1 July - Article Excerpts | Methane Release From the Gulf Spill

Methane Release From the Gulf Oil Spill: What Does It Mean? How Bad Could It Get?

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/methane-release-gulf-oil-spill-what-does-it-mean-how-bad-could-it-get

Tremendous quantities of methane are being emitted by the Gulf oil spill.

The methane could kill all life in large areas of the Gulf.

However, rumors being spread widely around the Web claiming that the methane could bring on a doomsday catastrophe are not credible.

Many people know that the government has encouraged deepwater drilling for oil by giving huge tax subsidies for deepwater drilling.

As the Los Angeles Times writes:

Some say the Gulf of Mexico catastrophe can be linked to Congress' policy of oil-friendly tax breaks and financial benefits.

An increasing number of analysts say the waiver program has pushed drilling into fragile and remote areas  where emergency response plans were inadequate.
But most people don't know that the government has actively encouraged drilling for methane in the Gulf of Mexico as well.

For example, Congress passed the Methane Hydrate Research and Development Act of 2000 "to promote the research, identification, assessment, exploration, and development of methane hydrate resources...."

The Energy Policy Act of 2005 also provided government support for methane hydrate research, exploration and development - including in deep water.

The Department of Energy has actively encouraged deepwater drilling for methane hydrates. See thisand this.

Indeed, this has specifically included support for deepwater drilling for methane in the Gulf of Mexico. See this, this, this, this, this,

In fact, the government, oil industry and academia have been exploring the high methane content in theMississippi Canyon area of the Gulf of Mexico - where the spill is occurring - for years. 

Methane in Gulf "astonishingly high": U.S. scientist

Hat Tip : Dr. John v. Kampen

 As much as 1 million times the normal level of methane gas has been found in some regions near the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, enough to potentially deplete oxygen and create a dead zone, U.S. scientists said on Tuesday.

Texas A&M University oceanography professor John Kessler, just back from a 10-day research expedition near the BP Plc oil spill in the gulf, says methane gas levels in some areas are "astonishingly high."

Kessler's crew took measurements of both surface and deep water within a 5-mile (8 kilometer) radius of BP's broken wellhead.

"There is an incredible amount of methane in there," Kessler told reporters in a telephone briefing.

In some areas, the crew of 12 scientists found concentrations that were 100,000 times higher than normal.

"We saw them approach a million times above background concentrations" in some areas, Kessler said.

The scientists were looking for signs that the methane gas had depleted levels of oxygen dissolved in the water needed to sustain marine life.

"At some locations, we saw depletions of up to 30 percent of oxygen based on its natural concentration in the waters. At other places, we saw no depletion of oxygen in the waters. We need to determine why that is," 

Special Report: Deepwater spills and short attention spans

Ixtoc's blowout caused the world's worst ever oil spill. More than 140 million gallons of crude poured into the Gulf of Mexico, eventually washing up on beaches in Texas, hundreds of miles away. That is roughly three times more than what has so far spewed into the Gulf of Mexico from the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

"Every fisherman could see the column of flame and smoke," the 59-year old Rodriguez said earlier this month in the living room of his metal-roofed home. "Then suddenly our nets were coming up empty, except for the crude."

Until the Deepwater Horizon rig drilling BP Plc's (BP.L) Macondo well off Louisiana blew up in April, Ixtoc was the only catastrophic oil spill at sea that was not caused by a tanker accident or sabotage.

That disaster made plain what could go wrong in deepwater drilling. After all, it tookMexico's state oil company Pemex PEMX.UL 297 days and the drilling of two special relief wells -- the industry's slow moving but only certain fix for blowouts -- to intersect and cap the raging Ixtoc well, located in 150 feet of water.

But a review of hundreds of pages of U.S. government documents related to the Ixtoc spill, as well as interviews with many experts, shows that regulators for years downplayed the possibility of a similar disaster occurring in the United States.

THE ROAD TO MACONDO

Offshore oil drilling faced little organized opposition in the United States until 1969. That year, an oil production platform in federal waters off Santa Barbara, California exploded, dumping 3 million gallons of crude into the sea over four weeks.

A decade later Ixtoc blew, and the U.S. Congress faced pressure to do something. In 1982, Washington imposed a moratorium on drilling in some federal waters, which was renewed and expanded annually for about a decade, putting 462 million acres of federal waters off limits by 1992.

By then, however, oil companies were keen to go deeper as areas still open to drilling off Texas and Louisiana in shallower waters had been thoroughly explored. What stopped them was the prohibitive cost of getting into deeper waters.

So the industry pushed for lower fees on oil and gas production, known as federal royalties, to support more aggressive deep drilling. They found an unlikely ally in President Bill Clinton and his Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary, who threw their support behind an initiative to temporarily cut royalties on deepwater oil and gas production to spur the industry.

