Site 23051: Still Lots of Oil, Still Lots of Underreporting

For those of you keeping track, in April the NRC received 27 reports over the course of 30 days for the site of Platform 23051 in the Gulf of Mexico off the Mississippi Delta. This is the site where Taylor Energy had 26 wells destroyed by Hurricane Ivan back in 2004. According to the NRC and our SkyTruth Alerts site for the month of April, Taylor reported 105.74 gallons total were coming from these leaking wells. That's 3.92 gallons per day. But according to our SkyTruth calculations of the size and sheen of these reports, assuming a minimum average thickness of 1/1000th of a millimeter, we estimate that 7639.92 gallons were leaked during the month of April. That's 282.96 gallons per day. Our SkyTruth Site 23051 Chronology page is where we keep track daily of all NRC reports that are taken for this site, and you can see that page and more on our SkyTruth Oil Spill Reports site.

SkyTruth Alert received on 5/11 for the NRC report received on 5/10 for a leak at Site 23051.

Can Carbon Nanotubule Sponges Soak Up The Next Oil Spill?

We've been carping on this site about the lack of progress in cleaning up an oil spill in the water.  The oil industry has been relying on pretty much the same techniques -- booms to corral the oil, mechanical skimmers to pick it up off the water, intentional burning of the thickest oil, and chemical dispersants to break it up and sink it -- that have been used for decades, with little success and little improvement.

But we're excited by the recent announcement of what could be a new tool to strengthen our weak cleanup arsenal: researchers have invented small sponges made of carbon nanotubules, a material that shuns water and attracts oil.  They claim these sponges can be squeezed out and re-used multiple times, or incinerated to generate electricity. 


We don't know how much it costs to produce this material.  But we can envision an oil-spill response scenario where air tankers drop loads of these sponges into the thickest parts of the slick.  After a few hours or days of soaking up oil, skimmer vessels towing magnetic booms collect the sponges and scoop them up.  The sponges could be processed at sea to squeeze the oil out with a press or centrifuge, then redeployed to soak up another load. 

These sponges might work on slicks too thin to effectively skim or burn, or in high sea-state conditions that usually bring cleanup operations to a grinding halt. This is all just speculation until we can see this new material in action.  We look forward to learning more about it. 

Mining in Alaska - New Interactive Map

The folks at Ground Truth Trekking just released a nifty interactive map called Alaskan Hardrock Mining Exploration, showing the locations of active hardrock mines and hardrock mining prospects in Alaska.

Until we saw this map we had no idea there was so much potential mining activity across the state. You can read a lot more about that on GTT's Alaska Metals Mining site.

Like our SkyTruth Alerts map, you can zoom in to a specific place and sign up to get an email when new hardrock mining activity pops up in that area of interest:

Tanker Collides With Drill Rig Off Corpus Christi, Texas

The FR8 Pride, a Panamax tanker that carries petroleum products, lost power this morning and drifted into a mobile offshore drilling unit - a large jackup drill rig called the Rowan EXL I.  The rig was not drilling at the time; it was damaged and has been stabilized.  The tanker sustained flooding in a bow compartment and grounded itself; it is carrying a load of fuel oil.  No oil spill has been reported.  View a video of the collision and aftermath.

BP Oil Spill 2 Years Later: For Dauphin Island, Cure Worse Than Disease?

There's been plenty of ink the past couple of weeks about the lingering impacts of the BP / Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.  Two years ago here at SkyTruth we were just beginning to raise the alarm that the spill was actually much larger than we were being told by BP and government officials, and that the nation's previous worst oil spill -- the Exxon Valdez disaster -- had already been surpassed.  Months of agony and economic loss followed for folks in the Gulf region and beyond. Recovery has come in fits and starts, with mixed news for offshore drilling and tourism (generally up), and for fishing and the environment (generally down).

We recently learned about another long-term casualty of the oil spill: Dauphin Island, Alabama, a beautiful stretch of barrier island at the mouth of Mobile Bay. In this case most of the damage was done not by the oil spill itself, but by a panicky and ill-conceived response effort during the spill ("we had to destroy this village, in order to save it").  Large quantities of sand were excavated from a series of pits on the Mississippi Sound side of the island to build a berm along the Gulf side, a move designed to keep oil from washing up over the beach in case of a storm:

Sand berm being piled up along Gulf side of Dauphin Island during 2010 BP / Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Photo courtesy The Washington Post.

