Web Concepts

Posts Tagged ‘oil’

The seven-story oil rig at Sakhalin, nicknamed Yastreb (the Hawk), is the industry’s most powerful, with four 7,500-psi mud pumps, 14,000 barrels of liquidmud storage and six generators. It has two walls to help it withstand the cold and earthquakes, which are frequent. The Yastreb’s drill torque is approximately 91,000 foot-pounds (a pickup truck operates with about 200).

Extended-reach drills travel both outward and down. To control the position and angle of the wellbore, drilling engineers use magnetometers and inclinometers; the information the tools gather is sent back by pressure pulses in the drilling fluid, which the engineers then analyze at the surface. The team - about 800, mostly Russians — pre-maps each expedition using 3D seismic imagery to create visual models of the conditions in the rock and the locations of the oil reservoir. They can reach their target with an accuracy of just a few feet. It’s as if they were standing in the middle of Central Park and drilled down to a specific doorway of the New York Stock Exchange.

Oil won't run the world forever, but it will for the next few decades--so how do we get from here to the next energy economy?

Our dependence on oil is driven less by the political might of the oil industry than it is by the fact that oil itself is a terrific source of power. It packs more energy into less space than any other commonly available resource, and it requires much less energy to produce. In the Middle East, where “easy” oil remains most plentiful, drillers need only invest a single barrel’s worth of energy to produce a full 30 barrels of crude. That is among the highest ratios of energy returned on energy invested, or EROEI, for any widely available source of power on the planet. (That same barrel’s worth of production energy, for instance, would get you fewer than two barrels of corn ethanol.) Oil’s amazing efficiency is one reason it remains in such high demand, especially for transportation, and it’s also why finding an alternative will be so difficult.

We face some complex choices, not just about where to extract what kind of oil, but also about when to extract it.But find one we must. We have already burned our way through most of the world’s easy oil. Now we’re drilling for the hard stuff: unconventional resources such as shale and heavy oil that will be more difficult and expensive to discover, extract, and refine. The environmental costs are also on the rise. Oil production remains a significant local ecological hazard—as we were reminded by the disastrous failure of the Deepwater Horizon well in the Gulf of Mexico last year--even as oil’s large carbon footprint threatens the global environment as a whole.

Bridging the gap between our current oil economy and an as-yet-undefined clean-energy economy will not be easy. Alternative systems, such as hybrid cars powered by biofuel drawn from oceanic algae farms, may be vastly more sustainable someday. But “sustainability” is an economic concept as much as it is an environmental one. People will always prefer cheap energy to expensive energy. (Indeed, many people in less-wealthy nations require cheap energy simply to survive.) And the process of making alternative energy systems affordable will be long and uncertain, in part because the oil-based systems they must compete against (internal combustion engines, for instance) will themselves become even more efficient and alluring.

Even if we were ready to mass-produce a new generation of, say, biofueled plug-in hybrid electric cars by 2020, and even if we--in an absurdly best-case scenario--started cranking out those new cars as fast as we now make gas guzzlers (about 70 million a year, worldwide), we would still need another 15 years to swap out the fleet. In the meantime, oil consumption will continue to rise, as demand from fast-growing economies in Asia outweighs any green gains by Western nations.

David Victor, an international energy policy specialist at the University of California at San Diego, says consumption won’t even begin tapering off for another 20 years. At that point, daily consumption, now at 85 million barrels a day (mbd), will have topped 100 mbd. Realistically, says James Sweeney, director of the Precourt Energy Efficiency Center at Stanford University, cutting global oil consumption to a more economically and environmentally tolerable level (say, 30 mbd) will probably take at least four decades. Before then, he says, “we will use a lot of oil.”

How much? At the rate Victor suggests, we’ll need something like a trillion barrels of crude to get us to the peak of oil consumption sometime in the 2030s--and, in all likelihood, another trillion barrels to get us down the other side, to a point where oil is a vastly smaller part of the energy economy. Just to bridge the gap, then, we’ll have to extract about two trillion barrels of oil during the next four decades--almost double the 1.2 trillion barrels we’ve already burned through since Pennsylvania wildcatters launched the oil age in 1859.

