BP Releases Oil Spill Cleanup Environmental Data

November 20, 2013

BP has released environmental data used in its efforts to clean up the Gulf of Mexico where its Macondo well spilled millions of barrels of oil in 2010.

Since the oil spill, federal and state agencies, as well as BP, have collected more than 2.3 million lines of water chemistry data, published yesterday in the first release.

Data released includes:

• Analytical chemistry results of water samples collected as part of more than 70 Response and Natural Resource Damage Assessment studies. Also included in the data is information on concentrations of the common chemical constituents of crude oil, such as volatile hydrocarbons, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH), saturated hydrocarbons (SHC), and petroleum biomarkers.
• Information on the composition of oil released from the Macondo well and analyses of Macondo oil in various degrees of degradation, or weathering. The first dataset available in this area relates to oil obtained from the vessel Q4000.
• Oil analyses for water chemistry lab calibration. Macondo source oil was analyzed as a quality control sample by analytical laboratories along with analyses of environmental samples collected in the field. This quality control sample analysis is generally referred to as “MC252 control oil.”

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