuss ways to save the last remaining tigers.

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A Royal Bengal tiger yawns in the state zoological park in Gauhati, India, Monday, March 28, 2011. India's latest tiger census shows at least 1,706 tigers in forests, about 300 more than four years ago.

Anupam Nath/AP

Endangered tigers are back in the spotlight at an international conference in India this week, where representatives from all 13 Asian countries where tigers still roam have gathered to work out the practicalities of saving a species from extinction.
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The conference in New Delhi comes on the heels of the world's first tiger summit, hosted in November of last year by Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.
The landmark meeting in St. Petersburg brought together high-level government officials from all Asian tiger range countries, along with conservation groups and donor nations, and produced the Global Tiger Recovery Program (GTRP), an international agreement aimed at, among other things, doubling today's wild tiger population — roughly 3,200 animals — by the year 2022. [See remaining and extinct tiger subspecies.]
IN PICTURES: Siberian Tigers
How to accomplish such bold aims is the subject of this week's meeting, according to Mike Baltzer, head of conservation group WWF's Tigers Alive Initiative.
"St. Petersburg was, 'What we are going to do?'" Baltzer told OurAmazingPlanet. "This meeting is all about implementation — how are we going to do it?"
The answer is different in each Asian country where tigers live, and each country is presenting plans of action this week.
A female Bengal tiger on the move, Ranthambore National Park, Rajasthan, India. Credit: © naturepl.com/Andy Rouse / WWF.
However, all tiger range countries will now at least have one thing in common: a monitoring system to count wild tigers and share data across all 13 nations. Baltzer called the development a major step forward.
The first day of the meeting was devoted to India's own work in tiger conservation, and the host country, which is home to roughly half the world's wild tigers, announced both good news and bad news.
First, the overall number of tigers across India has increased by about 225 animals, for a grand total of 1,706 tigers, officials said.
But while India saw an overall increase in wild tigers since its last count, in 2007, some tiger reserves saw a decrease in animals, almost entirely due to professional poaching.
"Poaching for illegal trade and tiger products is still a major problem," said Sabri Zain, advocacy director for TRAFFIC International, a global wildlife trade monitoring group.
Zain said the next step is to decrease demand for tiger parts on the consumer level, a task which will be different in each tiger range state.
"In the past you would put a cute picture of a tiger on a poster and tell everyone, 'Don't do this, don't do that,' but that's preaching to the converted," Zain said.
Zain said now it's a question of molding education and public awareness efforts to fit unique markets for tiger parts. In Indonesia, the demand for tiger skins for amulets is keeping smuggling alive, whereas in a place like Vietnam, tiger meat may be the biggest driver of illegal trade.
Both Baltzer and Zain, who are attending the meeting in New Delhi, say the enthusiasm of all tiger range countries for saving the endangered species is incredibly encouraging, but stressed that funding for tiger conservation is still scarce in some countries.
"As we are making these plans, tigers are dying," Zain said. "So there has to be a sense of urgency and these plans need to be implemented as quickly as possible. They need to be translated to boots on the ground."
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Reach Andrea Mustain at amustain@techmedianetwork.comThis e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . Follow her on Twitter @AndreaMustain.

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Exxon Valdez cleanup holds lessons for Gulf oil spill

Oil from the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska in 1989 may take centuries to disappear, says Exxon. How long will the Gulf oil spill linger?

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An Alaskan fishing boat returns from Prince William Sound. The state’s rocky shoreline still has pockets of spilled oil from the Exxon Valdez. The Gulf oil spill could have the same effect on the southeastern US coastline.

