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5 facts about the BP oil spill
On April 20, 2010, an explosion rocked the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 workers and sending oil gushing into the water. By the time the well was sealed months later, about 5 million barrels of oil had spilled into the Gulf. Here are five key facts about the oil spill and its aftermath:
1) Support for offshore drilling plummeted after the 2010 spill, but has largely recovered since.
2) The months-long BP story was one of the two biggest stories of the year in terms of news interest.
3) Public interest went hand-in-hand with the vast amount of news coverage of the spill.
4) The public trusted news organizations more than the federal government and far more than BP for information about the leak.
5) While support for offshore drilling has largely rebounded, many Americans also support investments in alternative energy.
Containing oil spills: Nano-coated mesh could clean oil spills for less than $1 per square foot
Date: April 15, 2015Source: Ohio State University
The unassuming piece of stainless steel mesh in a lab at The Ohio State University doesn't look like a very big deal, but it could make a big difference for future environmental cleanups.
Water passes through the mesh but oil doesn't, thanks to a nearly invisible oil-repelling coating on its surface.
In tests, researchers mixed water with oil and poured the mixture onto the mesh. The water filtered through the mesh to land in a beaker below. The oil collected on top of the mesh, and rolled off easily into a separate beaker when the mesh was tilted.
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Shell's Arctic Drilling Plans Approved by Department of Interior
April 12, 2015
It seems like the battle to save the wild and remote Arctic seas from predatory oil and gas companies never ends. Despite court cases finding it had illegally sold oil and gas exploration leases in the Chukchi Sea off Alaska and despite its own environmental impact study depicting the dangers of drilling there, the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) has opened the door to selling offshore drilling leases in the Arctic seas again. Currently there are no gas or oil operations in the Arctic seas, and environmental groups would like to keep it that way.
But this week the DOI announced that it is re-affirming the 2008 Bush-era leases opening 30 million acres of the Chukchi Sea -- an area about the size of Pennsylvania -- to oil drilling, even though a court-ordered re-analysis showed that the environmental impacts could be far worse than previously thought.
In 2010, a federal district court in Alaska found the 2008 lease sales violated the National Environmental Protection Act. The following year the Obama administration re-affirmed the sale. Shell attempted to start drilling operations in 2012 but was plagued with misadventures such as a drilling rig running aground. It abandoned its plans to drill in 2013 and 2014.
Is Gulf Oil Spill's Damage Over or Still Unfolding?
By Craig Welch, National GeographicPUBLISHED April 14, 2015
Every spring, scientists tromp through Louisiana's mud and waist-high grass, hunting for the hidden nests of a palm-size bird called the seaside sparrow. Their goal: to see whether the massive oil spill from a broken Gulf of Mexico rig known as Deepwater Horizon has hurt creatures that don't actually inhabit the water.
Five years after the worst oil spill in U.S. history, early reports from this and other research suggest that the ecological damage lingered in unexpected ways.
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5 Years After BP Spill, Industry Touts Ability to Respond
April 12, 2015
An oil consortium says an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico today can be cleaned up far faster than five years ago when BP's Macondo well blew out 45 miles off the coast of Louisiana, spawning the nation's worst offshore oil spill.
It took BP and the industry's best containment technology 87 days to contain the deep-water blowout. The Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosion and spill on April 20, 2010, resulted in as much as 172 million gallons of oil getting into the Gulf of Mexico.
On Tuesday, the Marine Well Containment Co., a Houston-based consortium developing high-tech containment technology, presented its latest pieces of equipment at a business luncheon at the Roosevelt Hotel in New Orleans.