[Senate Hearing 114-116]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
S. Hrg. 114-116
FIVE YEARS AFTER DEEPWATER HORIZON:
IMPROVEMENTS AND CHALLENGES
IN PREVENTION AND RESPONSE
=======================================================================
HEARING
before the
COMMITTEE ON COMMERCE,
SCIENCE, AND TRANSPORTATION
UNITED STATES SENATE
ONE HUNDRED FOURTEENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
APRIL 29, 2015
__________
Printed for the use of the Committee on Commerce, Science, and
Transportation
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SENATE COMMITTEE ON COMMERCE, SCIENCE, AND TRANSPORTATION
ONE HUNDRED FOURTEENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
JOHN THUNE, South Dakota, Chairman
ROGER F. WICKER, Mississippi BILL NELSON, Florida, Ranking
ROY BLUNT, Missouri MARIA CANTWELL, Washington
MARCO RUBIO, Florida CLAIRE McCASKILL, Missouri
KELLY AYOTTE, New Hampshire AMY KLOBUCHAR, Minnesota
TED CRUZ, Texas RICHARD BLUMENTHAL, Connecticut
DEB FISCHER, Nebraska BRIAN SCHATZ, Hawaii
JERRY MORAN, Kansas EDWARD MARKEY, Massachusetts
DAN SULLIVAN, Alaska CORY BOOKER, New Jersey
RON JOHNSON, Wisconsin TOM UDALL, New Mexico
DEAN HELLER, Nevada JOE MANCHIN III, West Virginia
CORY GARDNER, Colorado GARY PETERS, Michigan
STEVE DAINES, Montana
David Schwietert, Staff Director
Nick Rossi, Deputy Staff Director
Rebecca Seidel, General Counsel
Jason Van Beek, Deputy General Counsel
Kim Lipsky, Democratic Staff Director
Chris Day, Democratic Deputy Staff Director
Clint Odom, Democratic General Counsel and Policy Director
C O N T E N T S
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Page
Hearing held on April 29, 2015................................... 1
Statement of Senator Thune....................................... 1
Statement of Senator Ayotte...................................... 2
Statement of Senator Nelson...................................... 30
Statement of Senator Peters...................................... 35
Statement of Senator Klobuchar................................... 37
Statement of Senator Markey...................................... 39
Statement of Senator Sullivan.................................... 42
Statement of Senator Rubio....................................... 45
Statement of Senator Blumenthal.................................. 45
Witnesses
Charles (Charlie) Williams II, Executive Director, Center for
Offshore Safety................................................ 2
Prepared statement........................................... 4
Nancy E. Kinner, Ph.D., Co-Director, Coastal Response Research
Center; Director, Center for Spills in the Environment;
Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of
New Hampshire.................................................. 7
Prepared statement........................................... 9
Christopher M. Reddy, Ph.D., Senior Scientist, Department of
Marine Chemistry and Geochemistry, Woods Hole Oceanographic
Institution (WHOI)............................................. 12
Prepared statement........................................... 14
Samantha B. Joye, Ph.D., Athletic Association Distinguished
Professor of Arts and Sciences, Professor of Marine Sciences,
University of Georgia.......................................... 18
Prepared statement........................................... 20
Appendix
Response to written question submitted by Hon. Marco Rubio to:
Charles (Charlie) Williams II................................ 55
Christopher M. Reddy, Ph.D................................... 55
FIVE YEARS AFTER DEEPWATER HORIZON:
IMPROVEMENTS AND CHALLENGES
IN PREVENTION AND RESPONSE
----------
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 29, 2015
U.S. Senate,
Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation,
Washington, DC.
The Committee met, pursuant to notice, at 9:39 a.m. in room
SR-253, Russell Senate Office Building, Hon. John Thune,
Chairman of the Committee, presiding.
Present: Senators Thune [presiding], Wicker, Blunt, Rubio,
Ayotte, Fischer, Sullivan, Gardner; Nelson, Klobuchar,
Blumenthal, Markey, Booker, and Peters.
OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. JOHN THUNE,
U.S. SENATOR FROM SOUTH DAKOTA
The Chairman. This hearing will come to order. If you all
would come up, all the panelists, we will introduce you in just
a minute. Thank you, and welcome, it is great to have you here.
Domestic energy production, whether it is in the form of
crude oil in the Gulf of Mexico or North Dakota, hydropower in
the Pacific Northwest or wind energy in South Dakota, is an
important way of reducing America's dependence on foreign oil
while creating jobs and decreasing energy costs.
This energy production, as vital as it is, must be
accomplished in the safest way possible. A major failure in
safety occurred on April 20, 2010 when 11 crewmen lost their
lives in an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig.
The resulting oil spill was the largest ever recorded in U.S.
waters with widespread environmental and economic damages
across the Gulf.
In the past 5 years, we have attempted to learn from this
tragedy and to find solutions that will improve the speed of
clean up efforts, minimize the potential for future spills, and
save lives.
In 2012, Congress passed the bipartisan RESTORE Act, which
allocated funds to the Gulf states for restoration activities.
In addition, Federal, state, industry, and academic scientists
and engineers have been working together in unprecedented ways
to find solutions to prevent and minimize oil spills in the
future.
Today we are going to be hearing from some of these
scientists. I look forward to learning about the progress they
have made.
Senator Nelson will be here momentarily, I think. Until he
arrives, we will get underway, and we will introduce our
witnesses.
One of our panelists today is from the state of New
Hampshire, and I will turn to our colleague from New Hampshire,
Senator Ayotte, and allow her to introduce that witness.
STATEMENT OF HON. KELLY AYOTTE,
U.S. SENATOR FROM NEW HAMPSHIRE
Senator Ayotte. I want to thank the Chairman. I am really
honored today to have with us Dr. Nancy Kinner. Dr. Kinner is a
Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the
University of New Hampshire. She also is Co-Director of the
Coastal Response Research Center and Director of the Center for
Spills in the Environment at the University of New Hampshire.
I am very proud of the work that the Coastal Response
Research Center and the Center for Spills is doing, not only on
important scientific research on how to prevent spills, how to
best address them. I just recently visited the Center. I think
you will find the testimony today about the work being done at
the University of New Hampshire as led by Dr. Kinner very
important on how we work together to not only prevent future
spills but also make sure we have the proper environmental
response when we hope they do not occur, they do occur.
I am honored to have Dr. Kinner here, and so glad UNH is
such an important part of this discussion.
The Chairman. Thank you, Senator Ayotte. Dr. Kinner, it is
nice to have you here. We look forward to hearing about your
research.
We also have with us Mr. Charlie Williams. He is the
Executive Director for the Center for Offshore Safety. He will
be discussing improvements in safety and prevention in the
offshore oil and gas industry since the Deepwater Horizon oil
spill.
Dr. Christopher Reddy is the Director of the Coastal Ocean
Institute at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Dr.
Reddy is one of the top cited and published scientists studying
oil spill effects for mediation methods and petroleum
microbiology.
Dr. Samantha Joye is a Professor of Marine Science at the
University of Georgia. I look forward to learning about her
multidisciplinary work in chemistry, microbiology, and geology.
It is a great panel. We are delighted to have you all here
this morning. We will start on my left and your right with Mr.
Williams. Please proceed with your opening remarks, and if you
could confine them to as close to five minutes as possible, we
will do our best to get our questions in. I think a number of
members have to depart for an event that we have coming up a
little later this morning.
Mr. Williams, please proceed.
STATEMENT OF CHARLES (CHARLIE) WILLIAMS II, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR,
CENTER FOR OFFSHORE SAFETY
Mr. Williams. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thanks to members of
the Committee for this opportunity.
America's oil and natural gas industry is safer than ever
before. Safety is a core value to the industry and an
imperative. Our goal is and always will be zero spills and zero
accidents.
What has changed? A renewed and sustained commitment to
collaborating, learning, and delivering together through
committing the resources needed to do this. How this has come
is with new industry standards, a new sub-sea containment
system, increased clean up capability, and the Center for
Offshore Safety.
The Center for Offshore Safety was created based on an
industry study team recommendation but also on the Presidential
Commission recommendation that there be a for the industry and
by the industry organization totally focused on safety.
We are that organization and I am proud to lead the Center.
We work every day, all day, on safety, using many teams of
industry volunteers dedicated to our mission and the industry
mission, which is one and the same.
We are also an important stakeholder in enabling all the
work of the BSEE regulation that all the operators have a
safety and environmental management system. An example of this
is recommended Practice 75. The regulation and what we work on
is not safety as most people know it. It is not about personal
and personnel safety, such as hardhats and safety shoes, even
though this is critically important. The industry has actually
done a great job on personnel safety.
What we work on is safety and environmental management
systems. What is SEMS and why is it so critical? SEMS is about
having good procedures and standards, skills, a knowledgeable
workforce, and good project design and execution processes
including such things as hazard identification, planning, and
very importantly, management of change.
SEMS is foundational to safety culture and must have a
strong and clear leadership, and this strong and clear
leadership develops SEMS into a sustained safety culture.
SEMS is a key barrier to major incidents, and in that way
it is different from staff safety. How can this be? It is
because SEMS is a sustainable and continuous learning process
that manages safety with the same principles of planning and
organization, implementation, and controls that you would
expect from any other business function.
It fully embeds and integrates safety into the business.
All planning and management of change are done in support of
maintaining safety.
What else is different? SEMS is a performance-based system
and not a rules-based system. People have to develop the system
to best fit their business within the elements that are
defined, and then it is measured through auditing that the
performance of SEMS is effective and the performance is good.
The Center for Offshore Safety is making a difference in
many ways. First, we are the place where the industry comes
together and is totally focused on SEMS and how to make SEMS
more effective. As a member, you commit yourself to high
standards of safety.
An example of this is we committed to doing third-party
audits before it was part of the regulation. We have also
ensured good SEMS' audits through audit tools like audit
procedures, auditor training, actually auditing in the
accreditation of auditors. That is the primary way SEMS' audits
and performance is assessed. This feedback is also used for
learning and improvement purposes.
COS has established other measures that are continuous and
forward looking and give us much more information about SEMS
and how to improve its effectiveness as we go forward.
These tools include safety performance indicators and
learning from incidents which help us learn about the safety
and cultural elements of incidents and how those incidents will
be prevented in the future, and it also has forward-looking
measures like managing maintenance on your critical systems
that helps you look and see that your safety and environmental
management systems are effective going forward, and give you
early indications.
A good example of what we do is we collect all this
information and develop an annual report, and then develop a
plan to have good standards and have good practices to help
improve SEMS when we find places that need improvement.
A good example of what is our leadership site visit
guideline, which helps leaders improve safety and safety
culture by what they say when they are on the work site.
In closing, I want to leave you with two concepts that are
key to SEMS. The first is barrier management. A key part of
SEMS is identifying hazards and establishing barriers,
maintaining those barriers, and ensuring those barriers stay in
place to prevent major incidents, and using barriers to measure
the effectiveness of the management systems.
The last one is skills and knowledge. We have to go beyond
classroom training, and we have to have people that are
knowledgeable, have experiences in all kinds of scenario's and
are able to think about and respond to those.
Every incident is one too many and a powerful incentive for
COS to redouble our efforts to learn and improve. Our thoughts
will always be with those that lost their lives and their
families. The industry is doing better, even the companies that
had good SEMS are doing better through the Center for Offshore
Safety in being able to share and work together.
Our strong culture of safety continues to grow along with
advances in technology and standards. As long as there is room
for improvement, COS' work is never complete. This is my
livelihood and passion, and I will never stop improving safety
management.
Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Williams follows:]
Prepared Statement of Charles (Charlie) Williams II, Executive
Director, Center for Offshore Safety
America's offshore oil and natural gas industry is safer than
before, but our goal will always be zero accidents and zero spills.
A significant enhancement in safety and environmental protection in
the oil and natural gas industry post-Macondo was the creation and on-
going work of the Center for Offshore Safety (COS). COS was created by
the industry for the industry, and is devoted entirely to continually
assessing, learning about, and improving the safety and environmental
management systems (SEMS) implemented by operators in the OCS.
SEMS has the following benefits:
Shifts execution and oversight strategy from a prescriptive
rule-based approach to one that is proactive and performance-
based
Manages safety with the same principles of planning,
organization, implementation, and controls that we expect from
other business functions
Drives both Process and Personal accountability up and down
the organizational structure
SEMS requires mechanisms that:
1--Specify what is needed for safe operation
2--Check to see that these specifications are being followed
3--Build competency by developing individual knowledge and
skill
COS is entirely focused on Safety and Environmental Management
Systems (SEMS) and how their effectiveness can be continually evaluated
and enhanced.
SEMS is intended as an active-learning safety and environmental
management system that establishes and manages barriers, takes a
systematic approach to all parts of offshore safety, has active
monitoring via safety performance and other indicators, uses
independent verification via third-party auditors, and focuses
continually on operationalizing and enhancing safety and environmental
management. Most significantly, SEMS focuses on the importance of
leadership and the interaction of management with staff to deliver a
positive safety culture.
The COS mission is promoting the highest level of safety for
offshore operations through effective leadership, communication,
teamwork, use of disciplined management systems and independent third-
party auditing and certification. Sharing data and lessons learned
throughout the industry is an essential part of the work COS does to
continually enhance safety.
Through the COS, industry members are committed to improving SEMS
performance by subscribing to the following principles:
Industry leaders demonstrate a visible commitment to safety
Operators, contractors, and suppliers work together to
create a culture of safety
Decision making at all levels will not compromise safety.
Safety processes, equipment, training and technology undergo
continual examination and improvement
Members share learnings and apply industry standards, good
practices and promote continual improvement
COS broadly represents the oil and natural gas business on the U.S.
Outer Continental Shelf with members from all aspects of the upstream
offshore oil and natural gas industry including operators, drilling
contractors, equipment manufacturers and service contractors. The COS
has a full-time staff that works in conjunction with industry task
groups to address specific SEMS issues. In addition, COS has a
governing board made up of senior management of the industry member
companies.
The COS is responsible for:
Assuring that third-party Audit Service Providers and their
auditors meet the goals, objectives and requirements for
conducting SEMS audits
Compiling and analyzing SEMS data and other safety metrics
to find areas for enhancement
Creating Good Practices to close gaps found through the
safety data analysis
Coordinating COS-sponsored functions designed to facilitate
sharing and learning processes regarding SEMS and good
practices
Identifying and promoting opportunities for industry to
continually improve SEMS and safety
Developing outreach programs to facilitate communicating
with government and external stakeholders regarding SEMS
COS has developed processes and documents in the following areas:
COS SEMS Toolkit--SEMS Audit Protocols, Operator-Contractor
interface documents, staff Knowledge & Skills worksheets, and
other products for SEMS.
SEMS Audit Service Provider (ASP) Documents, protocols, and
guides
COS Auditor Qualification and Training, SEMS Certification
for Operators and Contractors, and ASP Accreditation
Documents--Suite of documents that outline the qualification
and training requirements for third-party auditors performing
COS SEMS audits, COS SEMS certification requirements,
accreditation requirements for ASP performing third-party
audits and COS Standard Audit Report worksheets and template.
Skills and Knowledge Management System Guideline (SKMS)--
Tools and techniques to provide industry with a common process
for the verification and development of employee and contractor
skills and knowledge
Leadership Site Engagement--Good practice guidance for
senior managers and leaders to demonstrate visible safety and
environmental commitment during visits to offshore operating
sites, as well as enhancing accountability and safety culture
COS is actively working in the following areas:
Audit Service Provider Accreditation--Develop an enhanced
set of COS-endorsed standards for accrediting Audit Service
Providers and their auditors to support the COS SEMS
certification program
SEMS Certification Program-Operator Certification--
Certification of operator SEMS programs via accredited third-
party audit.
SEMS Certification Program-Contractor Certification--third-
party SEMS Certification of drilling contractors and offshore
service/supply companies in order to provide assurance to
operators and regulators that a system is in place which meets
applicable requirements and demonstrates contractor workers
have skills and knowledge to follow safe work practices.
Safety Performance Indicators (SPI) Program--Clearly defined
indicators to evaluate safety performance and aid in
identifying safety trends. This includes new leading indicators
of SEMS effectiveness.
Learning from Incidents (LFI) Program--A process and
methodology to identify, assess and communicate high value
learning incidents to promote cross-industry learning. This
includes identifying SEMS elements that were ineffective and
contributed to the incident and how the possibility of the
incident will be minimized in the future.
Information and Knowledge Management--An information and
knowledge management framework to gather, manage and share
information to enable the industry to continually improve SEMS
performance.
COS Safety Events--Plan, develop and coordinate annual COS
Safety Forum, Offshore Technology Conference Technical
Sessions, SEMS Audit Workshops, and other events to facilitate
sharing knowledge and promoting opportunities to continually
improve SEMS and safety.
COS has recently published its first Annual Performance Report
detailing the initial round of data and lessons learned from the Safety
Performance Indicator Program, Learning from Incidents Program and SEMS
audits described above. This report is available via the COS website.
The oil and natural gas industry is committed to operating in a
safe and responsible manner while minimizing our impact on the
environment. Protecting the health and safety of our workers, our
contractors and our neighbors is a moral imperative and core value of
our industry.
No incident is acceptable. Our industry takes every incident
seriously. Continued vigilance is essential in helping to prevent
future incidents.
In the five years since the Macondo incident, the oil and natural
gas industry has methodically examined every aspect of offshore safety
measures and operations to identify potential improvements in safety
management. COS was established by the industry to ensure that this
continues and is effective, that there is a single group exclusively
focused on SEMS, and that there is a group responsive to supporting a
culture of safety.