Mark Thiessen/AP

Anchorage, Alaska Two decades after the Exxon Valdez supertanker ran aground and ripped open its cargo tanks, the spill still marks Alaska's environment. Pockets of fresh crude are buried in beaches scattered around Prince William Sound and segments outside it, in isolated spots along more than 1,200 miles of coastline that received oil in 1989.
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The discovery confounded earlier predictions that remnant crude would quickly weather and disperse as waves washed it into the sea.
"At this rate, the remaining oil will take decades and possibly centuries to disappear entirely," concluded the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council, the federal-state panel that administers the $900 million civil settlement struck in 1991 between the governments and Exxon for natural resource damages.
IN PICTURES: Destructive Oil Spills
The lingering oil was a revelation to scientists like Gail Irvine of the United States Geological Survey (USGS), who found some still-fresh crude hundreds of miles away from Bligh Reef, along the Alaska Peninsula far outside Prince William Sound. "I was surprised," she says. "It was still goopy and aromatic. It was not asphalt."
The remnant oil represents a tiny fraction of the 11 million gallons that spilled – just 20,000 to 22,000 gallons, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. But it is a symptom as well as a symbol of a persistent oil spill disaster.
Creatures large and small still are struggling. One pod of killer whales lost nearly half its members, has failed to reproduce, and is likely to go extinct. Another pod lost about a third of its members and is still struggling. The big schools of Pacific herring that supported a rich commercial fishery are gone. Sea otter populations in heavily oiled areas are about half as big as would be expected.
While there have been far bigger spills, the Exxon Valdez disaster ranks, by far, as the most devastating in North America to marine life. The immediate toll included hundreds of thousands of seabirds and thousands of marine mammals. Commercial fisheries were closed, and traditional native American harvests of wild foods were halted.
A near-perfect storm of circumstances exacerbated the impacts: Heavy North Slope crude dumped near the shore; cold water; a semienclosed sound at the start of spring, when fish stocks and migratory wildlife were arriving.
Conditions made some cleanup efforts futile. Though 15,000 gallons of spilled Exxon crude were burned the day after the grounding, dispersants – like the chemical blends being deployed in the Gulf of Mexico today – didn't seem to work in colder water.
The shoreline's characteristics hinder cleanup and recovery as well. The rocky beach surfaces act as armor, preventing oil degradation, even in areas with strong wave action. The mousselike emulsified state of the oil also helped preserve the toxic freshness inside a filmlike coating, Ms. Irvine says.
The spill struck an ecosystem already in flux because of changing seasons, ocean cycles, and long-term climate warming in the far north, says Molly McCammon, a former executive director of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council.
Unless there are oiled carcasses, much of the evidence is circumstantial. It's not certain that killer whales were lost to the spill, she says. "But they were seen swimming through oil, and they disappeared."
For many affected by the spill, the prolonged class action litigation was as stressful as the initial spill. In 2008, the US Supreme Court slashed the punitive penalty to 1/10th of the $5 billion that a federal jury had awarded in 1994.
The final Exxon Valdez cleanup workers may be the animals, like sea otters.
"As they forage in the intertidal [waters], they're probably slowly releasing oil from the sediments," says Brenda Ballachey, a USGS scientist who has focused on sea otters. "When you think of the thousands of pits that a sea otter digs, that starts to become a cleanup."
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Alaska beaches still have oil from 1989 spill

An estimated 20,000 gallons of crude oil remain trapped in the gravelly beaches of Prince William Sound, Alaska, long after the Exxon Valdez oil spill..

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Pictured is crude oil trapped on a rocky beach shortly after the Exxon Valdez tanker spilled nearly 11 million gallons of oil into the Prince William Sound in March, 1989. About 20,000 gallons of the oil remains 20 years later.

Jack Smith/AP/file

ANCHORAGE, Alaska An engineering professor has figured out why oil remains trapped along miles of gravel beaches more than 20 years after the Exxon Valdez tanker disaster in Prince William Sound.
An estimated 20,000 gallons of crude remain in Prince William Sound, even though oil remaining after the nearly 11-million-gallon spill had been expected to biodegrade and wash away within a few years.
The problem: The gravelly beaches of Prince William Sound are trapping the oil between two layers of rock, with larger rocks on top and finer gravel underneath, according to Michel C. Boufadel, chairman of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Temple University. His study appeared
Sunday in Nature Geoscience's online publication and will be published in the journal later.
Dr. Boufadel found that water, which could have broken up and dissipated the oil, moved through the lower level of gravel up to 1,000 times slower than the top level.
Once the oil entered the lower level, conditions were right to keep it there, he says. Tidal forces worked to compact the finer-grained gravel even more, creating a nearly oxygen-free environment with low nutrient levels that slowed the ability of the oil to biodegrade.
"The oil could be maybe one foot below the beach surface and in contact with sea water with a lot of oxygen, but the oxygen doesn't get to it," Boufadel says.
He found that the upper layer of beach is so permeable that the water table falls within it as fast as the tide. However, the permeability of the lower level is so low that the water table does not drop much within it, he says.
Boufadel says the study points out the susceptibility of beaches worldwide to long-term oil contamination, especially at higher latitudes where beaches tend to be gravel or a mixture of sand and gravel.
"As global warming is melting the ice cover and exposing the Arctic to oil exploitation and shipping through sea routes such as the Northwest Passage, the risk of oil spills on gravel beaches in high-latitude regions will be increased," the study says.
Boufadel and his team dug about 70 pits between 3-feet and 5-feet deep on six beaches during summers from 2007 to 2009. His report focuses on data collected on Eleanor Island, about 15 miles away from Bligh Reef where the Exxon Valdez grounded on March 24, 1989.
Peter Hagen, program manager for Exxon studies for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, says Boufadel's study is a continuation of previous work that began in 2001 when 9,000 pits were dug around the sound, confirming the presence of oil.
While the remaining oil likely remains somewhat locked up in the beaches, the spill's lingering effects are ongoing, Mr. Hagen says. Sea otters, sea ducks and some sea birds are producing an enzyme showing exposure to oil.
Boufadel's study was funded by a $1.2 million, three-year grant from the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council. The council was formed after the environmental disaster to oversee restoration of the sound.
Boufadel doesn't know how long it might take for the remaining oil to finally disappear but predicted it will take a long time.
"It will be a slow process because the oil is relatively sheltered from water motion," he says.
Editor’s note: The Monitor's Environment section has a new URL. And there's a new URL for its Bright Green blog. We hope you'll bookmark these and visit often.

Alaska oil pipeline has safety and environmental risks

The US Department of Transportation’s pipeline safety division says the 800-mile trans-Alaska pipeline is corroded and poses a severe public safety and environmental risk.

