Oil Spills

An undetermined amount of oil spilled into the Mississippi River early Friday morning near New Orleans after an oil barge collided with another vessel, according to the U.S. Coast Guard. Many of the details of the accident were not available early Friday morning. Coast Guard Petty Officer Elizabeth Bordelon said that a five-mile stretch of the Mississippi about 50 miles upriver from New Orleans had been closed to river traffic as pollution investigators and other officials responded.

WASHINGTON -- In the first criminal charges to emerge from the federal probe of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, a former engineer for BP was arrested Tuesday on suspicion of intentionally destroying evidence requested by federal authorities who were investigating the April 2010 explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil platform. Kurt Mix, 50, of Katy, Texas, was charged with two counts of obstruction of justice in a criminal complaint filed in the U.S. District Court's Eastern District of Louisiana and unsealed Tuesday.

China is moving to contain two oil spills in the Bohai Sea off the nation's northeast coast amid complaints from environmental groups and online activists that it took weeks for government regulators and an oil company to publicly disclose the incidents. The spills occurred below two platforms jointly owned by U.S. energy giant ConocoPhillips' China subsidiary and the state-owned China National Offshore Oil Corp., or CNOOC, creating a 320-square-mile oil slick that's reportedly spreading.

WASHINGTON - Two years after the Deepwater Horizon explosion unleashed the worst oil spill in American history, Congress has failed to take meaningful action to prevent a similar disaster, according to a new report from members of a presidential panel. The report cited significant progress by the Obama administration and the oil industry, giving them a B and a C+ grade, respectively, for their efforts to bolster safety, spill response and resources. Congress, however, got a D grade for its inability to "enact any legislation responding to the explosion and spill.

After half a century of oil spills, Nigeria's troubled Niger Delta is one of the most polluted places on Earth, and it could take $1 billion and 30 years to clean up the mess, according to a U.N. report released Thursday. A 14-month study by the United Nations Environment Program that was commissioned by the Nigerian government examined 200 locations and 75 miles of pipeline, more than 4,000 soil and water samples and the medical reports of 5,000 people. "Pollution from over 50 years of oil operations in the region has penetrated further and deeper than many may have supposed," the report says.

President Obama denounced Republicans on Tuesday for "playing special-interest politics" after a GOP senator thwarted a Democratic effort to raise the liability cap for oil spills to $10 billion. Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) was seeking the unanimous consent of the Senate to move forward on the Big Oil Bailout Prevention Act, which would retroactively boost the legal cap of $75 million on how much companies must pay for economic damages. But Sen. James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.)

Alas, another oil spill has befouled our beaches, killed marine animals and given environmental groups something to protest about. We will continue to suffer horrendous oil spills as long as we are forced to transport foreign oil in fragile ships. Ships will continue to be at the mercy of some dictator or sheik as long the public is duped into preserving the panoramic ocean view of a star's cliff-side house over jobs and the national economy. And we will continue the occasional use of military force to keep the oil flowing.

I would like to respond to your excellent reports regarding the oil spill off Huntington Beach. Having a small business in the area, the city forced me, like other small businesses in the area, to replace my single-wall oil drain tank. This tank, which is in very good condition, holds 300 gallons of oil. The new tank, which has sophisticated dual-walls, holds the same amount of oil and costs approximately $1,500. These precautions are necessary, but it seems that small businesses are singled out instead of large corporations such as Shell, Exxon and British Petroleum for these improvements.

Once again oil has fouled the waters off Huntington Beach, a city that has suffered mightily this year in attacks on some of its premier attractions: the beach and the ocean. As was true in June, the culprit this month was a shut-down oil pipeline that leaked. During the summer, the leak originally was reported as one barrel, or about 42 gallons. Later that figure was increased to more than 400 gallons.

Chevron Corp. and Transocean Ltd. are being sued for $22 billion in environmental damages in Brazil, double the initial claims, after a federal prosecutor filed a lawsuit over a second oil spill off the nation's coast. Chevron committed "a series of errors" that led to the March spill at the Frade project, the federal prosecutors' office said. Prosecutor Eduardo Santos de Oliveira is also seeking to halt operations at the project and block the San Ramon, Calif., oil giant from transferring profits from Brazil.