Hossein Kazemi, a professor of petroleum engineering at the Colorado School of Mines, says that about half of those final two trillion barrels have already been discovered and are waiting in “proven” reserves that can be exploited profitably using today’s technology. The other half won’t come so easily. By some estimates, the Earth contains up to eight trillion more barrels of oil, but that oil exists in many forms, some of which, such as shale oil, can be extremely expensive to extract or refine. And as we work our way through the easiest oil, we will also be confronted by increasing external costs—real costs that nonetheless aren’t accounted for at the gas pump. A desperate rush to extract oil from unstable nations can topple regimes, for instance, even as extracting it from environmentally fragile spots can do major harm to the land or the sea.

Which means that we face a series of complex choices, not just about where to extract what kind of oil, but also about when to extract it. Going after everything at once may seem wise, especially to oil entrepreneurs invested in specific resources or policymakers unconcerned about external costs. But as engineers develop new extraction and refinement techniques, oil that is expensive or environmentally harmful now may be cheaper or cleaner in the future. With that in mind, what would happen if we considered how best to extract our two trillion barrels not from the short-term perspective of a politician or a businessman, but from the longer view of a petroleum engineer? Which oil would we save for last, and which would we go for first?

Resources to Save for Last
Shale
Total reserves: 3 trillion barrels of oil equivalent (BOE)
Given the political anxiety surrounding the prospect of importing oil, U.S. policymakers will be understandably tempted to reach first for the closest, richest oil resource. For many, that would suggest shale oil. The vast deposits located beneath Colorado, Utah and Wyoming alone could generate up to 800 billion barrels of oil. But policymakers should resist that urge.

Oil shale is created when kerogen, the organic precursor to oil and natural gas, accumulates in rock formations without being subjected to enough heat to be completely cooked into oil. Petroleum engineers have long known how to finish the job, by heating the kerogen until it vaporizes, distilling the resulting gas into a synthetic crude, and refining that crude into gasoline or some other fuel. But the process is expensive. The kerogen must either be strip-mined and converted aboveground or cooked, often by electrical heaters, in the ground and then pumped to the surface. Either process pushes production costs up to $90 a barrel. As all crude prices rise, though, the added expense of shale oil may come to seem reasonable--and it is likely to drop in any case if the shale oil industry, now made up of relatively small pilot operations, scales up.

Policymakers should resist the urge to go hunting shale oil.The problem is that the external costs of shale oil are also very high. It is not energy-dense (a ton of rock yields just 30 gallons of pure kerogen), so companies will be removing millions of tons of material from thousands of acres of land, which can introduce dangerous amounts of heavy metals into the water system. The in-ground method, meanwhile, can also contaminate groundwater (although Shell and other companies say this can be prevented by freezing the ground). Both methods are resource-intensive. Producing a barrel of synthetic crude requires as many as three barrels of water, a major constraint in the already parched Western U.S. With in-ground, the kerogen must be kept at temperatures as high as 700°F for more than two years, and aboveground processes use a lot of heat as well. Those demands, coupled with kerogen’s low energy density, yield returns ranging from 10:1 (that is, 10 barrels of output for every one barrel of input) to an abysmal 3:1.

Coal
Total reserves: 1.5 trillion BOE
Coal can also be converted into a synthetic crude, as the German army, desperate for fuel, demonstrated during World War II. The method of transformation is simple: Engineers blast the coal with steam, breaking it into a gas that can then be converted, by the Fischer-Tropsch process, into gasoline and other fuels. Many energy companies are promoting various coal-to-liquid processes (CTL) as a way to replace oil, especially in the U.S. and other coal-rich nations.

The appeal is obvious. At a conversion rate of just under two barrels per ton, the world’s 847 billion tons of recoverable coal theoretically represent roughly 1.5 trillion barrels of synthetic oil, or a substantial piece of the final trillion.

Like shale oil, however, CTL has significant shortcomings. Its energy return is unimpressive; a barrel’s worth of invested energy nets just three to six barrels of CTL. Moreover, coal contains about 20 percent more carbon than oil does, and converting it to liquid raises the ratio even further. CTL fuels have a carbon footprint nearly twice as large as that of conventional oil--1,650 pounds of CO2 per barrel of CTL, versus 947 pounds per barrel of conventional.

