Lawmakers query EPA on efforts to close knowledge gaps
WASHINGTON, DC — Congressmen Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) and Brad Miller (D-N.C.) today released a new report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) that found that, despite an increase in research in the wake of the BP oil spill, very little is known about either the effectiveness or toxicity of chemical dispersants when applied beneath the surface of water as well as in cold and icy Arctic waters. This report comes just days after Shell announced that it has deployed two oil drilling rigs bound for the Arctic seas. In response to the GAO report, the lawmakers sent a letter querying the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on its efforts to ensure that appropriate testing has occurred on dispersants before they are deployed for use in the Arctic or used again subsurface.
The GAO report found that approximately $15.5 million responsible for 106 dispersant-related research projects has been expended since fiscal year 2000, with more than half of the total funding occurring since the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico. More than 40 percent of all federally-funded dispersant research projects focused on testing dispersant effectiveness, with the remaining studies covering a range of topics including toxicity, modeling, subsurface application, alternative formulations, human health impacts and fate and transport.
“Too many questions remain about the long-term chronic health and environmental impacts of chemical dispersants to simply begin using them in the extremely cold, icy and very deep conditions of Arctic, where they have never been used before,” said Rep. Markey, who led a key Congressional investigation into the BP spill and co-authored the first legislation to establish an independent spill investigation. “We may hope to never have another oil spill like that in the Gulf of Mexico that requires the use of these chemical dispersants, but as history and oil companies have taught us, we must learn more first in order to prepare for the worst.”
“It’s stunning how little we know about the effect of dispersants just two years after using millions of gallons in the Gulf of Mexico,” said Rep. Miller. “And whatever lessons we learned from the Gulf of Mexico are probably useless in the Arctic.”
The new GAO report is available HERE.
In response to the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster, the EPA for the first time in U.S. history, approved the application of chemical dispersants subsurface in the Gulf of Mexico. This led to many large plumes of oil droplets below the surface of Gulf waters, whose environmental impacts still are not fully understood. The choice of dispersant used during the clean-up came under fire for being one of the most toxic and least effective of the options available on EPA’s pre-approved list of dispersants. In the letter to EPA, Reps. Markey and Miller note that the agency has not yet updated its list of approved chemical dispersants or safety testing protocols despite acknowledging the need to do so.
“In light of the expansion of offshore drilling in both the Gulf and Arctic regions, it is necessary that the EPA ensure that future spill mitigation agents, such as dispersants, have undergone appropriate testing for real response situations prior to their deployment in our waterways,” write the lawmakers in the letter to the EPA.
A copy of the letter to the EPA can be found HERE.
More information on Rep. Markey’s oversight on the use of dispersants during the BP oil spill can be found HERE.
###