We worked with the U.S. Department of Interior, the Presidential
Oil Spill Commission, other Government Organizations, and industry
experts as we developed the mission, programs, and tools of COS. But
COS did not start from scratch. Offshore exploration and production has
long been focused on safety and delivering remarkably safe and
successful technology and operations. The industry is committed to
ensuring that SEMS is continually enhanced and that the COS
organization is in place to focus on this and share industry knowledge
of SEMS and safety.
Despite industry's history of safety dedication and performance, it
was understood that the balance between personnel safety and prevention
of major incidents had to be enhanced and the focus on continual SEMS
learning, as well as operationalizing those learnings, must be
maintained. The oil and natural gas industry has dedicated the past
five years to using the lessons learned from Macondo to enhance safety
and operational practices.
Our strong culture of safety continues to grow along with advances
in technology and industry standards. So long as there is any room for
improvement, our work at COS will never be complete. This is our
livelihood, and our work is critical to America's new energy
renaissance.
Every incident is both one too many and a powerful incentive for
COS and industry to improve SEMS, the learning process, skills and
knowledge, operating procedures and standards, and effectiveness
measures and audits. Our thoughts will always remain with the families
of all those who lost their lives in this tragic accident. And the
industry, and the industry through COS, stands ready to continue to
work with government and regulators to improve safety.
The Chairman. Thank you, Mr. Williams. Dr. Kinner?
STATEMENT OF NANCY E. KINNER, Ph.D., CO-DIRECTOR,
COASTAL RESPONSE RESEARCH CENTER; DIRECTOR,
CENTER FOR SPILLS IN THE ENVIRONMENT; PROFESSOR,
CIVIL AND ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEERING,
UNIVERSITY OF NEW HAMPSHIRE
Dr. Kinner. Chairman Thune, Ranking Member Nelson, and
distinguished members of the Committee, thank you for giving me
the opportunity to appear before you today.
I am a professor of civil and environmental engineering at
the University of New Hampshire, and as Senator Ayotte
mentioned, I am also the UNH Co-Director of the Coastal
Response Research Center, a NOAA-funded partnership, and
Director of the Center for Spills in the Environment, a center
that expands the scope of interaction to other governmental
agencies, the private sector, and NGOs.
The mission of the centers is to conduct and oversee
response on spill response, assessment, and restoration, and
make sure that research is transformed into practice. In
addition, we serve as a hub for spill research and facilitate
collaboration among all stakeholders in the response community,
including those affiliated with industry, government, academia,
and NGOs.
The centers were created in 2004 because many research and
development needs existed with respect to spills. It may seem
unusual that a spill response center is located in New
Hampshire, but that makes sense when the goal is to have an
independent and highly credible voice that can speak freely
during a crisis and mediate difficult discussions among diverse
stakeholders.
For example, we were asked to facilitate a discussion
during the Deepwater Horizon spill among 50 renown scientists
to evaluate whether dispersants should continue to be used.
After examining the available data and the science
regarding the potential impact of dispersant use on the
environment, the conclusion of those scientists was that use of
dispersants and the effects of dispersing the oil were
generally less harmful than allowing the oil to migrate into
sensitive wetlands and near shore habitats, and therefore,
dispersant use should continue at that time.
When oil is spilled, there is no single silver bullet
response technology that provides an universal solution. As I
like to tell my students, oil spills are bad and they cause
very bad things to happen. The goal of response is to minimize
as much as possible the damage. Hence, the challenge is to
translate the results of the oil spill research into better
response.
In the wake of the Deepwater Horizon, there has been a
large influx of money into research, and there are many oil
spill related papers being published each month as a direct
result of this funding.
The question is how much of this research will result in
improvements in oil spill response. Unfortunately, the answer
might be not very much. Why not?
First, the research that needs to be done to improve
response is often not conducted because researchers rarely
interact with responders. They do not go to the same parties.
Second, it is difficult for scientists to simulate the real
environment.
For example, to answer questions as to whether chemical
dispersants should be added to a blowout, scientists need to
simulate the mixing that occurs at a deep wellhead where many,
many gallons of oil and gas are billowing out rapidly at very
high pressure. That is to say the least a very challenging
environment to simulate in the laboratory, small test tank, or
with mathematical modeling.
Third, scientific journals rarely publish papers where
experiments do not show any measurable changes. Yet, research
that shows no effects can be very useful.
For example, if we added oil to very cold seawater that
contained naturally occurring microorganisms and that oil
concentration did not change over time, the results would
probably be difficult to publish. Yet, responders fighting a
spill in the Arctic Ocean would want to know that the oil might
not be degraded as rapidly as in warmer water.
How can we address these challenges? We can bring
responders and scientists together in a partnership to develop
research needs and design and conduct experiments to address
those needs.
Even if we started that process today, the results of the
research would not be available for several years. In the
interim, we can sort through the large amount of research
published to determine if and how it can improve response.
Here is one example of how our centers in partnership with
NOAA and EPA are doing this. We have convened 70 scientists,
two of whom are sitting to my left, to review the literature
and determine what is known and what is uncertain about the
state of the science of dispersants and dispersed oil in spill
response, especially as it applies to the Arctic.
My job is to facilitate those discussions, which as you
might imagine can be quite interesting. What never ceases to
amaze me is how a diverse group of researchers and response
scientists can come to consensus when the focus is on the
details of the science. I see this approach as a path forward
on many thorny issues.
In summary, there are many questions that must be addressed
to improve response when oil is spilled, especially as we
consider drilling in outer continental shelf regions and face
the energy renaissance in the U.S. We must take advantage of
the current and future investments in research, translating
them into better response.
I believe we can accomplish this by bringing responders and
scientists together in a partnership to determine what is known
and what is uncertain with respect to response science.
Once identified, those uncertainties can be used to define
research needs and design experiences whose results can be
translated into improved response decisionmaking, and that does
mean a better job of minimizing the damage spills cause.
Thank you very much.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Kinner follows:]
Prepared Statement of Nancy E. Kinner, Ph.D., Co-Director, Coastal
Response Research Center; Director, Center for Spills in the
Environment; Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering, University
of New Hampshire
Chairman Thune, Ranking Member Nelson and distinguished members of
the Committee, thank you for giving me the opportunity to appear before
you today. My name is Nancy E. Kinner and I am a professor of Civil and
Environmental Engineering at the University of New Hampshire. I am the
UNH Co-Director of the Coastal Response Research Center (CRRC), a NOAA-
funded center, and the Director of the Center for Spills in the
Environment (CSE), a center that expands the scope of interaction to
other governmental agencies, the private sector and NGOs.
1.0 The Coastal Response Research Center and The Center for Spills in
the Environment
The mission of the two UNH Centers, CRRC and CSE, is to conduct and
oversee research on spill response, assessment and restoration and make
sure that research is transformed into practice. In addition, we serve
as a hub for spill research and development (R&D), and facilitate
collaboration among all stakeholders in the spill community including
governmental agencies, NGOs, academia, and industry, both in the U.S.
and globally. Since the Centers' inceptions in 2004, we have overseen
34 funded research projects, conducted 48 workshops, and currently
manage five working groups on topics such as dispersants and dispersed
oil, data management during environmental disasters, modeling and
submerged oil response.
The Centers were started because NOAA and UNH, which is known for
its strong programs in marine science and ocean and environmental
engineering, knew that many R&D needs existed with respect to oil spill
preparedness, response and restoration. Further, we realized that oil
and chemical spills are always occurring and, that despite popular
belief, there would continue to be major oil spills in the U.S. It may
seem unusual that an oil spill center would be located in New
Hampshire, a state that lacks any petroleum-based resources, but that
fact makes sense when the goal is to have an independent and highly
credible voice that can speak freely during a crisis and mediate
difficult discussions among the diversity of stakeholders. The Centers
have focused on R&D in a few key areas: dispersants and dispersed oil,
toxic and sublethal effects of oil on organisms, Arctic spill response
and restoration, human dimensions of spills, and environmental data
management. As one example, the CRRC was asked to convene a meeting in
May 2010, during the DWH, of a diverse group of renowned scientists to
evaluate whether dispersants should continue to be used. Fifty
scientists, some of whom were diametrically opposed to dispersant use,
met for two days to examine the data and state-of-the-science,
regarding the potential impact of dispersant use on the environment.
The overwhelming consensus of the group was that, while removing the
oil from the environment using mechanical recovery is preferred, it was
not always effective because of environmental conditions such as the
wind and waves in the Gulf. Further, the scientists concluded that up
to that point, use of dispersants and effects of dispersing oil into
the water column had been generally less environmentally harmful than
allowing that oil to migrate on the surface into the sensitive wetlands
and nearshore coastal habitats.
In 2014, CRRC conducted a unique Forum on the campus of the
University of New Hampshire on the 25th anniversary of the Exxon Valdez
Oil Spill (EVOS) in Alaska and the 5th anniversary of the DWH. This
forum brought together academicians, oil spill practitioners, industry
representatives and Federal and state agency personnel to discuss the
lessons learned from EVOS and DWH that could help improve future oil
spill response (e.g., the Arctic, pipelines and rail transport).
Several initiatives came from the Forum which has set some new
directions for CRRC/CSE.
Expand the role of academic science in improving spill and
environmental disaster response, assessment and restoration;
Identify strategies and actions to improve governmental
communication with the public and ensure journalists the
information they need prior and during spills;
Improve outreach to Congress on spill and environmental
disaster science and response.
CRRC/CSE has begun to move forward with some of these new
initiatives. CSE provided an initial briefing on oil spill response
since the DWH for Senate staffers on April 21, 2015, sponsored by New
Hampshire Senators Shaheen and Ayotte. In addition, in conjunction with
Capitol Hill Ocean's Week 2015, we will host a forum with responders
and journalists to discuss how to improve communication and provide
information more effectively to the public.
2.0 Research Response Since DWH
Since the DWH, there has been a large influx of funds into oil
spill R&D: most notably BP's $500 million over 10 years to the Gulf of
Mexico Research Initiative (GoMRI), and the $500 million over 30 years
given to the National Academy of Sciences for Gulf of Mexico and other
Outer Continental Shelf R&D. Industry through the American Petroleum
Institute (API), and other international petroleum associations (e.g.,
IOGP/IPIECA), has also funded a significant amount of new research.
There are also some Federal (e.g., BSEE) and state (e.g., Texas,
California) R&D programs, though these tend to be funded at lower
levels. This influx of funding for research has focused on a number of
issues important to future oil spill response including:
Short and Long Term Spill Impacts in the Gulf of Mexico as a
Result of DWH;
Studies of the Chemical and Physical Behavior of Oil
Released in the Environment;
Efficacy and Effectiveness of Various Response Actions;
Public Health Impacts; and
Social and Economic Impacts of Spills.
Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative
The Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative (GoMRI), one of the major
new oil spill research institutions, was formed to investigate the
impacts of the oil, dispersed oil, and dispersant on the ecosystems of
the Gulf of Mexico and affected coastal states in a broad context of
improving fundamental understanding of the dynamics of such events and
their environmental stresses and public health implications. Another
focus of GoMRI is developing improved spill mitigation, oil and gas
detection, characterization and remediation technologies.
The ultimate goal of GoMRI will be to improve society's ability to
understand, respond to and mitigate the impacts of petroleum pollution
and related stressors of the marine and coastal ecosystems, with an
emphasis on conditions found in the Gulf of Mexico. Knowledge accrued
will be applied to restoration and to improving the long-term
environmental health of the Gulf of Mexico. GoMRI has issued numerous
RFPs for consortia and individual investigators.
National Academy of Sciences
As part of legal settlements associated with the DWH, the National
Academy of Sciences (NAS) established a Gulf Research Program to fund
and conduct activities to enhance oil system safety, human health, and
environmental resources in the Gulf of Mexico and other U.S. outer
continental shelf regions that support oil and gas production. The
Program will work to enhance oil system safety and the protection of
human health and the environment in the Gulf of Mexico and other U.S.
outer continental shelf areas by seeking to improve understanding of
the region's interconnecting human, environmental, and energy systems
and fostering application of these insights to benefit Gulf
communities, ecosystems, and the nation, safety, human health, and
environmental resources. Given this context, the Program will address
three interconnected goals:
Goal 1: Foster innovative improvements to safety
technologies, safety culture, and environmental protection
systems associated with offshore oil and gas development;
Goal 2: Improve understanding of the connections between
human health and the environment to support the development of
healthy and resilient Gulf communities; and
Goal 3: Advance understanding of the Gulf of Mexico region
as a dynamic system with complex, interconnecting human and
environmental systems, functions, and processes to inform the
protection and restoration of ecosystem services.
The Program will fund studies, projects, and other activities using
three broad approaches specified in the legal settlements: research and
development, education and training, and environmental monitoring.
ICCOPR
The Interagency Coordinating Committee on Oil Spill Research
(ICCOPR) was created by Congress in the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 (OPA
90). ICCOPR is charged with two general responsibilities to: (1)
prepare a comprehensive, coordinated Federal oil pollution research and
development plan; and (2) promote cooperation with industry,
universities, research institutions, state governments, and other
nations through information sharing, coordinated planning, and joint
funding of projects. ICCOPR reports on its activities to Congress every
two years. It is comprised of 15 Federal independent agencies,
departments, and department components. The USCG chairs ICCOPR with
NOAA, BSEE, and EPA rotating assignments as the vice-chair every two
years.
ICCOPR is currently preparing, with the assistance of CRRC/CSE, an
Oil Spill Research and Technology Plan (OSRTP) that will set the
priorities for oil spill research for the next six years. The OSRTP
will be completed in 2015.
Industry
In the wake of the DWH spill, the petroleum industry, API and IOGP/
IPIECA, launched four Joint Industry Task Forces (JITFs) to critically
assess capabilities and performance. Each JITF brought forth subject
matter experts to identify best practices in offshore drilling
operations and oil spill response and to share that knowledge across
industry. The goal is to ensure environmental protection through
enhanced safety.
The Oil Spill Preparedness and Response JITF is examining
industry's ability to respond to a ``Spill of National Significance
(SONS)'' or other large spills.
The program is developing guidance and planning documents,
recommended practices, training and exercise guidelines, technology
evaluations, and developing a database for research activities. As part
of the overall research program, industry is developing communications/
outreach and decision making tools. Topics include:
Spill response planning;
Oil sensing and tracking;
Dispersants;
In situ burning;
Mechanical recovery
Shoreline protection and
Alternate response technologies.
3.0 Impediments to Transforming Research into Improved Response
The combined effort of all these programs has resulted in a
significant body of information. It is difficult to remain current on
all the papers being published related to oil spills. Each month,
several new papers appear in journals and there are two to three major
conferences each year solely dedicated to oil spill research. The
question is, how much of this research will result in improvements to
oil spill response? Unfortunately, the answer might be, not very much.
There are several reasons for this.
A primary reason is that researchers and responders do not have
much opportunity to interact and coordinate research. They usually do
not attend the same meetings. Most researchers are not familiar with
what occurs during a response: the pace at which decisions must be made
and the types of trade-offs considered during a spill. Conversely,
responders are often not familiar with the latest experimental
techniques which scientists have at their disposal to assist in
response decision-making.
Another significant problem is that it is very difficult to
simulate the environment in a laboratory or small test tank or with
mathematical modeling. For example, even though a solution of 200 ppm
of dispersants can be created in water to test its toxicity on
organisms, the findings may not be translated into what would happen in
the field where concentrations of dispersants are likely to be at least
10 times lower. In addition, it is incredibly difficult to simulate the
mixing that occurs at a deep well blowout where many gallons of oil and
gas are billowing out of a pipe rapidly at very high pressure. Yet this
is exactly what must be done to determine whether dispersants prevented
oil from reaching the surface of the GOM during the DWH.
Finally scientific journals almost always publish papers that show
effects: where the research shows that the experimental conditions
resulted in a measurable change in some parameter. If no change is
observed, a so-called ``null'' result, the paper will rarely be
published even if that null result occurs many times. For example, if
an experiment was conducted where oil was added to very cold seawater
that contained naturally occurring microbes and the oil concentration
did not change over time, the results would probably not be published.
However, responders fighting an oil spill in the Arctic would want to
know this information. You can see the implicit bias that might result
when examining the scientific literature for possible response options
that might improve spill response.
4.0 A Path Forward
So how can we effectively sort through the research that has been
published since the DWH and the older, relevant research? First, we can
bring responders and scientists together to develop research needs and
design and conduct experiments to address those needs. One way we have
done this at the Centers is to have responders and response scientists
act as liaisons during the development of request for proposals (RFPs),
selection of projects, design of experiments, and translation of
results into practice. This approach was used very effectively in
developing the Environmental Response Management Application (ERMA)
which was used as the Common Operating Picture (COP) during the DWH and
provided the public easy access to information about the spill.
However, even if we start bringing responders and scientists
together in this manner today, the results of the research would not be
available for years. In the interim, we need to sort through the large
amount of research published to determine if, and how, it can improve
response. One example of how this might be done is a partnership
between our Centers, NOAA and EPA. We have convened more than 70
scientists, representing a diversity of perspectives and expertise in
the research and response communities, to read all of the applicable
literature and determine the state-of-the-science of dispersants and
dispersed oil in spill response especially as it applies to the Arctic.