Even if producers installed a vast and expensive system to capture and sequester the CO2 produced during the conversion process, says Edward Rubin, a professor of environmental engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, coal production uses so much energy that CO2 emissions from CTL fuels would still be as great as those of conventional oil. At best, making fuel from coal would get us no closer to a more climate-compatible energy system.

All of that aside, even the supply of coal is not infinite. Researchers at the Rand Corporation concluded in 2008 that replacing just 10 percent of U.S. daily transportation fuel with CTL would take 400 million tons of coal annually, which would mean expanding the American coal industry, which is already straining environmental limits, by 40 percent. Although such an undertaking might be politically feasible in China or other nations, Rubin says, “I have a hard time seeing that in this country.”

Resources Better Later Than Now
Heavy Oil
Total reserves: 1 to 2 trillion BOE
Other unconventional resources may, despite having many shortcomings, become somewhat more attractive as new extraction methods come online. One of these is “heavy oil,” which ranges from the molasses-like crude in Venezuela to the bituminous oil sands of Alberta. For decades, oil traders saw heavy oil as inferior to light crude, which is easier to extract and whose smaller-chain molecules are more readily refined. Heavy oil’s bigger molecules, in contrast, were suited mainly to low-profit products, such as ship fuel or asphalt. But new refining techniques are making heavy oil more renderable into gasoline, and new extraction methods are making it easier to get out of the ground.

At a heavy-oil field outside Bakersfield, California, for instance, Chevron deploys computer-guided steam injection to thin the oil sufficiently to pump out. Even more promising are oil-sands operations in Alberta, where companies are now separating the brittle bitumen from sand and clay and cooking it into synthetic crude. At a conversion rate of one barrel for every two tons of sand, Alberta’s oil sands alone may contain up to 315 billion barrels of crude. As refining costs have dropped, output has reached 1.5 mbd and could more than quadruple, to 6.3 mbd, by 2035.

That said, heavy-oil production also has plenty of external costs. As with the kerogen in shale, the bitumen is processed either in-ground or by strip-mining. Both processes consume up to 4.5 barrels of water for every barrel of oil they produce and yield an unimpressive EROEI of about 7:1. And because heavy oils are carbon-rich, the CO2 footprint of crude from bitumen is up to 20 percent higher than that of conventional crude—not as bad as coal, but not exactly friendly to the environment either. Carbon-capture and -sequester techniques can only keep so much of that CO2 out of the atmosphere. Oil-sands operations are sprawling, and as a result, very little of the total CO2 emissions can be captured (one study suggests we might trap just 40 percent by 2030).

If carbon-capture techniques improve, though, heavy oil could make up a substantial share of the final two trillion barrels for a carbon penalty substantially below that of either CTL or shale oil. A further advantage (from the U.S. perspective) is that a lot of heavy oil is located in a politically stable country that’s right next door.

Ultra-Deep Offshore
Total reserves: 0.1 to 0.7 trillion BOE
The “deep” in ultra-deep refers to the depths plumbed by floating oil rigs (typically, anything beyond 5,000 feet). But the more important depth is the distance from the ocean floor to the oil itself. It’s not easy to start an excavation a mile or two underwater, much less one that continues on for several more miles underground (the current record, set in 2009 in the Gulf of Mexico, is nearly seven miles). But an ever-expanding drilling fleet is deploying new techniques in horizontal drilling, sub-sea robotics and “four-dimensional” seismology (which geologists use to track oil and natural-gas deposit conditions in real time) to rapidly expand output. Although fewer than half the world’s ultra-deep provinces have been fully explored, deepwater output in the past decade has more than tripled, to 5 mbd, and it could double again by 2015.

