Two Chinese bodies of water made pollution headlines this week: the Yellow Sea is home to an oil spill, and the Ting River to waste water from a copper processing plant.

The Ting River

The waste water came from the Zijinshan mine in China’s Fujian province. Though earlier this month mine operators blamed weather for waste water entering the river, this week they admitted to and contaminating the river with–as The Sydney Morning Herald puts it–”four Olympic-size swimming pools” worth of waste water containing acidic copper.

Zijin’s board of directors expresses “its deep regret regarding the incident and the improper handling of information disclosure by the company, for causing substantial losses to the fish farmers located at the reservoir downstream of the mine and having a harmful impact on society,” the company said yesterday. [Bloomberg Businessweek]

Chinese police have detained two of the mine’s operators. Meanwhile, acidic copper has reportedly killed 4 million pounds of fish and threatens drinking water.

Reports from China’s official Xinhua News Agency suggest that Zijin is being required only to fix the problem and compensate locals with an offer of three yuan for every kilogram of dead fish. That makes the potential payout about 6 million yuan, [about $900,000]. [Sidney Morning Herald]

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If three months of waiting for BP to fix its oil leak have taught us anything, it’s not to get too optimistic about potential fixes. On Thursday, BP installed a cap that appeared to cut off the flow of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, but yesterday the federal government officials overseeing the leak response said (pdf) that there appear to be hydrocarbons leaking from the seafloor near the well, and possibly methane detected above the well.

The upshot is that BP has until tomorrow (Tuesday) to investigate this possible leak. If it is there, the government could force BP to reopen the cap and resume pumping oil up to tankers on the surface.

The discovery of a seep and the unspecified anomalies suggest that the well could be damaged and that it may have to be reopened soon to avoid making the situation worse [The New York Times].

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Do you hear that? That’s the sound of oil not gushing uncontrollably into the Gulf of Mexico from BP’s leak, for the first time in nearly three months. BP is still running tests on the new cap the company installed this week, but at least for now there’s some for slight optimism.

The flow stopped yesterday afternoon, and BP video feed of its leak site showed quiet containment.

The view on Thursday afternoon was eerily tranquil, just the slate blue of the deep interspersed with small white particles floating across the screen. Though the exact amount of the oil that has poured out of the well may never be known, it was suddenly and for the first time a fixed amount. The disaster was, for a little while at least, finite [The New York Times].

The task now is a pressure test, which will take place over two days. Lower pressure inside the well would mean the surrounding rocks are leaking a little; high pressure would indicate the well is sealed off.

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Will this solution finally be the solution? Today in the Gulf of Mexico, BP is attempting to secure another containment cap onto its oil leak, which the company says could trap and collect all the oil gushing from the leak—if it works.

On Saturday BP removed the leaky cap that had been catching a little bit of the oil, meaning that the oil is now flowing unchecked into the Gulf as engineers race to install the new one. This is the latest try in a string of attempts to cap the leak, and BP’s Kent Wells says that engineers are lowering the new, tighter-fitting cap into place this morning.

The new cap, which should eventually not allow any gas or oil to escape, will be used to divert more oil to collection ships that will be brought in over the next two to three weeks, Mr. Wells said. “We’ll continue to ramp up the capacity so that sometime along the line, whatever the flow is, we’ll capture it all,” he said [The New York Times].

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With the perpetual flow of filthy crude from BP’s oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, just about anything seems like a better energy solution than deep sea offshore drilling. One new proposal, though, has the potential for similarly disastrous environmental harm.

The Keystone XL is a huge proposed pipeline that could carry oil from Canada’s oil sands on a snaking path through the American Midwest and all the way down to Texas, where it will be refined. The idea has been up for public comment for months, and that period comes to a close soon. So, should we build this thing?

YES

There is one good thing about the project: It would be a source of energy that’s not the Middle East, Iran, Venezuela, or another region or country hostile to the United States.

From an energy perspective, Keystone XL delivers one thing the United States needs: plentiful oil from a friendly neighbor. Most oil companies have invested heavily in Canadian oil sands and are firmly behind it [The New York Times].

The project would bring in another million barrels of oil per day from Canada, which is already our biggest foreign oil supplier.

A study released this month by the Perryman Group, an economic analysis firm based in Waco, concluded that the project could generate as much as $2.3 billion in new spending for Texas during construction and $1.1 billion in property taxes to local and county governments over the pipeline’s operating lifetime [Houston Chronicle].

NO

The oil sands are one of the dirtiest energy projects in the world. The oil is dirty to extract and dirty to refine, plus there are the transportation dangers.

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The eye of Hurricane Alex steered hundreds of miles clear of the center of the BP oil spill, but it still managed to hold up cleanup efforts in the Gulf of Mexico.