The scientists are asked to determine: (1) what is known; and (2) what
is uncertain. Over 500 peer-reviewed papers and reports have been
amassed in a database covering the period June 2008 to the present and
this is been combined with an existing database of dispersant research
from 1962 to 2008. The scientists have read the articles within their
area of expertise and have been discussing whether each paper simulates
the environment, has the necessary controls, and is statistically
sound. What we have observed through our facilitated discussions is
that a group of scientists can come to consensus when they focus on the
details of the science. The results of the state-of-the-science
discussions on dispersants and dispersed oil should be available later
this year. I see this process as a way forward on many of the thorny
issues of applying oil spill R&D to practice.
5.0 Summary
When oil is spilled, there is no single ``silver bullet'' response
technology that provides a universal solution. Oil spills are bad, and
cause very bad things to happen. The goal of response is to minimize,
as much as possible, the damage. Hence, the challenge is to translate
the results of oil spill research and development into better response.
In summary, there are many questions that must be addressed to
improve response when oil is spilled, especially as we consider
drilling in other outer-continental shelf regions and in the face of
the energy renaissance in the U.S. We must take advantage of current
and future investments in research, translating them into better
response. I believe we can accomplish this by bringing responders and
scientists together to determine what is known and what is uncertain
with respect to response science. Those uncertainties can be used to
identify research needs and design experiments whose results can be
translated into improved response decision-making before, during and
after spills.
The Chairman. Thank you, Dr. Kinner. Dr. Reddy?
STATEMENT OF CHRISTOPHER M. REDDY, Ph.D.,
SENIOR SCIENTIST, DEPARTMENT OF MARINE CHEMISTRY
AND GEOCHEMISTRY, WOODS HOLE OCEANOGRAPHIC INSTITUTION (WHOI)
Dr. Reddy. Chairman Thune and Ranking Member Nelson,
members of the Committee, thank you for the invitation to
participate in this hearing, and I have three points to make.
For the record, I am a senior scientist in the Department
of Marine Chemistry and Geochemistry at Woods Hole
Oceanographic Institution. I have extensive experience studying
oil spills, which are detailed in my written testimony,
including the Deepwater Horizon, as well as the Exxon Valdez,
and in the last year, I have responded to three oil spills, one
in Bangladesh, Galveston Bay, Texas, and Yellowstone River.
In September 2010, I was asked to join the Unified Command,
essentially the oil spill headquarters to the Deepwater Horizon
in New Orleans, to serve as a liaison between Federal
officials, industry, and the academic community.
At that time, there was a disconnect and some unsettling
tensions. I can tell you very happily that things have changed
for the better, that the unprecedented Deepwater Horizon
disaster created an unprecedented intersection of stakeholders,
and the silver lining to the Deepwater Horizon disaster is it
compelled previously disparate cultures, scientists and
responders, much like Dr. Kinner just mentioned, to introduce
themselves and join forces.
I would be remiss without giving great credit to my Senator
from Massachusetts, Senator Markey, who ran as United States
Congressman in 2010, demanded the increased transparency and
availability of information from the responders so academia
could contribute.
I believe this has led to the silver lining that I just
discussed, and I also just wrote about this in the Huffington
Post last week.
My second point is I got asked a lot of questions about the
Deepwater Horizon in the last month or so, coming up to the
fifth anniversary. The one that is asked often is how bad is
the Gulf today.
There were many studies that have been done, documenting
damages, simulating them in the lab, and you likely heard about
many of these results, but I would advise you to read the fine
print. I would advise you to think about where these studies
were, what time they were done after the spill, where they were
in the broader context, and even follow up and say how certain
are you with these results.
Let me give you an example from some work I have done. I
published a paper in November 2014 examining the evidence of
contamination on the sea floor near a damaged well. It was a
massive effort. Our upper end estimate was that 16 percent of
the total oil discharged during the accident fell within a
1,250 square mile patch on the deep floor.
What was not often mentioned was our lower end estimate,
that we might only think there is 2 percent on the bottom of
the sea floor. That is a pretty big range, and that is the fine
print, and that is the uncertainty that we have to ask and push
for.
Moreover, that research that got a lot of press was based
on studies that ended in 2012. Today, I cannot say how much oil
is still on the Gulf of Mexico floor. I cannot say how toxic it
is, and I cannot say whether or not it is negatively affecting
the Gulf.
How is the Gulf today? It is far from the graveyard
predicted by some experts in the throes of the spill, but it is
not a picture of health. What we hear most about are damages
that are compartmentalized and localized, and the story is not
complete, as studies are still underway.
It is probably frustrating to you that you are not going to
get all the answers you want, and the rub is we cannot put the
Gulf of Mexico in an MRI. It would have been great if we had
some physicals on the Gulf of Mexico and MRI scans in 2008,
2009, 2010, and as of yesterday. It would be a much easier
presentation today to show those MRI scans of the Gulf. We do
not have that.
My advice right now is to let science take its course and
allow for all the pieces to be placed together, and then we can
provide a full accounting.
My last point is the one I am most passionate about, about
dispersants. I think the media coverage of dispersants has been
lopsided, and we regularly hear that dispersants amplified
damage in the Deepwater Horizon and are continuing to harm
marine life.
These are the negatives, and there is certainly no doubt
there are negatives with the use of dispersants, but they are
benefits, which is precisely why dispersants were authorized
and part of that discussion that Dr. Kinner mentioned.
When sprayed on an oil slick, the resulting micro size
droplets freely mix into water effectively breaking apart the
coating and diluting oil over a greater volume. Both effects
can be beneficial.
Dilution and also a chance that we are going to reduce
oiling on the coast line. What is also lost, and unfortunately,
is not available, is anecdotal evidence that the air quality of
responders near the well was better when the dispersants were
used subsurface. That means if we did not use dispersants,
there is a chance that it might have taken more than 87 days to
shut it down.
What we hear about in the media are only the negatives.
What is not discussed are the benefits. I think the question
that really needs to be asked is what if we did not use
dispersants? By weighing this question, we can weigh the
negatives against the benefits to know if dispersant use caused
more harm than good.
If I can leave you with just one take away this morning, it
is the pressing need to perform an objective, thorough, and
comprehensive post-Deepwater Horizon analysis on the net usage,
was it good or was it bad.
This is a non-trivial exercise. It will take a lot of time,
but it is worthy of the attention. It touches upon several of
the recommendations of the President's Commission, it will
settle many of the concerns about the Deepwater Horizon, and it
will be critical to how spills are tackled in the future.
To me, the absence of a study that looks at the overall net
benefit analysis, which is a huge study, is the elephant in the
room. It is so big that we cannot ignore it, and I would
recommend Congress endorse such a study by the National Academy
of Science.
Thank you for your attention.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Reddy follows:]
Prepared Statement of Christopher M. Reddy, Ph.D., Senior Scientist,
Department of Marine Chemistry and Geochemistry, Woods Hole
Oceanographic Institution (WHOI)
Chairman Thune and Ranking Member Nelson and Members of the
Committee:
Thank you for the invitation to participate in the hearing, ``Five
Years After the Deepwater Horizon: Improvements and Challenges in
Prevention and Response.'' It's an honor to provide my observations and
recommendations on future oil spill response, in particularly from
``lessons learned'' in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon (DWH)
disaster. This statement reflects my personal professional views and
does not represent those of my institution, the Woods Hole
Oceanographic Institution.
For the record, I am a Senior Scientist in the Department of Marine
Chemistry and Geochemistry at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
(WHOI) in Woods Hole, Mass., principally investigating marine
pollution. I have published more than140 peer-reviewed scientific
journal articles and several book chapters on the chemistry of oil, how
it interacts with the natural environment, and related subjects. I have
studied or am currently studying the aftermaths of oil spills that
occurred in 1969, 1974, 1996, 2003, two in 2007, and also the 1989
Exxon Valdez spill. More recently, I have been involved the Galveston
Bay, Texas, spill in March 2014, the Bangladesh spill in December 2014,
and the Yellowstone River oil spill in January 2015.
For the past five years, I have focused considerable efforts on the
Deepwater Horizon oil spill. I have visited the Gulf of Mexico more
than twenty times, participated or led four open-water trips near the
Macondo well and three overflights of the region, collected hundreds of
oiled beach samples, published 16 peer-reviewed papers on DWH,
consulted with government and response officials, provided countless
interviews to the media and written several opinion pieces on the
topic, including ones on the role of academic scientists in disaster
response. In September 2010, I was a scientist working at the Unified
Command in New Orleans, the official operating center responding to the
DWH oil spill.
In my experience, the disaster's impact was enormously exacerbated
because the Macondo well pipe ruptured 5000 feet deep--a depth never
encountered before. There was little or no experience in getting a such
a rupture under control or tracking its consequences at those depths.
This was aqua incognita to most industry and oil response officials.
But it was a familiar neighborhood for scientists at my
institution, who had long conducted basic research in the deep sea and
mustered their deep-submergence technology and expertise to help. In
the heat of the disaster, I worked with WHOI scientists and engineers
who had developed an instrument, an Isobaric Gas-tight Sampler (IGT) to
sample and preserve fluids spewing from seafloor hydrothermal vents. We
used an IGT to get a definitive sample of oil spewing right from the
Macondo well. On the same mission, I worked with Sentry, a deep-diving
autonomous underwater vehicle--used to find plumes from hydrothermal
vents--to map a trail of hydrocarbons from the well flowing at depth
through the Gulf of Mexico, something that had theorized but never seen
before.
In this story lies two lessons learned from Deepwater Horizon: This
nation's community of academic scientists represents an insufficiently
tapped reservoir of expertise and assets that can be of great service--
both during and before a disaster.
(1) We should seize the opportunity to build on the DWH experience
to improve the integration of academic scientific expertise in
disaster planning and response.
(2) Basic research paid off--in this case, in unanticipated ways. We
should invest in baseline research to understand all facets of
environments we want to drill in--before we drill, rather than
after an oil spill. This increased knowledge will give us the
capacity to recognize opportunities to prevent future damages
and to know quickly, under crisis conditions, where and how to
allocate assets to limit damage.
Integration of the academic science community
I flashback to the spring and summer of 2010 while oil was flowing
unstoppably from the seafloor 5,000 feet deep in the Gulf. U.S.
officials and industry had an impressive track record responding to the
hundreds of oil spills that occurred every year. But those spills,
unlike Deepwater Horizon, were in shallow waters. Government officials
had little need to keep abreast of such things as oceanographic robots
equipped to operate at great depths or biological communities living on
the deep seafloor. They were generally unaware of singular and valuable
assets and technology that academia had available.
Academic scientists, on the other hand, had little incentive and
few avenues to add their expertise. These were two cultures that
infrequently met and were unaware of one another's perspectives.
In September 2010, I was asked to join the Unified Command to serve
as a liaison between Federal officials and the academic community. I
saw that some Federal officials were bitter toward my colleagues and
me, and much of it was justified. They thought we did not appreciate
their efforts and successes and that we were naive about their shorter-
term responsibilities to control the disaster. They remarked that
academics did not understand that occasionally our highhanded comments
to the press forced the officials to respond and took precious time
away from them performing their urgent mission.
The unprecedented Deepwater Horizon disaster created an
unprecedented intersection of stakeholders. A silver lining to the DWH
disaster is that it compelled previously disparate cultures to
introduce themselves and join forces.
One piece of evidence for this came just a few weeks ago in a
single e-mail. It was sent by one of the lead Federal officials
responsible for responding to oil spills after an inquiry from one of
my academic colleagues. It was sent the day after the April 1 explosion
of a Mexican oil-processing rig in the Gulf of Mexico that killed four
people and created a slick, informing the recipients what happened,
what was known, and the chances of oil reaching U.S. waters.
It was the recipient list that made it a milestone event. The e-
mail was sent not only to .govs and .mils, but .edus. So not just to
employees in government agencies, but also to several scientists from
academic institutions who have been conducting research in the Gulf of
Mexico. I would wager that the Federal official who sent the recent e-
mail and her predecessors had written similar e-mails, faxes, and
teletypes about past oil spills, small or large, without including
academic researchers. Now the government official is sending the same
information she gives to her own people to a host of academic
scientists--not a watered-down version, or even worse, a carefully
worded message to ``stay away.''
Before Deepwater Horizon, there were few meetings for much
interaction among the federal, academic, and industry stakeholders and
media to cover the results. The annual meeting of the new Gulf of
Mexico Research Initiative (GoMRI), funded after DWH, has now provided
a forum for them to meet, exchange ideas, share data, and begin
collaborations.
I have participating in another project that is forging key
relationships between agency responders and academic experts: the
``Science Partnerships Enabling Rapid Response'' (SPERR) project,
coordinated by the Center for Ocean Solutions and ChangeLabs at
Stanford University. Academic scientists and government decision-makers
from agencies such as NOAA, EPA, Coast Guard and USGS involved in this
project have a common goal: to understand the obstacles to effective
scientist-responder collaborations that emerged during Deepwater
Horizon and codesign a solution to bridge the cultural divide and build
trust across those communities.
Over the last year, the SPERR project has explored the tensions
that arose around motivations and incentives within academic research
institutions and government response agencies, and their inability to
collaborate before and during large oil spills. The project team and
partners have since crafted a solution that we believe will powerfully
address these tensions and catalyze the agency and academic
partnerships and resource sharing pathways that are imperative for
improving oil spill response in the future.
The proposed solution, called the Science Action Network, will be a
network of academic and professional scientists that are linked to
regional government planning and response bodies--such as Regional
Response Teams--to coordinate and streamline scientific input for
decisionmaking. In the proposed Network, Regional Academic Liaisons in
each of the ten response regions would ensure academic expertise is
leveraged from universities, and government bodies such as NOAA and the
Coast Guard have streamlined access to relevant science before and
during disasters.
As we glean lessons learned from Deepwater Horizon, there is strong
consensus among agencies and academia alike: improved integration of
science and scientific expertise into disaster planning and response is
essential. In order for a scaled, national solution like the Science
Action Network to be implemented, funding is needed for formalized
coordinator positions, such as the Regional Academic Liaisons, and
Network operation. We must institutionalize the communication and
collaboration demonstrated by the e-mail I cited, so that the next time
a spill occurs, we can effectively leverage our unparalleled scientific
expertise to improve decisionmaking and, ultimately, minimize spill
impacts on human and ecological communities. The challenge of
integrating scientific expertise into decision-making is not unique to
oil spills and the investment in formalized solutions like the Science
Action Network will pay off in the short term across all types of large
disasters.
I've already seen beneficial changes:
When I was researching some mysterious oil sheens near the
DWH site in 2012, BP provided me with satellite overflight data
and other information. With BP's help, we were able to grab
invaluable samples that eventually showed that the oil was not
from a leak at the repaired Macondo well, but a trickle of oil
that leaking from the wreckage of the toppled rig.
In March 2014, the Kirby barge released 168,000 gallons of
fuel oil in Galveston Bay, Texas. I immediately dispatched a
team from my lab to collect samples. After several exchanges
with NOAA officials, my team was granted badges and easy access
to study this location. This contrasts starkly with an
experience I had in 2007 when I was trying to collect samples
in San Francisco Bay following the Cosco Busan oil spill.
Gaining access to field samples was challenging, and often I
was not permitted access to oiled locations, limiting my
capacity to provide valuable insights into that spill.
In December 2014, I heard that there was a devastating
release of a very heavy, viscous oil along the coast of
Bangladesh. With a keen interest in the behavior of these types
of oils, I offered my services and willingness to help NOAA
personnel who was sent to assist. I was sent a sample of the
oil and was able to prepare a report on the behavior of the
spilled oil, which was forwarded to the Bangladeshis.
In January 2015, there was a pipeline break in the
Yellowstone River in Montana that released Bakken crude oil.
The use and transport of Bakken crude oils continues to
increase, but little is know about how they biodegrade, so I e-
mailed NOAA personnel on how I could access samples. Thru a
NOAA intermediate, I was introduced to the lead EPA on-scene
coordinator. With assistance and guidance, he introduced me to
the spiller who shared samples with me. I was then able to
provide a report on the fate of the oil to the spiller within
two months.
Last Thursday, I was a guest lecturer in Commander Gregory Hall's
marine pollution class at the United States Coast Guard Academy in New
London, Conn. I could have presented some new scientific results on DWH
on how sunlight broke down the oil, how much oil is on the seafloor, or
that some oiled samples we find on the beaches of the Gulf are not from
the Deepwater Horizon, but my lesson for these future Coast Guard
officers--who will be on the frontline of lines of future oil spills--
is that they will have to interact with numerous stakeholders who have
different interests. What I have learned, and others have observed, is
that the best outcomes occurred when members of academia and the oil
spill response community had pre-existing relationships. I encouraged
these future officers to get to know those they may work with during a
crisis. It may sound trite, but a cup of coffee and an exchange of e-
mails may save miles of coastlines from oiling.
Wise pre-emptive research
I could give you numerous examples--from Woods Hole Oceanographic
Institution alone--where investments in basic research paid
unanticipated dividends in assessing the DWH disaster. WHOI and other
academic institutions were ``preadapted'' to respond to the spill.
``Preadaptation'' is a term borrowed from evolutionary biology. It
refers to natural selection turning an existing structure to a novel
use when the right conditions develop. In an analogous manner, our
culture of scientific inquiry meant that knowledge applicable to the
oil spill response already existed and could be applied to a new use.
But my suggestion is not a blanket call for more investment in
research because it often turns out to be useful and applicable. More
specifically, I recommend more investment in collecting baseline
information about environments we intend to drill in.
The DWH disaster exposed how little we knew about fundamental
physical, chemical, and biological conditions and processes that exist
in the Gulf of Mexico. In an area full of oil rigs, where a spill was a
good bet (if not inevitable), we had not conducted extensive, long-term
research that would have captured what the Gulf was like before it was
dosed with oil. We lacked baseline knowledge about preexisting
conditions, making it extremely hard to assess damages afterward.
