The BP Gulf Oil Gusher has shown the whole world the nightmarish risks of deep sea drilling. But there is another, older, story of environmental destruction in the Mississippi River Delta wetlands–and it, too, is related to offshore drilling. This tragedy will continue long after BP’s well is shut down. And to make matters worse, there’s another kind of terrible accident just waiting to happen. Guest Blogger Dominique Browning, author of the new book Slow Love, and writer with the Environmental Defense Fund website has the story.
The first offshore well was drilled in fourteen feet of water off the coast of Calcasieu Parish, Louisiana in 1937. In the decades that followed, a dense infrastructure was thrown up to support a booming offshore oil business–which was rapidly moving into ever-greater depths. Some 30,000 to 40,000 miles of underwater pipeline were laid and navigational canals were cut through the wetlands for shipping. Oil industry maps show an astonishingly dense and complex thicket. Most of the pipelines and canals that service the roughly 4,000 active wells in the Gulf were built long before environmental laws were passed and agencies were created to protect the wetlands.
Just as we have collapsing bridges in our highway system, so, too, we have a decaying infrastructure underwater. It is aging, and as the marsh erodes it uncovers pipelines never built to be exposed to water, let alone saltwater. EDF senior director Paul Harrison describes an open meeting with the federal Council on Environmental Quality, where “an oil industry person got up and said he worries about the vulnerability of the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port (LOOP) pipeline.”
The LOOP carries about a billion dollars worth of material every day. The cost of plugging canals, building diversions, and bringing river water into the wetlands, is small change by comparison–but the survival of the wetlands depends on it. Only the power of the Mississippi River can build land and keep up with sea level rise. That is why we need mega-scale restoration of this landscape. We cannot afford to let this work become an environmentalist’s pipe dream.
The Geophysical Research Letters will soon publish a paper, “High Sea-Floor Stress Induced by Extreme Hurricane Waves,” indicating that 31,000 miles of pipelines along the seafloor of the Gulf of Mexico are extremely vulnerable to hurricane-induced currents [click here for news release]. During Hurricane Ivan in 2004, sensors placed on the ocean floor, hundreds of feet deep, showed that underwater currents put considerable stress on the oil infrastructure. More than 1,000 reports of damage to pipelines in the Gulf have been made in the past two decades; more hurricane-resistant design of this infrastructure is needed before another crisis erupts. Predictions are for a strong hurricane season this year.
Meanwhile, the vast oil infrastructure has already cost Louisiana dearly. Since the early 1900s, Louisiana has lost 2,300 square miles of wetlands to the sea, an area roughly the size of Delaware. Those thousands of miles of pipeline and canals–all that infrastructure that was laid down to support the offshore drilling industry–have severely compromised the resilience of the delta ecosystem.
The Mississippi River has been separated from the wetlands by the levees and jetties that were built to keep shipping channels open. Fresh river water, carrying its rich load of sediment, no longer reaches and replenishes the delta. The straight, wide industrial canals have disrupted the hydrology –the water flow–of the wetlands. Normally, bayous are full of small, winding channels that keep saltwater from running inland. The manmade canals, in contrast, serve as conduits for seawater, which kills the freshwater marsh vegetation that holds the land together, leaving it to wash away with the tides.
And the last, and largest, problem for the Mississippi River Delta wetlands is global warming. In low-lying places like Louisiana, you have to consider relative sea level rise. Because the land is subsiding at the same time that the ocean is rising, Louisiana faces the most severe consequences of climate change.
The BP disaster will have severe economic consequences for everyone whose livelihood depends on those oil-soaked Gulf waters. But the far greater disaster is the one that has been years in the making. The next Gulf tragedy is waiting to happen.
Guest Blogger Dominique Browning is author of the new book Slow Love. She writes regularly for The New York Times Book Review, Wired, and others.
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BP oil disaster threatens goods and services worth far more than BP’s value – Study
The BP oil disaster, hurricanes and wetlands loss threaten a net value of $330 billion to $1.3 trillion in natural system goods and services, according to the first study of the Mississippi River Delta as a capital asset released on Thursday.
Even the low end estimate of the Delta’s value exceeds BP’s market capitalization before the oil disaster on April 20 of $189 billion. The study was completed shortly before the spill.
http://wireupdate.com/wires/6272/bp-oil-disaster-threatens-goods-and-services-worth-far-more-than-bps-value-study/
Watching the BP shares live http://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:BP
Fort Saskatchewan residents sicker than neighbours: prof
Health questions raised at ERCB hearing into Total upgrader northeast of Edmonton
Fort Saskatchewan residents have twice as many hospital admissions and emergency room visits as people in surrounding counties, an Energy Resources Conservation Board hearing was told Tuesday.
It’s not clear what role pollution from the surrounding industry plays in these statistics, but it’s something local public health authorities should look into, said Stuart Batterman, a professor of environmental health sciences from the University of Michigan.