The result was the Deepwater Royalty Reduction Act of 1996 that triggered a rush into new areas in the Gulf of Mexico that had previously been dismissed as uneconomical.

That same year the Clinton administration also ruled that environmental concerns over deepwater drilling on the outer continental shelf were outweighed by the upside: a boost in oil services activity and a potential reduction in foreign oil imports.

In 1996, a study by the Minerals Management Service, the arm of the Interior Department that regulated offshore oil development, found that: "any environmental risks ... are largely offset by resulting decreases in risks from foreign tanker traffic ... Oil spills would represent a localized and low-level impact to coastal waters."

Starting in 2000, operators led by some of the biggest oil companies in the world were drilling in water depths of 7,500 feet or more -- described by the MMS as "ultra-deepwater."

The rapid pace of development unnerved some scientists and the environmental community. These people worried aloud that too little was known about the behavior of oil spilled at great depths to be sure a major accident would not lead to a profound environmental catastrophe.

An unintended consequence of the 1980s moratorium was cuts in funding to oil spill research, as it fell down the list of priorities, recalled Woods Hole's Farrington.

A 1999 report commissioned by the MMS noted that the development of undersea containment systems was prohibitively expensive. That was especially true, it said, given the low probability of a deepwater blowout. The report went on to argue that it would be pointless to speculate about the behavior of crude oil spilled near the sea floor in deep waters.

Another area of concern for researchers, the report said, was the challenge of dealing with the huge pressures and depths associated with ultra-deepwater drilling. Specifically, it asked if the race toward new record depths was potentially risky.

As recently as December 2004 a doctoral thesis that was later incorporated into an MMS study noted a surprising lack of research into containing a blowout at great water depths since the late 1990s. The thesis also warned that ultra-deepwater drilling conditions made it more difficult for operators to detect "kicks," an oil industry term for the potentially dangerous intrusion of oil or gas into a well.

"The trend and history for blowout frequency show that ultradeep drilling is clearly at risk and an ultradeep blowout will be very difficult to avoid in the future," Ray Oskarsen wrote in his dissertation.

Jun 14, 2010 7:28pm EDT

Russia is now the largest oil producer in the world.

It appears that, unbeknownst to Westerners, there have actually been, for quite some time now, two competing theories concerning the origins of petroleum. One theory claims that oil is an organic ‘fossil fuel’ deposited in finite quantities near the planet’s surface. The other theory claims that oil is continuously generated by natural processes in the Earth’s magma. One theory is backed by a massive body of research representing fifty years of intense scientific inquiry. The other theory is an unproven relic of the eighteenth century. One theory anticipates deep oil reserves, refillable oil fields, migratory oil systems, deep sources of generation, and the spontaneous venting of gas and oil. The other theory has a difficult time explaining any such documented phenomena.
So which theory have we in the West, in our infinite wisdom, chosen to embrace? Why, the fundamentally absurd ‘Fossil Fuel’ theory, of course — the same theory that the ‘Peak Oil’ doomsday warnings are based on. *

http://www.questionsquestions.net/docs04/peakoil1.html

http://www.gasresources.net/index.htm)

listen to NPR link http://www.gasresources.net/toc_articles.htm

“Control energy and you control nations” –-Henry Kissinger
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Peak_oil:_we_have_oil

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=19660

http://www.ias.ac.in/currsci/oct252008/1018.pdf

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/raymond-j-learsy/why-does-abiotic-oil-theo_b_118845.html

loguealator Report As Abusive

FACTBOX-Developments in the Gulf of Mexico oil spill

* Experts say oil-spill cleanup workers at risk of short-term lung, liver and kidney damage from the fumes, tend to remove protective gear in summer heat. [ID: nN22156329]


* Senator John Kerry says President Barack Obama still intends to push for Congress to vote on a proposal to put a price on emitting greenhouse gas. [ID:nN22129447]

QUOTE OF THE DAY

"The court is unable to divine or fathom a relationship between the (Obama Administration's) findings and the immense scope of the moratorium," Judge Martin Feldman writes in voiding a six-month U.S. moratorium on deepwater drilling. (Compiled by Bruce Nichols; editing by Mohammad Zargham and Chris Wilson)

* Topical stories include concerns that Texas - source of textbooks - will wreck scientific content over 'religious' intervention in the process of compilation re: Evolution ; and that complete hairball between those promoting AGW by labeling dissent as the extremist opinions of a few and the promoters of exploitation without regard for pollution or depletion of resources. This freezes out balanced and thoughtful perspective in every case - while things like the health effects of chemicals in our personal environment and wrecking of sustainable agriculture and water supply miss mainstream attention. In this situation the further framing of natural gas and crude oil as renewable resources is a natural and convenient extension.

The Truth : is missing. I really find it annoying that 'scientific fact' is not just on sale to the highest bidder - but that the process making it so is obscured.