And although after-the-fact assessment studies will teach us
lessons, in some ways it is like providing knowledge to firefighters
and insurance adjusters after the fire. Another approach is to focus
research on learning what we can about how individual ecosystems
operate--because they all operate differently--before we invest in
constructing oil rigs in them.
Let us learn from the Gulf before we look to drilling in the
Arctic. The Arctic is a unique ecosystem that we know very little
about. It is also far more unpredictable, remote, harsh than the Gulf,
with far less infrastructure nearby to combat spills.
With knowledge and predictability about their operating
environment, oil spill responders will have the ability to plan more
effective responses and be prepared with necessary equipment. In other
words, what to do and what is needed and where--in much the way, for
example, that firefighters have surveyed how tall the buildings are in
their city are and have mapped their city's streets, so that they can
take the fastest routes, bringing trucks with ladders of sufficient
heights.
Oil spills are inevitable. This is a pay-me-now-or-pay-me-later
situation in which up-front investments now can save lives, property,
and money later.
I appreciate the opportunity to testify and am prepared to respond
to any questions from Members of the Committee.
The Chairman. Thank you, Dr. Reddy. Dr. Joye?
STATEMENT OF SAMANTHA B. JOYE, Ph.D., ATHLETIC
ASSOCIATION DISTINGUISHED PROFESSOR OF ARTS
AND SCIENCES, PROFESSOR OF MARINE SCIENCES,
UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA
Dr. Joye. Good morning, Chairman Thune, Ranking Member
Nelson, and members of the Committee. Thank you for the
opportunity to provide testimony today regarding the lessons
learned from the Deepwater Horizon.
My name is Samantha Joye. I am a Distinguished Professor at
the University of Georgia. My research examines naturally
occurring microbial processes that mediate oil and gas cycling
in the Gulf of Mexico and elsewhere.
I am going to limit my testimony today given that my
colleagues here have covered many of the points that I wanted
to touch on, but I hope to impress upon you the need for
developing an academic response network, complete with
necessary infrastructure, tools and technology, for academic
scientists to be out on the water working closely with the
National Incident Command within days of a disaster.
Such a collaboration would reduce response time to an
offshore spill, potentially limiting long term damage to
offshore and nearshore ecosystems. A shortened response time
would save resources and could save lives. It will also reduce
hydrocarbon exposure, acute ecological impacts, and economic
impacts regarding tourism and fisheries.
The cost benefit of investing in effective oil spill
response mitigation technologies and infrastructure is almost
assuredly positive, given the high density of oil production
platforms in the Gulf and the increasing number of drilling
endeavors undertaken in ultra-deep water and in extremely gas
rich reservoirs.
One of the big issues that we faced when the Deepwater
Horizon occurred was a lack of communication. This scientific
action network, which is being developed by scientists and
individuals at Stanford University, and both Dr. Reddy and Dr.
Kinner are involved in this effort, I provided Senator Nelson's
staff with some copies and information about this network.
I think this network would move us forward in terms of
bringing together Federal responders and academic scientists.
In terms of the oil spill, I want to talk about a couple of
critical things. The most important is the issue of
environmental baselines. Dr. Reddy just touched on this
briefly, that it would be nice if we had a pre-Deepwater
Horizon MRI of the Gulf of Mexico. The fact is the Minerals
Management Service funded many, many studies of the Gulf of
Mexico prior to the oil spill. The problem was that none of
those studies had a microbiological component involving oil and
gas degradation.
There are many studies of deepwater chemosynthetic
communities. There are many studies of deepwater invertebrate
communities, many studies of physical oceanography of the Gulf
of Mexico, those physical oceanographic studies were really
insufficient to help us do what we needed to do in terms of the
Deepwater Horizon, but you cannot really quantify an impact
when you do not know what the original condition was.
That means you have to make guesses, and I think that
hinders the natural resource damage assessment process that is
going on today because we are making guesses as to what those
original baselines were.
Few long-term baseline datasets exist in the Gulf of Mexico
regarding microbiology. One of the few was funded by the NOAA
National Institute of Undersea Science and Technology at
Mississippi Canyon Block 118, which lies about 20 miles
northwest of the Deepwater Horizon wellhead.
The baseline microbiological data from this site was
integral in providing the background information that we needed
to see how the microbial community was evolving in the water
column after the Deepwater Horizon blew out.
Environmental baselines are also lacking on the natural
distributions of hydrocarbons in the Gulf and their geochemical
fingerprint. You have heard many people say, I am sure, that
you cannot really trace the oil that you might find on the sea
floor to the Macondo wellhead because there is a lot of oil
seeping out of the seabed in the Gulf and it is all the same.
It is not all the same. We do not really know how different
all those reservoirs are, but we need to know how different
those reservoirs are. We need to be able to go in there and do
some CSI geochemistry and resolve the actual fingerprints of
those individual reservoirs.
Finally, to be prepared for the next incident, the research
community needs well validated models of deep circulation and
the ability to deploy tens if not hundreds robotic floats with
appropriate instrumentation. The benefit of providing robotic
floats or underwater vehicles to do plume tracking and oil and
gas tracking for us is that it limits the requirements for ship
times out on the water.
I would like to conclude for a plea for environmental
baselines again. Environmental baselines are absolutely
important for the Gulf of Mexico ecosystem and for the Arctic
ecosystem in light of the drilling that is going to be probably
undertaken there in the future.
Environmental baselines, obtaining necessary environmental
baselines, are a goal that could be achieved as part of the
Department of Interior Bureau of Ocean Energy Management's
mission since they are mandated to provide funding to support
documentation of environmental baselines through the
environmental studies program.
However, BOEM's budget for the environmental studies
program is $35 million a year. This may sound like a lot but it
is not a lot when you consider the area over which this money
must be spread.
Obtaining proper baselines for the Gulf and Arctic alone
would cost substantially more than $35 million a year, and I
personally believe that these costs could and should be shared
by industry.
Sufficient environmental baselines are the best instruments
of industry and the trustees, thus, I encourage Congress and
the Administration to increase BOEM's funding and give them the
authority to require industry to obtain baselines and ongoing
environmental monitoring data at all locations impacted by oil
and gas development and production.
These requisite data collected by proper standardized
protocols and sampling intervals should be determined by a
panel of experts selected and convened by either BOEM or the
National Academy of Science, potentially in collaboration with
NOAA's Emergency Response Division.
Industry should shoulder some of the cost of this
monitoring program, and I believe the funds would be best
administered competitively through BOEM.
With that, I conclude my testimony, and answer any
questions you might have.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Joye follows:]
Prepared Statement of Samantha B. Joye, Ph.D., Athletic Association
Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences, Professor of Marine
Sciences, University of Georgia
Good morning Chairman Thune, Ranking Member Nelson, and members of
Committee. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to provide testimony
regarding the lessons learned and long term environmental impacts of
the Deepwater Horizon (DWH)/Macondo oil well blowout (hereafter Macondo
Blowout), which devastated the Gulf of
Mexico ecosystem beginning in April 2010. My name is Samantha Joye
and I am a Distinguished Professor at the University of Georgia. My
research examines the naturally-occurring microbial processes that
mediate oil and gas cycling in the Gulf of Mexico and Arctic Ocean, two
areas where natural seepage of hydrocarbons is widespread. I have
published over 120 peer-reviewed papers on these and related subjects.
I have worked in the Gulf of Mexico ecosystem for 20 years and continue
to do so.
For this hearing, I was asked to discuss what the scientific
community has learned in the past five years in the wake of the Macondo
Blowout, the lingering environmental impacts, as well as my thoughts on
how to move forward so that we are better prepared as a research
community and as a response community for the next incident. My
comments represent the not only my opinions, but those of my colleagues
within the consortium that I direct, and of the broader scientific
community working in the Gulf system, of which I am an active
participant. The topic of this hearing could not be more timely.
Recently, John Amos summarized the number and location of hazardous
material spills in the Gulf since the 2010 DWH disaster: 10,000 spills
of various sizes have occurred in the past five years. Clearly, it is
not a matter of if, but rather when, the next large accidental offshore
marine oil discharge occurs in the Gulf of Mexico.
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Figure showing the locations of hazardous material spills in the
Gulf since 2010. This is time 5-yr aggregate map; the time series is
available at the SKYTRUTH website: (http://bit.ly/1aLX5UF).
On April 20, 2010, a chain of events that ultimately resulted in
the most significant offshore oil release in U.S. history began. The
Deepwater Horizon, a dynamically positioned offshore mobile drilling
unit, was drilling a production well in the Macondo Prospect, located
in Mississippi Canyon lease block 252, about 40 miles offshore if the
southeast coast of Louisiana. The night of April 20, 2010, rig
operators experienced a loss of well control, resulting in an
uncontrolled blowout. The explosion and subsequent fire on the platform
killed eleven men and injured sixteen others. The blowout preventer,
which should have cut the riser pipe at the seafloor and sealed the
blown out well, failed and the fire on the platform raged for two days.
On April 22nd, the Deepwater Horizon sank, initiating an uncontrolled
release of oil and gas from the seafloor that lasted for 87 days and
introduced some 5 million barrels of oil (210 million gallons) and
500,000 metric tons of methane into the Gulf of Mexico ecosystem.
I am qualified to provide testimony on the impacts of the Macondo
blowout based on my detailed knowledge of the Gulf ecosystem and
through my role as Director of a large research consortium that is
tracking long-term impacts and recovery from the Macondo blowout. I was
among the first academic responders to the DWH oil spill, serving as
chief scientist on the second academic response cruise on board the R/V
Walton Smith in May/June 2010. Being out on the water in May/June 2010,
August/September 2010, and November/December 2010, I witnessed, first
hand, the devastating environmental consequences of this deep-water oil
well blowout. I was part of the scientific team that discovered the
``underwater oil plumes'' and led the effort that discovered freshly
deposited sedimentary layers containing weathered oil that extended
over a large parts Gulf seabed in late August 2010.
Since 2010, we have continued and expanded our work in the Gulf
with the aim of conducting long term monitoring studies and directed
laboratory experiments to elucidate the impacts of oil, chemical
dispersant, and dispersed oil on Gulf microbial communities, in both
the water column and in deep sea sediments. I am the Director of the
``Ecosystem Impacts of Oil and Gas Inputs to the Gulf'' (ECOGIG)
research consortium (www.ecogig.org), a group of 29 scientists
conducting DWH-related research. Our consortium is funded on a
competitive basis by the Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative (GoMRI),
which was created to administer the $500M research fund BP provided to
support DWH-related research over a 10-year period. The ECOGIG mission
is to understand the environmental signatures and impacts of natural
hydrocarbon seepage versus that of abrupt, large hydrocarbon discharges
on coupled benthic and pelagic processes in deepwater ecosystems in the
Gulf of Mexico, and to chart the long-term effects and mechanisms of
ecosystem recovery from the 2010 Macondo blowout.
My testimony today is limited to issues relevant to offshore,
deepwater environments and I will describe the major lessons learned
and long impacts of the Macondo Blowout. I also hope to impress upon
you the need for developing an academic response network, complete with
necessary infrastructure--tools and technology--to be on the water
within days of disaster. This network of academic responders would work
closely and collaboratively with National Incident Command. Such a
collaboration would reduce response time to an offshore spill,
potentially limiting long term damage to offshore and nearshore
ecosystems. A shortened response time saves resources and could save
lives, and will also reduce hydrocarbon exposure, acute ecological
impacts, and economic impacts (fisheries, tourism). The cost-benefit of
investing in effective oil spill response and mitigation technologies
and infrastructure is almost assuredly positive, given the high density
of oil production platforms in the Gulf and the increasing number of
drilling endeavors undertaken in ultra-deep water and in extremely gas-
rich (e.g., Tertiary) reservoirs.
Preface
The Gulf of Mexico ecosystem is representative of a highly stressed
oceanic environment--multiple stressors affect the system from almost
every direction and this was the case before the Deepwater Horizon/
Macondo oil well blowout. Nutrient over-enrichment, seasonal hypoxia,
fishery stress, pollution, intense industry activity, warming waters,
and ocean acidification have collectively pushed the Gulf ecosystem to
the point of collapse. The Macondo Blowout was yet another
anthropogenic impact and it has had a tremendous affect on this
ecosystem.
Lessons Learned from the Deepwater Horizon Disaster
Assessing impacts of an offshore, open ocean oil discharge represents a
formidable challenge.
At the peak of the DWH incident, oil covered 29,000 square miles of
the Gulf's surface, an area comparable in size to the state of South
Carolina (32,020 square miles). An oceanographic research vessel
travels at about 10 miles an hour. Imagine attempting to characterize
the vegetation and soil all across South Carolina by driving in a car
at 10 miles an hour across the state. Given the large area, you could
only take a sample every few hours, perhaps 8 samples a day if you and
your partner shared the driving. And if taking a single sample required
3 hours ( this is the amount of time required to collect a depth
profile of water samples at a depth of 1500m), it would take a very
long time to characterize the entire state.
This example provides insight to the situation faced by scientists
attempting to characterize Gulf offshore environments in the wake of
the DWH discharge. The sheer size of the open ocean area impacted by
the DWH discharge and the fact that the ocean is extremely dynamic--the
water moves and chemical signatures can change on time scales of
minutes to hours--underscores the daunting challenge this incident
posed to oceanographers. The spatial and temporal complexity of the
arena and the presence of oil complicated collection of basic
geochemical and biological data. Characterize the distribution of oil
and gas, aiming to discover novel features, and quantify impacts, made
this task Herculean. The regular sea-going gear we use to collect
samples is not made for oily water; extraordinary effort was required
to clean bottles, sensors, etc. between sample collections. And,
choices had to made: one could characterize smaller areas at greater
resolution or characterize larger areas at more coarse resolution--one
could not do both on a short cruise.
The infusion of oil and gas to the system meant that the biological
system was rapidly evolving. This meant that time series data were
critical, so that we could track the response of various parts of the
system to perturbation. Though insufficient data of this type were
collected for offshore water column and sediment habitats, the one
published suite of time-series measurements made over a 10-month period
(March-December 2010) underscores the clear importance of time-series
data, as opposed to ``snap-shot'' sampling (i.e., a single week or two
sampling campaign) (Crespo-Medina et al., 2014). An enormous amount of
time and multiple ships conducting comparable operations would have
been required to properly sample and characterize the entire area
impacted by the discharge.
Possessing prior system knowledge, i.e., experience working in the
area and familiarity with the bathymetry of the seabed, was integral
for our group's discovery of the deepwater plumes. We discovered the
plumes because we had a good idea of the direction the deep currents
was moving and we knew the bathymetry of the area because many of us
had been involved in the only long-term Gulf benthic observatory (at
Mississippi Canyon lease block 118) which lies to the N/NW of the
Macondo wellhead, so had seabed maps of the area. In depth system
knowledge provided us with instincts--and the willingness to trust our
instincts--and this led to our discovery of the plumes (Diercks et al.,
2010, Joye et al., 2011). We shared the locations of the plumes with
Federal responders and with other scientists, which led to additional
discoveries (Camilli et al., 2010, Valentine et al., 2010, Kessler et
al., 2011).
To facilitate and improve the efficacy of future open-ocean oil
spill response, a foundation of strong coordination, communication and
trust is needed between academic responders and Federal incident
command officials. Ideally, this foundation should be in place and
vetted before the next incident occurs. As described in the testimony
below, academic scientists have a great deal of expertise to offer the
Federal responders and this expertise should be brought to bear
immediately in future response scenarios. Furthermore, in hindsight,
significant investments in infrastructure and technology and basic
research are required to be prepared for the next deepwater discharge.
Such bold moves will increase the ability of responders to identify the
multitude of system-scale impacts and assure collection of the proper
samples to quantify those impacts.
Environmental baselines are necessary and must be obtained.
How do you quantify whether and to what extent something has
changed (i.e., an impact) when you do not know the original condition
(i.e., the baseline)? The answer is that it is difficult and it
requires that you essentially make an educated guess as to what the
original condition was. Environmental baselines are sorely lacking
across the Gulf of Mexico ecosystem. Despite numerous Minerals
Management Service (now the Bureau of Ocean and Energy Management)
funded studies to describe Gulf physical oceanography (e.g., MMS 204-
022, ``Cross-shelf exchange processes and the deepwater circulation . .
.) and deepsea chemosynthetic and hard bottom communities (e.g., MMS
2009-046, ``Investigations of chemosynthetic communities on the lower
continental slope . . .''; MMS 2009-039, ``Northern Gulf of Mexico
Continental Slope Habitats and Benthic Ecology Study''; and MMS 2007-
004, ``Characterization of Northern Gulf of Mexico Deepwater hard-
bottom communities with emphasis on Lophelia coral''), the basic
microbiology of the Gulf system and the ability of microorganisms to
oxidize oil and gas were essentially unconstrained at the baseline
level in 2010. There was no data available on water column oil
degradation rates and very little available on water column methane
oxidation rates (Wankel et al., 2010). Prior to the DWH, someone once
described my work on oil and gas microbiology in the Gulf as esoteric.
In the post-DWH world, that word would never be used because we now
know that microbiological research is absolutely critical.
Few long-term baseline data sets that include basic microbiology
are available for the Gulf (Joye et al., 2014). The NOAA/National
Institute for Undersea Science and Technology Mississippi Canyon block
118 (MC118) Gas Hydrate Microbial Observatory and a NSF funded 5-year,
though only 2 research cruises, Hypersaline Ecosystems Microbial
Observatory programs are notable exceptions. The MC118 site is less
than 20km from the site of the Macondo blowout and data from this
program provided critical baseline data that was used to assess
microbial community changes in the water column and sediments following
the DWH incident (Crespo-Medina et al., 2014, Yang et al., 2014).
