Amanda McElfresh  amcelfresh@theadvertiser.com

Original Story

The idea of using compressed natural gas to run vehicles is gaining popularity in Lafayette, with the Thursday visit from a Chevrolet Tahoe that runs on the fuel and a recent grant application to build a CNG refueling station in the city.

The Tahoe is being driven by Castlen Kennedy, an Apache Corp. employee and University of Texas at Austin graduate student who is driving the vehicle about 2,300 miles, from Austin, Texas to Boston, to prove that such a trip can be made.

The tour will eventually stop in 14 cities, where company officials will talk to others about their experiences with CNG.

“There are positives and negatives that we’re hearing,” Kennedy said. “Obviously, it’s a lot cleaner and better for the environment. But there also are challenges, particularly on the infrastructure side. And this isn’t something that a lot of people even realize is an option.”

Obie O’Brien, Apache’s vice president for governmental and regulatory affairs, said that about 130 years’ worth of natural gas is currently available for use, and several energy companies are exploring ways to use it as a transportation fuel. On average, CNG burns about 30 percent cleaner than regular gasoline, gets similar gas mileage and is about $1 cheaper per gallon than regular gasoline.

O’Brien said some of the focus is now on building more CNG fueling stations, something Kennedy said was a bit of a concern. Because of the small number of such stations, special tanks were built into the Tahoe so that enough of the fuel would be available between stops.

Last week, Lafayette officials applied for a $749,000 grant from the Louisiana Department of Natural Resources with the hopes of using that money to build the first of three CNG refueling stations in the area. Lafayette Consolidated Government, UL and the Lafayette Parish School Board all are involved in the project and are being referred to as the Lafayette Parish CNG Consortium for grant purposes.

“The need for the three stations can be assured by the number of transit vehicles, particularly the school board buses, which operate over the entire area of Lafayette Parish,” the application reads. “As demand increases after the first station is built, then the additional two stations are planned to be constructed and operated.”

The strategy is to develop an official Request for Proposals so that a private partner could be selected to help leverage public funds.

Meanwhile, Kennedy said the vehicle so far is performing well and attracting several questions and onlookers at various stops.

By David Jacobs – http://www.businessreport.com/news/2010/may/18/crude-awakening-indt1/

About 27 miles off the coast of St. Bernard Parish, in Drum Bay, it‚s unusually quiet for an early May morning. The area is dotted with white PVC poles, which mark oyster leases. On a typical day, oyster luggers and recreational fishing boats would be churning these waters. But despite the calm seas and a light wind, the spoonbills and egrets practically have the marsh to themselves.

A Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries enforcement boat slows down as a white lugger, Invincible Vance, comes into view. Men are dropping a line of containment boom from the lugger, while fishermen in three small, outboard-powered boats gather the boom and connect it to a line already in the water, forming a thin barrier around the inlets that‚s somehow supposed to protect the inner marsh.

This is a tiny part of the effort to guard Louisiana‚s fragile wetlands from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, an effort for which BP, which had leased the rig, promises to pay. At the moment, the people on the Invincible Vance are volunteers.

„They say they‚re going to pay us, but who knows for sure?‰ says Joseph Kinkella, a St. Bernard Parish oysterman who suddenly is out of work as a result of the April 20 explosion and subsequent spill.

Gary Vitrano, a marine fisheries biologist, watches with concern. From where he stands, the slick is still miles away, although later in the week traces of oil will wash ashore east of here in the Chandeleur Islands.

„This is the first line of defense,‰ Vitrano says.

Or maybe it‚s one of the last lines of defense.

As Vitrano speaks, aircraft are carpet-bombing the slick with chemicals to break down the oil; over at Port Fourchon, workers are finishing a 100-ton concrete and steel dome that BP will lower onto the site that‚s still spewing hundreds of thousands of gallons a day.