Federal authorities have approved an oil spill response plan that could allow drilling to commence this summer in the Beaufort Sea, the first major offshore drilling in the Arctic since the early 1990s. Though Shell Alaska still needs several final permits, the oil spill plan has been the most debated aspect of the upcoming drilling program , with fears that cleaning up an offshore blowout in the turbulent, often icy seas of the Arctic could be a formidable challenge.

Amid the tangle of towering steel, heavy cranes and overcast skies of Seattle's busy commercial shipyards, Shell Oil's massive Kulluk drilling rig is preparing to push off for the Arctic Ocean. When it does, America's balance between energy needs and environmental fears will enter a new era. Barring unexpected court or regulatory action, by July the Kulluk will begin drilling exploratory oil wells in the frigid waters off Alaska's northern coast. After one of the biggest environmental fights in the U.S. in decades, there is a palpable sense of all-systems-go on the dock.

The massive civil lawsuit stemming from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, originally scheduled to go to trial Monday in New Orleans, has been postponed for one week to give oil giant BP and lawyers for more than 120,000 plaintiffs time to continue settlement talks. The postponement of the start of the trial to March 5 was announced in a joint statement Sunday from BP, which was in charge of the drilling project, and the group of plaintiffs' attorneys known as the Plaintiffs' Steering Committee, or PSC. "BP and the PSC are working to reach agreement to fairly compensate people and businesses affected by the Deepwater Horizon accident and oil spill," the statement read.

Spill 4.9 million barrels of oil into the ocean, and this is what you get: the lollapalooza, labyrinthine, mega-mother of all lawsuits. It encompasses 72 million pages of documents, 20,000 exhibits and 303 depositions — the collective effort of hundreds of lawyers and legal workers. It involves the Justice Department and about 120,000 plaintiffs: angry fishermen, restaurateurs, state governments and condo owners who say their beach-side property is not worth what it once was. The trial phase, set to begin Feb. 27 in a New Orleans federal courtroom, could go on for nine months.

An undetermined amount of oil spilled into the Mississippi River early Friday morning near New Orleans after an oil barge collided with another vessel, according to the U.S. Coast Guard. Many of the details of the accident were not available early Friday morning. Coast Guard Petty Officer Elizabeth Bordelon said that a five-mile stretch of the Mississippi about 50 miles upriver from New Orleans had been closed to river traffic as pollution investigators and other officials responded.

New research suggests that oil and gas belching from BP's blown-out well during the Deepwater Horizon disaster disappeared more quickly than expected because of the northern Gulf of Mexico's geography. The deep-sea blowout, which produced the largest offshore spill in the nation's history, occurred off the coast of Louisiana in a portion of the gulf that is almost enclosed on three sides. That influenced water movement in a way that boosted bacterial consumption of the leaking oil and methane gas, according to a study that will be published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.  “When the hydrocarbons were released from the well, bacteria bloomed,” said the paper's lead author, UC Santa Barbara geochemist David Valentine.  “In other locations, those blooms would be swept away by prevailing ocean currents, but in the Gulf of Mexico, they swirled around at great depths like a washing machine, and often circled back over the leaking well, sometimes two or three times.” That meant more munching by oil-loving microbes near the wellhead.

Bad news for the Gulf of Mexico: a study released this week sheds new light on the toxicity of oil in aquatic environments, and shows that environmental impact studies currently in use may be inadequate. The report is to be published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . The study, spearheaded by the UC Davis Bodega Marine Laboratory in collaboration with NOAA, looked into the aftermath of the 2007 Cusco Busan spill, when that tanker hit the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge and spilled 54,000 gallons of bunker fuel into the bay. The key finding involved the embryos of Pacific herring that spawn in the bay. The fish embryos absorbed the oil and then, when exposed to UV rays in sunlight, physically disintegrated.