Obviously the Gulf oil spill has been a huge story and it has devastated the short term economy of Louisiana and others along America’s Gulf coast. But have its effects been largely overstated? Perhaps — according to this post at The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley — a British scientist and author. Here’s a bit, go read the whole thing:
Indeed, the sea floor in the Gulf is rich in `cold seeps’ — communities of tube worms and other organisms that live off oil naturally seeping from beneath the seabed. (The annual flow of oil through such seeps is about half the total spill.) Hundreds of these clusters of clams and tube worms have been found since the 1980s in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, living off the microbes that eat the oil.
Such ecosystems are not equipped to cope with being inundated with so much oil even if it is their food, but one Texas scientist told the New York Times that `the gulf is such a great fishery because it’s fed organic matter from oil…it’s pre-adapted to crude oil. The image of this spill being a complete disaster is not true.’
Another lesson to learn is that the media covers the disaster and not the recovery. When the Sea Empress spilled 70,000 tonnes of oil off Pembrokeshire in 1996, the oil was quickly dispersed. The impact on the 500,000 pairs of birds that breed nearby was relatively small, but the impact on the 500,000 tourists who normally visited the beaches of Pembrokeshire each year– and the businesses that relied on them – was dire. In about a year Louisiana’s tourist businesses will be protesting that their beaches are now clean and would the tourists please come back, but the media will largely ignore them. Good news is no news.
The final lesson is that the environmental threats that matter are the slow, continuous ones, not the telegenic sensations like oil spills. BP’s spill is known to have killed just over 1,300 birds so far. Just one wind farm, at Altamont Pass in California, was until recently known to kill perhaps 1,300 birds of prey every year. If BP really wants to kill birds, it should indeed go beyond petroleum and into wind, an industry that kills far more rare birds per joule of energy produced than oil does.
Maybe our science guys can flesh this out more for me… but I know that too much of a thing is bad, but oil is a naturally occurring substance — especially when it’s in a place — like the Gulf — that is lousy with it. How bad can the long term environmental damage be when the Gulf of Mexico is already loaded with oil and has been for thousands or millions of years?
And I love that bit about wind.
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Correction:Louisiana does not have beaches.It has only one beach,Grande Isle.
Seepage of oil from the sea floor off the coast of California is also common.
There’s a scholarly report (UCSB?) that even posits that off-shore drilling in that area would be environmentally-beneficial because it would ease some of the pressure that leads to the formation of naturally-occurring tar-balls that can be found on West Coast beaches and shore lines.
I’ll see if I can dig up the reference.
“tar balls”… is that like tar babies? Racist.
Stosh, this is just anecdotal but heard Rush take a call from a man in SoCal who spoke about a golf course he frequents. He said that there were places that oil naturally comes to the surface on this golf course. Makes my non-scientific brain wonder what would happen if we didn’t pump oil out of the ground.
Pardon my layperson thinking but I wonder if we would have more gushers if we didn’t remove the oil?
Your instincts are spot-on: see the article below.
It’s all the rage to provide “experiential” college credit for knowledge garnered through life-experiences, so in my self-appointed role as adjunct professor of environmental debunking at Threedonia University (be sure to visit our Development Office to leave a non-tax exempt donation), I hereby award you one hour of credit applicable to your TU transcript, with all the rights and privileges implied therein.
You honor me, Sir. Thank you.
I just read an op-ed in a local paper today regarding the folly of wind farms and also enjoyed the references to wind farms. Not that I enjoy the deaths of birds of prey but the pithy turn of phrase used by the author made me laugh. Those who have a romance with wind farms turn a blind eye to the amount of land used by them. Probably the same people who complain about the number of acres used by golf courses.
This is more proof to me that oil is good, oil is natural and is meant to be used by people. Apparently other creatures like it as well.
Spent most of Tuesday driving the family east on our annual beach trip, and on the way came across a humungous wind farm in Indiana that wasn’t there last summer – of the windmills we saw (there were probably over one hundred), at least two-thirds were sitting there, doing nothing. Why some were turning while most weren’t I couldn’t say, but that was definitely the situation as we cruised by.
Mrs. -fritz- and I did some extensive research a few years ago in regard to the cost, efficiency, and aesthetics of wind turbines for large power production. I won’t go into detail why, other than to say we were attempting to start a business, and cheap energy production would have helped us immensely. Anyway, what we found was that wind turbine power production on any kind of a mass scale is a total boodoggle! The wind is too fickle, the equipment too ugly, too expensive to maintain, and the current availability of proper power storage is not scientifically developed as yet to make the whole thing other than a failed experiment that a lot of people have been hornswaggled into believing will be of any great help. Solar power, however, is a different ballgame, depending on if one lives in the sunbelt.
sp.-edit…boondoggle!