The dome failed on May 7 after it filled with hydrates, or crystals, formed by rapidly cooling gases inside the chamber. A second, smaller containment box known as a „top hat,‰ which is about four feet wide and five feet tall, has been brought to the site and lowered to the seafloor, away from the plume; undersea robots will position it over the gusher. Because the new device is much smaller than the dome, there is less water inside and less chance of crystallization. It also will be heated with methane.

The extent of the damage to the state‚s coastline, gulf wildlife and south Louisiana communities remains unclear. BP could be on the hook for billions of dollars, but the ramifications of the spill˜more than 4 million gallons had spewed from the well as of May 11˜will spread far beyond one company, potentially tainting the entire offshore drilling industry.

Cause and effect

BP and rig owner Transocean have not released details about what happened the night of April 20. But a likely picture is starting to emerge. Workers were setting pipe into the well and cementing it into place, preparing to move the Deepwater Horizon to a new site, when a natural gas bubble got into the well bore and traveled up the riser.

Every rig has blowout preventers, or BOPs, which are basically systems of shears and valves meant to close off the well in just such a situation. The Deepwater Horizon‚s BOP never engaged, perhaps because the system was jammed with cement or because workers never had a chance to engage it. Once the gas reached the surface and spilled out of the center of the rig floor, a spark of static electricity would have been enough to cause the first explosion.

Eleven workers who were never found probably died instantly, while 115 people made it out alive˜some by crawling in the darkness across mud and debris. Two days later, the entire rig collapsed as massive amounts of oil leaked from cracks in the crumpled mile-long pipe that extended from the rig to the well.

BP has taken most of the heat for the disaster. Halliburton will face scrutiny for the cementing job they completed shortly before the blast. Cameron International built the blowout preventer.

Executives from BP, Transocean and Halliburton pointed fingers at each other during a May 6 hearing before the U.S. Senate Energy Committee. Chairman Jeff Bingaman, a New Mexico Democrat, said it appeared the explosion was the result of a „cascade of errors˜technical, human and regulatory.‰

But experts agree the Deepwater Horizon incident isn‚t just a problem for companies with direct ties to the rig.

„It has now become the industry‚s problem,‰ says David Dismukes, associate executive director of LSU‚s Center for Energy Studies. „There are going to be consequences for all offshore oil and gas businesses because of this, all across the board.‰ Those changes will likely include tighter regulations, tougher insurance requirements and new backup systems, he says.

„It‚s a powerful challenge,‰ says Rayola Dougher, a senior economic adviser with the American Petroleum Institute. „We‚ve been very proud of our record in the Gulf of Mexico, especially during hurricanes Rita and Katrina, and thought that this technology was virtually foolproof. ∑ This has been a shock to everyone.‰

The API will be part of the public-relations reaction to the inevitable anti-industry backlash. Dougher says the institute is forming two task forces of „the best minds in the industry‰ to look at technologies and procedures.

Backup systems are required for blowout preventers; perhaps there should be three redundancies, Dougher suggests. BOPs are tested every two weeks; should they be tested every day? Can spill-mitigation techniques be improved to safeguard against the worst-case scenario?

The rig didn‚t have a remote switch to activate the BOP. Some reports have said Brazilian and Norwegian authorities require remote switches in their waters, but Dougher says that isn‚t the case. She says the Minerals Management Service funded two studies that found the acoustic signal could be blocked by the well flow, hard surfaces or water; some operators instead choose to have robotic submarines.

BP‚s robots have been unable to engage the BOP valve, which, Dougher says, indicates a remote switch wouldn‚t have done much good. „If the system doesn‚t work, it hardly matters if you have a switch remotely someplace,‰ she says.

The rig also had an unfortunately nicknamed „dead man‰ system. A shear ram is supposed to be able to slice through the riser and seal off the well as a last resort. Some of the workers who died in the tragedy might have spent their last moments trying to engage the ram.

The professionalism and competence of the MMS, which regulates offshore drilling as part of the federal Department of the Interior, often was questioned during the Bush administration. A 2008 report from the department‚s top inspector found „a culture of ethical failure‰ at the agency. The report described an Animal House-like free-for-all atmosphere in the MMS royalty program, including sex, alcohol use and drug use among government employees and energy company officials.