As the Deepwater Horizon disaster made clear last year, though, tapping this resource can involve significant external costs. The pressure in ultra-deep reservoirs can reach up to 2,000 times that at sea level. The oil within can be extremely hot (up to 400°F) and rife with corrosive compounds (including hydrogen sulfide, which when in water can dissolve steel). And the pipes that rise from the seafloor are so long and heavy that the platforms supporting them must be extraordinarily large simply to stay afloat. The biggest discovery in decades, Brazil’s “pre-salt play,” meanwhile, is defended by a 1.5-mile-thick ceiling of salt, which had the beneficial effect of absorbing surrounding heat and keeping the oil from breaking down—but which also, in doing so, congealed the oil into a paraffinic jelly that drillers must now thin with chemicals before they can extract it.

There is little chance that the transition to a clean-energy economy will be entirely clean. It will require compromises.Not surprisingly, ultra-deepwater oil is some of the most expensive in the business. A single drilling platform can cost $600 million or more (especially if the deepwater is in the Arctic, where rigs must be armored to withstand Force-10 winter storms and hull-crushing ice floes), and companies can easily spend $100 million drilling a single ultra-deepwater well. The result of all this effort is a modest EROEI--from 15:1 all the way down to 3:1.

Thus, even as companies scramble to improve safety, most of the research and development in the ultra deep will focus on saving money and energy. Remotely controlled, steerable drill heads, for example, allow companies to drill multiple bores from a single platform (thus lowering costs and the aboveground footprint) and to follow the path of narrow oil seams, greatly increasing oil output. (The record for a horizontal bore, set by Exxon near Russia’s Sakhalin Island, is also about seven miles.) To further cut drilling costs, companies will steadily boost rates of penetration with more-powerful drill motors, drill bits made of ever-harder materials and, eventually, a drilling process that uses no bits at all. Tests at Argonne National Laboratory suggest that high-powered lasers can penetrate rock faster than conventional bits, either by superheating the rock until it shatters or by melting it.

Costs will further recede as companies develop more-accurate “multi-channel” seismic prospecting techniques that will, by combining up to a million seismic signals, help them avoid the ultimate waste of drilling into empty rock. And to better measure the oil reservoirs themselves, companies are creating heat- and pressure-resistant “downhole” sensors (similar to devices NASA developed to monitor rocket engines) that communicate to surface computers via optical fiber.

As the volume of data rises, the industry will also create more-powerful tools to analyze it, from monster compression algorithms (courtesy of Hollywood animators) to entirely new computing architectures. “If we go to a million channels [of seismic data], then we need petaflop computation capability, which we currently do not have,” says Bruce Levell, Shell’s chief scientist for geology. To get that capability, oil firms are working with Intel, IBM and other hardware firms. In the future, Levell says, the oil business “is really going to drive high-performance computing.”

Resources to Tap Now
Natural Gas
Total reserves: 1 trillion BOE
Natural gas, or simply “gas” in industry parlance, has long been oil’s biggest potential rival as a transport fuel. Gas is cleaner than oil--it emits fewer particulates and a quarter less carbon for the same amount of energy output--yet today it powers less than 3 percent of the U.S. transportation fleet (mainly in the form of compressed natural gas, or CNG). This proportion is poised to grow, though, in part because the overall supply of gas keeps growing.

With advances in a drilling technique called hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” companies can now profitably extract gas from previously hard-to-reach shale formations. Worldwide reserves of shale gas currently stand at 6,662 trillion cubic feet, the energy equivalent of 827 billion barrels of oil. And that doesn’t include the gas that is routinely discovered alongside oil in oil fields and that is sure to be found in some of those yet-to-be-explored deepwater basins.

Gas is so plentiful that, in energy-equivalent terms, its price is a quarter that of oil--a bargain that is already transforming CNG from a niche fuel, used mainly in bus fleets, to a product for general consumption. The Texas refiner Valero, for instance, will soon begin selling CNG at new stations in the U.S.

What happens if we consider how best to extract our two trillion barrels not from the short-term perspective of a politician or a businessman, but from the longer view of a petroleum engineer?A gas-powered future could still have some high external costs, though. Fracking can be extremely hazardous to the local environment. The method uses high-pressure fluids to break open deep rock formations in which gas is trapped, and these fluids often contain toxins that might contaminate groundwater supplies. But such risks, which have received substantial media coverage and are now the focus of a new White House panel, may be controllable. Gas deposits are typically thousands of feet belowground, while groundwater tables are much closer to the surface, so most contamination is thought to take place where the rising bore intersects with the water table--a risk that could be minimized by requiring drillers to more carefully seal the walls of the bore.

