Update on Tweety Matthews’ solution to clean up BP Gulf oil spill

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

I ran across an article that has some background on the "supertaker solution" That Chris "Tweety" Matthews harped about all last week on Hardball. Could Cleanup Fix for Gulf Oil Spill Lie in Secret Saudi Disaster? – AOL News:

[O]ne veteran of a massive (and secret) crude spill in the Persian Gulf says he has a tried-and-true solution.

Now if only the people who could make it happen would return his calls.

"No one's listening," says Nick Pozzi, who was an engineer with Saudi Aramco in the Middle East when he says an accident there in 1993 generated a spill far larger than anything the United States has ever seen.

According to Pozzi, that mishap, kept under wraps for close to two decades and first reported by Esquire, dumped nearly 800 million gallons of oil into the Persian Gulf, which would make it more than 70 times the size of the Exxon Valdez spill.

But remarkably, by employing a fleet of empty supertankers to suck crude off the water's surface, Pozzi's team was not only able to clean up the spill, but also salvage 85 percent of the oil, he says.

"We took [the oil] out of the water so it would save the environment off the Arabian Gulf, and then we put it into tanks until we could figure out how to clean it," he told AOL News.

* * *

AOL News could not independently verify Pozzi's account, but one former Aramco employee did acknowledge that there was a large spill in the region in the early '90s, and that Aramco had used tankers to clean up earlier oil slicks.

* * *

The 1993 Persian Gulf spill, Pozzi says, began when Aramco was loading a tanker and "the umbilical cord got away." Oil started spewing from the pumps. Panicked, a line of tankers waiting to be filled began hightailing away from the flammable spray. Massive ships maneuvered in tight quarters. It was chaos.

Because of a confidentiality agreement with Aramco, Pozzi won't describe exactly what happened next, except to say that "there were [then] other mishaps causing other oil to spill."

"The order of magnitude rose exponentially due to the panic level," he says.

The tankers worked for the next six months skimming oil off the water's surface and pumping it into tanks for cleaning. Cleanup efforts went on for several years after that. Still, that such an enormous slick could be successfully cleaned ought to point the way this time around, Pozzi says.

There are substantial differences between the two spills. The 1993 spill involved sweet Arabian crude, not deep-water Gulf oil (not all oil is the same). The 1993 spill also involved a finite amount of oil. The BP spill is ongoing and difficult to estimate both the amount and how long it may continue to spill.

The 1993 spill was on the surface of the water. The BP spill is creating massive deep-water plumes of oil in temperate zones and within the strong currents of the Gulf. Washington's Blog summarizes:

The New York Times reported on May 15th:

Scientists are finding enormous oil plumes in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, including one as large as 10 miles long, 3 miles wide and 300 feet thick in spots. The discovery is fresh evidence that the leak from the broken undersea well could be substantially worse than estimates that the government and BP have given.

“There’s a shocking amount of oil in the deep water, relative to what you see in the surface water,” said Samantha Joye, a researcher at the University of Georgia who is involved in one of the first scientific missions to gather details about what is happening in the gulf. “There’s a tremendous amount of oil in multiple layers, three or four or five layers deep in the water column.”

The plumes are depleting the oxygen dissolved in the gulf, worrying scientists, who fear that the oxygen level could eventually fall so low as to kill off much of the sea life near the plumes.

AP reported on May 27th that scientists had found a second giant plume deep under the water. The plume is 22 miles long and 6 miles wide.

Today, the Washington Post is reporting that a third giant underwater plume has been discovered:

A Louisiana scientist said his crew had located another vast plume of oily globs, miles in the opposite direction.

James H. Cowan Jr., a professor at Louisiana State University, said his crew on Wednesday found a plume of oil in a section of the gulf 75 miles west of the source of the leak.

* * *

Cowan said that the submarine traveled about 400 feet down, close to the sea floor, and found oil all the way down. Trying to find the edges of the plume, he said the submarine traveled miles from side to side.

"We really never found either end of it," he said. He said he did not know how wide the plume actually was, or how far it stretched away to the west.

This discovery seems to confirm the fears of some scientists that — because of the depth of the leak and the heavy use of chemical "dispersants" — this spill was behaving differently than others. Instead of floating on top of the water, it may be moving beneath it.

The Persian Gulf is a far smaller body of water than the Gulf of Mexico, relatively shallow, and surrounded by land masses on all sides. There are "choke-points" to contain a spill. The Gulf of Mexico is a deep, open body of water that connects to the Atlantic Ocean and plays an integral role in Atlantic Ocean currents. The massive oil plumes, once in the strong currents, may affect the Atlantic Ocean and particularly the east coast of the U.S.

While there may be some limited viability for oil skimming operations, this is not the "silver bullet" to cleaning up the Gulf as irresponsible journalists (sic) like Tweety Matthews like to portray it. There are simply not any easy answers, which journalists prefer, to cleaning up this environmental disaster.