Well, I’ve lost the link but I’ve got the copy-if you’re interested in the original sources, one should be able to track them down by chasing down the sources given in the second paragraph:
OIL AND GAS SEEPAGE FROM OCEAN FLOOR _ REDUCED BY OIL PRODUCTION__November 18, 1999
(Santa Barbara, Calif.) Next time you step on a glob of tar on a beach in Santa Barbara County, you can thank the oil companies that it isn’t a bigger glob.
The same is true around the world, on other beaches where off-shore oil drilling occurs, say scientists, although Santa Barbara’s oil seeps are thought to be among the leakiest.
Natural seepage of hydrocarbons from the ocean floor in the northern Santa Barbara Channel has been significantly reduced by oil production, according to two recently published peer-reviewed articles, one in November’s Geology Magazine, the other in the Journal of Geophysical Research – Oceans.
The Santa Barbara Channel provides an excellent natural laboratory, as it is among the areas with the highest levels of seepage in the world, said co-author Bruce P. Luyendyk, professor and chair of the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
The studies were not funded by oil companies, but rather by the University of California Energy Institute and the U.S. Minerals Management Service, states Luyendyk, responding to the fact that the results favor off-shore oil production and are opposed by some environmentalists.
“We’ve done a good piece of science,” said Luyendyk. “We’ve developed a good understanding of a natural process. It’s all public data; it’s all straightforward. If I thought the study was compromised I wouldn’t be involved in it.”
Most of the seepage is methane, a potent greenhouse gas which escapes into the atmosphere, said Luyendyk. About 10 percent of the seepage is composed of “higher hydrocarbons,” or reactive organic gases which interact with tailpipe emissions and sunlight, creating air pollution.
The researchers state that the production rate of these naturally-occurring reactive organic gases is equal to twice the emission rate from all the on-road vehicle traffic in Santa Barbara County in 1990.
According to the articles, studies of the area around Platform Holly showed a 50 percent decrease in natural seepage over 22 years. The researchers show that as the oil was pumped out the reservoir, pressure that drives the seepage dropped.
“If the decrease in natural seepage found near Platform Holly is representative of the effect of oil production on seepage worldwide, then this has the potential to significantly alter global oil and gas seepage in the future,” state the researchers in the article “The World’s Most Spectacular Marine Hydrocarbon Seeps: Quantification of Emissions ” in the Sept. 14 issue of the Journal of Geological Research – Oceans.
They continue, “For example if the 50 percent reduction in natural seepage rate that occurred around Platform Holly also occurred due to future oil production from the oil field beneath the La Goleta seep, this would result in a reduction in nonmethane hydrocarbon emission rates equivalent to removing half of the on-road vehicle traffic from Santa Barbara County. In addition, a 50 percent reduction in seepage from the La Goleta seep would remove about 25 barrels of oil per day from the sea surface, which in turn would result in a 15 percent reduction in the amount of tar found on Santa Barbara beaches.”
They conclude by saying that the rate of increase of global methane atmospheric concentrations has been declining for the past 20 years, and that a “worldwide decrease in natural hydrocarbon seepage related to onshore and offshore oil production may be causing a global reduction in natural methane emission rates.”
Why is Gaia suicidal? Doesn’t she know oil is evil? And in other news… I’m glad fritz is not the only one who seeps methane. He’ll feel better about himself now.
So now the name calling begins…..you’re calling me a bloated gasbag?
if you’re seeping you’re not bloated…
“And then one day he was shootin’ at some food,and up through the ground come a bubblin’ crude…”
And there have been tales of dry wells suddenly beginning to replenish themselves seemingly out of nowhere, which would mean — taken to the logical conclusion — that “fossil” fuels may not actually be biologically derived… otherwise, where is that oil coming from?
Clearly, we do not know enough about what happens within and beneath the earth’s crust.
Correctomundo – there’s a whole school of thought that posits oil formation occurs naturally under the high temperatures and pressures well-below the earth’s surface, without the need for carbon derived from living sources (you still need carbon, of course, but presumably it’s carbon naturally-present down there).
Google “abiogenic oil” and you’ll get gogs (globs?) of references.
and the Moon then is not made of green cheese?