A U.S. Government Accountability Office report released in March says „limited oversight, gaps in staff skills, and incomplete tools hinder the Interior Department‚s ability to manage its production verification programs,‰ which is a fancy way of saying taxpayers might be getting ripped off when it comes to oil and gas revenue from federal leases.

Then there‚s the now-infamous BP exploration plan for the site, in which an MMS official certifies „that BP Exploration & Production Inc. has the capability to respond, to the maximum extent practicable, to a worst-case discharge.‰ The Jindal administration has repeatedly complained that BP and the Coast Guard didn‚t have a detailed plan to deal with the spill, although the state didn‚t start working on a plan with coastal parishes until several days after the April 20 explosion.

„Under federal law, this is 100% BP‚s responsibility,‰ says Garret Graves, director of the Governor‚s Office of Coastal Acitivities. The state was assured that BP had a plan that was able to deal with up to 300,000 barrels of oil leaking per day, he says. Very rough estimates continue to peg the leak at about 5,000 barrels a day.

The exploration plan says BP isn‚t required to have „a site-specific Oil Spill Response Plan‰ or a „model of a potential oil or hazardous substance spill.‰ Taken together, the three reports suggest a federal government that isn‚t watching the industry closely enough.

„I think the MMS has been very diligent in visiting those rigs and making inspections and reviewing these plans,‰ says Steve Sears, who chairs LSU‚s petroleum engineering department. „In hindsight, yes, something‚s going to need to be changed.‰

The results of investigations by industry groups and the U.S. government will be reviewed by officials all over the world, probably leading to greater scrutiny of offshore exploration by regulators. But the lessons might be applied differently in the Gulf of Mexico than in the North Sea, Sears says.

„This particular rig is known for their safety record, but yet, we had a failure,‰ Louisiana Oil & Gas Association President Don Briggs says. „Several backup systems did not work, and consequently, we will implement even more backup systems so that doesn‚t happen again. No matter how hard you try sometimes, not everything is fail-safe.‰

The oil and gas industry, like all industries everywhere, says it‚s already heavily regulated by the government. Now industry leaders worry about an overreaction from the regulators.
LINE OF DEFENSE: Workers lay down booms to protect Eads Island at the southern tip of the Mississippi River. Booms are deployed along much of the Gulf Coast to prevent oil from the Deepwater Horizon from reaching the shore.

Courtesy U.S. Coast Guard

LINE OF DEFENSE: Workers lay down booms to protect Eads Island at the southern tip of the Mississippi River. Booms are deployed along much of the Gulf Coast to prevent oil from the Deepwater Horizon from reaching the shore.

„From every accident, we learn something,‰ Briggs says. „We don‚t need the government to tell us we‚ve got a problem here.‰ But in the next breath, he says business will partner with government to create the necessary precautions.

A political shift

From the industry‚s perspective, the timing of this tragedy couldn‚t be worse. Offshore drilling has always been controversial among environmentalists and some politicians, but momentum had been building to open new areas for energy exploration.

Less than a month before the spill, President Barack Obama announced plans to at least study lifting a moratorium on new drilling in certain American waters, including the eastern Gulf of Mexico. Obama says the move is „part of a broader strategy that will move us from an economy that runs on fossil fuels and foreign oil to one that relies on homegrown fuels and clean energy.‰

Some locals were skeptical, since the proposed expansion is seen partly as a bargaining chip to pass climate change legislation. But the news was encouraging for the state‚s oil and gas producers. Louisiana companies working out of Louisiana ports would get a lot of that new business.

But now, further expansion of offshore drilling seems far less likely. Florida Gov. Charlie Crist might push for a ballot initiative to ban drilling near his state. The phrase „Drill, baby, drill‰ isn‚t so popular these days. Some of the most vocal drilling proponents seem to be backing down, but not all of them.