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Caribou along the Trans-Alaska pipeline in the Arctic, North Slope, Alaska. Federal regulators say the 800-mile pipeline is corroded and poses a severe public safety and environmental risk.

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The US Department of Transportation’s pipeline safety division says the trans-Alaska pipeline is corroded and poses a severe public safety and environmental risk.
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The 800-mile pipeline ships 12 percent of the domestic oil supply. In a letter sent earlier this month to the Alyeska Pipeline Service Co., a coalition of oil companies that control the pipe, the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration [PHMSA] says “multiple conditions … pose a pipeline integrity risk.”
A reason for the increased corrosion is limited use. Oil began flowing through the 48-inch diameter pipeline in 1977. At its peak, the pipeline carried 2.1 million barrels per day, crossing three mountain ranges, from the North Slope of Alaska to Valdez, the state’s northernmost port.
Capacity has dropped starting in the late 1980’s. According to Alyeska Pipeline Service data, between 2000 and 2010, total annual capacity has dropped 38 percent. Today the pipeline operates at less than one-third of the 2.1 million barrels per day that flowed soon after it was built.
The decrease in oil flow is accompanied by a drop in crude oil temperatures, which leads to corrosion. The lower temperatures also create the risk that the water mixed with crude oil may freeze in case the pipeline needs to be temporarily shut down. The PHMSA letter said, “the water itself is another corrosion hazard” which could damage all components of the pipeline including the instrumentation and valves.
Regulators listed 13 corrective measures they say are necessary, including the replacement of any piping that cannot be assessed properly, additional technology used to mitigate corrosion, and a cold restart plan that can be demonstrated to prove its effectiveness.
The order follows a January leak in the pipeline that released about 13,326 gallons of oil at the North Slope pump station.
A larger oil spill would be dire due to a diminished capacity to recover spilled oil in Alaskan waters.
In testimony given Friday to a House Transportation subcommittee hearing dealing with last year’s Gulf oil spill, retired Coast Guard Rear Adm. Thad Allen said the Coast Guard does not have enough working icebreakers to respond to a spill and that North Slope response and recovery infrastructure is likewise inadequate.
“The current condition of the Coast Guard icebreaker fleet should be of great concern to the senior leaders of this nation,” Adm. Allen testified. As incident commander in the Gulf spill, Allen was responsible for coordinating response operations between government and BP, the responsible party.
Alyeska Pipeline Service spokesperson Michelle Egan told the Associated Press Friday that the company believes “the pipeline is safe and … it’s a large, complex system that we manage within the risk.” Ms. Egan added that Alyeska is requesting a meeting with regulators and that “there are several [items in the letter] we disagree on and there are also several items in there that we have already begun.”
BP owns half of Alyeska Pipeline Service. The other half is largely split between ConocoPhillips and ExxonMobil.

Gulf oil spill: Greed didn't trump safety, says Deepwater Horizon panel

The presidential commission investigating the April 20 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico cited a misread test as one likely cause of the disaster.

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Chief counsel Fred Bartlit, of the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling, speaks with a panel of representatives from BP, Transocean, and Halliburton during the panel's public hearing in Washington on Nov. 8.

J. Scott Applewhite/AP

Crewmen and company officials overseeing the Deepwater Horizon oil drilling operation in April misinterpreted a critical "negative pressure" test on the well. They thought it was a success – it was actually a failure. If recognized, it would have revealed the imminent danger of a blowout, reported the chief investigator of the presidential commission looking into the disaster.
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The Deepwater Horizon oil rig burns off the southeast tip of Louisiana on April 21.

Gerald Herbert/AP/File

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The blowout of the Macondo well that killed 11 men and wreaked environmental havoc on the Gulf also hinged on the failure of the cementing of the well. That critical process was to have prevented gases from flowing up and around the drill well casing, said Fred Bartlit, chief counsel for the commission.

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But there is no evidence so far to suggest that there was a conscious decision to sacrifice safety to save money, he said. Instead, the preliminary conclusion on the cause of the disaster cites a litany of problems, including:

• The volatile gas that reached the surface and exploded flowed exclusively through a device at the bottom of the well called a "shoe track" and from there on "up through the casing."
• The cement injected into the well to block the passage of gas was potentially contaminated or displaced by other materials in the shoe track and failed to isolate the high-pressure oil and gas from coming up the well.
• Pre-job laboratory tests of the cement mixture should have prompted a redesign of the cement slurry, as was previously reported. Haliburton last week said investigators' methods used to reproduce the results of the company’s earlier cement tests produce inaccurate results.
• Later, cement evaluation tools might have been used to identify cementing failures, but most operators (including BP) would not have run tools at that time. Instead, they would have relied on a "negative pressure test" – the results of which were completely misinterpreted.

A negative pressure test is considered the last critical step before a drill rig places a final cement plug, pulls up its blowout preventer, and moves on. For that test, the drill crew first had to remove the downward pressure of heavy mud being exerted by the rig on the well. This had to be done to determine whether cement at the bottom of the well was holding back oil and gas – or whether it was being bypassed by those hydrocarbons. If gas was bypassing the cement, it could cause the well to "kick" – allowing a blast of explosive gas to rocket to the surface.
The crew repeatedly tested and consistently found that the well had 1,400 pounds per square inch pushing back up the well – when there should have been none. This showed oil and gas were bypassing the cement and pushing surfaceward. In the end, however, pressure readings from alternate lines and a debate over the results led the crew to consider the pressure reading from the well to be unreliable and the result of an inexplicable phenomenon dubbed the "bladder effect."
That effect was, however, something that nobody in the industry has come forward to confirm, the investigators said.
In the end, the negative pressure test results were deemed a success. Yet experts on all sides who reviewed data sent back to onshore facilities now say they clearly were not.