I think that is a question best-addressed to those in charge of cultural outreach at NASA – we wouldn’t want to offend anyone with different approaches to such queries by shooting-from-the-hip with some glib, insensitive reply.
Isn’t there a lot of controversy around the subject? Partly because the forefront of abiogenic oil came from the former Soviet Union, who didn’t like to share so a good sum of the work is lost and only published work in Russian making it difficult for other scientists to corroborate?
Although it’s funny you mention this. Because belief of it currently makes you sound like a crackpot in many circles. But the other day I was watching a Science Channel or Nat Geo or something where they talked about gasoline worlds. And I wanted to leap up from the couch and stop the interviews and talk to those guys. They didn’t mention any dinosaurs running around on those worlds. So if conditions like that can occur off world, why not Earth?
Tar balls naturally occur in the Galveston area too. In fact, they’ve tested many of them and have concluded that they don’t come from the current oil spill. Do they have id cards? At any rate, I have no doubt that this mess is a mess and I also have no doubt that it’s being overblown in the media. Apparently there was another really really bad oil spill in the 70′s that we recovered from just fine, but other than one guy on NPR, no one else has mentioned that. So every 40 years we have a really bad spill so we should shut drilling down for 6 months? That don’t make no sense.
Re: tar ball ID cards – it’s kind of an “inside baseball” question, but in a sense the tar balls *do* come with “ID cards”
Oil is a mixture of scores – actually more like hundreds – of individual compounds, and each source of oil has a different distribution of different materials – identify the nature and the amounts of those things, and you can home-in on the source of the oil. And with modern techniques (remember the “Hewlett-Packard gas chromatograph with a flame ionization detecter” that showed up in the testimony in “My Cousin Vinnie”?), one can pretty accurately obtain that information. Each source of oil has its own unique distribution of components – essentially its “fingerpring” or “ID card”.
I’ve heard that one can trace an oil leak to a specific tanker using precisely those methods.
And you’re exactly right about shutting down Gulf drilling over one oil leak. I grew up watching oil refinary fires (yes, more than one) in Whiting, Indiana – if we shut down all our refineries any time there was a refinary disaster, we’d bring our economy to a standstill.
The O administration is kissing the behind of that branch of the enviro-whacko movement that would like to make an oil-based economy so impractical that we’d be forced to rely on windmills, solar panels, and treadmills.
And if anyone thinks that’s an over-statement just consider what they’ve done to our nuclear power industry (despite the fact that even the bloody French have shown you can run a country on nuclear with almost no problems).
If anyone would like to read some great (and free!) SciFi about what life will be like if the enviro-tards are in charge, than “Fallen Angels” by Niven and Pournelle & Flynn is what you’re looking for.
You can read it online or download it for free at Baen Books, at the link below. I’ve read it twice now, and it’s a great and troubling read. Especially significant when you realize when it was written: 1991.
http://www.baen.com/library/067172052X/067172052X.htm
Another example right in Texas.
http://www.newsobserver.com/2010/06/13/530250/after-big-1979-spill-a-stunning.html
The Ixtoc I oil spill (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ixtoc_I) released over 3 million gallons off the coast of Texas. The Deepwater spill should be a little bigger than that by now I think. But to quote the article, “You look around, and it’s like the spill never happened,” shrugs Tunnell, a marine biologist. “There’s a lot of perplexity in it for many of us.”
That doesn’t mean NO consequences but these things so far have never been the total environmental devastating collapse the public is led to believe.
Remember Skip, that to the left the sky is always in a state of falling. They have to have crises or they can’t function as the nannies they were born to become!
Can someone (perhaps a graduate of TU) explain this quandary: a) During the 2008 election cycle we were constantly told that it takes “10 Years” to start one of these oil drilling operations. b) flash forward to 2010 and we are now being constantly told that sometime next month we will have not one but two, TWO! relief wells drilled at this Deepwater Horizon site. c) this is a mere 4 months, not 10 years. 4) if a = 10 years and b = 4 months who is driving the bus?
I think the “10 years” figure includes excessive legal rambling, bureaucratic nonsense when it comes to permits and such, and the rest of the blah, blah. It takes us longer to drill a damn hole than it did to go to the moon.
From Michelle Malkin’s column at NRO today:
[...] Is It With Leaks Being Overhyped? Floyd | Wednesday, 28th of July 2010 at 06:02:08 AM Last week I blogged an item about how the Gulf oil spill’s long term effects are being over hyped by the media. In that post I asked: How bad can the long term environmental [...]