Without such critical baseline data, it would have been impossible to
quantify changes in pelagic microbial oil and gas degrading communities
in response to the blowout. Still, other parts of the pelagic
``microbial'' community such as phytoplankton and small zooplankton,
are unknown because we do not know much about them in the first place.
Thankfully, baseline data were available for some cold water coral
communities and that has facilitated research aimed at quantifying
Macondo-related impacts to those communities (White et al., 2012,
Fisher et al., 2014a, 2014b).
Environmental baselines are also lacking on the natural
distributions of hydrocarbons and their geochemical ``fingerprint'' for
the Gulf. Fingerprinting oil to a specific reservoir requires ultra-
clean sampling protocols in the field and sophisticated instrumentation
in the laboratory. We need to know how the natural distribution of oil
(dissolved hydrocarbons) and gas (methane) vary across the Gulf system
and we need to be able to identify and isolate specific sources
(reservoirs). We need to understand variability in concentration and
fingerprint at the scale of an individual seep field, in a lease block,
and between regions (e.g., Mississippi Canyon, Green Canyon, Alaminos
Canyon, etc.). Furthermore, we must obtain basic information on oil and
gas degradation rates in the environment, how they vary over space and
time, and we have to know what constrains these activities. One cannot
conclude that ``microbes ate all the oil'' based on the observation
that oil is no longer measurable in a water sample; the fact is that
the oil may have instead moved to another location (e.g., the seafloor)
where you were not looking.
Finally, to be prepared for the next incident, the research
community needs well-validated models of deep circulation and the
ability to deploy 10s-100s of robotic floats with the appropriate
instruments (fluorometers) to detect oil. We have much better models of
the Macondo area now (Goni et al., 2015) and of some of the unique
physics that led to development of the deepwater plumes, for example
(Zachary et al., 2015), but we need comparable models for the entire
Gulf ecosystem. This is a goal that can be achieved, with proper
research funding. In fact, one could argue that such floats with CDOM
fluorometers should be deployed now, to start obtaining the desperately
needed environmental baselines. The research community must push the
envelope to develop other instruments specific to hydrocarbons that can
be deployed on autonomous vehicles.
This will permit characterization of large areas with minimal
demands for ship time.
Obtaining proper environmental baselines for the Gulf system is
something that every environmental scientists conducting post Macondo
research realizes. This necessary goal can be achieved as part of DOI/
BOEM's mission, since they are mandated to provide funding to support
documentation of environmental baselines through the Environmental
Studies Program. BOEM's budget for the ESP is a $35M a year and those
funds must cover all areas impacted by oil and gas development.
Obtaining proper baselines for the Gulf and elsewhere (e.g., The
Arctic) will cost substantially more than $35M per year and I believe
these cost could and should be shared by industry. Sufficient
environmental baselines are in the best interest of the industry and
the Trustees. Thus, I encourage Congress and the Administration to
increase BOEM's funding and to give them increased authority to require
industry to obtain baseline and ongoing (annual) environmental
monitoring data at all locations impacted by oil and gas development.
The requisite data collected, proper protocols, and sampling intervals
should be determined by a Panel of Experts selected and convened by
BOEM officials, potentially in collaboration with NOAA's Emergency
Response Division. Industry should shoulder the costs of this
monitoring program and the funds should be administered competitively
by BOEM.
Knowing the flow rate is a critical to closing the ``oil budget''.
Knowing the discharge rate is essential for selecting and employing
the most appropriate method of intervention to seal a discharging well.
Quantification of the discharge rate over time--and knowing and
whether, and if so how much, it varies over time, is also essential for
determining the total hydrocarbon discharge, a value of obvious
importance in the NRDA process. I have heard many people say there was
no technology available to quantify the flow rate when the Macondo
blowout began. This statement simply is not true. Scientists had
determined the flow rate of discharging vents in deepsea hydrothermal
systems using particle imaging velocimetry (PIV, Westerweel 1993),
optical plume velocimetry (OPV; Crone et al., 2008) or acoustic
scintillation (Di Iorio et al., 2005, 2012) before the Macondo Blowout.
The first evidence that the discharge rate was well above the stated
rate of 1000 or 5000 barrels of oil per day (BOPD) came from satellite
imagery: the satellite-derived estimate of 26,500 barrels a day was
called the ``MacDonald Minimum'' by the New York Times (the number was
generated by Prof. Ian MacDonald at Florida State University). The
first estimate of the Macondo well discharge rate based on (very poor
quality) digital video footage of the discharging wellhead was obtained
by PIV and the value was 57,000 10,000 BOPD (Crone and
Tolstoy 2010). It is noteworthy that release of this video footage
required three congressional subpoenas. Later in the discharge, Camilli
et al., (2011) reported a flow rate of 52,700 BOPD. There is no
reasonable explanation for why the flow rate was not quantified early
on and continuously. However, because it was not, we will never truly
know how much oil was discharged from the Macondo wellhead. And not
knowing the absolute discharge rate makes generating and closing the
oil budget impossible.
In the future, immediate and continuous assessment of the discharge
rate should be an absolute requirement of the responsible party.
Patching other holes in the oil budget.
--Deepwater plumes and sedimented, weathered oil
The discovery of deepwater plumes enriched in oil and gas was not
an accident. The literature was rich with papers describing the
formation of underwater oil-rich plumes in the event of a deepwater
blowout and field experiments verified model results. On the first
academic response cruise on board the R/V Pelican in early May 2010,
Vernon Asper and Arne Diercks discovered the deepwater plumes (Diercks
et al., 2010) and on the second academic response cruise, we
characterized the chemistry and microbiology of those plumes in great
detail (Joye et al., 2011, Crespo-Medina et al., 2014). How much of the
discharged oil was in the deepwater plume? That value is not well
constrained but the number that is most commonly stated is 30 percent.
All of the discharged gas, namely methane, some 500,000 metric tonnes
of it, was trapped within the deepwater plumes (Joye et al., 2011).
Notably, discharged gas is not included in the ``oil budget''.
A significant fraction, some 5 to 15 percent of the discharged oil,
was deposited to the seafloor as ``marine `oil' snow'' (Chanton et al.,
2014, Valentine et al., 2014), covering an area of over 8,000 square
kilometers. Our research team collected cores from many sites at
various distances from the wellhead in May 2010. We re-sampled some of
those areas in August 2010 and discovered layers of recently deposited
oil-containing material that were absent in May 2010. These layers were
observed many 10s of miles from the wellhead, showing that ``oil snow''
deposition was a widespread phenomenon. The freshly deposited layer
exhibited a dark coloration; these cores smelled strongly of
hydrocarbons and the water overlying the cores contained a visible
rainbow sheen of oil. These cores were not from known hydrocarbon seep;
this oil had not seeped into the sediments from below, it had rained
down onto the sediments from above. The depth of the layer was up to
several cm thick in some places; layers that thick would take hundreds
of years to accumulate under natural sedimentation regimes. The
animals, worms and such, living in the sediment had been suffocated.
These cores were like nothing any of us had ever seen.
We now know that this oil-containing material reached the seafloor
through the mechanism of marine oil snow sedimentation, a process that
was unrecognized and unappreciated prior to the DWH disaster. Marine
oil snow forms by several different mechanisms, abiotically through
oil-mineral aggregation, and biologically through the activity of
bacteria and phytoplankton (Passow 2014, Joye et al., 2014).
Environmental conditions determine which type of marine snow is most
important for the transfer of oil to depth and the primary mode of oil
snow formation can vary by location and time. Mobilization and
redistribution of this sedimented, weathered presents a long-term,
persistent impact of the oil on benthic ecosystems that are exposed,
possibly multiple times, to oil components that sank to the seabed.
Marine oil snow could also serve as an important food source for
many planktonic species as well, making oil contaminated snow a
mechanism to move oil into the food web. Macondo-derived hydrocarbons
were found in floating particulate matter in the Gulf as far as 190 km
southwest of the wellhead in 2010, and the ancient hydrocarbon isotopic
signal persisted into 2011 and 2012. This particulate phase appears to
have been ingested by zooplankton and it entered the food web. There is
also evidence consistent with the hypothesis that Macondo hydrocarbons
entered the food web of coastal organisms to the north of the spill
site.
Sedimentation of oil was not included in the original Federal oil
budget. We now know that the formation of marine oil snow particles is
an important fate of oil. This fate must be considered in future
response plans and its importance quantified, through direct
measurements of sedimentation and trophic transfer, relative to other
potential fates and impacts of oil.
--The failure to constrain rates of microbial oil degradation
Despite the fact that oil was present in the deepwater plume and on
the sea surface, no actual rates of oil degradation were carried out.
By ``actual rates'' I mean that oil degradation rates were not
determined using highly sensitive radiotracer techniques. The one
degradation rate that was published was from a lab bottle experiment
and it represented a potential rate of one group of compounds, alkanes
(Hazen et al., 2010). The ``turnover constant'' for this one, very
labile, group of compounds, the alkanes, was then applied to all the
various components of oil, from benzene to polycyclic aromatic
hydrocarbons, by some other scientists and the media, leading to the
highly inappropriate conclusion that microorganisms magically degraded
the Macondo ``oil'' on a 10 day time scale. Another journal in Science
(Camilli et al., 2010) published much slower oil degradation rate, but
that value was largely overlooked.
There is no evidence that `magic microbes' consumed all the Macondo
oil. The reasons why we do not how much of the Macondo oil the microbes
did, in fact, consume are as follows: The reasons microbial degradation
rates were not determined include: (1) making these rate measurements
is extremely difficult and time-consuming, (2) the radiotracers are
very expensive, and (3) the measurements requires specialized shipboard
accommodations (e.g., radioisotope-usage isolation vans). The
scientific community is better prepared now to make these
measurements--robust methods are now available--but the bottleneck may
be expertise as few people make these laborious measurements.
In contrast to oil, methane consumption rates were well constrained
and it is clear that microbial processes were unable to completely
consume the methane discharged from the Macondo wellhead (Crespo-Medina
et al., 2014). Though there remains some debate about the fate of
methane (e.g., Kessler et al., 2011 and Crespo-Medina et al., 2014),
the differing conclusions are largely a function of the timing of
sampling and the time-scale sampled (the former lacked samples from
early in the discharge when activity was maximal while the latter
presented a comprehensive data set representing a 10-month time
series).
Because no direct measurements of oil (component) degradation rate
exist, we are left to make assumptions about the potential for the
microbial community to degrade oil and that results in very large error
bars and an unconstrained oil budget. The Federal oil budget released
in August 2010 stipulated that approximately 50 percent of the
discharged oil was not accounted for in a quantitative sense. Some
fraction of this now lies along the seabed. Another portion was
certainly consumed by microbial processes. However, we cannot know, in
an absolute sense, how much of this oil remains in the system in some
(weathered) form or where this oil ended up.
In the future, we must constrain the quantity and fate of oil and
gas in deepwater plumes; we must constrain the formation and fate
(sedimentation vs. trophic transfer) of marine oil snow; and, we must
quantify rates of oxidation of model oil compounds, e.g., hexadecane as
a model alkane, naphthalene as a model PAH, etc.
Dispersants
Chemical dispersants break down surface oil slicks, creating a
spectrum of sizes of dissolved oil particles. The general principle
behind application of dispersants is that they reduce the amount of oil
that reaches the shoreline and that they increase rates of microbial
oil degradation by increasing the available surface area of oil that is
subject to microbial attack. Importantly, these chemicals are also
assumed to be inert, doing no harm to the environment.
The decision to apply dispersants during the DWH response was not
taken lightly and ultimately, I believe it came down to minimizing
coastal impacts with a true belief that offshore impacts of dispersants
would be minimal. As it turns out, the evidence that dispersants
increase oil biodegradation rates is contradictory (Kleindienst et al.,
2015). There is no scientific consensus that chemical dispersants
increase rates of microbial oil degradation. In fact, since the DWH
incident many papers have been published documenting that dispersed
oil, and in some cases dispersant alone, are more toxic and harmful
than oil alone. Negative impacts of dispersants have been documented in
marine phytoplankton (Ozhan and Bargu 2014), ciliates (Ortmann et al.,
2012, Almeda et al. 2014), rotifers (Rico-Martinez et al., 2013), fish
(Ramachandran et al., 2014, Brette et al., 2014), corals (DeLeo et al.,
2015) and coral larvae (Goodbody-Gringley et al., 2012).
Clearly, the assumption that dispersants are inert and impart no
negative ecosystem consequences was wrong. Much more research is
required to quantify the impacts of dispersants and dispersed oil on
the biological components of the Gulf system before they are again used
as a primary mode of oil spill response. Notably, today, blowout
preventors are being instrumented with automated dispersant
applicators. Available science suggests this is a bad idea and argues
that this practice should be halted until either a truly biologically
inert dispersant is developed or concrete evidence is produced to
contradict and invalidate the available work that underscores the
inherent negative impacts of dispersant/dispersed oil exposure.
Long term Impacts of the Deepwater Horizon Disaster
Damage to deepwater ecosystems
Deepwater benthic ecosystems, including cold-water corals (White et
al., 2012, Fisher et al., 2014a, 2014b) and benthic invertebrates
(Montagna et al., 2013) were significantly impacted by weathered oil
sedimentation. Cold water coral ecosystems are critical benthic
habitats in the Gulf of Mexico and elsewhere. Few people realize that
only half of the world's coral reefs lie within the photic zone; the
other half lies in deeper, dark water. These deep, cold-water coral
environments provide fishery habitat as well as other ecosystem
services. Corals, and octocorals in particular, are excellent sentinels
for anthropogenic impact in the deep sea: They sample the surrounding
water, normally live for 100s to 1000s of years, and when impacted,
their dead branches or skeletons remain attached to the sea floor
providing a record of impact that can last for up to a decade. Exposure
to dispersants and dispersed oil made a bad thing worse, at least for
the corals (DeLeo et al., 2015).
Cold water corals are slow growing animals; since they grow at a
rate of around 1 cm per year, a meter tall coral is 100 years old.
Several coral ecosystems in the vicinity of Macondo were severally
impacted from the Macondo blowout. The most serious impacts with within
about 11 km of the spill site, but corals over twice that distance away
and at much deeper depth (to 1900m) were also visibly impacted
resulting in dying branches on these normally very long lived corals.
Full recovery will not happen in our lifetimes.
The injuries to corals were not confined to the nearby deep sea
communities. The mesophotic corals were also injured in large numbers
on the shelf. Prof. Ian MacDonald's group at Florida State documented
400 injured coral colonies at two sites, but this represents a small
fraction of the total coral habitat known to exist on the shelf under
the area covered by surface oil and under the airborne dispersant
flight lines.
Resuspension and remobilization of sedimented oil could generate
multiple and new exposures to both corals and invertebrate communities,
prolonging Macondo's impact on vital deepwater habitats.
Benthic invertebrates may be considered ``worms in the mud'' but
these animals provide important services to their environment: their
movement, whether it be burrowing or simply trudging along the surface,
serves to mix and oxygenate sediment, increasing oxygen penetration
into sediments and allowing the microorganisms in the sediments to
mineralize more organic carbon. Thus, benthic invertebrates can affect
the rate of sediment organic matter turnover, which also serves to
remineralize nutrients. These sedimentary processes are inherently
linked to processes in the surface ocean: Remineralized nutrients from
the deep are ultimately returned to the surface ocean where they
support primary production. Primary production in surface waters fuels
the food web but also supports a natural particle flux to the benthos.
This delicate balance between nutrient supply to the surface ocean from
the deep seafloor and return flux of some fraction to the deep through
natural sedimentation was turned on its head by the massive
sedimentation event following the Macondo blowout. This benthic-to-
surface connection is poorly constrained at baseline levels and we need
more data to constrain the magnitude of this perturbation.
Benthic invertebrate communities, especially within a 5-10 mile
radius of the wellhead, were wiped out. How long it will take them to
recover is unknown. Likewise, damaged coral communities have been
documented 10s of miles from the wellhead. These communities are still
showing impact and though we know it will require 100s of years for the
most damaged coral communities to recover, we are still documenting
impacts that were not documented in 2012 and it is likely that the true
magnitude of the deepsea impact may never be fully appreciated.
Notably, there is no set-back distance that would have prevented
these catastrophic impacts. The regulations in place still allow
drilling and production to occur far too close (500m) to sensitive
communities. I encourage Congress and the Administrative to review
these set-back distances and to increase them to minimize damage to
sensitive chemosynthetic communities. The deep sea is very poorly
surveyed and its fauna are very poorly known. As noted previously,
baseline studies of the distribution and status of deepwater
communities near oil and gas development sites, even if this is video
surveys run by the industry, need to be reviewed by BOEM/BSEE and
trained scientists. We need to better understand the baseline
conditions in the deep sea to better understand where the more unique
communities are found in the sea of mud that is most of the deep sea
floor. More in depth knowledge of the biodiversity and population
connectivity of the deepsea fauna is needed to understand the effects
of the next disaster or cumulative impacts of anthropogenic impacts on
the oceans.
Microbial community shifts
The massive infusion of hydrocarbons to the Gulf system in the
Macondo area resulted in a rapid shift in hydrocarbon-degrading
microbial community composition that, in some places, remains
detectable today (Yang et al., 2014). Whether the present microbial
hydrocarbon degrading community is providing the same ecosystem
services or maintaining their previous levels of activity is unknown.