The berm was never needed. Possibly it would have helped if a hurricane came along during the spill, but it's not clear such a flimsy barrier would survive long under those conditions.  What has become apparent is how rapidly and dramatically this action is altering Dauphin Island.  22 pits were dug into the Sound side of the island to excavate the necessary sand. These pits quickly became ponds of standing water. The ponds are steadily eroding and growing to the point where some are now open to the sea, and subject to further erosion by waves and tide. Satellite imagery and aerial survey clearly show how this has progressed, threatening properties on this developed part of the island:

West end of Dauphin Island in May 2010.  Excavation of sand to build a berm along south (Gulf) side of island is underway; sand is being removed from pits on the north (Sound) side. One pit has already filled with water (dark rectilinear shape at right center).

Same area in January 2012. Sand-excavation pits are now ponds filed with water; some have eroded to the point that they are open to the Sound.  One coastal engineering scientist thinks the eroding sand-excavation ponds are now a weak spot in Dauphin Island that could become the next breach when a major storm hits.

This area full of houses now looks strikingly similar to how an undeveloped stretch of the island a few miles to the west appeared before it was breached by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.  Called the Katrina Cut, the mile-long breach had grown to nearly 1.4 miles wide by June 2010, when the Army Corps of Engineers began piling up a barrier of rock and sand to close off the gap and block BP's spilled oil from entering the Sound.  This barrier ended up costing $17 million, and didn't fully close the Cut until January 2011 -- four months after BP's runaway Macondo well had been plugged, and just five months before the whole danged thing was supposed to be removed, according to the original construction permit.  The State of Alabama is asking for permission to keep the structure in place, although one scientist thinks that's not a good idea.  

What's more, the sand berm was apparently piled on top of water and sewer lines servicing the island, causing potential problems and additional expense for future maintenance work.  In this case, it looks like the actions taken to minimize damage from the oil spill might actually cause worse impacts down the road.  Will we be making the same dubious decisions when the next major oil spill comes around?

View a slideshow of our time-series images of Dauphin Island, or check them out one at a time in our Flickr image gallery. 

In Florida, old fires out, new fires burning

In this MODIS/Aqua image taken yesterday, you can see a wildfire burning northwest of Carrabelle, Florida. This fire has to be burning extremely hot for it to be visible in this band 7-2-1 infrared composite.

MODIS/Aqua 721 satellite image - April 25, 2012

In the MODIS/Terra true color image from the same day, you can clearly see the smoke plume blowing to the northeast from the fire.

MODIS/Terra true color satellite image - April 25, 2012

No sign of smoke in today's MODIS/Terra image of the area, so it looks like this fire has been extinguished.  In this cool graphic from Active Fire Mapping, you can see where this fire was located, along with many other fires burning. You can also see the location of last week's County Line fire.

Image courtesy of Active Fire Mapping

And as follow-up to the Florida wildfires we blogged about last week, in the MODIS/Aqua 721 image below you can see the scorched earth left from the County Line fire which burned over 36,000 acres of forest. Read more about last week's fire on NASA's Earth Observatory site.

Modis/Aqua satellite image - April 25, 2012

And the under-reporting continues...

On 4/20, SkyTruth Alerts received a report from the NRC that was apparently submitted by Taylor Energy. They reported a spill of 4.72 gallons, with a slick 400 feet by 6.2 miles. Our SkyTruth calculations assuming a minimum average thickness of 1/1000th of a millimeter suggest that this slick held closer to 321 gallons. And the MODIS satellite image for that day shows a slick coming from that location that measured not 6.2 miles long but just over 19 miles long:

MODIS/Terra image - April 20, 2012

April 20 MODIS/Terra image with slick measurement

On 4/25 the SkyTruth Alerts received another report from the NRC apparently submitted by Taylor Energy. This time the reported spill amount was listed as 5.64 gallons, with a slick of 500 feet by 4.8 miles. Our SkyTruth calculations suggest that this slick holds about 311 gallons. And in that MODIS image, the slick appears to be 19.04 miles long:

MODIS/Terra image - April 25, 2012

April 25 MODIS/Terra image with slick measurement

The report from the 25th was taken at 9:00 a.m. and the MODIS image that shows the slick was taken about 2 hours later.  We don't think it's likely that the slick could have grown from 4.8 miles long to over 19 miles long between the time the report was called in and the time the image was taken.  It's possible that under the right conditions satellite imagery is a better tool for detecting and measuring the full extent of a slick than direct observation from aircraft or on the water.