That said, allocating too much natural gas to transportation might have surprisingly negative consequences. First, it would most likely increase demand for natural gas so much that prices would rise, thereby undermining the current cost advantage. Second, shifting a large volume of gas to the transportation sector would mean pulling that volume away from the power sector, where it is more constructively displacing coal, whose carbon content is far higher than oil’s. But converting specific sectors of the transportation system (delivery fleets, for instance, or buses) could simultaneously cut CO2 emissions and reduce oil demand.

Enhanced Oil Recovery
Total reserves: 0.5 trillion BOE
The resource that comes with the lowest external cost might be the oil we left behind, back when energy was a lot cheaper. Drillers typically end up extracting just a third of the oil in a given field, in part because when they drain reservoirs they also decrease the pressure that pushes oil to the surface, making it more expensive to extract the remaining barrels. In the U.S., abandoned oil fields may still contain a staggering 400 billion barrels of residual oil; worldwide, the figure is probably in the trillions. Extracting all of it is economically impossible, but advances in enhanced oil recovery, or EOR, could boost extraction rates to as high as 70 percent.

EOR could add perhaps half a trillion “new” barrels worldwide. And it could also carry a substantial environmental bonus. One of the most promising EOR methods involves “flooding” oil reservoirs with CO2, which dissolves into the oil, making it both thinner and more voluminous, and thus easier to extract. Once the oil is extracted, the CO2 can be separated, re-injected into the field, and sequestered there permanently. An aggressive strategy in which CO2 is captured from single-point sources (such as power plants or refineries) and pumped into oil fields could increase U.S. oil output by as much as 3.6 mbd while sequestering nearly a billion tons of CO2. And depending on the method, EOR can have an EROEI as high as 20:1.

EOR can’t entirely bridge the gap--but in a perfect world, we would at least begin by tapping those barrels, along with the oil--equivalent barrels of natural gas. That way, we would be using the least damaging resources first and saving the worst barrels for later, when (if all goes well) future engineering innovations will let us extract and consume them more safely and efficiently.

But of course, we don’t live in a perfect world. For now, oil producers will do what they have always done, which is to extract oil as cheaply as they can. And oil consumers will follow suit, buying the cheapest energy they can. We may eventually ask the market to take the true costs of production into account, perhaps by way of a carbon tax or some kind of climate regulation. Or we may not. Energy policy has never been particularly far-sighted. There is little chance that the transition to a clean-energy economy will be entirely clean. It will require trade-offs and compromises, and the cost of those trade-offs and compromises will rise with every year that we wait to get serious about moving away from oil.

Paul Roberts is the author of The End of Oil: On the Edge of a Perilous New World.

Concerned about the future of energy? Click here for more.

Study lends credence to abiogenic petroleum theory, which means there may be more oil in our future than we thought

Scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory used supercomputers to simulate what would happen to carbon and hydrogen atoms buried 40 to 95 miles beneath the Earth’s crust, where they would be subjected to prodigious pressures and temperatures.

They found at temperatures greater than 2,240 degrees F and pressures 50,000 times greater than those at the Earth’s surface, methane molecules can fuse to form hydrocarbons with multiple carbon atoms. Interactions with metal or carbon sped up the fusion process, the researchers said. These conditions are present about 70 miles down, according to an LLNL news release.

Methane, CH4, has one carbon and four hydrogen atoms; high hydrocarbons, like propane and butane, have more carbon atoms.

About 99 percent of all the hydrocarbons in oil and natural gas are derived from the compressed, heated remains of ancient living organisms like zooplankton and algae. These critters were buried under layers of sediments five to 10 miles beneath the surface of the Earth.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, some scientists believed hydrocarbons could form from abiogenic (non-biological) processes, too. The existence of methane on several solar system bodies shows hydrocarbons can exist without organic ingredients. But the theory fell out of favor, in part because no one ever found any abiogenic oil deposits.