Batterman was speaking to the three-member panel of the ERCB that is in the second week of a hearing into a proposed bitumen upgrader that the Total oil company wants to build in Strathcona County. The upgrader would eventually convert 295,000 barrels of bitumen from the oilsands into synthetic crude oil each day.
Read more: http://www.edmontonjournal.com/business/Fort+Saskatchewan+residents+sicker+than+neighbours+prof/3127409/story.html#ixzz0qSsNT4GP
1/2 the wetlands eroded because the vital Mississippi River mud was cut off from them. Already before the spill and was said to be a factor in the Katrina flooding.
The oil is washing into the marsh grass, killing it. The dead roots won’t hold the soil. The soil will erode and let the oil get to the next few inches of soil. A bad storm may wash oil over several feet.
It seems to me to be necessary to restore the sediment getting to the delta. Otherwise New Orleans will be directly expose to the sea in the next storms.
Has anything be done since Katrina to reengineer the canal systems?
Yesterday brought another big drop in BP’s stock price along with a devaluation of its bonds to junk status. Basically this means that BP will not be able to borrow money to pay its oblications, although it can clearly sell off assets. As liabilities mount, the ability of the company to pay them is declining. After what happened to Lehman Brothers, investors will worry about the rapid demise of large corporations. The case might be made that pushing for criminal sanctions on BP would be more than world stock markets can bear.
This oil damage will certainly make New Orleans more vulnerable to flooding. Clearly the Gulf Coast will face new disasters. Let’s just hope that they are not as massive as the current crisis.
“Only the power of the Mississippi River can build land and keep up with sea level rise.”
Rising sea level will move the Mississippi delta further inland. The costal infrastructure will be drowned by sea water. No amount of delta sediment deposition will be able to keep the ocean back. We will need to build dikes on a massive scale (like the Netherlands). As sea level rises it will stress all coastal infrastructures. I imagine we will deal with old oil pipeline as we do with old water pipeline; wait for the leak.
Media ignores Goldman Sachs’ ties to Corexit dispersant
http://www.picassodreams.com/picasso_dreams/2010/05/media-ignores-goldman-sachs-ties-to-corexit-dispersant.html
I concur with Michael Tucker @3. With the added caveat – Should we be considering how to deal with New Orleans in the long term, say by 2030? What happens if significant portions of the West Antarctic, East Antarctic, and Greenland ice sheets collapse? Rising sea level will not reach the Gulf for 5-10 years but panic will strike almost immediately. Do we continue to abide by economic theory that classifies these impacts as externalities?
Massive pipeline leaks triggered by massive hurricanes may be enough to turn the tide (pardon the pun) but they may be only the first of many shocks.
For your entertainment:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AAa0gd7ClM&feature=channel
Re: 5 – Building dikes to protect cities, sure. Building dikes to protect tidal wetlands – won’t work; it’ll kill them. Shrimp and fish can’t migrate in and out of wetlands, nor can tidal marsh vegetation survive if the wetlands are diked off from the ocean. Also, once you get out of the immediate Mississippi delta, it’s the tide that brings sediment into the marshes and maintains them in a healthy state.
Although it was once thought that canals and the resulting saltwater intrusion and disruption of subsurface freshwater flow caused the ongoing massive loss of Louisiana wetlands (Eugene Taylor); not everything added up. Mainly that the marsh mat (dead vegetation and peat soil) in most cases has not eroded away. It’s hard to argue that the marsh died and eroded away when it’s still there. Rather the marsh has been submerged in place. Outside of the Mississippi’s bird’s foot delta; in the older delta lobes and the Chenier Plain, it is subsidence caused by subsurface fluid extraction that is the major cause of wetland loss.
This is mostly due to oil and gas production.
Because the oil industry pays the wages of most of the local populace, funds much if not most of the game management, and donates surface rights to land for conservation purposes, this fact is often played down or denied. Therefore, it isn’t suprising that the EDF got the story wrong here.
The oil industry rarely cuts new canals these days. And many canals have been blocked as mitigation projects. Therefore, this “old” practice has been abandoned and is being “fixed” supposedly. This allows the industry to state that they are no longer harming the environment. It also allows Louisiana to condemn BP while facilitating much worse damage to their wetlands and the Gulf of Mexico.
Unfortunately reality is a tough one to fool. Because it is subsidence and not saltwater intrusion, ongoing oil and gas production exacerbates the marsh loss. And blocking canals or building levees does not bring back the marsh (unless you consider a floating mat of frogbit a success). The land would need to be “reinflated” (impossible) or elevated (possible on a small scale with dredged muds) for true restoration.
There is a way to halt the damage and allow oil and gas production to continue. That would be to require carbon dioxide injection to maintain reservoir pressure and prevent ground deflation and subsidence. However this is expensive. Its requirement would mean that many marginal oil and gas wells, wells that often produce more water than oil, would be shut down.
That ain’t gonna happen. So Louisiana will continue to lose 30 square miles of marsh every year until its all gone. That’s the real world.