NALCO to announce new line of COREXIT consumer products

(PRNewswire) – Encouraged by the outstanding performance of its COREXIT® Technology in the recent Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill, the Naperville, Illinois based NALCO is eager to show that the product is effective and proven to minimize the impact of consumer products on the environment. NALCO announced five exciting new product lines, a luxury body bar for your bath, a high-performance dishwashing liquid for your kitchen, a smooth, skin-loving moisturizing lotion and a healing petroleum jelly for your skin, and a tantalizing new personal lubricant for your (shhh!) intimate moments. NALCO Chief Executive Officer Erik Frywald said, “we’re pleased to offer consumers access to the extraordinarily successful, effective and most importantly safe COREXIT® Technology. ”We’re sure that consumers will be delighted by our products’ performance, just as they were with the use of the technology during the recent Gulf Oil Spill.”

UPDATE:  Lots of hits from Naperville.  Come on, NALCO execs. You LOL’ed, didn’t ya?

Envirolarmists in a Tizzy: Microbes are eating all the damned oil plumes!

Who woulda thunk it? 

Scientists have not only discovered a previously unknown oil gorging germ deep in the Gulf of Mexico, they now also think that microbial action in the water has been so effective that virtually all of the oil really is gone.

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A top scientist studying the ability of bacteria to break down the oil plume in the Gulf of Mexico says that microbes have been so successful that the oil may be gone.

Terry Hazen, a microbial ecologist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who published a groundbreaking study of microbial activity Tuesday in the online research journal Science Express, has had a team of researchers out in the Gulf since May 25 collecting water samples. They noticed a dramatic drop-off in the amount of oil in the Gulf immediately after the well was idled July 15, and now they can't find any oil in the ocean.

"In the last three weeks we haven't been able to detect a deep plume anywhere," Hazen said. "We can't see it now. We can't see anything at the surface. We can't see anything in the deep subsurface either."

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Hah.  The Gulf of Mexico is a resilient, warm, germ-rich environment.  For millions of years, oil has seeped from the bottom, giving rise to a large population of microbes that are floating appetites for oil.  The little buggers probably rival the US in terms of crude oil consumption, and that was before the spill.  As soon as the Macondo crude hit the water, the microbes went to work.  But the real nut-grabber for the environmental wackos and conspiracy nutjobs has to be this:

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That the oil-munching bacteria were able to consume tiny droplets of oil could validate the use of the Corexit chemical dispersant for helping to speed the biodegradation of the oil, Hazen said, although the long-term effects of Corexit on the ecosystem in the Gulf remains to be seen.

"It certainly looks like it may have had some positive effect by keeping that oil down there and allowing it to be biodegraded," Hazen said, adding that his team hasn't been able to find the presence of any Corexit, either, because it's water-soluble.

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The long term effects of Corexit are on the order of the long term effects of your average bottle of generic dishwashing liquid.  Hell, it’s probably even good for your skin.  The stuff is also a miracle of modern chemical engineering.  It breaks the oil into tiny droplets, then it dissolves in the water and goes away.  Just like…  Well, dishwashing liquid.

If they have any left, maybe they should host an eco-protest and when all the nutjobs show up, bathe them by hosing’em down with Corexit and cold Gulf water.

Gimme some feedback in the comments.

Markey gets it wrong about the Coasties and Corexit

On Saturday, US Representative Edward Markey, D-Mass., accused the US Coast Guard of being complicit in BP's "carpet-bombing" the Gulf of Mexico with Corexit, the oil dispersing chemical BP applied to the crude as it was gushing up from the runaway Macondo well. BP, and in some instances the Coast Guard itself, also applied the dispersant on the surface using aerial spraying equipment.

Markey laments that BP and the Coast Guard's frequent and copious use of the chemical violated an EPA order to BP, which instructed the company to only use Corexit in "rare cases."

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The U.S. Coast Guard has routinely approved BP requests to use thousands of gallons of toxic chemical a day to break up oil slicks in the Gulf of Mexico despite a federal directive that the chemicals be used only rarely on surface waters, congressional investigators said Saturday after examining BP and government documents.

The documents show the Coast Guard approved 74 waivers over a 48-day period after the restrictions were imposed, resulting in hundreds of thousands of gallons of the chemicals to be spread on Gulf waters. Only in a small number of cases did the government scale back BP's request.

The extensive use of dispersants to break up oil gushing from BP's Deepwater Horizon raised concerns early on as to what long-term damage the toxic chemicals might be doing to the Gulf's aquatic life. That prompted the Environmental Protection Agency on May 26 to direct BP to stop using the chemicals on the water surface except in "rare cases."

But Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., said Saturday that the chemicals continued to be used extensively with Coast Guard approval, often at a rate of 6,000 to 10,000 gallons a day. A request was made and approved on June 13 to spread as much as 36,000 gallons of dispersant, according to data obtained by Markey's Energy and Environment subcommittee.

The EPA directive "has become more of a meaningless paperwork exercise than an attempt ... to eliminate surface application of chemical dispersants," Markey wrote in a letter sent Friday to retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the government's point man on the spill.

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Markey seems to believe that an EPA order to BP has teeth, but under the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 and the National Contingency Plan developed under that statute stipulate that the Federal On-Scene Coordinator is the federal official whose job it is coordinate and direct the response to the incident.  Furthermore, the Joint Incident Command is set up to loosely follow the National Incident Management System, or NIMS.  Under NIMS, a single federal official--the Incident Commander--is responsible for directing all activities until the incident is over.