"Why would these men not have realized that this was a bad negative pressure test?" asked Sam Sankar, deputy chief counsel of the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling. "Nobody in industry or in government had set forth any procedures governing what the negative pressure test is, how to conduct it, or how to interpret it."
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The Deepwater Horizon oil rig burns off the southeast tip of Louisiana on April 21.

Gerald Herbert/AP/File

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After the negative pressure test “success,” BP took the next steps toward "temporary abandonment" – a process that investigators said introduced "additional risk." That was because the oil company chose to set the final concrete "temporary abandonment plug" of cement at 3,000 feet below the ocean floor – instead of 300 feet, as originally planned. That unusual step required removing a far larger amount of drilling mud from the well – the weight of which was holding down the well’s oil and gas. That reduced the pressure holding back the gas, a risk not anticipated because the negative pressure test had earlier been deemed a success.
Added to those factors was the high number of activities going on about the rig at the time of the critical test and afterward. For crewmen watching flow monitoring equipment, such distractions would have made subtle instrument readings and detection of a well "kick" – the unexpected emergence of volatile gas – more difficult, investigators said.
Even so, logs show that pressure in the well was rising, a sure sign that a kick was happening. If it had been observed, it would have allowed the rig crew to respond, investigators said.
Once the rig crew recognized the influx of gas, several options were open to them that might have prevented or delayed the explosion. They could have "shut in" the well by triggering the 400-ton blowout preventer (BOP) device sitting on the ocean floor. Or, they could have diverted the gas and drilling mud overboard, thereby preventing, delaying, or limiting the impact of the explosion, investigators found.
Charges that a failed BOP was at fault must await results of a forensic examination, said Mr. Bartlit.
He cast doubt on the idea that premeditated efforts to cut costs were a primary cause of the disaster.
"As we stand here today, and we've asked everybody, we don't see a man or two men or a group of men who are making one of these decisions and they had it in their minds if we do it this way, it will be safer, if do it this way it will be cheaper, we'll do it the cheap way instead of the safe way," Bartlit said. "We haven't seen that."
While acknowledging that the Deepwater Horizon's $1.5 million-a day-operating cost was "overhanging" the heads of those on the rig, Bartlit said the research showed "a complex matrix" for decisionmaking by crew that included efficiency. But at the same time, "they don't want their buddies to be killed or themselves," he said.
"I don't believe people sit there and say, 'This is dangerous, but the guys in London will make more money,' " Bartlit said. "We don't' see a concrete situation where human beings made a tradeoff of safety for dollars."

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Studies suggest MMS knew blowout preventers had 'critical' flaws

Government regulators have said that the failure of the Deepwater Horizon's blowout preventer April 20 was unforeseeable. But studies conducted for federal regulators in MMS or with their participation show that blowout preventers were known to have 'safety critical' vulnerabilities.

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Robot submarines vainly attempted to activate the shear rams on the Deepwater Horizon's blowout preventer on April 22 to close off the flow of oil from the Macondo well. Federal regulators from MMS set the standards for blowout preventers, but several studies suggest the agency took no action to tighten safety measures even when 'critical' vulnerabilities became apparent.

US Coast Guard/AP/file

The federal agency charged with setting safety standards for offshore oil exploration failed to act on at least four warnings about vulnerabilities in subsea blowout preventers, the critical safety device that failed to shut down the Gulf oil spill when the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded April 20.
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In this diagram of a blowout preventer, the hydraulic rams are the horizontal, piston-like protrusions. The rams are designed to cut and seal the pipe in an emergency, shutting off the flow of oil. They failed during the Deepwater Horizon blowout.

