For example, no high-resolution map of the seafloor existed, information that would have helped scientists understand where the bottom-dwelling creatures of the Gulf might be affected. After several failed efforts to contain th… âSince Deepwater Horizon, weâve taken two steps forward and one step back, and that one step back is worrying because we could very much end up in a similar situation,â says Lee Ashley. Terry Garcia, former deputy administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and a member of a major safety commission convened after the Deepwater Horizon disaster, worries that the safety changes in the years after the disaster didnât extend broadly enough, either.
âSo basically weâre back to where we were in 2010, in terms of regulatory environment.â. (Read about how pelican habitat on the Louisiana coast is being restored after the spill). Most notably, in 2019 the Trump administration finalized rollbacks of several components of the 2016 rules, including the independent safety certification for blowout protectors and bi-weekly testing. Later this summer, his team will conduct the second phase of the experiment, when they will apply dispersants to the oil as it shoots into the tank to observe the effects on droplet formation and trajectory.
Many lapses in safety had contributed to the disaster, many of which traced back to a culture both within BP and the industry more broadly that did not value safety enough. About 17 percent of the U.S.âs total crude oil production comes from offshore projects in the Gulf. "Rather than limiting ourselves to a forensic investigation of the Deepwater Horizon release, we are using that spill to explore spill scenarios more generally," Boufadel said. Pipelinesâ26,000 miles of themâconnect wells to the processing infrastructure that lines the coast. 4 million barrels of oil flowed from the damaged Macondo well over an 87-day period, before it was finally capped on July 15, 2010. In conjunction with studies that used drifters, boats, drones, and other techniques, scientists have deepened their understanding of the Gulfâs restless movements. Forgot BSEE announced a new set of safety rules for offshore operations in 2016. (Read about how the effects of the spill are still reverberating in dolphins).
Knowledge of the deep ocean is in general far murkier, and at the time of the accident, BP's drilling operation was the deepest in the world. âEven in times of low prices like today, offshore just keeps going on,â says Gregory Upton, Jr., an energy economist at Louisiana State University. "These experiments are the largest ever conducted by a university in terms of the volume of oil released and the scale," he noted.
"Our goal is not to prepare for the previous spill, but to broaden the horizons to explore various scenarios.".
Researchers at Texas A&M in turn created a model to study the movement of pollutants away from the wellhead. Led by Michel Boufadel, director of NJIT's Center for Natural Resources (CNR), the initial phase of the experiment involved releasing several thousand gallons of oil from a one-inch pipe dragged along the bottom of the tank in order to reproduce ocean current conditions. The final tally showed that the spill dumped more than 200 million gallons of oil. "These predictions depend on local weather conditions that can vary from day to day.
Boufadel and Lin Zhao, a postdoctoral researcher in the CNR, developed a model that predicted the size of droplets and gas bubbles emanating from the wellhead during the sub-surface blowout; they then factored in water pressure, temperature and oil properties into the model, and employed it to analyze the effects of the injected dispersants on this stream. Driven by the disaster, federal scientists produced a map in 2016. âIt was crucial to be able to detect and predict where the oil would go,â says Oscar Garcia Pineda, a satellite expert. âWorking on the ultra-deep stuff is pretty much like working in outer space,â say Mark Davis, a water law expert at Tulane University. âWe underestimated so many of the impacts when we were first looking.â Only after a decade of sustained observation, she says, have the true impacts of the spill started to become clear. "Among other tests of our model, we studied the hydrodynamics of various plumes of oil jetting into different wave tanks," Zhao noted. Before plummeting demand from the coronavirus pandemic drove already-low oil prices lower, the Gulf of Mexico was producing as much crude oil as it had in years. A severely oiled brown pelican is rescued in Queen Bess Island, Louisiana, after the oil spill. All rights reserved. Today, more than 50 percent of Gulf oil production comes from ultra-deep wells drilled in 4,500 feet or more of water, compared with about 4,000 feet for Deepwater Horizon. Among those rules was one that required blowout protectorsâthe piece that had failed at Deepwater Horizonâto be inspected by a third party, rather than self-certified by the drilling companies. Smoke rises from surface oil being burned by cleanup crews in the Gulf of Mexico after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in April 2010.
After the spill, BP agreed to pay out more than $20 billion in penalties and damages, with around $13 billion directed toward restoration and a vast research effort in the region. But that focus on the future didnât happen for oil rigs, and the next disaster is unlikely to look exactly like Deepwater.
Study by New Jersey Institute of Technology, M. Mitchell Waldrop. âThis is a marathon, not a sprint.â. Over the next three months, the uncapped well leaked more than 300 Olympic-sized swimming pools of oil into the Gulfâs waters, making it the biggest oil spill in United States history.
The emergency valve designed to cap the well in case of an accident, the âblowout protector,â failed, and the gas reached the drill rig, triggering an explosion that killed 11 crewmembers. Boats used absorbent booms to corral the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
Louisiana, which has the most comprehensive climate adaptation plan in the region, is expecting the number and intensity of major hurricanes to increase within the next 50 years.
As a crew on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig worked to close up an exploratory oil well deep under the Gulf of Mexico, a pulse of gas shot up, buckling the drill pipe. Clicking subscribe confirms your acceptance of our, Connecting The International Science Community, BP's drilling operation was the deepest in the world. U.S. Coast Guard fire boats crews battle the blazing remnants of the offshore oil rig Deepwater Horizon …
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