Beachcombing for the Sake of Surf and Science

As summer approaches, the scene is becoming more familiar: After a day at Huntington Beach, sun-lovers trek home, cursing British Petroleum and its ruptured ship, the American Trader, that peppered beaches with tar balls in February. Lifting ankles to knees, their anger grows as they attempt to strip a hardened layer of black goo from their feet.

But their anger may be misdirected.

Sixteen tar balls from area beaches recently found their way to Global Geochemistry Corp. in Canoga Park, where analysts probed oil components to determine the tar’s source. Findings indicate that just two tar balls originated from the vessel that dumped nearly 400,000 gallons of Alaskan crude oil into the Pacific Ocean off Huntington Beach on Feb. 7.

“A lot of crude oil leaks out of underwater oil seeps up and down the coast,” said Lt. John Meehan, marine environmental response division chief for the U.S. Coast Guard. “Every spring, whenever the winds blow heavily out of the West, we get more reports of tar balls. But they’re not from the American Trader.”

Global Geochemistry calls its analysis of tar balls “forensic geochemistry,” one in a series of innovative techniques for which the company is rapidly becoming known among environmental agencies. The firm has clients including 50 domestic and 20 foreign companies that ship a variety of rock, air and water samples for detailed analysis.

“Forensic geochemistry arises from the knowledge of the chemistry of oils,” said Ian Kaplan, president of Global, which employs 25 people. “With our methods, we can determine the source of the oil and how long it has been in the environment.”

Meehan said beach-goers can distinguish tar balls composed of natural coastal seepage from those of Alaskan crude oil by sight and smell. Natural seepage resembles a half-dollar-sized piece of black road tar and smells like asphalt. Tar from tanker oil forms tiny brown globules and smells much like motor oil. The equivalent of 70 barrels of crude oil a day surfaces in the Santa Barbara Channel area, where one of the largest natural seeps in the world is located, Meehan said.

Few companies have undertaken the complex process needed to extensively analyze oil.

Global’s studies fingerprint hydrocarbons, identify metals and analyze biomarkers--agroup of intricate compounds arranged in distinctive patterns that can identify oil from varied sources.

Other area companies involved in environmental research include Aerovironment in Monrovia and ENSR Corp. in Camarillo.

“We did 10 different analyses of the tar balls, which gave us five conclusive results,” said Kaplan, 60, pulling out a thick folder and flipping to charts that diagrammed oil compound comparisons. Kaplan, a professor of geology and geochemistry at UCLA, helped found the company in 1975. He received his doctorate in bio-geochemistry from USC in 1961.

The tar-ball findings were sent to British Petroleum and the Coast Guard in mid-April. The Coast Guard performed its own study on other tar balls and found that no samples originated from British Petroleum, although samples taken from open water matched the Alaskan crude spilled by the American Trader.

Cliff Narquis, project leader for British Petroleum research environmental technology in Cleveland, said an analysis group performed additional studies on the oil, “but Global did all the tar ball work,” Narquis said. “That’s what they’re known for.”

Global Geochemistry began operations during the mid-1970s in response to oil corporations that sought new exploration sites for fossil fuels. But modern environmental concerns have added greatly to the range of studies the firm now performs.

“It’s not your run-of-the-mill company,” said John Holmes, director of research for the state Air Resources Board. “Global is also on the frontier of atmospheric research. The main work they do for us is carbon analysis.”

For eight years, Global has painstakingly analyzed organic compounds in air samples sent by the board. The samples are measured by GC-mass spectrometer, a sophisticated detection tool that separates out carbon-12 and -13 and measures the differing masses of compounds found in the air. Data analyzed by the spectrometers is fed into a central computer, a storehouse for all forms of research data at the firm.

“Companies like Global help a great deal in doing our job,” Holmes said. “We can discover where smog comes from, how it develops and which places to look to reduce it.”

A current debate has focused on the origin of smog’s content of carbon, a fine particulate that constitutes 20% to 30% of smog and that gives the mixture its sooty appearance.

“We’ve been finding that perhaps 40% of carbon in the atmosphere seems to be from non-fossil sources, such as trees, vegetation, cooking oil or from burning wood,” Kaplan said.

“That figure sounds a bit high,” Holmes said. “A simple thing like barbecuing a hamburger or frying billions of hamburgers at McDonald’s does release a lot of carbon. We just don’t have a very good handle on how much of that ends up in the air. . . . That’s a lot of hamburgers.”

Besides samples from a network of collection stations used by the air board and Global, Kaplan occasionally tries some homespun experiments. “I collect samples of wood smoke from my own fireplace too,” said Kaplan, who lives in Sherman Oaks. “And we’ve analyzed cooking oil from the filter above my stove. The home environment is sometimes the best research facility.”

Global lab manager Alan Jeffrey said such air samples are first converted to carbon dioxide, which is sent out to nuclear reactor sites for carbon-14 dating. That process determines whether the carbon is recent, such as that found in cooking oils, or ancient, as in that generated by the burning of fossil fuels in cars.

Jeffrey, 41, led a tour of Global’s laboratories, stretched out over 8,000 square feet in an industrial area of Canoga Park. Rows of humming gas chromatographs, which measure hydrocarbons in oil, lined one room.

A maze of high-vacuum glass tubing dominated another laboratory. Various valves and traps were attuned to capture oil compounds in the tubing. A mercury pump gurgled below, pushing the gaseous mixture through curves and spirals in the glass. Men in clean white coats tended vats of liquid nitrogen and took measurements from yard-long manometers stretching the height of the glass rods.

“It’s like a complicated plumbing system,” said Jeffrey above the click and whirl of the instruments.

An adjoining water sample lab was stacked with hundreds of plastic bottles sent to Global from various regions. Global participates in a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency acid rain study that analyzes precipitation samples from 12 Southern states.

Flanked by photographs of oil rigs and a large color map of the ocean floor, Kaplan said, “We also collect information on acid fog, which can be more hazardous than acid rain.” Such fog holds up to 10 times more atmospheric pollutants than acid rain and disperses the elements closer to the ground over longer periods of time, he said.

Global researchers sometimes draw the attention of police when collecting fog samples during early morning hours. “Our fog-detection device looks something like a cannon,” Kaplan said. “The police stop us sometimes and ask us what we’re doing with this cannon-shaped device beside the road at 2 or 3 in the morning. We have to convince them we’re innocent scientists doing experiments, not terrorists.”

Additional studies have brought environmental samples to Global from all corners of the planet.

Six years ago, Global was one of several firms that participated in analyzing rocks from a 22,000-foot well dug in Sweden. The unusual experiment, which attempted to capture deep gas from the Earth’s mantle, turned up only trace gases generated during the drilling process.

Global recently signed a contract with the Chinese petroleum corporation Nan Hei to undertake joint studies of underwater oil exploration just off the coast of Hong Kong.

And now the company has begun work with medical schools, such as Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Torrance, to trace the amount of carbon-13 found in the breath of children with metabolic problems. Hospitals generally are unable to perform such tests because they don’t have the laboratory equipment needed to measure carbon.

“Others find it’s unusual for a small company such as Global to have such a spread of interests,” Kaplan said. “In part, I think it reflects my philosophy. I believe in concentrating on research as a means of answering difficult environmental problems.”