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Each of those four design flaws – detailed in three studies conducted for the US Minerals Management Service (MMS) during the past decade – threatened the ability of blowout preventers in deep water to function in an emergency.
Yet the flaws did not result in federal safety alerts or tougher standards for blowout preventer (BOP) manufacturers, say experts familiar with the MMS response to such findings.
RELATED: Before BP oil spill, Big Oil-led study urged feds to cut safety testing
With investigators still seeking to determine the cause of the Deepwater Horizon explosion, it remains unclear whether any of these vulnerabilities played a role in the failures that led to the Gulf oil spill. But MMS’s lack of action in spite of warnings about the flaws, three of which have not been previously reported, points to a long pattern of ignoring rather than fixing known safety threats, the experts say.
“Were BOPs designed to fail and did MMS know this? Yes, some of their key people knew,” says Robert Bea, an engineer at the University of California, Berkeley and one of the expert reviewers of President Obama’s 30-day offshore oil-exploration safety review. “Did BP know?” he adds. “Yes, some of their key people knew. Did the industry know? Yes, some of their key people knew.”
So what exactly did the MMS and industry officials know about the BOPs’ vulnerabilities and when? Government and industry officials have said the Deepwater Horizon disaster was unforeseeable – that BOPs were previously regarded as a virtually infallible “last line of defense” against a catastrophic blowout in deep water.
But a deeper look into three engineering studies from 2004, 2006, and 2009 commissioned by MMS – or done with MMS participation – tells a different story. The 2009 study, for instance, identifies 62 instances of BOP failures, four of which were deemed “safety critical.” The study was a joint industry-MMS venture and included the participation of at least four senior MMS officials. Each study sounded warnings about BOP vulnerabilities that, if heeded, could have given the agency years to fix them.
Officials at West Engineering Service, the consulting company and BOP specialist that conducted all three of the studies referenced in this article, did not return e-mails or phone calls. MMS officials, along with the Department of Interior, responded to e-mailed questions but refused requests for an interview.
“We are looking at everything, from what happened on the rig that night and the equipment that was being used, to the safety, testing, and backup procedures that are in place for that equipment,” Kendra Barkoff, Interior Department press secretary, wrote in an e-mail. “It’s also clear that we need a stronger oversight and enforcement agency to police the industry.”
The four design flaws highlighted by the three studies are as follows. The first three have not been previously reported.

No. 1: deep water pressure

In the fall of 2006, West Engineering Services of Brookshire, Texas, turned over to MMS officials a study on the effects of pressure on BOPs. Among its key findings: High deep-water pressure could severely damage the critical gaskets and seals on BOPs’ hydraulic ram valves, causing them to leak and fail in an emergency.
One type of hydraulic ram valve, called a shear ram, is designed to prevent a situation like the one in the Gulf. In the event of a catastrophic failure, the shear rams are supposed to stop the flow of oil by cutting and crumpling the pipe between them. The Deepwater Horizon’s shear rams failed, though it’s not yet clear why.

Many BOP gaskets (the Deepwater Horizon’s included) are designed to handle up to 15,000 pounds per square inch (psi) of internal pressure – the pressure of the oil and natural gas pressing outward on the BOP. But they are not mandated to handle external water pressure, which can equal more than 2,000 psi in deep water.
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In this diagram of a blowout preventer, the hydraulic rams are the horizontal, piston-like protrusions. The rams are designed to cut and seal the pipe in an emergency, shutting off the flow of oil. They failed during the Deepwater Horizon blowout.

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Moreover, stress on seals and gaskets could be exacerbated if the pressure inside the well drops dramatically, meaning pressure is higher outside than inside.
The study noted that neither the MMS nor the American Petroleum Institute (API) had any specific standards dictating how much external pressure the seals and gaskets must be able to withstand.
“The maximum allowable external pressure is never published and indeed may not even be known by the manufacturer,” the report said. “If differential pressure is applied to a component not designed to withstand it, there could be serious consequences for well control; the deeper the water the greater the risk....”
A BOP engineer active in the industry who asked not to be named corroborates the study’s findings: “It was gaskets and seals that were the challenge.”
The study recommended that the industry have an external-pressure test for closure mechanisms. That “would demonstrate a factor of safety in this critical area,” it said.
Some manufacturers have upgraded seals and gaskets voluntarily. “Manufacturers don’t sit around waiting for the MMS to write a spec,” says the BOP expert who requested anonymity. “If they waited for specs from MMS, they would still be waiting.”
But the lack of specific federal standards resulted in a lack of uniformity both in seal quality as well as their maintenance, say Dr. Bea and others.
Minerals Management Service officials said by e-mail that the agency’s safety research division did act on the 2006 report by sharing it with headquarters staff charged with writing regulations, with regional field staff who enforce the regulations, and with industry organizations. Technical papers were presented at conferences with the findings.
But almost four years after the study findings, there are no federal or industry external water pressure standards for BOP closure device seals and gaskets. “We have not updated our regulations related to these findings since the 2006 report,” an MMS official wrote in an e-mail.

No. 2: test ram vulnerability

Test rams are a relatively new innovation in the offshore oil and gas industry and are currently on only a few deep water drill rigs’ BOPs. They are designed to streamline costly and time-consuming hydraulic test procedures required under federal regulations. The Deepwater Horizon was one of the few rigs whose BOP had a test ram. One big problem: The devices don’t help in an emergency – and they may obscure emerging dangers.
That is precisely what happened in one of the “safety critical” failures recorded in the 2009 report. One of the BOPs studied experienced a critical failure when a leak developed at the wellhead connector, compromising its ability to maintain the correct pressure. “On rigs with test rams, the leak, regardless of size, would not have been identified,” the report noted.
The report strongly criticized test rams because they obscured leaks and took up space on a BOP that otherwise could have been used for a real ram.
Critics in Congress said the test ram retrofitted onto the Deepwater Horizon impaired the BOP’s redundancy and, therefore, reliability of the BOP.
The MMS responds that its “drilling engineers have allowed the use of test rams only after a very thorough review.”

