The Missing Oil

For some reason the Mobile Press-Register decided to do some fact-checking on the “oil just evaporated”. and sent people out to same the water along the Alabama coast.

Ben Raines, the paper’s environmental reporter, covers the early results – Tests suggest oil dispersant washing up on Alabama beaches

The stained, brown water seen washing up in pockets along Alabama beaches for the last two weeks appears to contain the dispersant widely used on oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill, according to a preliminary analysis.

The Press-Register collected samples from multiple locations along the Fort Morgan peninsula during the last several weeks and provided them to Ed Overton, a Louisiana State University chemist.

While heavy oil sheen was visible in the areas where the material was collected, little if any oil was found to be present in the samples, said Overton, who is analyzing oil samples for the federal government.

“We didn’t see oil in the analysis we do, but I passed some of these water samples to a colleague who does fluorescence analysis,” Overton said. “We saw some preliminary indications that there was a dispersant signal in the sample.”

Fluorescence analysis provides ultra-fine detail and can measure chemicals to the parts per billion level or better. Overton said it was too soon to say definitively that the material in the samples was the Corexit dispersant, but the signal was similar to a Corexit sample.

Later in the article is another piece of bad news:

Over the last several weeks, Harriet Perry, a scientist at the Gulf Coast Research Lab in Ocean Springs, has collected larval crabs, finding blobs of oil beneath their shells. Further testing has suggested that there may be dispersant present in the crab bodies as well, she said.

“They looked specifically for the Corexit. It looks like they found it,” Perry said of work by research colleagues at Tulane University.

“These (oil) droplets in the crabs, they are pinhead-sized. For a droplet to be that small, it has to be dispersed oil,” Perry said. “It’s supposed to biodegrade rapidly. It’s supposed to disappear in days, not weeks, but that may not be happening.”

So, the EPA goes along with the dispersant because it is no more toxic that the oil, supposedly, but Alabama shores are being poisoned by the dispersant with no oil present. Further, a justification for the dispersant is to break down the oil to make it easy to degrade, but the treated oil isn’t degrading. Is it possible that the dispersant is actually protecting the oil from oil-eating microbes?