This Oil Spill Has Been Leaking Into The Gulf For 14 Years

[thackney]

This Oil Spill Has Been Leaking Into The Gulf For 14 Years
https://www.npr.org/2019/04/10/711085901/this-oil-spill-has-been-leaking-into-the-gulf-for-14-years
April 10, 2019

...The spill began in 2004, when Hurricane Ivan toppled an oil rig into the Gulf. The rig was owned by Taylor Energy, a New Orleans-based company, which managed to plug some of the 25 broken pipes, but the leak continued....

...The government is studying the impact on marine life, but even they can't figure out exactly how much oil is leaking. Neither can the company.

Henderson has been trying to monitor it himself by doing regular flyovers and reporting what he sees. He's frustrated at the government's response. "If we can put a man on the moon, we can figure out how to, like, grab oil that's coming up from the seafloor and 400 feet of water," he says.

The Department of the Interior and the Coast Guard have been working with the company to try to stop the leak for years, but it poses a major engineering challenge. The wells were buried under hundreds of feet of mud in an underwater mudslide, which are common in the area, where the mouth of the Mississippi has built up hundreds of feet of silt on the bottom of the ocean floor.

"This is a well-known, high-risk area," says Ed Richards, a law professor at Louisiana State University. He says it raises questions about offshore development. "Should they have built the rig the way they built it? Should it have been permitted that way?"

Taylor Energy has spent about $500 million to try to stop the spill, and it's paying for pilots to fly over and monitor it. The company has reported less than a barrel of oil a day on the surface, but estimates vary widely.

Ian MacDonald visits the site of the Taylor Energy oil spill regularly. He's helping measure the size of the spill for the government. He estimates that about 100 barrels of oil are spilling into the Gulf each day, what he calls a sobering finding, "and neither the government nor the responsible parties have been able to stop it, or even acknowledge that it really existed until now."...

[thackney]

Coast Guard orders cleanup of massive 14-year oil spill in Gulf of Mexico
https://www.washingtonpost.com/energy-environment/2018/11/20/coast-guard-orders-cleanup-massive-year-oil-spill-gulf-mexico
November 20, 2018

...The Taylor spill was hidden for years as the company and the Coast Guard declined to inform the public that it existed. Environmental groups that monitor the gulf were unaware that the broken wells were leaking for six years — until the catastrophic BP Deepwater oil spill in April 2010.

While monitoring that spill, both the Gulf Restoration Network, a conservation group, and SkyTruth, a nonprofit organization that uses satellite images to monitor spills, stumbled upon oil slicks that were unrelated to the Deepwater Horizon site.

“It was there all the time, longer than the BP spill,” said John Amos, founder and president of SkyTruth.

The two groups traced the spill to Taylor Energy’s platform and called the Coast Guard. A group of conservationists eventually took Taylor Energy to court, arguing that its agreement with the federal government to clean the site without the public’s knowledge amounted to a secret deal “that was inconsistent with national policy,” which calls for citizen input under the Clean Water Act.

[IsailedawayfromFR]

Most oil leaks across the earth are natural leaks.

Rather than continually attempting to control this one, perhaps this 'scientist' can perform a cost/benefit analysis prior to doing anything further.

[thackney]

https://www2.southeastern.edu/orgs/oilspill/spill.html