No. 3: no safety alert

 

The 2009 study recommended a “safety alert” concerning the threat of failure of a BOP valve called an annular. Annular valves are like a large doughnut made of rubber and steel that can be mashed into the pipe to seal a well. The study recommended an alert that would derate – or lower – the estimate of how much pressure the annulars could handle when special large-bore drill pipe was being used.
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In this diagram of a blowout preventer, the hydraulic rams are the horizontal, piston-like protrusions. The rams are designed to cut and seal the pipe in an emergency, shutting off the flow of oil. They failed during the Deepwater Horizon blowout.

Newscom

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“Failures have occurred while using this drill pipe size with standard [annular] elements,” the study found.
No such alert was ever issued, the MMS confirmed in e-mailed comments. The 2009 study “is not an MMS study” and therefore its “proprietary” data never became part of the agency’s safety research program data, the MMS wrote.
But the study itself and the prospectus for it refer to a partnership between MMS and 17 oil companies and other industry groups. The study and other documents related to it also reference four senior MMS officials who participated in the report.

No. 4: failure to cut pipe

The 2004 study for MMS suggested that changes in industry practices made shear rams increasingly prone to failure in deep water, a finding first reported by The Wall Street Journal. Among the problematic changes: higher well-bore pressures and greater drill pipe thickness.
Only 3 of 14 newer deep-water drilling rigs were found able to shear pipe at their maximum rated water depths, the study found. Not only that, only half of those rigs' operators required a shear-ram test during commissioning or acceptance. “This grim snapshot illustrates the lack of preparedness in the industry to shear and seal a well with the last line of defense against a blowout,” the study said.
Moreover, the industry was increasingly compounding the problem by using thicker, harder-to-cut pipes in deeper water. The shear rams could also fail if a thicker “tool joint” in the drilling pipe was between the rams when a disaster stuck.
In an e-mail, MMS writes that it did have a 2003 regulatory requirement that required rig operators to file data that show shear rams “are capable of shearing the drill pipe in the hole under maximum anticipated surface pressures.”
But even after the more comprehensive 2004 study, the MMS did not issue safety alerts or require specific new requirements for shear ram design to ensure they were powerful enough to cut the thickest pipe.

Oversight questions

All this raises the question: How tough should federal regulators be?
During the past decade, MMS’s approach has been to set a performance goal but not to dictate any specific requirements or regulatory standards.
But the president’s 30-day safety review of offshore drilling offers a laundry list of measures that will likely lead to tougher requirements, experts say.
At a New Orleans hearing last month, Michael Saucier, MMS field-operations supervisor in the Gulf, testified to federal investigators that the agency did not ensure that BP had proof that shear rams on Deepwater Horizon would work. But the agency had “highly encouraged” companies to have backup systems to trigger blowout preventers in an emergency, he said.
“Highly encourage?” US Coast Guard Capt. Hung Nguyen, asked. “How does that translate to enforcement?”
“There is no enforcement,” Mr. Saucier answered.
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BP oil spill: an accounting of its impacts after 39 days

Corporate behavior, drilling methods, regulators’ roles, and the search for oil alternatives all are reexamined in the wake of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

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Workers cleaned a beach of oil residue in Grand Isle, La., on Thursday, more than a month after the BP oil spill began.

Jae C. Hong/AP

Details about shortcuts ahead of the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig – and subsequent obfuscation by oil giant BP – have awakened Americans and their government to the tight relationship between oil explorers and regulators. The disaster has also made more clear the risks of drilling deeper and deeper in the quest for oil.
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Already, the spill is changing the nature of deep-water exploration.
“Problems that emerge when you’re 5,000 feet under water, that’s going to be a fact of life moving forward,” says Mark Zupan, an energy expert at the University of Rochester in New York.
As the spill in the Gulf of Mexico has overtaken the 1989 Exxon Valdez accident as the worst oil spill in US history, BP faces the greatest fallout. University of California researcher Robert Bea has put 90 percent of the blame for the disaster on the company.
While BP quickly accepted responsibility, the Obama administration has had to push BP toward transparency. On May 26, Rep. Edward Markey (D) of Massachusetts revealed an internal BP document that showed the company low-balled its public estimates of the spill’s size. Instead of 5,000 barrels a day, the flow has been between 12,000 and 19,000 barrels a day, according to a US Geological Survey report this week. Also, the White House had to lean on BP to continue the live feed of its undersea work as it prepared to try a “top kill” maneuver to stop the oil flow.
Laying bare such corporate instincts helped spark the decision by President Obama to extend a moratorium on new offshore drilling to six months. And it may have played a role in shelving, for now, Shell’s plans to drill in the Arctic Ocean off Alaska this summer.
In addition, the spill has moved the White House to move urgently to reform and even break up the 1,700-employee Minerals Management Service, years after reports surfaced about glad-handing among regulators and industry. The agency, critics say, has too often served as a handmaiden to Big Oil.
The spill has taken a political toll, but it also offers the Obama administration an opportunity to push a campaign promise: a more diverse energy grid. “This incident underscores that we do need to move to a new energy frontier,” Interior Secretary Ken Salazar testified before Congress May 26.
But even as Americans assess for themselves the fallout from the spill, geopolitical realities and growing resistance in the developing world to exploration are likely to keep the focus of US energy independence on the Outer Continental Shelf. There, high-tech rigs like the Deepwater Horizon poke and prod at the earth to yield up its diminishing stores.
"We can hate this spill all we want, but the world is going to continue to rely on oil until all the oil is gone,” says Robert Bryce, author of “Power Hungry.”
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Gulf oil spill: Did Big Oil run roughshod over regulators?

