Nalco’s Chief Lobbies Congress on Disputed Gulf Oil Dispersant

[MNeagle]

May 27 (Bloomberg) -- Nalco Holding Co.’s chief met with members of Congress yesterday to convince them that its chemical dispersant should continue to be used on BP Plc’s oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico as the U.S. weighs restrictions.

J. Erik Fyrwald, chief executive officer of the Naperville, Illinois-based company, sought to reassure lawmakers that the chemical, Corexit, is “safe and effective” after the Environmental Protection Agency demanded that BP curb its use to break up the spill, company spokesman Charlie Pajor said.

“The decision to use it or any dispersant is made by the responders to a spill,” Pajor said in an e-mailed statement. “We are simply complying with their requests.”

The EPA ordered BP to scale back the amount of Corexit used while the agency conducts independent tests and seeks a “better choice” of dispersant, Administrator Lisa Jackson told reporters on May 24. She said the chemical was being used at a “world record” rate and its effects on aquatic life were unknown.

“We are still deeply concerned about the things we don’t know,” said Jackson.

Nalco was already becoming more active in Washington when the Gulf spill occurred. It recently opened an office and hired Ramola Musante, a former EPA official, as its lobbyist.

The company sold $40 million of Corexit for the Gulf cleanup through last week, Pajor said. Nalco, which provides water-treatment chemicals, reported $3.75 billion in revenue last year and net income of $60.5 million.

Sales Small

While Fyrwald has said Corexit sales are too small to affect the company’s financial results, Nalco climbed 5.9 percent in New York trading on May 3 after announcing BP was applying the product and fell 5.3 percent on May 20 after the EPA called for curbing its use.

Nalco rose 92 cents, or 4.2 percent, to $22.79 at 12:51 p.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading after falling 14 percent this year through yesterday.

The Gulf spill provides potential revenue for Nalco of $800,000 to $6.5 million a day, Laurence Alexander, an analyst in New York with Jeffries & Co. said in a note to investors on May 18.

Corexit is approved for use in 30 countries, and “has been used successfully to treat oil spills globally for a number of years,” Pajor said.

Nalco doesn’t make public the chemical composition of the dispersant, which acts like a detergent on oil so that it breaks up more quickly.

Corexit is “a simple blend of six well-established, safe ingredients that biodegrade, do not bioaccumulate and are commonly found in popular household products,” the company said today in a statement.

Risks, Consequences

Representative Edward Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat and chairman of a House subcommittee on energy and the environment, wrote Jackson on May 17, saying he was concerned about the “risks and consequences” of dispersant use in the Gulf.

Richard Denison, senior scientist in Washington for the Environmental Defense Fund, said EPA and the U.S. Coast Guard have done little testing on chemical dispersants used on oil spills. It’s not known whether the chemical may accumulate in marine tissue and kill fish, shrimp and other marine life or enter the food supply, he said.

“Regulatory officials are making decisions on very incomplete information,” Denison said.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=azdJZQa0M6hw&pos=9

[keehah]

I'm less worried about the type, than the amounts of all used.

After seeing the Custeau dive video posted it confirms some fears I had.

Let me give you an example, I've picked a lot of trash from parkland over the years in my volunteer work. I was horrified a year or two back when the polio and media greenscreen seemed to latch on to degradable plastic as a near term solution again. Let me tell you one does not want to have to clean up degraded plastic!

The name is false advertising of course. What degradable plastic did was have a 'cheaper' binder so the bag fractured into smaller pieces of plastic sooner. So instead of picking up one piece of plastic, and being able to yank it from the ground, one would have to pick up dozens of fragile pieces carefully, to clean up the same amount. The litter was further dispursed in the environment, and more able to enter the bio-chain of life.

http://plasticisrubbish.wordpress.com/2008/05/20/degradable-versus-biodegradable-plastic/

Rather than take centuries for the product to break down it take years or months – the time it takes is built into the bag.

It breaks down into miniscule particles of plastic.

Just to remind you why plastic bits are not so good.

“ plastic is made by combining many toxic synthetic man-made chemicals by a process called polymerization. The plastics industry tells us that this process binds the toxic chemicals together so tightly that they are no longer toxic to us. But they don’t tell us that the polymerization process is never 100% perfect. It always leaves some of those toxic chemicals available to migrate out of the plastic product and into whatever contacts it—your food, you, air, water, and so on.

In the Gulf it seems rather than blobs of tar getting thicker and thicker helping separate it from interactions with the life in the Gulf, we now have a colloidal acting soup of oil and water increasing the ability of the oil to affect it. To have worked properly the dispersant would have to had fully dissolved oil globules (and even so, would this have been good or bad overall?).

Yet another example of failure of knee-jerk technology will save us action?