The LLNL researchers don’t claim to know where such deposits would be, nor did they examine whether or how such deep deposits could ever migrate higher into the mantle where they could be retrieved. But the researchers say abiogenic hydrocarbons are technically possible in some settings like rifts or subduction zones, according to Giulia Galli, a professor at UC-Davis and senior author on the study, which appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“We don't say that higher hydrocarbons actually occur under the realistic 'dirty' Earth mantle conditions, but we say that the pressures and temperatures alone are right for it to happen,” she said.

[Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory]

A Japanese inventor has figured out a way to convert plastic grocery bags, bottles and caps back into the petroleum from whence they came, providing a ready fuel source for individual homes that also diverts waste from landfills.

Akinori Ito’s plastic recycling machine heats up waste plastic, traps vapors in a system of pipes and water chambers, and condenses the vapors into crude oil, explains the website Clean Technica. It’s not the first machine to do this — a massive plant outside Washington, D.C., is testing the process, for instance — but it’s small enough for household use.

Ito’s machine turns two pounds of plastic into a quart of oil, using only one kilowatt-hour of energy. The crude oil can be used in some types of generators or it can be further refined into gasoline, Clean Technica reports.

Ito is selling it through his Blest Corp., but buyer beware: As of now, it will set you back about $10,000. Ito hopes the price will drop as demand and production increase.

Other plastic-recycling methods find creative new uses for the material, for instance turning oil booms into new Chevy Volts or building new boats to sail the Pacific. Ito’s invention is interesting because it puts the plastic back into the pipeline, as it were. This is definitely not carbon-neutral — burning the oil releases greenhouse gases — but it’s environmentally friendly in that it can divert non-biodegradable waste from landfills. And make you feel less guilty next time you forget your canvas grocery bags.

[Clean Technica via Cosmic Log]

What could possibly go wrong?

Last month, BP and Russian state-owned energy company Rosneft signed an Arctic exploration deal to develop prospective offshore oil reserves in what is arguably the most hostile drilling environment in the world. The Arctic has long been thought to harbor vast reserves--the US Geological Survey thinks one-fifth of the world’s undiscovered, recoverable supplies are tucked away there. But tapping it is difficult, and the prospect of a spill there somewhat horrifying.

First, the Arctic is a perilous place to drill. Icebergs, gale-force winds, icy temperatures, dense fog--all of these things add up to a potential mine field for drilling operations. All this is compounded by the fact that the Arctic is plunged into darkness for half of the year (just imagine trying to coordinate a Gulf-style cleanup effort in the dark). Ice cover during eight months of the year could block relief ships in case of a disaster, like a blowout or a rig fire.

The Arctic ecosystem is already so fragile, its food chain so delicate, that an unchecked gusher would spell disaster. Which brings us back to Putin, BP, and the hunt for riches in the waters north of Russia’s long Arctic coastline. Russia likes BP because, by Putin’s reasoning, the company has experience with disaster and a serious interest in not repeating its mistakes. It’s unclear if BP having recent experience with ecological disaster means that Russia is expecting to need that kind of experience on hand.

In any case Russia and BP are pressing on, and now that the genie is out of the bottle other Western companies are itching for their shot at Arctic riches. Those include Shell, who recently postponed plans to drill off Alaska’s Arctic coast after some U.S. lawmakers and regulators introduced obstacles to the drilling. We’d be surprised to see similar local opposition to a Parliament- and Putin-approved plan in the Russian Arctic.

[NYT]

How NASA repaired the seven-million-pound antenna it uses to track deep-space probes

The antenna’s dish rotates on an oil-lubricated bearing. The design let oil leak through the bearing’s track and degrade the grout below, making it hard to point the antenna accurately. The observatory had to be shut down twice a week to level it with wedges and extra grout.

In October, NASA started installing a new track and oil-proof grout for a permanent fix. Making the swap required jacking up the seven-million-pound antenna a quarter of an inch, which, says Wayne Sible, the manager responsible for the antenna’s operations, seemed as difficult as balancing a five-foot stack of dishes on his pinky finger.

