Related topics: stocks, energy, oil, BP, Michael Brush
A year ago, on April 20, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, beginning what turned into the biggest oil spill disaster ever. The so-called Macondo blowout spewed 5 million barrels of oil into the Gulf over three months, by some estimates, in a riveting saga that kept our eyes on the TV for much of the spring and summer.
Given the enormous scale of this tragedy -- for which oil-and-gas giant BP (BP, news)was held principally responsible -- it's no great surprise that signs of the environmental fallout from the disaster continue to crop up with troubling regularity. In recent weeks:
- The Coast Guard investigated a massive oil sheen on the surface of the Gulf about 20 miles north of the site of the BP oil spill, though the cause is undetermined.
- Dead dolphins washed up from the Gulf of Mexico with oil on them from the failed BP well, part of an unusually large number of dolphins that have washed up dead since the spill. Scientists are studying whether the oil caused their deaths.
Meanwhile, flyovers reveal that many Louisiana marshes remain saturated with oil, and remote beaches along the coastline and barrier islands are still polluted with the stuff.
Michael Brush
And while much of life above the surface of the Gulf has seemingly returned to normal, deep below, where oil settled around the disaster site, the seabed looks like a sea-creature graveyard, says one recent visitor.
It's "a very depressing sight," University of Georgia marine scientist Samantha Joye recently said in an online interview, describing a visit a few months ago. "There were no worms poking their heads out to greet us." She said crabs stood and waved feebly, instead of scurrying away as they should have. An oily sediment appears to have killed the coral and other life on the seabed.
Sights like these are one of the reasons Joye concludes it's going to take decades for the Gulf to recover from the oil spill.
BP, on the other hand, seems well on the way to recovery. The company produced more operating cash flow in 2010 than in 2009. Shareholders will soon be getting dividends again. And with oil prices on the rise, BP's stock will probably follow.
In short, a year later, BP is getting healthy. For the Gulf, the picture isn't so clear.
Ultimate impact on the Gulf unclear
The problem with dire observations about the Gulf, though, is that so much remains unknown. That body of water is so huge, so complex and still such a mystery that it's not really clear that the Macondo spill will have a long-lasting environmental impact, say several experts I spoke with recently.
"The Gulf is a big place," says Piers Chapman, the head of oceanography at Texas A&M University. "A lot of what people are talking about in terms of damage is confined to a very small area." Because natural processes help cleanse the vast Gulf's waters, Chapman believes the long-term impact will be "absolutely minimal."
A big positive for the Gulf is that much of it teems with bacteria that feed on oil. A lot of the crude from a spill also naturally evaporates, breaks down because of waves and exposure to ultraviolet light from the sun, or just gets diluted, says Mahlon C. Kennicutt II, a professor of chemical oceanography at Texas A&M University, who was part of the team that assessed the damage done by the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989. "The Gulf of Mexico has a fairly significant ability to recover," says Kennicutt.
Oil from hundreds of natural leaks pollutes the Gulf annually with about a third of the oil that leaked in the BP disaster -- and the Gulf handles that.
However, as locals know, many of the marshes that were hit by Macondo oil still look horrible. That's partly because they are so fragile that using cleanup tools like high-pressure water jets could do more harm than good. "If you start trying to clean them, especially if you are walking on them, you are more likely to push the oil down into the substructure and it will hang around a lot longer," says Chapman.
He says that, with time, the affected marshes will see an 85% recovery on their own -- but that the process will take years. Thankfully, many of the Gulf's marshlands were not affected because favorable wind and water currents, and containment efforts, protected them.
As for the fisheries so critical to the Gulf economy, recent surveys show that populations of many kinds of fish and shrimp are at levels two or three times what they were before the spill, says Kennicutt. The reason is that fishing was banned for months after the spill, so chronically overfished species had a chance to recover -- and came back strong. The jury is still out on some kinds of fish that take several years to mature, like tuna, since not enough time has gone by to see how much of the generation that would have spawned during Macondo got wiped out.
Other experts argue it may be too soon to really know what the Macondo spill will mean for the Gulf, because so many of the collected samples have not been analyzed. Scientists will continue to study the impact for years. "It's too early to make any predictions about anything," says Christopher Reddy, a senior scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. "It's like trying to take the prognosis of a patient knowing that the blood work hasn't come back yet."