I see the EPA on the news today may be waking up. Crowing about the 'good news' that they have scaled way back and limited use of dispersants by about 75%.

http://content.usatoday.com/communities/greenhouse/post/2010/05/epa-chief-use-of-dispersants-in-gulf-down/1

Jackson told a House subcommittee Thursday that BP used less than 12,000 gallons of dispersants Wednesday, down from 70,000 gallons four days prior, the story says.

In a conference call with reporters Monday, Jackson said the federal government asked BP to "significantly scale back" its use of dispersants on the Gulf spill, ProPublica reports.

The EPA demanded last week that BP find an alternative to a dispersant called Corexit 9500. But the energy giant continues to spray that toxic chemical to break up the Gulf oil spill, saying it is the best option available, according to ProPublica.

Or perhaps government will do what government does best (after the keep the control work).
Waste money!
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/5437793.html

The invention discloses methods of making oil coagulant compositions, the oil coagulants made thereby and processes for using the coagulants to coagulate oil that has been spilled on water. ... The coagulant of the present invention coagulates oil independent of both agitation and temperature, and may be used in both salt and fresh water. After the coagulant has coagulated the spilled oil, the coagulated oil may be readily mechanically removed from the water such that at least 99.9% of the oil is removed from the water and only a faint trace of oil remains in the water.

Hm... I wonder if Goldman Sachs bought both dispersant and coagulant stocks? :D

[Spectrism]

I would simply ask then to drink a glass of their own product if they thought it was safe.

[keehah]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/27/AR2010052703667.html?wprss=rss_nation&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wp-dyn%2Frss%2Fnation%2Findex_xml+%28washingtonpost.c om+-+Nation%29

The scientists, aboard a University of South Florida research vessel, found an area of dissolved oil that is about six miles wide, and extends from the surface down to a depth of about 3,200 feet, said Professor David Hollander.

Hollander said that he believed the plume might have stretched more than 20 miles from the site of a leak on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico, where the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig sank April 22. It has not yet reached Florida.

The plume is clear, with the oil entirely dissolved.

"Here is a situation where, unless you're looking at the chemical fingerprints, [the oil] is absolutely not visible," Hollander said. "It's not some Italian vinaigrette or anything like that. It's absolutely, perfectly clear."

But, Hollander said, even this clear-looking water could contain enough oil to be toxic to small animals at the base of the gulf food chain. He said he was also worried that the oil contains traces of "dispersants," soap-like chemicals sprayed into the oil to break it up.

"You don't want to put soap into a fish tank," Hollander said.

This discovery seems to confirm the fears of some scientists that -- because of the depth of the leak and the heavy use of chemical "dispersants" -- this spill was behaving differently than others. Instead of floating on top of the water, it may be moving beneath it.



That would be troubling because it could mean the oil would slip past coastal defenses such as "containment booms" designed to stop it on the surface. Already, scientists and officials in Louisiana have reported finding thick oil washing ashore despite the presence of floating booms.

It would also be a problem for hidden ecosystems deep under the gulf. There, scientists say, the oil could be absorbed by tiny animals and enter a food chain that builds to large, beloved sport-fish like red snapper. It might also glom on to deep-water coral formations, and cover the small animals that make up each piece of coral.

"It kills them because it prevents them from feeding," said Professor James H. Cowan Jr., of Louisiana State University. "It could essentially starve them to death."

The University of South Florida vessel, the Weatherbird II, used sonar and other devices to sample the water below it. Other scientists have said they have little of the equipment necessary to find oil under the water -- leading to debates about whether the underwater plumes were even there.

This week, Mike Utsler, who helps oversee the spill response off the entire Louisiana coast as BP Houma incident commander, said he's only focused on taking oil off the surface. "We don't know there's oil underwater," he said.

But others had seen worrisome evidence.

Owen Morgan of Amira, a group that specializes in breaking apart spills with oil-eating microbes, found evidence of the oil plume off Venice when his team sampled water 75 feet beneath the service. Morgan -- who said his company is pulling out of Louisiana because of insufficient cooperation from state and federal authorities -- showed a thick, gooey sample consisting of 60 percent crude oil.

"People don't realize how bad it is," Morgan said, dipping a fork in the sample to show the goo that hung in midair without sliding off. "This went on for three miles, of that consistency."

William Hogarth, dean of the USF College of Marine Science, said university researchers have sent samples to federal officials for analysis, but it's clear the oil is new because Stanford scientists had sampled the same area a year ago and found no evidence of oil. The Weatherbird II will conduct another tour next week, he said, with different researchers aboard.

"This is not natural seep," he said, adding that scientists will have to study the region for several years in order to properly gauge its impact. "We're talking about probably a three to five-year monitoring program to see what happens to food chain."