Since it is a slow news time after the Oil & Gas J. Article of Feb 8, I thought I might post this piece from the Scientific American about the bad effects of oil spills. Note that the oil in question came from an oil tanker and not from an oil drilling activity. Most of the man made oil pollution comes from tankers. Anyway, I'm just posting it here for the sake of attempting to have a complete picture. Perhaps there is some argument for CCO to give up some potential profit for the sake of the environment. When you start from $100 Billion or more, what's a few Billion here or there? If the State keeps screwing around we may have to start from $1 Trillion <G>.
........... Environment
Oil on Water
Studies arising from the Exxon Valdez oil spill suggest that fish are more sensitive to hydrocarbons than previously thought
Ten years ago this month the Exxon Valdez tanker crashed into Bligh Reef, releasing at least 11 million gallons or so of crude oil into Prince William Sound in Alaska. The spill had enormous implications not only for the environment and people of the surrounding area but for public perceptions of oil pollution and for the federal law governing oil spills as well. The spill also created a massive experiment.
Despite many scientific conflicts, ongoing studies have led to some important insights. Researchers now have a better understanding of the impact of cleanup and of how an ecosystem recovers. They also have a clearer picture of how hydrocarbons--the building blocks of oil--affect certain species. Of these latter studies, work on pink salmon has recently produced some surprising results that, if they hold up, could have widespread implications for water-quality standards.
As a commercially critical fish, pink salmon received much attention after the spill. For years, biologists have documented the size and health of salmon populations returning to oiled and unoiled sites in the sound and have conducted laboratory experiments to decipher the precise dangers of hydrocarbons. Such studies are proving to be eye-opening. "Now we believe that oil pollution has much longer effects at much lower concentrations and with different compounds than we had thought," says Ronald A. Heintz, a biologist at the National Marine Fisheries Service's Auke Bay Laboratory in Juneau.
Oil is composed of thousands of compounds, including polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs. PAHs are not regulated in the aggregate nor for their impact on aquatic life. The Environmental Protection Agency issues water-quality recommendations only for human consumption of specific PAHs--such as naphthalene and chrysene--although states can devise their own regulations.
What Heintz and his team did was to expose pink salmon eggs and embryos to different amounts of total PAHs. In previously published papers, the researchers reported that postspill concentrations of PAHs--from a high of 51.5 parts per billion to a low of 4.4 ppb--can, variously, kill the fish, impair their ability to reproduce and lower their growth rates. "Exposing an embryo to oil is like taking a shotgun to its DNA," Heintz describes. It has lots of different effects, he adds, and "over the whole life cycle, those little effects really add up."
Now Heintz and his colleagues have determined that PAH levels as low as 1 ppb harm both pink salmon and Pacific herring. In their most recent studies, which appear in this month's Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry, the scientists found that mortality increased for both species of fish exposed to 1 ppb. And they discovered that the effects of very weathered oil were the same as those of fresh oil--which means that the old oil persisting under gravel in some parts of Prince William Sound could still be harmful.
The fact that 1 ppb is damaging to two species suggests that intertidal organisms everywhere may be affected by the chronic pollution brought about by small spills or leaks. "You'd be hard-pressed to find any coastal area where you wouldn't get total PAH concentrations of that magnitude," asserts Judith E. McDowell of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts.
If more researchers determine that PAHs at 1 ppb are damaging fish and other organisms, new regulations may be needed to ensure water quality-- which could affect oil exploration offshore and ballast-water discharges. Even Alaska, which has the strictest criteria in the world at 15 ppb, might have to rethink its standards, observes Jeffrey W. Short, a chemist at the Auke Bay Laboratory. But it could prove virtually impossible to regulate the many nonpoint sources of PAHs, such as storm-water runoff and people's sloppiness with their motor oil. "The consciousness has got to change with the public and the way that we set standards," says Usha Varanasi of the Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle. "It is not always a company."
For now, as Heintz and both his supporters and critics point out, much more work is needed. "You need replication by an outside group," notes Paul D. Boehm, a petroleum expert at the consulting firm Arthur D. Little who has worked in the sound for Exxon. In addition, other species need to be studied to see if the observations extend beyond salmon and herring--although there is some evidence to support the Auke Bay findings. For instance, a 1991 study from Prince William Sound found that growth rates of capelin were affected at PAH concentrations of 4 ppb. And researchers in Puget Sound are finding similar effects in juvenile salmon, Varanasi remarks.
But in general, low-level PAH analyses remain uncharted terrain. Many intertidal regions are polluted, and discerning the specific effects of PAHs against a background of other contaminants is difficult. Heintz notes that his findings came to light because Prince William Sound had been a pristine area. "The Exxon Valdez is the stimulus that motivated a new way of looking at it for us," he says. "It has radically changed the way we think about oil pollution."
--Marguerite Holloway
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