Why didn't the US Minerals Management Service require that Big Oil install secondary blowout preventers on oil rigs, as other countries have? Congress is investigating this and other issues.

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Gulf oil spill: Dave Nagel, executive vice president of BP America, leaves a closed-door meeting called by House Energy and the Environment subcommittee Chairman Rep. Ed Markey (D) of Massachusetts Tuesday. Markey says, 'Boosterism breeds complacency and complacency breeds disaster.'

J. Scott Applewhite/AP

After the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion turned into the potential ecological and economic nightmare now known as the BP spill, the Obama administration vowed to keep "the boot on the neck" of the British oil giant, which leased the rig and managed the drilling operation.
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But even as Congress considers challenging the constitutional restraints against ex post facto laws in order to raise the $75 million damage cap for oil spill disasters, evidence is mounting that, despite myriad warnings of deepwater drilling risks, US regulators, in the run-up to the BP spill, hardly kept the boot on the necks of Big Oil companies working the depths along the US continental shelf.
Quite the opposite, in many cases.
IN PICTURES: Louisiana oil spill and Destructive oil spills
Alleged regulatory shortfalls are now under investigation by the House Energy and Commerce Committee and the Committee on Natural Resources, which will focus both on the adequacy of BP's risk assessment as well as regulators' role, or culpability, in the disaster.
At the same time, it's not only BP and federal regulators who are forced to confront the regulations and inspection regime for rigs like the Deepwater Horizon. Potential regulatory misfires and BP's low-ball estimates of the risks of drilling at record depths also reflect a societal acceptance of the risks of drilling – an assessment that's now very much in play as BP and Washington fight to limit damages to wildlife and the Gulf Coast's economy.

Big Oil's pushback against regulation

"I'm of the opinion that boosterism breeds complacency and complacency breeds disaster," Rep. Edward Markey (D) of Massachusetts told The New York Times on Tuesday. "That, in my opinion, is what happened."
Last year, the Interior Department exempted BP from a detailed environmental analysis of its Gulf of Mexico operations, even as BP in early April stepped up efforts to lobby for more such "categorical exemptions" from federal law.
Official documents show that pushback from the oil industry resulted in easing of requirements for new technologies to prevent the kind of blowout that led to the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion and ensuing leak of at least 5,000 barrels of oil a day, and possibly much more, into the Gulf of Mexico. Pushback from BP and others against installing a new kind of acoustic blowout preventer succeeded. The Minerals Management Service declined to make them mandatory, as other oil-producing nations have.
Moreover, a safety document from the Minerals Management Service 10 years ago raised the alarm about the potential for catastrophic spills, which could be alleviated by requiring backup and secondary blowout preventers for deepwater drilling. But the MMS didn't require any such system, leaving it to oil companies to decide what was best.

Scandal at the MMS

How MMS regulates the oil industry came under intense scrutiny in 2008 by then Interior Inspector General Earl Devaney, who released a blistering account of MMS employees engaging in illegal moonlighting, drug use, and even sex with oil company representatives in a scandal over royalty payments by Big Oil.
When one female agency employee – one of the "MMS chicks," as some Shell employees knew them – insisted that romantic liaisons with a Shell employee shouldn't require that she recuse herself from dealing with the company, Mr. Devaney shot back, "Sexual relationships with prohibited sources cannot, by definition, be arms-length."

In a call for an investigation into potential regulatory laxness or missteps by MMS and the Interior Department, Sen. Bill Nelson (D) of Florida wrote this week to Interior's Acting Inspector General Mary Kendall: "I ask that you determine in your investigation the extent to which the oil and natural gas industry exercised influence in the agency's rulemaking process."
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That request is made even more dramatic by the fact that BP, which has recently championed a "green" campaign, has one of Big Oil's worst US safety records. It had to pay record fines for the 2005 Texas City Refinery accident, and investigators found the company had taken shortcuts that led to a major pipeline leak in Alaska that same year. Last week, the White House canceled an event where BP was scheduled to be given a government safety award.
The company's worst-case scenario for a spill at the Deepwater Horizon site, as reported to MMS, predicted it would take 10 days to cap the well. Experts say it may now take three months.
Oil historian Tyler Priest at the University of Houston urges Americans to wait for the investigation to be resolved before placing blame on regulators. "What I do know is that the offshore regulatory program is a very good one at the MMS, and the people who work in that part of the agency are highly dedicated and competent," Mr. Priest told CNN.
Yet the problem may lie deeper than exemptions for BP and other oil companies, or even safety issues specific to the Deepwater Horizon rig itself.