You'll get no argument from me that the federal response was poorly organized and poorly executed.  Calling it "organized chaos" would be an insult to chaos organizers everywhere.  But as discombobulated as it was, nowhere in the NCP or NIMS is EPA given the power to circumvent or contradict the On Scene Coordinator/Incident Commander/Whatever.  EPA, like Fish & Wildlife and other federal agencies may be part of the team, but they take their orders from Allen, not vice versa.  Similarly, BP also takes orders from Allen, not EPA.

Markey is just grandstanding during an election year.  But you'd think he'd at least read the OPA and the Contingency Plan, right?

Wait...  Markey's a liberal Democrat.   Never mind...

Gimme some feedback in the comments.

But Corexit 9500 is still racist!!!

Uh oh.  Another huge setback for the doom-and-gloom crowd.  That nasty, evil and probably racist Corexit 9500 was among eight petroleum dispersants examined in a peer-reviewed labratory experiment by the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland.

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Richard S. Judson, Matthew T. Martin, David M. Reif, Keith A. Houck, Thomas B. Knudsen, Daniel M. Rotroff, Menghang Xia, Srilatha Sakamuru, Ruili Huang, Paul Shinn, Christopher P. Austin, Robert J. Kavlock and David J. Dix.
National Center for Computational Toxicology, Office of Research and Development, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina 27711, and NIH Chemical Genomics Center, National Institutes of Health, Department of Health and Human Services, Bethesda, Maryland 20892

Abstract

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill has led to the use of >1 M gallons of oil spill dispersants, which are mixtures of surfactants and solvents. Because of this large scale use there is a critical need to understand the potential for toxicity of the currently used dispersant and potential alternatives, especially given the limited toxicity testing information that is available. In particular, some dispersants contain nonylphenol ethoxylates (NPEs), which can degrade to nonylphenol (NP), a known endocrine disruptor. Given the urgent need to generate toxicity data, we carried out a series of in vitro high-throughput assays on eight commercial dispersants. These assays focused on the estrogen and androgen receptors (ER and AR), but also included a larger battery of assays probing other biological pathways. Cytotoxicity in mammalian cells was also quantified. No activity was seen in any AR assay. Two dispersants showed a weak ER signal in one assay (EC50 of 16 ppm for Nokomis 3-F4 and 25 ppm for ZI-400). NPs and NPEs also had a weak signal in this same ER assay. Note that Corexit 9500, the currently used product, does not contain NPEs and did not show any ER activity. Cytotoxicity values for six of the dispersants were statistically indistinguishable, with median LC50 values 100 ppm. Two dispersants, JD 2000 and SAF-RON GOLD, were significantly less cytotoxic than the others with LC50 values approaching or exceeding 1000 ppm.

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Corexit 9500, the predominant dispersant used by BP in attempting to break up the 140 million gallons of oil spilled by the runaway Macondo well, appears to have all of the toxicity and poisonous capacity of your average bottle of Dawn dishwashing liquid.

The company that makes the stuff, NALCO, has been thrown into the blender of conspiracy theories surrounding this disaster.  Other ingredients in the conspiracy mix are Halliburton, George Soros, Brazilian Petrobras, the North Korean submarine Navy and giant, asphalt-eating monsters living on the floor of the Gulf.


Have faith, conspiracists.  I'm sure you'll concoct some other evil plot to reduce world population and bring forth the New World Order of the Bilderberger Rothschild clan. Or, maybe that Corexit is racist!

Gimme some feedback in the comments.

About those nasty, toxic, evil dispersants and NALCO conspiracy theories...

In some news that should calm the nerves of environmentalists who were fretting about how dispersants, dispersed oil and dissolved Oxygen levels were destroying water quality in the Gulf of Mexico, the Joint Analysis Group has released its first peer-reviewed analysis of data collected by the R/V Brooks McCall.

Their conclusion:  This stuff is not naturally part of the Gulf of Mexico water column, but it is nowhere near as bad as you thought it was:

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The report concludes that decreased oil droplet size in deep waters is consistent with chemically-dispersed oil. The report also shows that dissolved oxygen levels remained above immediate levels of concern, although there is a need to monitor dissolved oxygen levels over time.

The report also confirms the existence of a previously discovered cloud of diffuse oil at depths of 3,300 to 4,600 feet near the wellhead. Preliminary findings indicate that total petroleum hydrocarbon (TPH) concentrations at these depths are in concentrations of about 1-2 parts per million (ppm). Between that depth and the surface mix layer, which is defined as 450 feet below the surface, concentrations fell to levels that were not readily discernable from background levels. The tests detection limit is about 0.8 ppm. Analysis also shows that this cloud is most concentrated near the source of the leak and decreases with distance from the wellhead. Beyond six miles from the wellhead, concentrations of this cloud drop to levels that are not detectable.

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You can read the entire report here, and a synopsis of it is here. The entire report is a 4MB PDF document with enough scientific data and jargon to keep even the most radical lefty environmentalist busy for hours.

But, the report also blasts the loony rightwing conspiracy theories out of the water, too.  Corexit, the primary dispersant being used, isn't "killing the Gulf," which the black helicopter crowds had claimed was part of Obama's masterfully sinister plan to depopulate the Gulf Coast, or something. 

In fact, the stuff is doing exactly what it was chemically engineered to do:  Disperse spilled oil into tiny droplets so that they mix more easily with the water and make the oil more readily available to oil-eating microbes that make it go away.  And, the smaller droplet size means there are fewer surges in the biological activity that removes dissolved Oxygen.

Sadly, neither the wacko left nor the wacko right are much inclined to even read a government report, much less a peer-reviewed one.  And even if they were able to sit still long enough to read it, they might find some subliminal message by reading it backwards under a full moon.

Skyclad, of course.

Gimme some feedback in the comments.