Nine Questions (and Provisional Answers) About the Spill

Piercing the fog of the BP disaster, Peter Coy and Paul M. Barrett lay out the best current thinking

By Peter Coy and Paul M. Barrett

Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

The sea is slow to reveal its secrets, and so is BP. The regulators and other companies caught up in the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster are almost as opaque. Whether motivated by the need for self-protection, the desire to get it right before releasing information, or the inevitable fog of a shape-shifting crisis, the sometimes conflicting statements released by BP, the Minerals Management Service, and others have left a raft of unanswered questions. How much oil is spewing into the Gulf each day? How much damage is it doing, and will the ecosystem ever recover? Who made the decisions that led to this nightmare?

The woman in charge of measuring the spill, Marcia McNutt of the U.S. Geological Survey, invoked the Rumsfeldian phrase "unknown unknowns" on May 27 while explaining why her Flow Rate Technical Group was having trouble figuring out how much oil was billowing from BP's broken well (more than 12,000 barrels a day, with no reliable upper limit). The same uncertainty surrounds enviromental impacts. "I don't think anyone knows, no matter what they say," says Nicholas Fisher, a professor of marine science at Stony Brook University in New York. "People want clean, simple answers to clean, simple questions, but we don't have them."

What follows is a careful attempt to take stock: asking the important questions and laying out the best current thinking on them. At the very least, we should all know what we don't know.

Will part of the Gulf be a Dead Zone?
Big oil spills of the past are poor guides to the Deepwater Horizon disaster because all of them occurred in shallower water. This time, with the leak at 5,000 feet, a great deal of the oil hasn't reached the surface. Scientists say that under the immense pressure at that depth, much of it has turned into a diluted mist of hair-width droplets that are staying submerged in vast clouds. As recently as June 6, BP chief executive officer Tony Hayward said there was no evidence of such plumes in the Gulf. On June 8, however, the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration announced that they had indeed been found thousands of feet down.

Biologists have little experience with undersea plumes. "This is going to be groundbreaking science," says Roger Helm, chief of the environmental quality division of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Microbes that customarily feed on oil seeping from the seabed are expected to consume most of this oil, but that creates its own problems: The bugs use up oxygen needed by other sea creatures, potentially creating dead zones devoid of animal life, says Frank Muller-Karger, professor of biological oceanography at the University of South Florida. Marine biologist Rick Steiner says two-thirds of the fish and wildlife species injured in the Exxon Valdez spill 21 years ago have yet to fully recover. Stony Brook's Fisher says that the spill might promote bacteria that convert inorganic mercury into toxic methylmercury, which is taken up in the flesh of fish and other seafood.

Is there a chance the relief wells won't work?
Drilling two relief wells to stop the flow of oil is almost certain to get the job done, just not necessarily right away. "It's been done thousands of times," says Nansen Saleri, chief executive officer of Quantum Reservoir Impact in Houston. "Where the uncertainty lies is how much time it is going to take."

That's because it's fiendishly difficult to intercept the broken well, which is narrower across than a soccer ball, by drilling another well more than three miles beneath the ocean floor. Both relief wells might miss—as other emergency wells have—requiring a second, third, or fourth try, says Dave Rensink, president-elect of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists. It took Mexico's state-owned oil company, Petróleos Mexicanos, or Pemex, nine months to plug its Ixtoc I well after an explosion and fire in 1979. The company's first relief well failed, so it had to drill a second. Eventually more than 140 million gallons of crude spilled into the Gulf of Mexico.

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