„For advocates that say we can‚t afford to drill off of our coast, then what coast should we drill off of?‰ Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu said in a lengthy defense of the industry on the Senate floor. „Should we have all of our oil coming from Saudi Arabia or Venezuela or Honduras or West Africa?‰

National polls in 2008 found support for offshore drilling as high as 73%. But only 58% of respondents to a poll taken May 4-5 said offshore drilling should be allowed, and politicians with close elections ahead of them have certainly noticed the shift.

„I don‚t know how it‚s going to play out in Congress in the days and the months ahead,‰ says Dougher, the American Petroleum Institute official. „A lot is going to depend on how quickly this spill can be stopped and the mitigation of the environmental impact.‰

Obviously, the oil and gas industry is one of the pillars of Louisiana‚s economy. While Baton Rouge doesn‚t rely on oil as much as Houma or Lafayette, the fortunes of state government, a major local employer, tend to rise and fall with that of the oil business.

With or without alternative energy, new sources of oil will be necessary for the nation‚s economic and political security for at least as long as most of us are alive, industry backers say. Unfortunately, there are far fewer „easy‰ sources of oil today than there were 20 or 30 years ago. Offshore drilling, particularly deepwater drilling, is one of the last frontiers.

But those who believe America needs to move away from its reliance on oil as quickly as possible now have a powerful argument in their favor. Before the oil industry and its allies can tap the natural resources they want, they might need to convince the public the Deepwater Horizon disaster is a once-in-a-lifetime event, not a sign of things to come.

LOGA Member and avid blogger Steve Maley, posted on www.redstate.com

Even under the most conservative of assumptions, this oil spill is very disperse. That’s good news, actually.

The Exxon Valdez, it ain’t. But when I say that, itseems to upset some people.

Only by being rational about assessing the environmental threat from the Deepwater Horizon spill can we be prepared to deal with the consequences.

Journalists, scientists, Congressmen and bureaucrats have been jockeying to see who can make the most calamitous prediction. As an engineer, I compulsively check their claims (because I know that the journalists are incapable of it, the environmentalists refuse to do it, and those in government are motivated by a power-grab).

From the Old Grey Lady:
Giant Plumes of Oil Forming Under the Gulf

Scientists are finding enormous oil plumes in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, including one as large as 10 miles long, 3 miles wide and 300 feet thick in spots. The discovery is fresh evidence that the leak from the broken undersea well could be substantially worse than estimates that the government and BP have given. …
The plumes are depleting the oxygen dissolved in the gulf, worrying scientists, who fear that the oxygen level could eventually fall so low as to kill off much of the sea life near the plumes. …
Given their size, the plumes cannot possibly be made of pure oil, but more likely consist of fine droplets of oil suspended in a far greater quantity of water, Dr. Joye said. She added that in places, at least, the plumes might be the consistency of a thin salad dressing.

Yumm. Pass the balsamic vinaigrette. Even better, let’s check the math…

So just one of the plumes is 10 mi x 3 mi x 300 feet thick? That seems really big.

In fact, it’s 2.5 E+11 cubic feet, or 45 billion barrels of “salad dressing”.

Let’s take a third of that, to allow for thinning of this plume in all dimensions: that leaves 15 billion barrels of oil & sea water emulsion.

The extreme high end of the rate of spill is 80,000 barrels per day (not that I believe that number, which is sixteen times the “official” estimate). Over 28 days, that’s 2.24 million barrels of oil to date.

If all the oil from the biggest spill estimate were in this single plume, crude oil accounts for less than 0.00015 of the volume (that’s 0.015%, or 150 parts per million). That’s about three drops per liter of sea water.

Even given all the most conservative possible assumptions, that’s a mighty weak salad dressing.

We know it’s not right. Much of the oil has made it to the surface, and a lot of that has evaporated. Some has been burned, some has been recovered. You have to question whether oil in water in such a dilute concentration would have the oxygen-depleting effect described in the article. And remember, this is only one of several plumes.

Folks, this is good news. It means the dispersant is working, breaking up the oil into tiny droplets and dispersing them widely. Mother Nature handles dispersed oil all the time, oil from the natural seeps that account for well over half the oil in the marine environment. Bacteria just love the stuff.

