Getting a straight answer about how much oil is surging from the uncapped undersea oil well in the Gulf of Mexico--and how much is likely to come--is almost as hard as trying to separate oil and water.
After the BP Deepwater Horizon offshore oil rig exploded on April 20, killing 11 people, oil company BP and U.S. government officials reported that the underwater well was pumping approximately 1,000 barrels a day (about 42,000 gallons) of crude oil into the surrounding waters.
Within days, that figure was challenged by SkyTruth, a non-profit organization that uses remote sensing and digital mapping technology to study and evaluate environmental issues worldwide. On Wednesday, April 28, government officials confirmed that oil from the underground well appeared to be leaking at least five times faster than previously estimated--at a rate of 5,000 barrels (210,000 gallons) daily.
But the numbers game didn't stop there.
By Friday, April 30, a few industry experts were saying the well could be leaking oil into the Gulf of Mexico at a rate of 25,000 barrels (more than 1 million gallons) a day--five times the government's recently revised estimate. The experts said they were basing their calculations on government data and standard industry measurement tools, and the picture they were seeing was much worse than the one being reported by BP, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the White House.
Despite these new reports, both BP and U.S. government officials continued to estimate the flow of oil into the gulf at 5,000 barrels a day--and they still do--but questions about the accuracy of that figure continue to grow. John Amos, an experienced geologist and president of SkyTruth, told reporters late last week that 5,000 barrels a day was the "extremely low end" of his organization's estimates. Based on NOAA maps, Amos said, a more realistic figure would be 20,000 barrels (840,000 gallons) a day.
The most recent revelation came in a closed-door briefing for members of Congress, where senior BP officials said that the daily spill rate from the damaged oil well in the Gulf of Mexico could conceivably reach 60,000 barrels (more than 2.5 million gallons). The BP executives were joined at the briefing by officials from Transocean, the rig operator, and Halliburton, which provided cementing services on the offshore platform.
During the congressional briefing, BP officials also described a number of untested techniques they are using to try to stop or slow down the oil that is gushing from the underwater well 5,000 feet (nearly a mile) below the surface, and said they couldn't predict whether oil from the spill would drift into loop currents in the gulf that would carry it through the Florida Keys and into the Atlantic Ocean.
After the hearing, U.S. Rep. Edward Markey, the Massachusetts Democrat who heads the Energy and Environment Subcommittee of the House energy panel, said: "What we heard today from BP, Halliburton and Transocean were a lot of worst-case scenarios without any best-case solutions."
The worst of the worst-case scenarios was offered up by U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar during his appearance on CNN's State of the Nation on Sunday, May 2, when he said: "The worst-case scenario is we could have 100,000 barrels or more of oil flowing out." Salazar's comments may have been based on a statement by Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, who said the worst fear of officials working to contain the spill is that the well could leak at a rate of 100,000 barrels (4.2 million gallons) a day if the well head breaks. Over the past few days, however, the 100,000-barrel figure has been largely refuted as "nearly impossible" by both environmental and industry sources.
In the final analysis, however, the question of how bad the Gulf Coast spill will become may depend more on how long oil continues to leak from the damaged well than on how quickly it is leaking. That's another question that no one seems able to answer with any certainty, but most experts agree it will take several months to finally stop the underwater flow of oil.
The most optimistic estimates say that it will likely take at least 90 days to cap the well and stop the flow of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Even if we accept the official (and by most accounts low) BP and government spill-rate estimate of 5,000 barrels a day, that's nearly 19 million gallons of oil spilling into the gulf over the next three months. If the rate turns out to be closer to 25,000 barrels a day, the underwater well would pump 94.5 million gallons of oil into the gulf by late July--more than eight times as much as the Exxon Valdez spilled into Alaska's Prince William Sound in 1989.
Updated on June 17, 2010: On June 15, 2010, the U.S. government revised its official estimate upward, saying than an estimated 60,000 barrels of crude oil (more than 2.5 million gallons) is leaking into the Gulf of Mexico every day.
Also Read:
Comments
BP will likely be bankrupt by this disaster. Anyone know if there could have been safety shutoff valves on the ocean floor? And if so how much would they have cost?
Better ^ up^ that estimate of the amount of oil to 40,000 Barrels or 100 Million gallons to the date of June 10, 2010 has leaked into the GOM.
Reported by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute to EPA in todays Washington Post.
Instead of trying to plug the well, would it not be more convenient to let the oil and gas flow, under restricted conditions? Maybe this could be achieved by placing one or more pipes over the well heads. The pipes would be wide enough in order to avoid the freezing effect caused by the gas.
Side arms could be adapted to the pipe, in order to ease the flow.
Oil and water coming out would be pumped to oil tankers and sent to storage tanks of a refinery, where both liquids would be easily separated.
It is also feasible to recover the gas, by adapting a system similar to the one used when drilling for natural gas.
jims1020
This has helped alot on my homework!! thank you!!