This is typical of all major oil companies. I work doing this type of cleanup and used to do work for one of the majors (lets call them MM for marine mollusk). I used to get infuriated by MM because the cleanup strategy they always wanted to employ was called Monitored Natural Attenuation. To clean up a site by Monitored Natural Attenuation all you had to do was nothing. The theory (and it is a good one if applied correctly) is that the bacteria present in the groundwater and soil will consume the oil or gasoline and leave harmless byproducts. This can work, bacteria can be very useful in cleaning up low concentrations of oil and gasoline. But I got into arguments with representatives from MM that wanted to use this cleanup strategy when there was 6 inches to a foot of gasoline floating on the water table.
When the cleanup began, some experts estimated that there were 17 million gallons of oil in the ground – about 6 million more than the tanker Exxon Valdez is believed to have spilled off the coast of Alaska. State environmental officials said last winter that at its current pace, the cleanup could take another 20 years.
ExxonMobil installed a treatment system in 1990 that has recovered 9.3 million. That’s an average recovery of about one gallon a minute since the system was installed. I have operated similar types of systems, on a smaller basis, that are capable of recovering oil at around 20 gallons per minute up to 50 gallons per minute. Now this can all vary depending on the local geology, probably not a problem because a lot of that area is filled wetlands, and the recovery rate of the groundwater pumped from the wells that have been installed to recover the oil, again not likely to be a problem due to the proximity to the Newton Creek. This seems to be a very slow rate of recovery based on the amount of gasoline in the ground.
Go get ’em New York!