Alex was by no means a whopper, reaching category 2 status at its height and blowing with winds just over 100 miles per hour. While mild by hurricane standards, it meant that only the largest ships, like those doing the relief well drilling and oil capturing, could stay out at sea.

Hundreds of shrimp boats that were converted into oil skimmers now sit in port, and the tall waves tossed boom that was holding back the oil onto the beaches of Grand Isle, La. The beaches are now too dangerous even for cleanup crews. “Those booms, they don’t seem like they were designed for this kind of wave action,” said Matthew Slavich, an oyster fisherman hired by BP for cleanup efforts. He was out on the open water trying to lay boom today, but didn’t stay long [ABC News].

Besides hampering cleanup efforts, Alex also negated some of the work crews already did.

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BP can’t clean up its mess. Kevin Costner’s trying. But if you know how to clean up the leaking oil in the Gulf of Mexico, you could be a winner.

The X Prize Foundation says this week that it’s considering the creation of a multimillion-dollar prize for the solution to cleaning the BP oil spill. This is the same organization that put together awards of $10 million or more for private spacecraft and high mileage cars. The foundation’s Frances Beland announced the idea at an oil spill conference in Washington, D.C.

Beland said the foundation wanted to come up with a prize to find a solution to capping the well but found it was unable to obtain enough data to design such a challenge, so it opted to focus on the cleanup. “We’re going to launch a prize for cleanup, and we’re going to kick ass,” he said, to applause. Beland said 35,000 solutions to the Gulf crisis have been proposed to BP, the government and other organizations, including the X Prize Foundation [CNN].

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Hurricane predictors warned us this season could be a bad one, and could bring unknown consequences for the ongoing BP oil spill. We may soon find out what those consequences are, as Tropical Storm Alex moves toward the Gulf and may reach hurricane status today.

More Delays

Supposing Alex reaches the spill, it might not be all bad.

Waves churned up by Alex — as high as 12 feet — could help break up the patches of oil scattered across the sea. The higher-than-normal winds that radiate far from the storm also could help the crude evaporate faster. “The oil isn’t in one solid sheet. It’s all broken up into patches anyway. It will actually work to break those patches down,” said Piers Chapman, chairman of the oceanography department at Texas A&M University [AP].

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When it comes to greenhouse gas emissions, any fossil fuel looks bad compared to wind, solar, and even nuclear power sources. But how do fossil fuels stack up against one another? Natural gas is a lot better emissions-wise compared to coal, according to a new report, and may serve as a temporary coal stand-in over the coming decades, until the cost of alternative energy sources comes down.

The MIT Energy Initiative drafted an 83-page report that looked both at the United States’ natural gas supply and the fuel’s possibility to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Over the past two years, the MIT group discussed natural gas use with industry leaders, environmental groups, and government officials. They presented their findings and recommendations to legislators and senior administration officials in Washington last week.

“Much has been said about natural gas as a bridge to a low-carbon future, with little underlying analysis to back up this contention.  The analysis in this study provides the confirmation—natural gas truly is a bridge to a low-carbon future,” said MITEI Director Ernest J. Moniz in introducing the report. [MIT News]

The report’s main points:

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Build a wall of sand: That was Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal’s answer to protecting the state’s delicate marshlands when it became clear that BP wasn’t going to stop its gushing oil leak anytime soon. But now the federal government has put the kibosh on Louisiana’s construction, saying that the project to save one ecologically sensitive area will ruin another.

Scientists raised several objections to the state’s first proposal last month to build a long line of sand berms on 10 May. One key concern was that taking sand from in front of the Chandeleur Islands would make them more vulnerable to erosion. The state agreed to change its approach by taking sand from a site further away and then pumping it through pipes to build the berms [ScienceNOW].

However, that didn’t happen. Louisiana officials said they couldn’t get the pipes built in time, and asked the feds to let them dredge near Chandeleur at least until the other site was ready. OK, the Interior Department said—you’ve got a week. That week has lapsed, but Louisiana is still requesting more time to dredge near Chandeleur, promising to return the sand once the berm project has done its job.

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Perhaps it’s a disservice to continue calling the oil pouring into the Gulf a spill. “Spill” makes it hard to conceptualize the estimated 60,000 barrels of oil per day blasting up from a well more than 5,000 feet below sea level. It also makes it difficult to picture how, as BP estimates, as much as 40 percent of the material “spilling” is methane gas. That methane has been largely overshadowed by the horror of oil-soaked pelicans and tar balls washing ashore, but now a survey, completed on Monday, has measured how the methane has spread.

What’s the problem with methane? The microbes that feed off it. It can create “methane seep ecosystems”–shallow food chains that eat crude oil and dissolved methane and in the process consume all available oxygen, leaving nothing for other marine life forms. Bacteria eat the methane and “ice worms” (so-called because they live around ice-like methane hydrate) eat bacteria, but nothing else eats these worms. This creates a “dead zone.”