Another thing to remember is that agricultural runoff creates a life-choking anoxic “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico every summer. The size of these oxygen-depleted zones is usually compared to a Northeastern state (usu. Connecticut or New Jersey, for some reason). The oxygen depletion is a result of too much algae, which is a result of too much nitrogen fertilizer being used in the Midwest, which is a result of our government’s misguided insistence on using food as a motor fuel – corn-based ethanol.

But that’s the topic of another diary.

Oil Spill Reality Check, Part I is here.

(Originally posted in the Times-Picayune)

After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, we learned how to better screen airline passengers. After the floods following Katrina, we (hopefully) learned how to build better levees.

After this oil spill, will we learn how to build better safeguards for deep-water drilling? Many people are citing this tragic accident as a reason we should not be drilling deep-water oil wells.

If that philosophy had prevailed after the other tragedies, we wouldn’t be flying and we would not be rebuilding our city. That would be a worse tragedy.

Steve Koehler
Metairie

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Interior Secretary said on Tuesday offshore drilling was vital to meet the country’s energy needs just as lawmakers pushed forward with efforts to make big oil companies fully liable for oil spills.
 
U.S.
 
In Capitol Hill hearings four weeks after a drilling rig exploded and caused a massive oil spill deep in the Gulf of Mexico, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said offshore drilling was still a necessary part of U.S. energy policy.
 
Salazar said about 30 percent of U.S. oil production comes from the Gulf of Mexico, where the rig leased by energy giant BP Plc exploded on April 20, killing 11 people and spewing vast amounts of crude into the ocean.
 
Election-year politics were evident in Congress on Tuesday when Democrats for the second time in a week tried to force a Senate vote on a bill to increase oil companies’ liability for accidents. The move, as expected, was blocked by Republicans.
 
“Republicans side with big oil companies,” said one Senate Democrat’s press release shortly after the failed maneuver.
 
Senator Robert Menendez, one of the Democrats seeking approval for the bill that would increase the liability cap per company per incident to $10 billion from $75 million, said Democratic senators were considering pushing legislation that would place no limits on the liability.
 
“We will be discussing whether to go to unlimited liability,” Menendez told reporters.
 
Republican Senator James Inhofe stopped Menendez’s bill from coming to the Senate floor on Tuesday, citing one of the same reasons used when it was stopped last week — that a new cap could hurt smaller drillers.
 
Salazar said the Obama administration agreed that the liability cap needed to be lifted though he would not give a specific number for how high it should be.
 
As part of a push to uncover more details of the impact of the explosion, another Democratic senator said BP had agreed to provide video records related to the Gulf of Mexico spill.
 
“These films are critical to understanding the volume of the spill, the reach of the spill, and the results of the efforts so far to contain it,” said Senator Barbara Boxer, chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works committee.
 
BP had been criticized for not being forthcoming with providing more video footage or photographs of the damage, sparking questions over whether the spill was actually much bigger than the 5,000 barrels (210,000 gallons/795,000 liters) per day the company says is leaking into the ocean every day

Originally on FoxNews.com, written by LOGA member Steve Maley

Americans don’t like to think much about where their gasoline comes from. They’re happy when supplies are plentiful and prices are cheap. Many have painful memories of oil embargoes, gas lines and price spikes, and prefer those episodes not be repeated. Americans expect gasoline to be as reliable as electricity.

The oil industry satisfies their demand. Some 30% of domestic oil (along with 11% of natural gas) comes from the Gulf of Mexico. Considering that 35,000 workers are engaged in a heavy industry that operates 24 hours a day in a marine, all-weather environment, the safety and environmental record in the Gulf of Mexico is pretty remarkable.

There have been incidents. The worst spill in the Gulf was the Bay Marchand spill in 1970, a near-shore production incident. The greatest losses of life occurred in 1987, when 13 men perished in a helicopter accident, and in 1976 when 11 men died, ironically, when their emergency survival capsule overturned while being towed.