Fox guarding the hen house

Because regulators need knowledge that only industries have, "the tendency is to kind of create a situation where the fox is guarding the hen house," says Duane Gill, a sociologist at Oklahoma State University and an expert on the impacts of oil spills. "Industry has a tremendous advantage as well as a tremendous amount of financial and political capital that they use to influence the regulatory process. The government has to try to balance the needs and desires of industry with those of the public, but the public can't bring the same kind of political and economic capital to bear."
Big Oil's money goes to the very top. President Obama was the top recipient of BP campaign contributions over the past 20 years, according to Politico. The White House counters that Mr. Obama did not take any PAC money during his 2008 presidential campaign and has pushed, more than any other president, for clean energy alternatives to oil. Obama is hardly alone, though. Some $2.89 million flowed into political candidacies over that same period from BP-related political action committees (PACs).
"Make no mistake: BP ranks among the most powerful corporate forces in US politics,” Dave Levinthal, spokesman for the Center for Responsive Politics, tells Politico.
Central to the BP spill aftermath is how fully future regulators rely on industry risk assessment for the new drilling depths that are now at the vanguard of exploration, says Mr. Gill.
"Where do you get your information as to potential risks? Industry has the inside information on that," he says. "We trust industry to do it right, but we should be smarter than that. Yes, we're addicted to oil, so, yeah, we're all complicit in this. But it's not quite the same complicity as the oil companies."

Obama to sever ties between drilling cops and Big Oil

As oil continues to spew into the Gulf of Mexico, the Obama administration moves to break up the agency tasked with both collecting royalties and policing Big Oil.

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Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announces that the Obama administration is splitting up the Interior Department agency that oversees offshore drilling in Washington on Tuesday.

J. Scott Applewhite/AP

Atlanta

Working hard to contain the political as well as the ecological damage of the Deepwater Horizon spill, the Obama administration on Tuesday vowed to shake up the Interior Department agency responsible for policing Big Oil's deepwater drilling operations along America's continental shelf.
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As a number of Congressional probes into the April 20 Deepwater Horizon accident in the Gulf of Mexico got underway Tuesday, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced a proposal to split the Minerals Management Service (MMS) in half, separating its policing function from its royalty-collection arm. Critics say there's always been a conflict of interest in having the same agency that collects $13 billion in royalties a year be responsible for inspecting rigs, enforcing safety rules, and probing skullduggery.
IN PICTURES: Destructive oil spills
"I think what is driving a lot of moves toward tighter regulations is our trust has been violated, and when trust is breached or lost, it's hard to get it back," says Duane Gill, an oil spill disaster expert at Oklahoma State University.
Three global corporations – BP, the explorer; Transocean, the driller; and Halliburton, the concrete contractor – have begun pointing fingers at each other as lawsuits pile up and congressional investigations into the cause of the Deepwater Horizon accident get underway.
What is known is that a methane bubble burst up through the 23,000-foot pipe, creating a geyser of gas that spread across the rig and finally ignited. Hydraulic shears inside a five-story-tall blowout preventer where the drill pipe exits the earth's crust are supposed to sever and plug the pipe in the case of a blowout. They didn't.
Eleven people lost their lives in the explosion, and the crumpled "riser" pipe a mile from the Gulf's surface is now spewing at least 5,000 barrels a day of oil into the Gulf, with a total of at least 4 million gallons already escaped.
But while BP is bearing the brunt of blame, MMS, which is populated largely by former industry executives, has been criticized for failing to react to studies that showed problems with the blow-out preventers, refusing to mandate back-up systems, and downplaying the extent of other accidents in the Gulf. At issue in Tuesday's US Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing is safety testing of the shear. One former regulator testified that MMS needs more data on shear ram performance, but insisted all such rams were tested and certified every two weeks.
"Why is it that the testing always seems to pass and yet when it was needed it failed?" Sen. Robert Menendez (D) of New Jersey asked.

A long-term investigation led by Rep. Darrell Issa (R) of California into MMS has uncovered abuses dating back to the Clinton administration and which continued through the Bush and Obama White Houses. And Sen. Ben Nelson raised eyebrows this week when he brought up a series of 2008 revelations about sex and "pot parties" among MMS regulators and industry executives. Moreover, MMS collects $13 billion in lease royalties a year while amassing an increasingly spotty record on policing Big Oil on safety issues.
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"While there are many outstanding questions surrounding what went wrong and what should have been done to avoid this disaster," Mr. Issa said Tuesday, "what we know for sure is that MMS is in need of a surgical overhaul and that a quick-fix, band-aid approach is wholly inadequate and will only serve to preserve a broken bureaucracy at the expense of the American people and their safety."
The Obama administration has fought back against comparisons of the Deepwater Horizon response to the hurricane Katrina disaster, where complacency that spanned local, state, and federal agencies combined to take a heavy human and political toll. But while Rep. Ed Markey (D) of Massachusetts on Tuesday pointed at lax regulation by the Bush administration, which had heavy ties to oil, it's also true that President Obama is the largest recipient of political donations from BP-associated PACs over the past 20 years.
And though the Obama administration has halted all new exploratory drilling in the Gulf, MMS has approved 26 environmental review exemptions for proposed drilling sites since the April 20 accident.
As part of the Obama administration's response to the Deepwater Horizon accident, Salazar said Tuesday he will seek an additional $29 million from Congress for stepped-up rig inspections and enforcement,
“The tragedy aboard the Deepwater Horizon and the massive spill for which BP is responsible has made the importance and urgency of our reform agenda even clearer,” Salazar said Tuesday in Washington.