Assessment of time-series changes in phytoplankton, zooplankton and
meso-pelagic organisms is lacking, so it is unclear whether their
populations were impacted similarly. However, given the variable
ability of some organisms to tolerate oil exposure, shifts in community
composition are likely. The long-term impacts of such shifts and the
time required for the base of the food web to achieve a new steady
state is unknown.
Moving Forward
During the DWH response, it became clear that the research
community lacked sufficient resources in the form of manned
submersibles, ROVs, and AUVs to adequately and rapidly respond.
Germany, France, Russia, Japan and China have invested much more vested
in deep-sea technology than the U.S. has in the past twenty years and
it shows. Deep-sea assets and technology development and instrument
acquisition are necessary to support basic scientific exploration and
discovery. These tools are also absolutely essential to track,
quantify, map, and verify open ocean water column and benthic impacts
of incidents like the Macondo blowout. Training and instrumenting an
academic task force to aid in response to offshore blowouts and other
natural disasters is a worthy investment. I encourage Congress and the
Administration to increase BOEM's funding and scope of work to
facilitate and improve future response efforts.
Thank you for the opportunity to testify today. I would be happy to
answer any questions that you have.
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The Chairman. Thank you, Dr. Joye. I want to turn now to
our distinguished Ranking Member of the Committee, Senator
Nelson from Florida, who I know has a keen interest in this
subject.
STATEMENT OF HON. BILL NELSON,
U.S. SENATOR FROM FLORIDA
Senator Nelson. Mr. Chairman, it is just as well that my
opening statement, which will be very short, is after the
witnesses. This matter is very personal to me. Those of us on
the Gulf lived through this.
We were first told that it was maybe 1,000 barrels a day,
and over the course of time, what we found is it was upwards in
excess of 50,000 barrels a day, a total spill over the course
of 89 days that was a mind blowing just under five million
barrels of oil, and the specific figure that Judge Barbier in
the Federal Court in New Orleans has come up with is right at
four million.
That is a lot of oil. The consequences were obvious. Some
of you have pointed them out. In a state like mine, we lost an
entire tourist season, not because there was oil on the beach,
as there was on Pensacola Beach, and some tar balls got as far
east as Panama City Beach, but because people thought there was
oil on the beach, and they did not come to the Gulf Coast, all
the way down to the southern tip of Florida, Marco Island.
In addition, almost 40 percent of the Gulf was closed to
fishing, and all the livelihood that occurred from there.
About a year into this, I went to LSU and I talked to a
couple of professors that were doing an investigation comparing
what was happening in Barataria Bay with other bays that had
not had the oil. The little fish that is about that big
[indicating] called the ``killifish,'' they found a lot of
changes. They found mutations in the lungs. They found
reproduction was down. They found stunted growth, et cetera,
compared to those killifish in other bays.
We know there is an obvious effect. That is in part why we
set up the money that is eventually going to flow from the
RESTORE Act in the Trust Fund.
That is why we set up these centers of excellence in each
of the states, and specifically for Florida, a real research
organization, and it is the Florida Institute of Oceanography,
a 21 university consortium located at University of South
Florida, that will continue to do research on the health of the
Gulf, which we do not know, as you all have suggested in your
testimony, we do not know the effect, and we do not know how
much oil is down there at 5,000 feet still below, and what are
the long term effects. We saw in the food chain up from the
killifish effects upon the higher food chain creatures.
There is a lot to know. I will be filing some legislation
tomorrow that I will announce later that would ensure that NOAA
and the Coast Guard have the tools to prepare and respond for
the next marine oil spill.
Mr. Chairman, thank you.
The Chairman. Thank you, Senator Nelson. I guess we can
start on questions. I know we have an event coming up before
too long over in the House chambers, a joint session. A lot of
people will probably be departing for that.
I will just ask a couple of quick questions and then I will
turn it over to people here who may want to drill down a little
further.
This would just be for the entire panel. That has to do
with kind of the lessons learned from all this, and what has
been the most important improvement in safety or response
technology in the 5-years since Deepwater Horizon.
Mr. Williams. I will talk about what we are doing at the
Center for Offshore Safety and SEMS. I think even though a lot
of companies have good programs, we have really changed, we
have come together, worked together, developed better systems
for sharing learning in improving this, and it is really a key
tool because it balances between focusing on protecting the
individuals and protecting yourself from major incidents, and
it gets that balance right.
I think that is what they talked about when they talked
about safety culture in the Presidential Commission report.
The SEMS processes embed safety into every phase of
learning, managing change, developing skills and knowledge, it
is embedded into your whole work process. It continuously looks
at assuring and measuring that you have built barriers and have
those barriers in place.
I think building a place to learn, improve, and make that
continuously better and maintain a continuous focus on that and
get the balance right is one of the important additions.
The Chairman. Anybody else?
Dr. Kinner. Yes, I would like to address that, Senator. I
think probably the seminal impact has been the influx of
research dollars into oil spill R&D. Really, prior to the
spill, the amount of money that went in both on the Federal
side and on the industry side, et cetera, was really relatively
low, and this effort through GoMRI, the National Academy,
through industry, and to a lesser extent through the Federal
Government, has really focused on some key questions.
I think the real issue is moving beyond figuring out what
is going on in the Gulf, to figuring out how to do response
better, and response in areas other than Gulf oil spills.
As you know, every day we see in the news spills of trains,
spills with pipelines, potentially developing in the Arctic.
There are some major, major impacts that could occur from those
spills that we are really not addressing as well.
I would hope that we would see that research percolate into
these other key areas.
The Chairman. Dr. Reddy?
Dr. Reddy. Thank you. My thoughts about response are it is
a lot better than it used to be, and in part because after the
Exxon Valdez spill, which was 13 million gallons of oil, we had
only one million gallons of oil released in 1991. Business was
incredibly good. In fact, the track record of oil spills was
much, much better.
The oil spills were not from tankers but actually from
ships carrying oil, like the Cosco Busan oil spill in 2007.
My biggest concern and perhaps the lesson learned is that
there is a continued interest in understanding effects and
damages of spills, and not putting enough input, as my
colleagues have said, into response.
For all practice purposes, we are training the next
generation of home insurance adjustors on how to do a better
adjustment about a house that just burned down instead of
training firefighters to stop the fire from being one story to
a complete catastrophe.
If I could say one thing, the response has to get more
attention because that is where the action is. That is where
limiting damages is.
I originally would say we should double down on our
response but I am pretty sure we should be all in. Thank you.
The Chairman. Thank you. Dr. Joye?
Dr. Joye. I echo Dr. Reddy's sentiment on the value of
response, but in terms of lessons learned, I think there were
potentially three really critical lessons that we learned from
the Deepwater Horizon moving forward, and they have to do with
the Federal oil budget.
One is the absolute essential nature of determining the
flow rate properly from day one, not 2 months after the spill--
the discharge has become. The fact that the flow rate was not
properly determined until almost 2 months into the event means
we will never know how much oil was discharged from that well,
which means making the oil budget and closing the oil budget
essentially impossible. Techniques are available to do that and
it should be done.
The second thing is if you look at the Federal oil budget,
that little pie chart, there is a big part of the pie that is
missing, and Dr. Reddy referred to that. That is oil sediment
to the sea bottom, and the range of that is from two to 16
percent, and we do not know where in that 2 to 16 percent the
actual number is. That is upwards of 10 million, it is a huge
fraction of the discharge.
We know the mechanism now by which that oil got from the
surface to the bottom, it is biological processes for the most
part, and that needs to be included in the oil budget and it
needs to be quantified during the next response.
Finally, the deepwater plumes. We do not really know how
much of the discharged oil was in the deepwater plumes. It
could have been 30 percent. I think that is a good number. That
is a number that I use. What happened to all that oil. The only
way you could have constrained that is if you were actually
tracking the fate of that material continuously, and it was
not.
One of the biggest holes in the oil budget is you have all
this oil that you cannot really quantify. Nobody was measuring
rates of oil by degradation. Why is that? Because it is really
hard to do. It is painful, it is excruciating, it is expensive,
it is time consuming, it is laborious, your graduate students
hate you for making them do it. It is absolutely necessary.
Back in 2010, we were doing it in my group at a very
minimum level because of the expense, and now we do it
extensively because of the urgency, and the fact that we need
to know what these baselines are.
Those sorts of things have to be factored into the next
response because otherwise we are never going to be able to
close the oil budget and understand what happened to all the
oil that was discharged from the next well that blows up.
The Chairman. Thank you, Dr. Joye. I am going to turn now
to Senator Nelson, followed by his colleague from Florida,
Senator Rubio.
Senator Nelson. Are you talking about the oil that was
floating on the surface?
Dr. Joye. I am talking about both the oil that was floating
on the surface----
Senator Nelson. No, the plumes.
Dr. Joye. The deepwater plumes, I think we did a pretty
good job of measuring methane degradation. In terms of oil by
degradation, there are only two estimates. One was by Terry
Hazen, and that was in a flask experiment done in the lab, and
one was done by Rich Carmilli and Dr. Reddy here looking at
oxygen depletion.
The two numbers of oil degradation that they get are vastly
different. One was very fast and one was very slow. Those are
the two numbers and neither of them were direct measurements
using tracers.
Senator Nelson. You are talking about the oil that was
floating on the top?
Dr. Joye. All of it. We did not measure microbial
degradation of any of the oil properly.
Senator Nelson. Were we not lucky that the loop current did
not catch the oil and take it south and around the Florida Keys
and up the southeast coast of Florida?
Dr. Joye. Very lucky.
Senator Nelson. Where the Gulf Stream is right at the
coast.
Dr. Joye. We were very lucky.
Senator Nelson. We were. Tell us, Dr. Joye, about your
study regarding the subsea oil sediment blizzard.
Dr. Joye. Dr. Reddy has published on this as well. One of
our original hypotheses was that there would be sedimentation
of oil due to bacterial processes. The bacteria that degrade
oil are renown for their ability to excrete mucous, really
sticky, heavy, exopolymers, that help them essentially emulsify
the oil and make it more bioavailable.
The unfortunate side of that is this stuff is sticky, and
sediment particles, other organisms, it sticks to that material
and makes it sink. It sinks like a stone, hundreds of meters
per day. This material can get from the top to the bottom
within a week, and it contains residual weathered oil.
We first found these deposits in August 2010 near the
wellhead. They were as thick as five to 10 centimeters, as you
go away from the wellhead, they thinned out, but these deposits
were essentially everywhere that we looked. We have been
tracking them for the past 5 years. In many places, if you put
them side by side from 2010 to 2015, you would not be able to
tell which were collected in 2015 or in 2010 because they are
not going away.
Senator Nelson. How far out from the wellhead did you find
that?
Dr. Joye. Our most far field sample, I believe, was around
70 kilometers or so from the wellhead. Again, it is a huge
area. One of the issues is you cannot possibly sample the
entire area. It is so heterogeneous, as Dr. Reddy said, we are
never going to know how much oil is on the sea bed, because
there is just no way to physically sample it properly.
Senator Nelson. As we are researching in the future to try
to determine the health of the Gulf as a result of this four to
five million barrels of oil spill, what are we going to look
for other than the obvious, the food chain, the critters? What
are we going to look for?
Dr. Joye. The benthic impacts of sediments of oil are
multiple. One is cold water corrals, for example, that were
essentially wiped out because of oil sedimentation. Benthic
invertebrates were wiped out in areas of high oil
sedimentation.
The things you can look for in terms of long term impact,
this material is not just sitting on the bottom, it is getting
immobilized, it is getting re-suspended, and it is moving
around, and it still contains a significant level of polycyclic
aromatic hydrocarbons which are toxic.
The movement of this material could perpetuate its impact
on benthic ecosystems. There are many bottom dwelling fish and
organisms that live in the Gulf of Mexico. Anything that relies
on the bottom as a food source or habitat could be potentially
damaged by this material.
Dr. Kinner. Senator Nelson, might I follow up on that?
Senator Nelson. Please.
Dr. Kinner. I think one thing that we would credit the
great state of Florida for is that some of this work was
pioneered by researchers in Florida. Dave Hollander, for
example, at University of South Florida.
The key question of what these scientists have found is how
would we use that information in a future response, either in
the Gulf or for Senator Sullivan in the state of Alaska.
If you have another spill, what does this sedimentation
process mean. I think the question here is if we have oil in
either the surface water or deep down and you have some kind of
particulates, for instance, in Cook Inlet, if you have a lot of
sediment in the water, or if you have this biological
phenomenon in the Gulf during the spring, you are going to
bring potentially a certain amount of that oil down to the
bottom.
That is something that responders need to think about and
factor in when they think about the tradeoff's in response. I
think that is a great example of how research can impact the
response we do in the future and the tradeoff's responders have
to make and factor in.
That is where this scientific collaboration really would
work. Another great example that both Dr. Reddy and Dr. Joye
brought up is this question of flow rate. If we had a
scientific network that responders could talk with scientists
beforehand and say here is the situation we are worrying about,
a blow out scenario, we could get scientists thinking ahead of
time and say how would you measure the flow rate, and a
dialogue would ensue, and I think we would have realized much
more quickly that was a lack of what we knew in response.
Those are just a couple of examples, Senator.
Senator Nelson. I will just say in closing that we had to
raise cain to get the pictures 5,000 feet below. Once we got
that streaming video, and we actually put it up on my website,
then you scientists could look and start making calculations.
Whoa, this is a lot more than what was originally thought.
I will just say in closing that we had the Coast Guard
Commandant here in the last couple of days. There are a lot of
lessons learned about how to handle an emergency. I personally
think it has to be a military command structure with a clear
line of authority, since you have emergency conditions that are
happening every day. It is a war zone out there.
I think there were quite a few mistakes made in that
regard. Thank you.
Senator Rubio [presiding]. Senator Peters?
STATEMENT OF HON. GARY PETERS,
U.S. SENATOR FROM MICHIGAN
Senator Peters. Thank you, Senator Rubio. Thank you to the
panelists for the discussion here today.
We are looking at the fifth year anniversary of the oil
disaster in the Gulf, but this could also be, this coming July,
the fifth anniversary of another major spill disaster that
occurred in my home state of Michigan, where we had a six foot
break in a pipeline that resulted in over a million gallons of
heavy crude oil, which overwhelmed the Kalamazoo River, that
has been the most expensive pipeline break on shore in the
history of this country, well over $1 billion has been spent in
clean up. They are still working aggressively to complete that
project.
One of the most troubling aspects of the disaster is it
took 18 hours before a utility employee reported the spill and
the pipeline company learned of the spill into the waters.
Unfortunately, as I am sure all of you will agree, failures
in pipeline oversight have become the norm, not the exception.
Last week, in fact, there was an article here locally in
Politico that showed the gaping holes that we have in pipeline
safety regulations.
We had the Commandant, as Senator Nelson mentioned, of the
Coast Guard here earlier. I asked him specific questions about
an issue that I am particularly concerned about, and that is
pipelines that we have in the Great Lakes, particularly after
the pipeline break we had in the Kalamazoo River.
It would be absolutely catastrophic to have a pipeline
break in the Great Lakes. We currently have a pipeline that
goes through the Straits of Mackinac, a little over five miles
of beautiful Lake Michigan and Lake Huron water. It is a
pipeline that is nearly 60 years old. It is operated by the
same company that had the pipeline break that has resulted in a
major disaster on our shore, and there are other pipelines.
Dr. Kinner, I appreciated your earlier comments that we
need to be looking at these other areas. I would argue that the
Great Lakes is particularly troublesome given the fact of not
only the recreation and other activities but we have tens of
millions of people who drink the water of the Great Lakes. This
is a depository of most of the world's fresh water.
If you would comment on a spill in the Great Lakes, Dr.
Kinner, Dr. Reddy, Dr. Joye. The Commandant from the Coast
Guard mentioned that if we had a spill in the Great Lakes, it
would be even more problematic because some of the microbes
that exist in the ocean do not exist in fresh water. He also
needed to review some of the response plans which he was not
able to comment on at least immediately, although I am sure
they have some.
If you could comment as to how comfortable you feel having
pipelines in one of the largest bodies of fresh water in the
world, and what are some of the unique challenges we may face
in the Great Lakes, and what are things we need to be thinking
about particularly as we look for reauthorization of PHMSA and
other legislation in the future. I will start with you, Dr.
Kinner.
Dr. Kinner. Thank you very much, Senator. The key
difference that I see, and there are response plans certainly
for that region--the key difference that I see is one of the
tools right now would be out of the toolbox of response, and
that is dispersants, because dispersants are not really
functional in fresh water. That tool, which was quite valuable
and obviously has some utility in the Gulf, is not available.
There is research being done to work on that, but that
would make it very, very difficult if you had high wind and
wave conditions, for example, and we know the Great Lakes can
be very, very dangerous, that would be very difficult to
recover that oil, and it could be quite problematic.
I think that is one thing that troubles me more than
anything else, how we would respond. Mechanical recovery is
great, but it does not work well if you have very stormy
conditions.
Senator Peters. Dr. Reddy?
Dr. Reddy. Senator Peters, I could not agree with you more.
In fact, I actually am no longer going to do any more research
on the Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico. We are in fine
hands with Dr. Joye and others.
I believe the future of oil spill science is with Bakken
oil spills and dilbits, like what happened in Kalamazoo, and I
am currently working on the Bridger pipeline release that was
in the Yellowstone River on January 17.
To make an example, Bakken oil spills, which is probably
then newest source of oil to the United States and North
America, there is not one published paper on a Bakken oil spill
in the United States.
