All ideas welcome: BP looks to public for oil leak solutions

US lawmakers to grill BP exec, others, over oil spill
Washington (AFP) May 10, 2010 - Top executives from firms tied to the massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill, including energy giant BP's US chief, face a grilling this week by US lawmakers unnerved and even angered by the disaster. The US Congress kicks off a spate of hearings into the catastrophe on Tuesday, when Interior Secretary Ken Salazar goes before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee to discuss "issues in offshore drilling." Coastal state lawmakers, especially Democratic allies of President Barack Obama, have condemned the decision to lift a moratorium on offshore drilling, and want to know whether the disaster could, and should, have been averted.

That afternoon, the Senate Environment and Public Works will question BP America's chairman and president, Lamar McKay, who has promised his company will make good on its legal obligation to pay for the clean-up. The British company has raced to contain the leak, hemorrhaging some 200,000 gallons of oil a day into the Gulf of Mexico from the sunken Deepwater Horizon rig that exploded on April 20, killing 11 workers. BP, facing a barrage of lawsuits and clean-up costs soaring above 10 million dollars a day, had pinned its hopes on a 98-ton concrete and steel containment box that it successfully lowered 5,000 feet (1,500 meters) down over the main leak.

But the contraption lay idle on the seabed as engineers furiously tried to figure out how to stop it clogging with ice crystals. The committee will also grill Steven Newman, president of Transocean, the platform operator, and Tim Probert, the top health, safety and environment officer at Halliburton, which worked on the rig shortly before the blast. And the panel -- officially looking into the spill's "economic and environmental impacts" -- will hear from top regional and state government officials, the head of a tourism association, and scientists. Some lawmakers, citing the possible impact of the disaster on local tourism and fishing industries, have called for lifting oil companies' liability for economic damages from a spill from 75 million to 10 billion dollars.

The same committee will hear Tuesday from a US Environment Protection Agency (EPA) official, Nancy Stoner, on EPA's role in "protecting ocean health" -- though that hearing is not explicitly tied to crisis. The House Energy and Commerce Committee has invited McKay and Newman as well as Halliburton chief David Lesar to testify at a May 12 hearing -- though a panel aide says the final witness list is not yet cast in stone. The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee will hold a May 19 hearing on "Deepwater Horizon: Oil spill prevention and response measures and natural resource impacts." On May 26, the House Natural Resources Committee will hold a hearing entitled "Outer Continental Shelf Oil and Gas Strategy and Implications of the Deepwater Horizon Rig Explosion," with unspecified witnesses.

by Staff Writers
New Orleans, Louisiana (AFP) May 10, 2010
With the impending threat of a growing oil slick just offshore, US Gulf coast states are seizing at all straws to avert disaster -- with police in north Florida even suggesting protecting beaches with rolls of hay.

"That's why we get a lot of inventions in wartime, because people are willing to take a chance," Eric Smith, an oil and gas expert at Tulane University in New Orleans, said of the flood of ideas on how to stop the spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

On Florida's Santa Rosa Beach, Walton County Sheriff Michael A. Adkinson and C.W. Roberts Inc., a private contractor, unveiled their audacious plan to stop oil from blackening 26 miles of pristine white beaches facing the Gulf.

The three-stage plan involves floating barges miles offshore -- filled with giant 1,400-pound rolls of hay. The barges -- equipped with blowers -- then spray the hay into the oily waters.

"The hay will clump together with the oil and make it easier to remove the waste from the water," said Sheriff's spokesman Mike Gurspan.

Despite more than two weeks of attempts using undersea robots and other high technology, BP has failed to stop oil from gushing up from the sunken wreckage of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig.

The structure sank 42 miles off the Louisiana coast on April 22, two days after a fiery explosion left 11 crewmembers missing and presumed dead, and the ensuing spill has spewed oil into the Gulf by 210,000 gallons a day -- threatening fisheries, wildlife and attractions like the sandy white beaches.

So with BP engineers publicly flummoxed by the challenges of mechanically repairing complex machines a mile down in the Gulf, a frustrated public has undertaken its own search to defend its coastal treasures from the widening spill.

BP maintains an online venue where the general public can submit ideas at the central command website deepwaterhorizonresponse.com. Submission are forwarded to a technical desk for engineers to sort through them.

"To the extent that they act on them, I have no idea -- but they have flown in experts from around the world to collaborate and contemplate the ideas that are presented," BP spokesman Bryan Ferguson said Sunday at the joint information center at Robert, Louisiana.

Smith said BP's solicitation of public imput (including a toll free number) may be "designed to fend off criticism" of the oil giant's responsibility for the environmental crisis.

"I'm sure there are some good ideas and a lot of other ideas that might not be so practical," he said.

The Florida plan, Gurspan said, exceeds preparations in other states, which require thousands of feet of absorbent boom.

"Booms are 90 percent ineffective in open water," he said, adding that if the oil slick contaminates Florida's rare coastal dune lakes the effect would be catastrophic.

"We don't know if it will work or not but everybody wants something to do -- and people deserve an effort."

Since the spill, the sheriff's hay plan has captured the imaginations of residents and US news media alike, but asked if the sheriff has any suggestions for plugging the BP oil well, after a containment dome failed at the weekend, Gurspan said hopefully "someone in Louisiana will come up with that idea."

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Spill impact will be 'significant... regardless': EPA chief
Washington (AFP) May 7, 2010
Even if BP manages to quickly cap the oil spill at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, the environmental impact from the massive slick will be "significant," Environmental Protection Agency director Bob Perciasepe said Friday. "There already is going to be a significant environmental impact here, even if it stops leaking now," Perciasepe told AFP in an interview. "Everything we are doing i ... read more

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