Its big-time trade off time in the Gulf. The question is: will the cure be worse than or equal to the disease? BP, British Petroleum, is using dispersants to “break-up” the oil now leaking from the damaged well a mile below the surface.

The trouble or potential problem is that no one knows what these dispersants contain. Their chemical makeup is a proprietary trade secret.  

This is the same wall of corporate proprietary secrecy that environmentalists run up against when trying to find out what natural gas companies are using in the defracting process that releases natural gas from shale.

Even if the materials, called dispersants, are effective, BP has already bought up more than a third of the world’s supply. If the leak from 5,000 feet beneath the surface continues for weeks, or months, that stockpile could run out.  The exact makeup of the dispersants is kept secret under competitive trade laws, but a worker safety sheet for one product, called Corexit, says it includes 2-butoxyethanol, a compound associated with headaches, vomiting and reproductive problems at high doses.

“There is a chemical toxicity to the dispersant compound that in many ways is worse than oil,” said Richard Charter, a foremost expert on marine biology and oil spills who is a senior policy advisor for Marine Programs for Defenders of Wildlife and is chairman of the Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary Advisory Council.

“It’s a trade off – you’re damned if you do damned if you don’t — of trying to minimize the damage coming to shore, but in so doing you may be more seriously damaging the ecosystem offshore.”