Two studies cast doubt on government’s claim that ‘vast majority’ of oil is gone

As the shrimping season finally returned to Louisiana yesterday, Dean Blanchard — who owns and operates the nation's largest shrimp wholesale operation — told The Upshot that some of the fishermen who put nets in the water were pulling up oil and oily shrimp.

"A couple of them are catching shrimp, a couple of them are catching oil," Blanchard said. "Look, nobody in their right mind believes they sucked all those hundreds of millions of gallons of oil out the Gulf," Blanchard told us.

Blanchard was echoing the enormous skepticism in the country, particularly in the Gulf Coast region, over the government's claim that the "vast majority" of the oil spilled by BP is gone from the Gulf. Now a pair of studies appear to confirm such suspicions, finding that the vast majority of the oil is still lurking beneath the Gulf surface.

A team of researchers at the University of Georgia say that up to 79 percent of the oil from BP's busted well remains in the Gulf, and is likely to stay there for years to come.

"One major misconception is that oil that has dissolved into water is gone and, therefore, harmless," UGA marine scientist Charles Hopkinson told the Wall Street Journal. "The oil is still out there, and it will likely take years to completely degrade."

The Georgia researchers say that 70 to 79 percent of the oil that government researchers classified as dispersed, dissolved or residual is actually still in the water. The Georgia team says the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) had badly misrepresented the nature of the oil disaster, since only oil on the Gulf surface can evaporate, leaving massive plumes of oil in deep water.

Indeed, the drive to push the Gulf oil still further underwater is the main focus of the second recent study calling the government's claims into question. That report, conducted by researchers at the University of South Florida, is due out today, according to CNN. The South Florida scientists have found that the chemical dispersants used by BP to break up the oil "may have sent droplets of crude to the ocean floor, where it has turned up at the bottom of an undersea canyon within 40 miles of the Florida Panhandle." The report notes that plankton and other microscopic organisms vital to the marine food chain have demonstrated a "strong toxic response" to the oil and the dispersants.

Many have criticized BP's use of dispersants in combating the spill, claiming that the company was flooding the Gulf with dispersants mainly to drive the oil out of view. BP detractors have also argued that the volume of dispersants in the Gulf could be causing much more long-term damage to the Gulf Coast ecosystem than the oil itself would. They say that BP's aggressive dispersants campaign will make it virtually impossible to clean up the spill fully, since nondispersed oil would naturally rise to the surface, where it could be skimmed or burned, or else evaporate in the heat.

Last week, the USF researchers also claimed that NOAA has tried to suppress their findings about extensive undersea oil plumes. The USF team contended that the federal agency "beat up" on their work and even tried to "discredit" their findings. It's also been widely reported that BP has been signing up teams of scientists and other oil-spill researchers to lucrative "consulting" contracts with the aim of postponing the official release of their research findings until at least three years after the spill's end. Members of the UGA and USF research teams aren't receiving any funding from the oil giant.

(Photo: AP/Gerald Herbert)