D. LASCARIS: This is Dimitri Lascaris reporting for The Real News Network from Montreal, Quebec.
The oil spill in the East China Sea has become the second biggest marine oil spill, surpassed
only by the BP Deep Water Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
A Panamanian tanker called the Sanchi was carrying almost a million barrels of Iranian
oil condensate when it collided with a Chinese cargo ship in the East China Sea on January
6th.
After burning for more than a week, it sank, spewing more oil into the surrounding ocean.
The 32 crew members of the Sanchi are missing and presumed dead, and the spill is still
expanding.
Last week it was to be over 40 square miles in diameter, or the size of Paris, France.
A few days later it was reportedly two to three times that size.
Is this disaster just a blip in the ocean or, as some scientists are warning, could
this have a massive impact on millions of fish and other marine life being contaminated
by carcinogens?
With us to discuss this and other ways in which fossil fuels are impacting marine ecosystems,
I'm pleased to be joined today from Anchorage, Alaska by Professor Richard Steiner, a marine
conservation biologist and oil spill environmental specialist.
Professor Steiner advises governments, United Nations NGOs on offshore energy and environment
issues globally.
Welcome, Professor Steiner.
RICHARD STEINER: Thank you, Dimitri.
Glad to be with you.
D. LASCARIS: Please start by discussing the potential effects of this oil spill in the
East China Sea on the local ecosystems.
RICHARD STEINER: Well, all these major marine oil spills are different.
Each one is unique.
This one is extraordinarily so.
We have never seen a major release of natural gas condensate as large as this in the marine
system.
This is by far and away the largest condensate release in history.
It burns, evaporates, and dissolves in the water, and the component that dissolves in
the water column is what I'm most concerned about.
This is acutely toxic, it's very volatile, and as it spreads with water currents it exposes
all marine organisms in its path.
They can be killed quickly, or they can suffer sub-lethal ecological harm, such as respiratory
impairment, reproductive impairment, long-term physiological damage.
All sorts of things can happen short of being killed.
So this is acutely toxic stuff, and again, we've never seen a major marine spill of condensate
like this, so we have to be very honest about what we don't know and what we do know, and
there's a lot we don't know about this.
D. LASCARIS: Quite concerning comments that raise the question: just how rich are the
surrounding waters in terms of marine life, and what types of marine life predominate
in those waters?
RICHARD STEINER: The East China Sea is a heavily polluted, degraded coastal ecosystem, no question
about it, from all the pollutants coming in from the river systems in China, and particularly
the Yangtze.
However, it is still a very productive marine ecosystem, and offshore there's over 200 species
of fish and shellfish that are harvested commercially for the local and international market.
This includes mackerel and pomfret, scad, croaker, cuttlefish, squid, shrimp, crab.
I mean, it's a very productive fishery offshore where this incident occurred.
Plus there's a very robust plankton community.
Sea birds and many marine mammal species, including humpback whales, minke whales, fin
whales, killer whales, Bryde's whales, porpoises.
It's a productive offshore ecosystem.
Humans often tend to focus more on what oil comes to shore, because we are terrestrial
primates, and we tend to focus on damage we can see, but in these sorts of instances,
the damage is offshore in the pelagic ecosystem, and people tend to think, "Well, I don't see
it, so what's the big deal?"
In reality, there is still extensive damage offshore in the pelagic, the offshore marine
ecosystem, but it's just not as visible to people on shore.
So the damage has been caused.
It's there.
It's certainly serious.
Whenever you spill tens of thousands of tons of an acutely toxic chemical into a productive
offshore marine ecosystem, you expect serious damage, and I'm sure we had it here.
D. LASCARIS: How do the particular qualities, physical properties of condensate affect the
ability of crews to clean up this spill?
RICHARD STEINER: That's an excellent question, Dimitri.
It's very different.
I mean, there's a lot we don't know about condensate, but what we do know is that it
behaves very differently when it is released.
It does not form a distinct surface slick like crude oil or heavy fuel oil does.
It burns, evaporates, and dissolves, because it's so light and volatile.
So you can't really contain it and recover it like you can crude oil.
The slicks that were reported on the surface around the disaster were the fuel oil from
the tanker, not the condensate.
And even those, one day the State Oceanic Administration reported they covered about
330 square kilometers of sea surface, and then the next day, when a storm blew in, they
reported they could find none.
Obviously, it had dispersed into the water column.
But that's just fuel oil, and that was only about a thousand tons that was left on the
tanker at the time of the collision.
The condensate was over 113,000 tons, and that was an enormous amount of pollutant that
went into the water and into the air as well.
So that's by far and away the largest concern we have.
D. LASCARIS: Studies are coming out, I understand, relating to BP Deep Horizon spill in the Gulf
of Mexico, which have identified dead zones.
Is that something that we may experience in this particular case?
RICHARD STEINER: Well, there certainly was a dead zone in the subsurface hydrocarbon
plume that dispersed away from the release site, the drifting tanker, in that week that
it was on the surface.
I suspect most of the condensate cargo came off in that week, or immediately after it
sank as well.
That plume, that underwater plume that drifted away with water currents ... and the water
currents are quite robust offshore there.
The tanker drifted about a hundred miles south before it sank, so we know this is a dynamic
offshore ecosystem.
And so the underwater plume spread over hundreds of square miles of the East China Sea.
Many of the marine organisms that were exposed to that acutely toxic underwater plume were
certainly killed.
Others suffered sub-lethal injury.
I don't think, because it's a well-mixed offshore ecosystem, you'll experience a persistent
dead zone, but again, there's a lot we don't know about condensate spills, which is why
it would have been fantastic to get a rapid environmental assessment mounted offshore
on day two.
I will mention that on day two, the day after this collision, I was in immediate contact
with the government of China and the government of Japan shortly thereafter, urging them to
put a rapid environmental assessment program offshore with water quality, air quality sampling,
biological monitoring, and carcass collection, and they simply weren't able to do that.
They decided not to do that immediately.
So a lot of that immediate information, we lost.
So there's a lot about the environmental impact of this we'll just simply never know.
We'll just have to speculate.
But we do know it was serious, and it should have been avoided.
D. LASCARIS: What more can and should be done in order to minimize the risks of the catastrophic
spills we're seeing in the East China Sea?
RICHARD STEINER: Yeah, that's the critical thing here.
That's an excellent question.
Once the collision occurred and the oil is out, the battle has really been lost on these
particular incidents, but what we can do is do everything humanly possible to prevent
a repeat.
And that's absolutely what the governments of China, Japan, and South Korea need to collaborate
on immediately in this heavy vessel traffic area of the East China Sea and Yellow Sea
region, and that is conduct a vessel traffic risk assessment to identify these potentially
hazardous crossing areas.
They need to set up traffic separation schemes to prevent some of this, to reduce the risk
of this.
Potentially tug escorts, positive vessel traffic control, better pilotage, better aids to navigation,
and also better response protocols.
They responded pretty well to this with firefighting and search and rescue, but unfortunately,
neither of those had a positive outcome.
But their environmental response was utterly lacking, and I think they know that.
But all we can really do now is prevent a repeat, and that's exactly what they need
to do.
We need to see some leadership by one of the governments there and/or the United Nations
and/or an intervenor government to help make this happen.
D. LASCARIS: This has been Dimitri Lascaris, speaking to Professor Richard Steiner, marine
conservation biologist and oil spill environmental specialist, about a catastrophic oil spill
in the East China Sea.
Thank you very much for joining us today, Professor Steiner.
RICHARD STEINER: My pleasure.
Thanks.
D. LASCARIS: And this Dimitri Lascaris for The Real News Network.