As much as we know about the Gulf of Mexico and the
baseline knowledge, it pales in comparison to future oil
spills, and I might even be so frank as to say that we are
particularly lucky because NOAA and the Coast Guard and other
responders are outstanding and did a fantastic job after the
Deepwater Horizon, and they are battle hardened for marine
spills.
I do not think we have the same level or experience in land
spills, so in many respects, we have a lot of work to do. I
think your concerns are validated.
Senator Peters. In the Great Lakes in particular.
Dr. Reddy. Throughout these areas where we have pipeline
movement of these new types of products, whether it is Bakkens
or dilbits or other products.
Dr. Joye. I am in total agreement. I see this as a huge
issue in terms of response, Federal response and natural
ecosystem response. The microbiology of oil and gas is not
nearly enough known in marine systems. When you go to fresh
water, there is quite a bit of data on groundwater, but not in
surface fresh water systems. We do not really know how those
systems are going to respond.
Many of these lakes have been very well characterized in
terms of the basic biology and microbiology, but in terms of
hydrocarbon dynamics, there is next to nothing known about how
the systems would respond to a major infusion of oil, and that
is a tremendous data gap that needs to be filled.
Senator Peters. Thank you for your comments. Very troubling
and something we have to pay very close attention to. Thank
you, Senator.
Senator Rubio. Thank you. I am going to skip my turn in
interest of time because I know everyone is anxious to hear
from the Prime Minister. Senator Klobuchar?
STATEMENT OF HON. AMY KLOBUCHAR,
U.S. SENATOR FROM MINNESOTA
Senator Klobuchar. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Thank
you. I just want to follow up a little bit, Dr. Reddy and Dr.
Joye, being in a state right next to North Dakota, where it has
really been in many ways a good thing that we have gotten some
more domestic oil, but we have also seen all the trains and
some spills.
What kind of scientific research exactly do you think would
be helpful? I know you talked about the effect on fresh water,
and how do we get that research going so we know and make good
decisions as we move forward?
Dr. Reddy. I do not even know where to start to be frank
because there is such little knowledge known. For example,
every oil is different. Oil has different personalities and
characteristics and these dictate their behavior. Ultimately we
have not had a full comprehensive examination.
If we are going to keep talking about health, we have not
done a physical on some of the products that are being moved in
your backyard. In order for us to even start to make plans, we
have to get a good understanding of the behavior and the
chemistry of oil spill science and Bakken oils.
Bakken oil has been well characterized and there are
excellent studies by the United States Department of
Transportation in the last year. That is about looking at
whether or not there is an explosion. There is much less known
about the behavior of oil.
I would start off by saying let's investigate our patient,
get an idea as to the behavior, and then we can make the most
well informed decisions about how to put our assets in place in
future research.
Senator Klobuchar. Very good. I wanted to go back to some
of the other spills and what has happened. There has been
legislation that has been passed since then. Mr. Williams, do
you think these policy changes--I am thinking of the Exxon
Valdez spill--has these policy changes resulted in reduced
incidents and safety improvements?
Mr. Williams. I think absolutely. All these were great
tragedies and the focus has to be on how we can continuously
improve. I agree we have to be ready for a response, but we
have to be really focused on prevention as well.
I think all the focus that is put on prevention and
improving prevention, like the things we are doing on safety
and environmental management systems and making those more
effective in prevention are extremely important as we move
ahead. We have to learn and improve and do the prevention and
also be ready for the response.
Senator Klobuchar. Thank you. One of the concerns that we
had with the Gulf spill was just the effect on migratory birds.
We have over a million, if you can believe, water fowl, in
Minnesota, including loons, ducks, geese. I remember we were
really concerned about their nesting grounds and what is going
to happen when they are headed down to the Gulf of Mexico. Our
state bird is a loon.
What has been the spill's long-term impact on migratory
bird habitat? I guess I would ask one of the three of you,
whoever wants to take it. Dr. Joye?
Dr. Joye. I can take a shot at that. I have done quite a
bit of work in coastal ecosystems. In the marshes of Louisiana,
there are still some fairly devastating impacts of the
Deepwater Horizon. There are places in Barataria Bay where if
you looked at it, it would appear to be fresh oil, shows upon
the marsh banks. This is a continuing impact on avian
populations in those areas that are impacted.
Some marshes are fine, some marshes are not. It is very
splotchy, very heterogeneous, and it is the same along the Gulf
Coast. Some places were hardly impacted, some places were
heavily impacted. The coast of Louisiana took a very, very hard
hit, and it is going to take a very long time for that oil to
get completely out of the system.
I remember a colleague of mine was telling me recently that
they had set up a project, a monitoring program, about four
years ago, and some of their control plots at the time were
free of any visible oil. They took sediment cores, there was no
oil there. Everything looked fine.
Two years later, their control plots were covered in oil
and had become completely transformed from a natural control to
a very contaminated site. That is what the animals that inhabit
these marshes are dealing with. The system is still changing 5
years after the incident.
Senator Klobuchar. Thank you very much.
Dr. Kinner. Senator, I would like to just follow up on that
if I could. I think Dr. Joye is right on, but I think the other
thing as I said in my remarks and in my testimony is when an
oil spill happens, very bad things happen. Tradeoffs have to be
made. That is one of the primary reasons why dispersants were
used, to minimize as best as possible the impact on the near
shore and coastal habitats. You cannot eliminate the impact
because it is so much oil. You are trying to minimize that
damage.
Senator Klobuchar. Mitigate it, that is right. Thank you
very much.
Senator Rubio. Senator Markey?
STATEMENT OF HON. EDWARD MARKEY,
U.S. SENATOR FROM MASSACHUSETTS
Senator Markey. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, very much.
Congress has still failed to put in place the safety reforms
recommended following the Deepwater Horizon disaster, the
independent Blue Ribbon BP Spill Commission gave Congress a
grade of D+ on its legislative response to the spill.
More than 5 years after the spill, we still have not
enacted key drilling safety reforms such as significantly
raising the liability cap for an offshore spill and increasing
civil penalties.
Dr. Joye, Dr. Reddy, can you speak to that and whether or
not--good to see you both again, and welcome to the Committee.
Your recommendation on those issues, D+ from an independent
commission really does not give any great reassurance that we
are going to be protected.
Dr. Joye. I think one way to move forward in a very
positive way that would benefit both industry and the response
side of this problem is to form an academic response network
that is well integrated into the National Incident Command that
works with Federal responders.
I think that many of the issues that were faced and the
challenges that were faced in the response to the Deepwater
Horizon by both the Federal side and the academic side was just
incredibly poor communication between Federal responders and
academic responders.
Academics have a lot to offer. We have a lot of system
knowledge. We have a lot of expertise, and that should be fully
taken advantage of, and it was not.
Senator Markey. Should Congress take action to make sure
the spill recommendations are put in place?
Dr. Joye. Absolutely.
Senator Markey. OK, great. Dr. Reddy?
Dr. Reddy. I could not agree more. Furthermore, I would
like to make sure that credit is due to you, Senator Markey,
because in many respects while you were a Congressman, you
actually paved the way, and you broke down many of these walls
that led to what I think is a much better place now between
academia and responders.
It was a big problem at the beginning of the spill, and
certainly you broke down these walls, and I think we are in a
much better place.
Unfortunately, scientists always say three things, we wish
we had more time, we wish we had more money, and we are not
quite sure. In this case, I would say that in order for us to
grease these wheels and to get academia and response working
more closely together where I think we have great synergistic
effects, we are certainly going to have to grease these wheels
and provide more funding that in many cases was outlined in the
President's Commission.
Senator Markey. Dr. Kinner, do you want the recommendations
of the BP Commission to be implemented?
Dr. Kinner. Absolutely. I think they are critical. I think
the other thing----
Senator Markey. Do you think it is critical for Congress to
act to put them in place?
Dr. Kinner. Yes, sir. What I think also to follow on with
what my colleagues have said, it is not only critical to have
the academic community interacting with responders during a
spill, but I think it is critical before a spill.
I think now is when we should be having responders talking
more with scientists and getting into the issues. Science has a
lot to bring to the table. It could be brought to the table
now. It is too chaotic during a spill to be discussing what is
going on.
It is thinking ahead of time, here is a spill, as the
Senator from Michigan and Senator from Minnesota pointed out,
here is a spill that could occur in the Great Lakes. What are
the issues we would face? How could we deal with them?
Senator Markey. The same issues that the BP Commission are
recommending that we implement.
Let me ask you this, natural gas, right now it is not
counted in terms of release and when there is a calculation for
fines, should natural gas be included in terms of potential
damage? Dr. Joye?
Dr. Joye. In my opinion, absolutely. It has an ecosystem
impact. It should be included without question.
Senator Markey. Dr. Reddy?
Dr. Reddy. I could not agree more.
Senator Markey. Dr. Kinner?
Dr. Kinner. Yes.
Senator Markey. Mr. Williams?
Mr. Williams. I think the key thing is to really look at
the gaps, and when you find gaps, close the gaps.
Senator Markey. Should natural gas be included?
Mr. Williams. I do not have a comment or position on that.
Thank you.
Senator Markey. OK. Thank you. Just one final question. The
BP is saying there has been no significant long-term population
level impact to species in the Gulf. Do you believe that is
accurate or is that just a premature overstatement of a
conclusion that cannot yet be determined? Dr. Joye?
Dr. Joye. I disagree with that statement.
Senator Markey. Great. I am going to run out of time. Dr.
Reddy?
Dr. Reddy. I believe it is premature and I would rather be
in the long game of science to make sure we get everything in
place before we can really hammer out what we know and what we
do not know.
Senator Markey. Thank you. Dr. Kinner?
Dr. Kinner. I do not think we know yet.
Senator Markey. That is great. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Senator Rubio. Thank you. Senator Ayotte?
Senator Ayotte. Thank you, Chairman. Thank you all for
being here. Dr. Kinner, I wanted to follow up based on my
recent visit, where I had the opportunity to visit the Coastal
Response Research Center, and ask you as we address the
challenges of preventing spills and also properly responding to
spills, to protect the environment and to really use the best
means available in technology, how at the Center have you had
discussions with the private sector and worked with the private
sector as we look at really their responsibility and their
piece in this of using the best technology to prevent spills
and also if we have one, of properly responding?
Dr. Kinner. Yes. I think we really as the Center, and as
you know, the Center focuses on bringing together all
stakeholders, so we bring industry to the table.
I am sure you remember my little circle pin. We bring
everybody to the table. They all have an equal seat at the
table, and industry is very important in that mix, because
industry, as Mr. Williams mentioned, is the group that is going
to implement changes.
We can legislate changes. We can have requirements. They
are the ones who have to implement them. We do bring industry
to the table in our discussions.
For example, I was just mentioning a bit ago about if there
was a spill in the Great Lakes, we need to be developing
dispersants that work in fresh water. Industry is certainly a
partner there and they are working on that.
I am not saying we should just take what industry does
without any kind of evaluation. I think they are a big player
here, and they have spent quite a bit of money on research.
Those researchers are valuable parts of the community of
researchers to discuss these problems.
I think they are important to bring to the table.
Senator Ayotte. Thank you for that. I just want to
understand, because I see this as we all have a piece in this,
making sure that we are using the best practices and then also
responding properly going forward.
I know you had a forum that was hosted and really brought
not only public sector research, industry groups together last
fall, and wanted to get your insight of what the discussion and
conclusions were of that forum that we might be able to use as
policymakers as we address these issues.
Dr. Kinner. Yes. I will say all of my colleagues up here
were at that forum.
Senator Ayotte. They are happy to jump in, too.
Dr. Kinner. We have taken away basically three messages
from that. The first is the concept of involving academics and
scientists in thinking about how to improve response. My
colleagues have talked a little bit about that.
As I mentioned, I think it is more than just interacting
during a spill, it is getting those dialogues going and those
evaluations happening before spills to think about the new
types of threats we face.
The second thing, and I think this is really important, is
thinking about communication. We have a real problem of
communicating with the public during a spill, prior to a spill,
et cetera. The Deepwater, we saw that. We see that continuing
today with the kinds of spills, with the energy renaissance.
To that end, as you know, we are having a forum where we
are bringing together folks from the media and folks from the
government and folks from industry to talk about how we can
prepare for communications that are more effective ahead of
spills, and what kinds of communication strategies, what will
the media bring that are issues that we have not dealt with.
The third thing, as you know, Senator, and helped us
sponsor last week, bringing the best people to the table to
brief congressional staff, and I know several people were at
our briefing last week, about the latest and important issues
that we as a community see developing.
Those are three things. Thank you, Senator.
Senator Ayotte. Thank you.
Dr. Reddy. I would take home one message from that meeting.
Commandant Allen said do not exchange business cards during a
crisis. That is certainly a lesson learned.
Last week, I was lecturing in a marine pollution class at
the United States Coast Guard Academy for cadets who will be
graduating this year. I could have talked about science to
them. Instead I talked to them about how they were going to
play a critical role in the future of oil spills.
At the end of the day, I tried to give them a lesson in
sociology and about different cultures, and that ultimately
they are going to interact with a wide range of different
stakeholders. I told them when they get stationed, instead of
exchanging e-mails, I think quite frankly that a cup of coffee
and exchanging e-mails is going to save many miles of coast
line.
We have to not only start to, but we have to recognize that
it is an important median to build relationships before a
spill.
Senator Ayotte. I thank you all for sharing your testimony
today. I have to say with many of the crises we face and
challenges, this seems to be a take away, that you cannot be
exchanging business cards at the time when you have a crisis
situation.
I think that is a good lesson for us to take, not only in
this context, and hopefully we can help facilitate your work
there, but in every context as we respond to challenges in
communities and also for our environment. Thank you.
Senator Rubio. Thank you. Senator Sullivan?
STATEMENT OF HON. DAN SULLIVAN,
U.S. SENATOR FROM ALASKA
Senator Sullivan. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I want to thank the
panelists. This is a very important issue that you are shedding
light on. I think we all struggle in many ways with the issue
of certainly mitigating risk to human live, as we saw in the
Gulf. Also, to the environment, and while maintaining the
opportunities that we have in the energy sector, whether it is
robust jobs, great opportunities, energy security.
Of course, you know in my state you see a lot of that. We
struggle with a lot of that. They are very, very important
issues. We are very proud of our record in Alaska, some of the
highest standards on the environment and protection literally
in the world.
I have had the opportunity to be in other parts of not only
the country but the world, Russia, Azerbaijan. The standards do
not even come close to what we have in Alaska, the highest.
At the same time we have significant opportunities. You
mentioned Cook Inlet. We have a jobs boom in Cook Inlet, a
basin that was considered a dead basin a couple of years ago is
now providing enormous opportunities, energy, jobs, and exports
for this country.
I think we all know this is a critical issue that we need
to balance. I appreciate all the work that you all have done on
this issue.
Let me just start with a quick question. I think a lot of
times we get the sense, particularly in the Federal Government,
that one size can fit all, on these issues. As you know, there
are many, many different types of basins, many different types
of resources.
I will give you one example. We were talking about the
Deepwater Horizon. There was, of course, a Gulf moratorium that
Secretary Salazar put on the Gulf during that time. He also
slapped a moratorium on Alaska that summer, which I thought as
Attorney General of the state was not legal. Two very, very
different scenarios, 100 feet of water in the OCS off the coast
of Alaska, 6,000 feet in the Gulf. They put a moratorium on us
anyway.
Do you agree that we should be looking at these issues not
as one size fits all but very, very particular given the
different basins, different challenges that we have in
different regions of the country? Mr. Williams?
Mr. Williams. I think there has to be a framework,
obviously, but I think it is absolutely key, and that is one of
the principles we work on in the Center for Offshore Safety,
that you have to plan, identify hazards, build barriers, manage
your program all to address the circumstances of where you are.
The real key to preventing incidents is this planning and
continuous monitoring around the circumstances and conditions
in which you are going to have to operate.
Senator Sullivan. Thank you. Dr. Kinner, do you have a
thought on that?
Dr. Kinner. Yes. I think that is correct, but I think we
can take some resources and knowledge that we have from other
areas and help it inform how we do work.
I will give you an example. During the spill in the Gulf,
there was a common operating picture called ``ERMA,'' the
Environment Response Management Application, that NOAA used,
and there was even a public site, that was actually a resource
for all sorts of environmental data coming in and being a home
for that data where responders and the public could look at it
and scientists.
That application has been applied in your state, but it
takes a different kind of application because, for instance, in
the Arctic, there may not be connectivity during a spill with
the Internet, which in the Gulf is much, much easier.
A stand-alone version of ERMA had to be developed. These
kinds of things sometimes do have some overlap, but they need
to be tailored to the unique situation, as you pointed out,
sir.
Senator Sullivan. Great. Thank you. Let me ask another
question, you raised the issue of the Arctic. I think one take
away that hopefully is positive, hopefully you would agree,
that the level of cooperation between government and industry
has changed in a positive direction since the Deepwater Horizon
spill.
I do not know if any of you have seen the National
Petroleum Council's recent study on the Arctic. To me, this is
to Secretary Moniz, this is a good example of industry,
science, academics, all collaborating on an important issue,
Arctic oil and gas development and potential.
Have you read this report and do you agree with the
recommendations? Mr. Chairman, I would like to submit for the
record the summary. This is a very large study that was
recently released to Secretary Moniz.
Senator Rubio. Without objection.
[The information referred to follows:]
Arctic Potential: Realizing the Promise of U.S. Arctic Oil
and Gas Resources
Committee on Arctic Research
Rex W. Tillerson, Chair
National Petroleum Council 2015
The executive summary of the report can be found at http://
npcarcticpotential
report.org/pdf/AR-Executive_Summary-Final.pdf
Senator Sullivan. Mr. Williams?