Jeff Osman, one of the antenna’s technical managers, says the repairs should buy scientists at least an extra eight hours a week to retrieve data from, and give instructions to, spacecraft. “Time on the antenna is a lot like disk space on your computer—there’s never enough of it,” he says. “For an astronomer, this extra time is like winning the lottery.”

THE FIX
STEP 1: LIFT ANTENNA
The crew carefully placed twelve 600-ton hydraulic jacks around the seven-million-pound dish assembly. They also ensured that they lifted perfectly in sync so that the dish wouldn’t warp as they raised it a quarter of an inch high.

STEP 2: REGROUT
The dish’s bearing’s track was leaking oil lubricant, degrading the grout below. Once the team lifted the dish, they swapped out the old track with a thicker one. They also replaced the grout under the track with a custom epoxy grout that is oil-proof.

STEP 3: RECALIBRATE
The antenna resumed operations on November 1 after eight months of repair, testing and calibration. Now it can again communicate with spacecraft, such as the Cassini probe exploring Saturn, the Mars rovers and Voyager 1.

We spent twenty-four hours on a Greenpeace boat in the Gulf of Mexico looking for oil and dispersant among marine life. On the six-month anniversary of the leak, we report back

Late last week I had the unique opportunity to spend a day on one of Greenpeace’s three ships, the Arctic Sunrise, in the Gulf of Mexico during the final leg of the group’s three-month-long oil spill campaign. A helicopter picked me up near Gulfport, Mississippi, and transported me directly onto the ship just 20 miles north of Deepwater Horizon ground zero. I spent the next 24 hours observing life onboard, chatting with scientists, and, oh yeah, watching a million-dollar manned submersible get launched into the water.

The current segment of the six-project campaign is devoted to deep sea corals and sponges. Steve Ross, an ichthyologist at the University of North Carolina Wilmington Center for Marine Science, and Sandra Brooke, a coral ecologist at the Marine Conservation Biology Institute in Bellevue, WA, are leading the effort to learn more about these important yet poorly understood marine animals, and to investigate any impacts from the spill on them.

I arrived on Friday just having missed the launch of a benthic, or ocean floor, lander carrying live corals to a site 30 miles northeast of the BP spill. The lander is equipped with instruments to measure ocean conditions such as dissolved oxygen, temperature, currents and salinity. It also has a rotating sediment trap that will collect monthly samples of “particulates,” or the stuff raining down the water column. When the lander is retrieved 12 months from now, the researchers will see how the corals faired in the present conditions.

See the photo gallery

Fortunately, I was onboard for the first manned launch of the sub, which turned out be a nail-biting experience. An anonymous supporter loaned the Dual DeepWorker 3 to Greenpeace. Although it looks a lot like a giant pair of shiny red clogs, DDW 3 is a sophisticated piece of machinery that’s capable of diving to depths of 2,000 feet. Only three of its kind exist (one is co-owned by filmmaker James Cameron, who used it to film underwater scenes for his 2005 documentary Aliens of the Deep). I’ve read a lot about submersibles, but I’ve never stopped to think how they get into the water. Turns out, it isn’t easy to launch a three-ton pair of steel clogs.

Several workers used tag lines (i.e. ropes) to steady the sub as the ship’s crane lifted it off the deck. Despite the best efforts of these burly seamen, the craft rocked back and forth and twisted in the wind. The captain and the head rep for the sub donor watched on edge as a too-early release from the crane resulted in a splash down into the water. The sub and its two-man crew were fine, though, and within a few minutes they disappeared from the surface and dove down to the ocean floor.

I headed to the bridge, where I watched the seasoned, Crocs-clad skipper Pete Willcox, at the helm. Representatives from Deep Ocean Exploration and Research (DOER), the marine consulting firm contracted to operate the sub, stayed in constant contact with the craft’s occupants via an underwater telephone. Two hours later, the sub returned to the ship after an unsuccessful attempt to find the lander on the ocean floor. (After I flew off the ship the next morning, the sub team found the lander and observed some teeming reefs.)

