BP Experts: Everything You Know About Oil Spill Is Wrong

(Aug. 1) -- With engineers ever closer to finally stopping the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, some experts who have been hired by BP as response consultants shared with AOL News their view from the inside and discussed what they see as several misconceptions about the oil spill and the cleanup technology.

Alan A. Allen is a field supervisor with over 40 years experience in controlled burning, skimming and other types of mechanical cleanup. He has worked on numerous other oil spills, including the Ixtoc blowout off Mexico and the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska.

Alun Lewis is a U.K.-based consultant and is considered a leading authority on oil spill dispersants. He worked with the BP Research Centre in the U.K. and helped prepare the U.K.'s guidelines on the use of dispersants.

Edward H. Owens is a coastal geologist with 40 years of experience working at the sites of oil spills. He was the technical adviser to Exxon's Alaska cleanup operations from 1989 to 1993 and served on the research faculty of Louisiana State University's Coastal Studies Institute.

Here are 10 misconceptions cited by the experts:

1. There's a lot of oil on the shoreline.

"There's maybe a couple of hundred barrels left on the coast which, considering the spill, is a very, very small number," Owens says. Responders have been documenting the oiled shoreline closely, he says, and it involves an area equivalent to about 100 football fields.

2. You can remove oil from the surface of the ocean.

Most people intuitively want to let spilled oil float to the surface, see how much is there, and then suck it up, the experts say. They sympathize.

"When there's oil on the sea, you want to pick it up," Lewis says. "People have tried and tried and tried. It just cannot be done."

Skimming -- when oil is concentrated into a small area and collected -- normally collects less than 10 percent of it, leaving the rest floating toward shore. Even burning, which is more effective, leaves a lot of the slick intact.

What's more, even though booming doesn't involve chemicals, it carries its own environmental risks, Allen says. Often booms are put out over hundreds of miles of ocean in places that are not strategically worthwhile, he says.

"A lot of people refer to that as political booming, because that's what the public expects," Allen says. "And we shouldn't be doing that. I think at times the action of recovering the boom -- the sheer interruption of that habitat by people recovering the booms -- can have more of an impact on the habitat."

3. Burning off the oil creates toxic smoke.

That's true, Allen says, but guess why we wanted it piped to our cars in the first place?

He says that big, black plumes of smoke are shocking to see in photos, but they are relatively harmless. More oil has been burned in this spill than the entire amount spilled in the Exxon Valdez disaster, he says, and that still isn't nearly as dangerous, environmentally, as having a small amount of that oil reaching the shore.

"You have to look at that black smoke as a trade-off," Allen says. "Would you rather have some black smoke, which is a relatively localized impact, and a relatively short-term impact, than to have the potential long-term impact of the oil itself on the beaches? We've studied those impacts for decades. ... It's very clear that the burning is the lesser."

4. The dispersant used in the spill is banned in the U.K.

"The U.K. has never banned Corexit," Lewis says.

The U.K. requires dispersants to be tested on a rocky shore as well as out in the open sea. Few products are recommended for use on the shore, including Corexit, the dispersant in the Gulf of Mexico, but it has never been banned in the open sea, Lewis says. What is happening in the gulf is a clear case of open-sea usage, with the dispersant applied at least 10 miles from shore.

Lewis says that the U.K.'s dual-test system is unusual and a point of debate within the country. Dispersants are never used at the shoreline, Lewis says, making it a moot point.

"No one in their right mind would spray dispersants onto oil on a rocky shore," he says.

5. Dispersants are dangerous to fish.

Dispersant is like a "super-duper shampoo," Lewis says. It is essentially a detergent made with off-the-shelf ingredients, and has been proven to have very low toxicity, he says. Experts agree that the oil is much more toxic.

In fact, the only reason dispersants are not normally described as detergents, a word most people find less scary, is because of the bad memory of an early oil-spill cleanup decades ago. An industrial-grade detergent was used that proved to be very toxic to wildlife, Lewis says. That experience prompted the invention of new dispersants that are thought to be safer, such as Corexit, which is being used in the gulf.

"There's something not very comforting about seeing an aircraft flying low, spraying something out the back where you don't know what it is. It evokes memories of Agent Orange," Lewis says. "It doesn't help calling them chemicals. Everything is a chemical, even table salt."

"I've been covered by it, coated in it many times," Allen says. "I've never had any problems, skin rashes, anything like that."

6. The response has been chaotic.

Like firefighters, oil-spill experts practice in teams and simulate response missions during "peacetime," which is what they call the period between major spills. In the spring, that training formed the backbone for a huge response involving thousands of untrained workers, rented vessels and scientists from all over the world.

"We created an organization of 20,000 people in three weeks, which is stunning," Owens says. "In any major organization of that size, you'll have a few bumps, but overall, it's amazing."

7. There is a lake of oil at the bottom of the gulf.

There is no mass of Deepwater oil where we can't see it, and there are no traveling plumes of heavy oil miles away from the well head, the three experts say.

"That would never happen, and all the monitoring that's been going on has been showing very low -- and decreasing -- concentrations of oil," Lewis says.

When oil is dispersed into tiny droplets, the droplets separate from each other and are diluted in the open ocean, he explains. They do not get weighed down and cannot rejoin each other under water. Bacteria break them down into carbon dioxide and water in a predictable way, and when they can't be found, it's because they are no longer there.

Lewis points to a huge eco-monitoring project started by the British government after the big Sea Empress spill was dispersed in 1996, Lewis says. "There were no effects the next year," he says. "If the oil is dispersed at sea, you can go back a year later and you can't find it."

8. Oil is harmful to ocean life no matter where it ends up.

In fact, the deep sea is much better at dealing with oil than the shoreline, the experts say. Miles away from shore, the wind and waves create a "high-energy environment" that helps break up the oil, and the right bacteria are there to consume the resulting droplets, Allen says. At the shoreline, it will just sit there, harming a huge array of flora and fauna that can't break it down as quickly.

9. People are experimenting with risky, untested technologies in the gulf.

Time is of the essence in an oil spill, experts says, and that means they move quickly with the knowledge they have. However, there have been no leaps of faith in this case, they say: All methods in the gulf response have been thoroughly tested and used for at least 10 years.

"We're just using the tools that we've used forever, just on a larger scale than typically before," Owens says. People may have gotten the wrong impression about this spill because of the dramatic attempts to cap the well in new, weird ways.

"That was like Apollo 13 all over again," Owens says. "There were some of the best scientists in the world hunkering down to solve this problem. That doesn't work? Try another, try another, try another."

10. Every spill is unique.

It's hard to argue with this truism, these experts say. But in some ways, this spill is more unique than other spills -- mostly in the unprecedented amount of oil spilled and in the massive response, something that responders say the public hasn't quite grasped because so little has reached the shore.

At the same time, the Deepwater Horizon spill is very similar to some other ones, especially the 1979 Ixtoc 1 spill, also in the Gulf of Mexico. Scientists say they are much better able to predict how that environment will handle the oil since they've already had a rare chance to see it first-hand.