“One major misconception is that oil that has dissolved into water is gone and, therefore, harmless,” Charles Hopkinson, director of Georgia Sea Grant and a professor in UGA’s Department of Marine Sciences, told Facing South. “The oil is still out there, and it will likely take years to completely degrade. We are still far from a complete understanding of what its impacts are.”

 

The Obama administration’s report indicated that nearly 75% of the oil was no longer a concern for the environment. According to the NIC report, one quarter of the 4.9 million gallons of oil that spilled into the Gulf of Mexico evaporated or dissolved, one quarter was removed through organized recovery, burning or skimming, one quarter was dispersed as microscopic droplets, either naturally or through the use of chemicals, and about one quarter is “residual,” meaning that it is still in the water or sand or has washed ashore.

 

But the Georgia Sea Grant report states that the media, in general, misunderstood the terms used in the NIC report. “The news media’s tendency to interpret ‘dispersed’ and ‘dissolved’ as ‘gone’ is wrong. Dispersed and dissolved forms can be highly toxic.” The report accepts that 10% of the oil was either burned or skimmed, but estimates that between only 4-8% was degraded by marine organisms and between 7-12% evaporated. That leaves 70-79% still in the ecosystem.

-David Wallechinsky, Noel Brinkerhoff

 

Almost 80 Percent of BP's Spilled Oil Still Threatens Gulf, Report Finds (Facing South)

Scientists Say as Much as 79% of Oil Remains in Gulf of Mexico (by Kim Chipman, Bloomberg)

Outcome/Guidance from Georgia Sea Grant Program: Current Status of BP Oil Spill (by Chuck Hopkinson, Georgia Sea Grant) (pdf)

BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Budget: What Happened To the Oil? (National Incident Command) (pdf)