BP ‘must set up second $20bn oil spill fund’

The president needs to press BP to establish another $20bn fund to pay for environmental restoration and recovery – a Gulf Restoration Fund.

Certainly, both people and the Gulf coast environment deserve prompt, comprehensive attention here.

Yesterday, BP’s operations ground to a halt as the company took 10 hours to reinstall the containment cap on the leaking well, allowing gallons of oil to gush into the sea. A separate oil-flaring system was still operating, capturing 10,500 barrels, but it is thought the well could be leaking between 35,000-60,000 barrels daily.

It will be useful to conduct Contingent Valuation studies to place “a price on the priceless” – the “value” of non-economic damages caused by the spill.

For Exxon Valdez spill 21 years ago, this environmental damage estimate ranged from $3 bn – $15 bn. I suspect the Gulf spill will be comparable, if not more, in today’s dollars.

As to the question of how to restore the Gulf ecosystems injured by the BP spill, we must first accept the fact that there is little that can be done to directly restore the environmental damage caused by large marine oil spills.

We just cannot fix a broken ecosystem like we can a broken car engine. To paraphrase the old nursery rhyme: All the kings’ horses and all the kings’ men can’t put the Gulf of Mexico back together again.

But what we can, and must do, is everything humanly possible to give the Gulf of Mexico and its coastal ecosystems the best chance possible to recover. That must be the singular objective of the Gulf Restoration program.

In Exxon’s Alaska spill, coastal citizens first proposed that the government and Exxon settle their claims for Exxon Valdez in 1990, recommending a $2 bn “out-of-court” settlement.

The federal court approved the final settlement in Oct. 1991 for $1 bn, paid over 10 years to the government Trustees for restoration and reimbursement of costs.

The restoration program developed in Alaska focused on minimizing other threats to the injured coastal ecosystem, with such mechanisms as purchasing conservation easements to protect coastal habitat from other forms of degradation, such as logging, etc.

In this way, the government’s protected over 600,000 acres of critical fish and wildlife habitat along the shoreline of the oil spill region with about $500m of the spill settlement.

In my opinion, too much of the Restoration fund went to fund oil spill research projects of limited value that agency and university researchers wanted to do, with little or no benefit to ecological recovery.

The same tendency will no doubt be seen in the Gulf spill, and it must be resisted.

We already know that oil, water, fish, and wildlife don’t mix. Some targeted science should focus on damage assessment and monitoring, but most should be directed toward the overarching question of how best to help the marine and coastal ecosystem to fully recover.

The restoration program for the Gulf spill should focus on Indirect Restoration, including reducing chronic pollutants into the system, allowing more sediment flow down-river to rebuild the Delta, establishment of new protected areas onshore and offshore, etc…eg projects that might be environmentally beneficial to the Gulf coastal ecosystems should be identified and funded.

My initial list for the Gulf Restoration Plan is as follows:
1. Let the River Run – restore the periodic flood flow of the Mississippi river, so that sediment can flow down-river and begin rebuilding the Delta. The Mississippi Delta has been shrinking for over 100 years, due primarily to flood control up river, as well as sea level rise and more intense and frequent hurricanes.

This shrinking / sinking delta has added risk from hurricane storm surge, such as we saw tragically in Hurricane Katrina. Reversing this trend is an essential component of any environmental and economic Restoration plan for the region. This will take cooperation with states and cities up-river, but we all have to pitch in to save the Mississippi Delta.

2. Eliminate the Dead Zone – reduce the input of nutrients down the river, from the misuse / overuse of agricultural fertilizers in the Mississippi drainage. This high nutrient load flows into the Gulf of Mexico each spring, causes enormous blooms of phytoplankton, which respire oxygen at night and also die and decay and use oxygen from the water, and causes a huge anoxic dead zone along the coast each summer. This can and must be eliminated.

3. Reduce coastal degradation – better manage, reduce, or eliminate the amount of coastal channelization, wetlands loss, road building, etc.

4. Halt overfishing – to the extent that some fish populations had been overharvested in the past, harvest levels of these populations should be minimized for a time – e.g. a conservation moratorium for stock recovery. Harvests should be resumed only when the population, and the marine ecosystem, can be sustained. In particular, principles of ecosystem management must be front-and-center of any Gulf Restoration program, to dial harvests down enough to allow for needs of other predators in the ecosystem.

5. Establish additional protected areas – both marine and coastal – to reduce disturbance and degradation of coastal fish and wildlife populations.

6. Build artificial seabird nesting islands in inshore areas – as the coastal nesting islands have dramatically eroded over the past several decades – due to reduced sediment flow down-river, sea level rise, and more frequent and intense hurricanes-the birds are now forced to nest on smaller and smaller remnants of their original nesting island habitat. In addition, the oil has severely damaged the perimeter of many of these nesting islands.

Many of the plants that provide stability to the island substrate will die due to direct oiling, and thus the spill will contribute to the acceleration of erosional processes that will eventually eliminate these small islands altogether. And when the first hurricane surge occurs across these tiny islands, the oil will cover the entire island, and thus more vegetative loss will occur. Using Gulf Coast Restoration Fund to place rip-rap and fill to form new islands or add to existing ones would greatly enhance breeding habitat for the thousands of birds in the region.

7. Prevent other oil spills – this is an obvious one, but needs to be mentioned. If the Gulf can recover from one Deepwater Horizon disaster, and that is a big if, it almost certainly can’t from another on top of this one.

Professor Rick Steiner, marine conservation biologist, Anchorage Alaska. Professor Steiner has been advising in the Gulf much of the past two months.