Mr. Williams. No, I actually have not read that report.
Senator Sullivan. It would be interesting to see what you
believe after reading this study, maybe we can follow up with
questions for the record, if you agree with some of these
recommendations in this study.
Mr. Williams. I will. Thank you.
Senator Sullivan. Dr. Kinner?
Dr. Kinner. Yes, I have looked at the report, sir, and I
think one of the key things that is important to point out here
is not only the Federal Government and the state government and
the industry working together, but also to involve especially
in your state the Alaskan Native knowledge and the Alaskan
Native culture that is so important to how we would respond and
the impact a spill would have in the Arctic. I think that is a
real key.
Senator Sullivan. I agree with that.
Dr. Reddy. Senator, I saw a presentation about it but I
have not read the report. I would love to go back to your other
question about lessons learned. It is like buying a house,
location, location, location. Alaska is not as conducive to
responding to oil spills as the Deepwater Horizon.
In fact, I have an ongoing research project studying the
Exxon Valdez, and I can tell you I can find fresher less
weathered oil from the Exxon Valdez than I can in the
Deepwater.
Senator Sullivan. But 100 feet of water is not 6,000 feet
of water.
Dr. Reddy. No.
Senator Sullivan. There is no reason for an Arctic
moratorium.
Dr. Reddy. No, my point is I am very concerned that we use
one size fits all.
Senator Sullivan. Me, too.
Dr. Reddy. And that we have to recognize in how we put our
assets in place with the limited infrastructure that you have
in place in the Arctic so we can use and tailor what we know
from these very small studies that we have done in the last 25
years, and not use what we used in Deepwater Horizon.
Senator Sullivan. I think this study has a lot of the
issues that we are looking at in my state certainly. Thank you
very much, Mr. Chairman.
STATEMENT OF HON. MARCO RUBIO,
U.S. SENATOR FROM FLORIDA
Senator Rubio. Thank you. I thought I saw Senator
Blumenthal. Stand by.
I think what I will do for the record while I wait for
Senator Blumenthal, I had a statement I was going to enter into
the record, and I will just enter it verbally.
I wanted to thank all of you for being here to discuss one
of the most devastating events that happened to the Gulf of
Mexico and the states that border it.
I do think first and foremost today we should pay tribute
to the 11 souls who lost their lives on that tragic day, their
families and friends are in our thoughts, especially today as
we reflect on the past 5 years and on the need to assure other
Americans do not suffer the same fate.
This oil spill in April 2010 had an impact on small
businesses that rely on fishing and tourism dollars, and that
impact has been tremendous. The event happened during the busy
time for my state's beaches and local economies along the Gulf
coast and felt the blunt of it. Hotel reservations were
canceled, restaurants sat empty, and those vital tourist dollar
plummeted.
Coupled with what I believe were the Administration's
actions to close 88,500 square miles of the Gulf to fishing,
131,000 jobs that were supported by $12.8 billion per year,
were negatively impacted.
The environmental impacts were also widespread. An
estimated 4.9 million barrels of oil flowed through that
habitat that is home to more than 15,000 species. Wildlife
washed ashore covered in oil, marshes which serve as a habitat
for wildlife suffocated and died, and deep sea coral colonies
showed signs of tissue damage.
The term ``blowout preventer'' was on everyone's tongue
while live underwater shots of oil spewing into the waters of
the Gulf was happening. For 87 days, the Nation watched and
waited for a fix.
Today, we have been hearing from you about how technology
has evolved to address the shortcomings of that well.
Innovations and equipment design and important changes to
response measures will hopefully prevent another catastrophic
event, and technological advances have also been made to
address any remediation necessary as quickly and effectively as
possible.
I am encouraged by this progress made through ongoing
recovery efforts, and I am even prouder of the resiliency of
the communities, the businesses, and the people that were
impacted.
I am pleased, as Senator Nelson highlighted earlier, that
the RESTORE Act money is finally being made available to
continue the recovery efforts on the ground.
I want to again thank all of you for your insight here
today. I look forward to a continued dialogue on these issues.
Senator Blumenthal?
STATEMENT OF HON. RICHARD BLUMENTHAL,
U.S. SENATOR FROM CONNECTICUT
Senator Blumenthal. Thanks, Mr. Chairman. Just very briefly
before we close the hearing, as you know, there was a joint
investigation by the Department of Homeland Security and
Interior in April 2010 which revealed, and I quote, ``Numerous
systems deficiencies and omissions by the Deepwater Horizon
crew as well as poor maintenance of equipment, ignoring alarms,
and lack of training personnel.''
In 2012, two years after these recommendations were issued,
Shell had to significantly roll back drilling plans in the
Alaskan Arctic because of several accidents and missteps that
revealed the company was ill prepared to be drilling in the
harsh conditions of the Arctic, and had not been taking safety
precautions serious enough.
Let me just ask Mr. Williams, has the oil and gas industry
in your view heeded the lessons of the Gulf disaster and the
subsequent recommendations from this investigation and others
in its activities in other parts of the world?
Mr. Williams. Yes, sir. I think if you look at the Center
for Offshore Safety, it was set up as a place where we could
collaborate and learn together, and learn these lessons on how
we could improve safety management.
The industry in general, I think one of the key changes
that I mentioned is how we came together and made new industry
standards and made new systems for subsea containment, and have
worked together to improve this.
The key thing is looking at safety management systems, not
only are we learning and looking at how we can improve safety
management, but we are also measuring it, so we get
measurements that feed back into this continuous improvement of
how to make it better.
Also, if you do the SEMS' audit, you have to have a
mandatory action plan to address any findings that are found in
the audit. There is also this system of measurement and
oversight that leads to improvement also.
Senator Blumenthal. Is there adequate collaboration among
the companies?
Mr. Williams. Yes, sir. That is why really the Center for
Offshore Safety was created, so we have this one place that is
entirely focused on safety, where we can come together, share
learning, share data, and share good practices and develop good
practices together to do that.
Senator Blumenthal. But is that adequate?
Mr. Williams. Sir?
Senator Blumenthal. Can more be done?
Mr. Williams. Always more can be done. That is what our
focus is, our focus is on doing the audits, doing the learning
from incidents, and seeing if there are gaps and opportunities.
If they are, what are the good practices that can close them.
We are going to continuously look at that and continuously
learn and address that.
Senator Blumenthal. Is there anything that Congress should
do to assure even greater collaboration or greater preemptive
and proactive action?
Mr. Williams. What I would say again is I think the best
thing to do is now that we have data and we are collecting
data, lots of people are collecting data, we have the
government reports and the industry reports, look at the
activities now, look at what needs to be done. If there are
gaps or opportunities for improvement, let's close those gaps
and make those improvements in the best manner that we can.
Senator Blumenthal. Have you identified gaps that exist
now?
Mr. Williams. We have improvement items that we have
already seen from the first set of audits and from our first
annual report. It is around things like making sure that we
have more effective processes, making sure people follow those
processes, looking at station keeping, so the good news is we
found these things we know we need to work on and we set up
task groups and we are working on it, and we are going to
develop the good practices to help the industry get better in
those areas that we have seen.
Senator Blumenthal. Did you have----
Dr. Joye. I just want to make a comment. John Amos, who
runs the SkyTruth program, released a report last week that
pointed out that since 2010, there have been 9,800 hazardous
materials spills in the Gulf of Mexico. I think that is a
number that we all need to keep in mind.
The other thing I wanted to point out is that in 2004, the
energy platform sank after Hurricane Ivan. That platform was
producing 26 wells, nine of the wells have been plugged, the
other 16 are still leaking oil into the Gulf of Mexico. That
has been ongoing now for almost 11 years and it has not been
dealt with.
Situations like that should not be allowed to proceed, and
I think in cases like that, legislation is needed to force the
responsible party to deal with and seal those wells so there is
not a perpetual discharge of oil and gas into nearshore waters.
Senator Blumenthal. Do you have a response, Mr. Williams?
Mr. Williams. Absolutely. Our goal is zero spills and zero
accidents, and we work hard to achieve that goal every day, and
want to learn and put all our efforts into that goal.
Certainly, any of these is a tragedy, and the key is to do
all we can to be prepared and prevent these, and then if in the
regrettable circumstance that we have one, to have the proper
response to mediate it as best as possible.
Senator Blumenthal. I guess what I am driving at is what
specifically can and should be done to address the kind of
problem that we just heard that seems to be ongoing. Dr. Joye
has raised it very specifically. I think there is a need to
consider specific action.
Mr. Williams. Like I said, we have worked on standards. We
have worked on response systems. What I work on, and what I
think the key focus has to be is you have to have planning, you
have to have execution, you have to have the skills and
knowledge in the staff, you have to have the business
processes, especially how you manage change going forward, and
those all have to be effectively and continuously done and
monitored, that it is all being done well.
That is where the focus really should be, in safety and
environmental management systems, making those effective and
continuously working.
Senator Blumenthal. My time has expired.
Dr. Kinner. Senator, might I just make a quick comment as a
follow-up? I think this kind of dialogue is exactly what I was
talking about in my testimony. What we really need to do is get
people like John Amos together with people from industry and
really talk about the details and talk turkey about these
situations.
Lots of times, just this kind of back and forth in the
media or in one conference or another is not really moving the
problem forward, and that is what I am talking about, really to
focus on the details of what is this data showing, what might
the situations be, et cetera. Those are all the important
questions, but they are not well discussed in a media forum.
Senator Blumenthal. Good point. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Senator Rubio. I want to thank all four of you for being
here today, for your testimony, for your time.
Before we adjourn, on behalf of the Chairman, I want to
enter two letters into the record. One is from the Gulf of
Mexico University Research Collaborative dated April 28, 2015,
and the other is from the Louisiana State University Office of
Research and Economic Development dated April 28, 2015.
I enter the second letter despite the fact that LSU will be
routinely humiliated by the University of Florida on the
football field.
[Laughter.]
Senator Rubio. We will enter them into the record without
objection.
[The information referred to follows:]
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Senator Rubio. Again, I want to thank all of you for being
a part of this. The hearing record is going to remain open for
2 weeks, so we are going to ask Senators to submit questions
for the record. During that period of time, we would ask that
if you receive these questions that you would submit the
written answers to the Committee as soon as possible.
Again, thank you for being a part of this today, and with
that, the hearing is now adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 11:08 a.m., the hearing was adjourned.]
A P P E N D I X
Response to Written Question Submitted by Hon. Marco Rubio to
Charles (Charlie) Williams II
Question. Mr. Williams, I recognize the importance of oil and
natural gas development in the U.S. and the positive impact that it has
on our economy. I also recognize that we must be vigilant and continue
to learn and improve. I understand that the Center serves the U.S.
offshore oil & gas industry with the purpose of adopting standards to
ensure continuous improvement in safety and offshore operational
integrity and I truly respect that. Can you describe what the Center is
doing to coordinate and share what industry has learned and what the
process is to do that?
Answer. Safety is a core value for our industry, and in recent
years, the oil and natural gas sector has made substantial improvements
to the safety of offshore operations and drilling. The industry has
revised existing standards or created new ones to guide the design,
construction and integrity of deepwater wells, blowout preventers,
subsea capping stacks and many other aspects of offshore exploration
and production and established the Center for Offshore Safety (COS) to
ensure continuous improvement in safety and environmental protection.
The Center for Offshore Safety (COS), launched in 2011 to promote
the highest level of safety for offshore drilling, completions, &
operations by effective leadership, communication, teamwork,
utilization of disciplined safety management systems, independent
third-party auditing & certification, and monitoring continuing
improvements, released a first-of-its-kind annual report in 2015 to
measure safety performance, compiled from industry data and independent
third-party audits.
Additionally, COS develops guidelines and best practices to help
companies embed a strong culture of safety into all their operations.
It is important to understand that safety culture is not a checklist.
Safety culture is a daily decision by companies and their employees to
choose safety first in everything they do.
COS has created tools to assist companies in building or enhancing
safety and environmental management systems, and three COS guidelines
have been adopted by the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement
(BSEE) into its own regulations. In 2015, BSEE also formally recognized
COS as the first and only organization with the authorization to
accredit Audit Service Providers who conduct the BSEE-required Safety
and Environmental Management System audits, which are required for all
offshore oil and gas operators.
An important component of SEMS is the ability to assess and measure
its effectiveness and continually improve as well as sharing SEMS
knowledge. COS will continue to gather and use the information in its
annual reports to develop data-driven improvements and good practices
as part of our mission to promote the highest levels of offshore
safety.
______
Response to Written Question Submitted by Hon. Marco Rubio to
Christopher M. Reddy, Ph.D.
Question. Dr. Reddy, it is great to hear that the tide has turned,
so to speak, for the government to be inclusive to the academic
community and I hope that cooperation continues and you and your peers
are able to fill gaps the various government agencies have. As far as
local response, I have heard in the past from Floridians that a
nationally led team is not the most efficient way to prepare for a
spill to reach the shores. Can you tell me about your experience on the
ground, working with local governments and officials?
Answer. In my near 20 years of responding and studying the fate and
impacts of marine-based oil spills, I have had very few interactions
with local and state officials. I have never participated in any
planning exercises, worked closely during a spill event, or had a
direct line of communication with local officials. When I have had such
interactions (summarized below), it is during general public discussion
of interested parties, unofficial briefings, acts of courtesy for
accessing an impacted area, or updates months/years later during the
damage-assessment phase.
However, it has been my experience and understanding that local and
state officials do interact with Federal responders by attending
planning meetings, participating in drills, and coordinating/sharing
assets during spill events. For example, two weeks ago, I was invited
to brief the Southeastern New England Area Region command response
group, which included Federal (Coast Guard, NOAA, EPA, Homeland,
Interior) and state environmental officials. Before my presentation, I
observed collegial and earnest exchanges as each group provided
updates. This group appeared to share a unified goal of reducing
damages during a spill (or preventing a bad one from getting worse).
After the meeting, I was invited to participate in all future meetings.
In addition, state representatives for RI and MA invited me to give
presentations within their teams. This is certainly evidence that
``tides are changing'' and suggests that during future spills there
will be a greater chance for academics to be more involved with both
Federal and local officials.
Attending meetings and an occasional brief is certainly
encouraging, but funding would create richer and more fruitful
relationships amongst state and local officials and academia. One of
the key lessons learned from the Deepwater Horizon disaster stated by
former NOAA administrator, Dr. Jane Lubchenco, was that NOAA had the
greatest benefit from tapping academic talent from past and pre-
existing relationships fostered by prior extramural funding and
coordination. While states continue to struggle with difficult budget
environments, small investments in cultivating state and local
relationships with the public and private academic spill response
communities has the potential to provide significant benefits and
reduced impacts when such events occur.
I will conclude by stating the obvious, it should not be a matter
of local versus national during environmental incident response, which
by their nature know no borders. Rather it must be a coordination of
local, who understand their water ways and issues the best, national,
who may have years of experience in spills across the country, and
academia who can provide fact based in situ information for those teams
to coordinate better responses. Therefore, supporting academia in
participating with these groups before, during and after an incident,
is crucial.
______
Christopher Reddy's involvement with state and local officials
prior to, during or after oil spills:
Presentations that included local and state officials in the audience:
Reddy, C.M. An update on the Bouchard 120 oil spill. New
Bedford Whaling Museum, New Bedford, MA, May 3, 2003.
Presentation. Invited.
Reddy, C.M., Chemistry and weathering of the oil. Cosco
Busan Oil Spill Technical Workshop January 25, 2008. Oakland,
CA (Presentation). Invited.
Reddy, C.M. Hunting for subsurface plumes in the Gulf of
Mexico after the Deepwater Horizon Disaster. Are we in
DEEPWATER? Applying Lessons Learned from our SONS Experiences,
March 22, 2011, Portsmouth, NH (Presentation). Invited.
Reddy, C.M. An argument for better aligned relations with
academia and the oil-spill response community. Southeastern New
England Area Region command response meeting. Massachusetts
Maritime Academy, Massachusetts Maritime Academy, Bourne, MA,
October 21, 2015. (Presentation). Invited.
Briefings, workshops, and testimony:
Testified on oil spills for Joint Committee on Natural
Resources and Agriculture, State of Massachusetts, Boston, MA.
May 25, 2004.
Advised Massachusetts Dept. of Environmental Protection on
spills of alternatives fuels and lubricants, Boston, MA. Mar.
13, 2007.
Advised city, state, and Federal officials following the M/V
Cosco Busan oil spill in San Francisco Bay (Nov. 2007).
Participant in Research & Development Priorities: Oil Spill
Workshop, The Coastal Response Research Center, U. of New
Hampshire (Mar. 2009); included state representatives
Briefed Lt. Governor Elizabeth Roberts (Rhode Island) and
Emergency Management Council on oil spills, Warwick, RI, August
10, 2010.
Access to field samples with help from state officials:
In 2012 upon request from me via e-mail, Mr. Garrett Graves (LA/
DNR) arranged for a boat to access an oiled salt marsh (from the
Deepwater Horizon).
Assisting state officials during a natural resource damage assessment:
I worked with the Rhode Island Department of Environmental
Management (Summer/Fall 1997) on the toxicity of oil released during
the North Cape spill (coast of Rhode Island; January 1996). I had found
that the oil was more toxic than thought and communicated it in several
talks to diverse audiences. Only the Rhode Island officials, months
later, acted upon it, leading towards an additional 1.5 million dollars
added to the damage settlement for Rhode Island. I received numerous
honors for this work including one from the Honorable Lincoln Almond
(Governor of Rhode Island).
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