That night, I sat in on an all-crew meeting in the mess after dinner, where the team discussed ways to improve the sub launch-and-retrieval process. What could have been a contentious gathering of three different factions—Greenpeace, the sub donor’s reps, and DOER—played out as a quick, productive discussion and pep talk. I’ll say this: The rough-and-ready men and women aboard the Arctic Sunrise run a good meeting. (The next morning’s launch was much smoother, by the way.)

After the meeting, I sat down to talk with scientists Ross and Brooke about the animals they’re researching. I was surprised to learn that the red, pink, gold and black corals used in jewelry are among the oldest animals on Earth. Specimens of black corals have been dated to 4,000 years ago, making them the oldest animals known. Brooke calls harvesting these creatures for jewelry, a common practice in the deep waters off the coasts of Asia and Hawaii, a “travesty.” Deep sea corals, which are found all over the world, are also threatened by the fishing industry—trawling for orange roughy is a major concern—and could be impacted by ocean acidification, which has already depleted the world’s shallow-water corals. And then, of course, there’s the oil. So far there haven’t been any obvious signs of oil or dispersant during the dives, and both Ross and Brooke told me they doubted they’d see any impacts directly during this cruise. “I think we got lucky,” Brooke said. She added, however, that the effects of the oil or dispersant could be more subtle, impacting the corals' reproduction, for example.

A huge amount of data exists on shallow water corals, thanks in large part to the invention of SCUBA. But although deep sea coral reefs have been known for several hundred years, they’ve only been studied heavily in the past two decades, and little is known about their ecology. Ross and Brooke are hoping to change that with their research. The Greenpeace cruise was one of four deep-sea expeditions they’re undertaking this year. “We want to establish baseline information that says, These are the habitats the corals are healthy in now,” says Ross. “People would kill for these databases later.”

When I asked the researchers why it’s important to study deep sea corals, both became impassioned. “Old corals are archives of environmental information,” Ross said. By analyzing these animals, researchers can piece together a picture of their ancient environment. “A colleague of ours looks at stable isotopes such as nitrogen, carbon and oxygen in the skeletons of corals to see what was being consumed in the ecosystem at the time,” Brooke said. Old corals also contain heavy metals that tell us about ancient volcanic eruptions. And their magnesium-carbon ratios can be used to calculate ocean-floor temperatures dating back thousands of years. Ross says that the deep-ocean species also have practical applications. A number of labs and universities are studying sponges as biomedical products—one of these species, he says, could hold the cure for cancer. “But these habitats deserve to be protected in their own right,” Ross added. “We don’t know if 4,000-year-old corals can reestablish today.”

Next I spoke with John Hocevar, oceans campaign director for Greenpeace USA. Hocevar, a marine biologist, is piloting the twice-daily submersible dives off the Arctic Sunrise. According to him, at least two of the other research teams participating in the three-month project have found impacts from the spill. “Scientists from Tulane University looking at blue crab larvae are 95 percent sure they’ve found dispersant in their samples,” Hocevar said. Corexit, the dispersant BP used, is a known toxin. Texas A&M University researchers found indications that there is a substantial plume of oil more than 3,000 feet below the surface in a site more than 100 miles west of the spill site. “That same team took sediment samples from the bottom of the Gulf,” Hocevar said. “You could see and smell the oil in them.” The team is now working on “fingerprinting” the oil to confirm that it came from the BP spill.

Hocevar thinks the most alarming results could come out of another of the campaign’s projects, in which acoustic buoys were used to record vocalizations of beaked and sperm whales in the northern Gulf. “There’s really good baseline acoustic data,” he says. “If we don’t hear similar numbers of whales, the questions will be: Did they leave and were they fleeing the oil? Where did they go? Or did they die?” The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimates that losing as few as three of the 1,400 sperm whales in the region could wipe out the population.

Hocevar adds, “One important message I want to get out is that science is slow. It’s far too early to claim that we can understand what the impacts of the disaster are. It will be a long time and will take a lot of work to fully understand what the damage has been.”

The next morning, on board the helicopter back to Gulfport, I took in the beauty of the Gulf’s waters. Schools of fish flashed at the surface, and I wondered what was happening deep below.

Dual DeepWorker 3 footage of deep sea corals and the benthic lander. That's researcher Steve Ross's voice on the clip.