I can’t remember a previous drilling incident in the Gulf with the nationwide significance of the Deepwater Horizon blowout.

BP was drilling in 5,000 feet of water. Given the cost, risk and operating challenges of that environment, why would anyone bother?

My company has never considered it. We operate on the “shelf” of the Gulf of Mexico, mostly in waters of 200 feet or less. We don’t use subsea blowout preventers. Ours are “dry”, on the surface. We rarely use ROVs (remotely operated vehicles) and divers can dive to any depths we might require. On the shelf, cost to drill and produce wells are a tiny fraction of deepwater costs. And the risk is much less. Problems, if they happen, are more easily controlled when the valves are at the surface instead of under a mile or so of sea water.

But the chance that we’ll find a really big field on the shelf is nill. Geologists say the shelf is very mature, or “picked over”; think of a cotton field after it’s already been worked once. Most U.S. drillers these days are working that second or third harvest because all the domestic basins are so thoroughly exploited. That’s my company’s niche, so we’re content to limit our search to shallow water.

By contrast, the deepwater Gulf of Mexico is not mature. There, the major multinational companies still find the world-class prospects which have the potential of providing oil in the huge quantities their integrated infrastructures need (i.e., refining, distribution and marketing, in addition to exploration and production). The majors must find reserves in big chunks, and produce their wells at high rates, so that they can satisfy our demand for uninterrupted and readily available supply.

There are also big prospects to drill elsewhere, in Africa, the Middle East, Brazil, and the Far East. The U.S. offers political stability and security of ownership that many foreign countries do not. But Americans’ attitude toward drilling has gone beyond “Not In My Back Yard!” Now it’s “Not Near Anything With a Pretty View!” and “Don’t Interfere With Mating Pronghorn Antelopes or Nesting Sage Grouse!” We’ve kept 85% of the Outer Continental Shelf off-limits for exploration for a generation.

So the majors turn to the deepwater Gulf of Mexico, the only domestic basin where they can find the “elephants” they need to sustain their businesses.

By keeping 85% of the OCS off limits to drilling, we’re holding back large swaths of shallow water where less risky offshore shelf technologies could be used.

If you agree with continuing the official policy of limiting drilling access, at least consider the consequences of your position.

Despite all the advertising by “green” interest groups and adminstration rhetoric, DOE’s Energy Information Agency forecasts increasing use of petroleum through at least 2030. That same forecast also assumes explosive growth in renewables, including biofuels. Our appetite for energy is voracious. As “green” as we’d like to think we are, individual consumers change their consumption habits very slowly.

So increased oil consumption, absent domestic growth of supply, necessarily means more dependence on potentially hostile regimes and less security at home.

It also means that more oil will be imported in tankers. Offshore, we use pipelines, which limit the volume in the event of a spill. Much more oil is spilled from ships, barges and boats than from the offshore oil and gas industry. Exxon Valdez and recent spills on the Delaware and Mississippi Rivers prove the point: transporting oil in boats is riskier than shallow water oil production.
The offshore industry was born and came of age right here in South Louisiana. The industry has learned its lessons from past failures. Despite the Deepwater Horizon incident, the offshore industry remains a safe, invaluable source for the nation’s energy supply.

Steve Maley is operations manager for a small Gulf of Mexico energy firm in Lafayette, LA. Steve is also Contributing Editor for Energy and Environmental Issues at RedState.com, writing under the nom-de-blog ‘Vladimir’.

An tube inserted into a busted pipe leaking oil into the Gulf of Mexico is collecting about 1,000 barrels of oil per day, about one fifth of the amount governmen officials believe is gushing into the sea, a BP spokesma said Monday morning.

The mile-long collection tube began pumping oil to a waiting ship Sunday. It is BP’s first successful attempt at containing oil, which is leaking from a riser pipe on the ocean floor.

A BP spokesman said the tube is capable of collecting more oil, and has not yet been fully “optimized.” BP and government officials estimate that 5,000 barrels of oil are leaking into the Gulf each day. Some experts, however, estimate that five times that much could be escaping.