The federal government has now given BP permission to pump chemicals into the spewing oil in hopes of breaking up the massive slick that continues to float through the Gulf of Mexico.
The chemicals themselves pose an environmental risk as well, but experts say that the threat from the chemical dispersants pale in comparison to the oil that the dispersants are breaking up. The trade-off, they say, is worth it.
Military-style aircraft are dumping enough dispersant to cover 250 acres per flight. 325,000 gallons so far. Another 500,000 gallons at the ready, says the White House.
And deep beneath the sea surface near the spewing wellhead, more dispersant is being released into the oily goo hoping to break it apart into very small beads. University of Miami chemist James Wilson says it's far less harmful than doing nothing.
"It's soap," he says. It's essentially the same thing we use “to get olive oil off plates."
Remember the old television commercials for Dawn dishwashing soap? Wilson says it demonstrates rather well what chemical dispersants do. He says the simplest way to explain it is that it’s like the shampoo we use to take the oil off our hair: we wash it off with water and it goes down the drain.
Oily animals face almost certain death when hit with thick oil, but the dispersants spread out the oil so that nature has a better chance of fighting it naturally. Wilson and others warn we are not getting rid of the oil by using dispersants. It's still going to be there. It's just going to be diluted throughout a much wider area of the Gulf.
Wilson offers this context from a 2009 study from Yale, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and the United States Geological Survey published in the peer-reviewed journal “Environmental Science and Technology” that found American households are flushing dispersants like shampoos, detergents, grease and the like down our drains and eventually into rivers and oceans at a faster rate than the Deepwater Horizon leak is spewing oil.
Wilson says about half of the household dispersants like soaps, detergents and shampoos are, ironically, made from oil through petrochemical manufacturing.
“So we drill oil. Make it into soap. Use it to clean up oil – is kind of what we’re doing,” he said.