So in short [an abundance of creatures that use] methane for food and oxygen to “breathe” will create areas where only bacteria and a few other non-life sustaining organisms can live. All others die. [San Francisco Chronicle]

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Brown pelicans smothered by BP’s oil spill may be the symbols of sadness for the disaster in the Gulf, but they are, of course, far from the only animals affected. Marine scientists are watching other species for signs of danger.

Whales

Late last week, scientists spotted the first dead whale seen in the Gulf since the leak began gushing oil in April. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration found a 25-foot-long sperm whale washed up, and now it is testing the sea creature for cause of death.

“While it is impossible to confirm whether exposure to oil was the cause of death, NOAA is reviewing whether factors such as ship strikes and entanglement can be eliminated,” the agency said. Samples collected from this carcass will be stored until the Pisces returns to port on July 2, or possibly if another boat is sent to meet the Pisces. Full analysis of the samples will take several weeks [New Orleans Times-Picayune].

Manatees

So far, it at least appears that manatees have been spared toxic exposure to the ever-growing oil spill. However, a science team hunkered down at Dauphin Island in Alabama—in the path of the oil—say their luck may not hold.

Until recently, biologists believed that manatees rarely ventured west of peninsular Florida, where, so far, no oil has appeared. But in 2007, Ruth Carmichael, who leads the Dauphin Island team, began documenting a relatively large summer migration of manatees to Mobile Bay, Ala. — leading them directly into and through the path of the oil from the Deepwater Horizon leak. From a couple of dozen to as many as 100 come to Mobile Bay for the summer, out of a total North American population of 5,000, she said [The New York Times].

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Last night, President Obama made his first Oval Office speech. In it, he described the BP oil spill as an assault on “our shores and our citizens” and outlined his “battle plan.” He discussed the immediate cleanup of the spill, the repayment he’ll insist on from BP for harm done, and the future of U.S. energy.

Katie Couric compared Obama’s speech to others issued from the Oval Office.

“The disaster in the Gulf may or may not be President Obama’s Katrina, but, tonight, it will be his Challenger explosion, his Cuban missile crisis, his Sept. 11. Unlike those events, this is a long simmering disaster, getting darker by the day.” [CBS]

Here are some of the major points covered in the speech:

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Can Kevin Costner’s centrifuge–a device to separate oil from water at up to 200 gallons per minute–clean up the Deep Horizon spill? We reported on Costner’s clean-up gadget back in May when he convinced the Coast Guard and BP to test his technology, and now comes news that BP has ordered 32 of Costner’s devices to try out in the Gulf.

It sure makes for easy reporting; Costner’s handsome mug is certainly more appealing than oil-soaked sea life. But what are the actual chances that the actor’s device will work? Costner seems to recognize how implausible it all sounds:

“It may seem an unlikely scenario that I am the one delivering this technology in this moment in time,” Kevin Costner said (see ABC video below) in a congressional committee meeting.  “But from where I’m sitting, it’s equally inconceivable that these machines are not already in place.” [CNN]

As described in last week’s testimony before the House Committee on Science and Technology, Costner bought the patent for the basic technology behind his centrifuge 15 years ago and has since spent $20 million to develop it with the company he founded, Ocean Therapy Solutions. BP will test the V20 model, a version that has about a five square foot base, weighs around 4,500 lbs, and costs (according to The Los Angeles Times) $500,000.

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People have now recovered nearly 500 oiled-but-alive birds from the Gulf region. Many of these are the brown pelicans, which—adding insult to tragedy—is Louisiana’s state bird. They have become grimy symbols of BP’s catastrophe, and responders are racing to save the birds and clean them.

But increasingly, the disheartening but necessary question has arisen: Should we euthanize them instead of trying to save them?

YES

Ron Kendall, director of the Institute of Environmental and Human Health at Texas Tech University, told the AP that it might be hard to stomach the thought, but trying to save the brown pelicans and other oily birds could be futile. To help the birds, responders must capture them, hold them in captivity, go through the exhaustive process of cleaning them, and set them free somewhere where they won’t fly back to the oil. In the case of BP’s leak, oil has spread so far that rescuers are currently taking Louisiana birds all the way to Tampa Bay, Florida.

Kendall, for one, is skeptical that our efforts do much good, and the data aren’t encouraging.

The arm of the federal government that nominally oversees offshore rigs agrees with Kendall, and has for some time. “Studies are indicating that rescue and cleaning of oiled birds makes no effective contribution to conservation, except conceivably for species with a small world population,” the U.S. Minerals Management Service said in a 2002 environmental analysis of proposed Gulf oil drilling projects. “A growing number of studies indicate that current rehabilitation techniques are not effective in returning healthy birds to the wild” [AP].

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