Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico - Historic Disaster
 

The best new estimate, based on actual video of the gusher, seems to be 70,000 Barrels per Day (+/- 20% or 56,000 to 84,000).

That's FOURTEEN TIMES worse than the previous estimate.

To put it another way: it is about 2.9 Million Gallons per Day -- it is already been bigger in the first week than the Exxon Valdez...

The other two estimates also based on the actual video of the oil/natural gas spill range between 20,000 Barrels and 100,000 barrels a day, and at least 50,000 barrels.

Gulf Spill Could Be Much Worse Than Believed : NPR

I'd like to think that people might open their eyes at some point... instead, I find it more and more likely that I'll just close mine.
-- Unknown

Sadly ironic that this tragic accident happened just after Obama approved off-shore drilling.

I remember how much went on in the US in the wake of Exxon Valdez, now this strikes much closer to home. Will this event finally make Americans stop and think about their oil dependence? Will they stop driving SUV's now? Did they stop in 1989?

Sadly no, I highly doubt it'll make most think twice about oil dependence. And, its only for one reason, it hasn't hit them where it counts yet, their pocketbook.

The Santa Barbara spill led to the pressure that really slowed down offshore drilling, but the companies are in a much better position to resist government now, while making money on the disasters. Hay makes a fine, effective, non-toxic sponge for oil, but who has stock in a hay companay? I sure hope all those fishermen get to retire on their clean-up contracts.

I know it hasn't hit most of America in the pocketbook yet, but it has here.
Fishermen, processors, wholesalers, tourism, etc are all out of work for the next long while.

And as an FYI, the media seems to delay reports of oil about a week. Mobile bay had some tar balls on the 9th and had tons on the 10'th. Seaside had a few (handful) on the 8th. Vermillion Bay has been disgusting since the 12th.

I just hope that BP is lying to Wall Street, not the Gulf Coast, everything so far has been a lie, so0 . . . .

Tarballs have reached Key West.

Edit: apparently they have now tested the said tarballs and they are *not* from the BP oil spill. There has been a report from a science ship showing the oil has made it into the so-called loop current, so it is only a matter of time...

NPR reports the ratio of oil to natural gas is 3000:1 (presumably by volume). Almost all of the natural gas is escaping into the atmosphere, where it is a greenhouse gas much more potent than CO2.

oh my god, that's too much of a price. too much headache.

Adam Smith
 

Not to worry.
The invisible hand will take care of everything.

It really is beyond exxon valdez at this point, by a long shot...

they even used it as a factor in abnormal high amount of hurricanes this year...

replying to suv comment:
stopping suv stops ability for more passengers in one vehicle. I just read of mercury going into history today...
the grand marquis and crown vic were only begun to be mastered since 2003, smarter engine and steering.

last step was half shafts and independent rears. Don't even lie to me about consumption, I grew up with those cars sometimes flat broke...and the carburator is in fact the champion.
I hope this all comes to a head, and I am guessing war...shamefully.
If my 3 main bearing subaru did not get at least 38 mpg... I'd be back in a v8 "hog" or whatever an idiot might call their own lack of mechanical skills... and ya know. doubling mileage means wrong mounted inlines and inability for more than 2 people in the damn tin can today...

Here's something I learned about this week: The Deepwater Horizon wellhead blowout isn't unprecedented, nor is it the largest (yet).

Ixtoc I oil spill - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A Mexican-operated rig in the Gulf of Mexico, the Ixtoc I, blew out its wellhead in 1979, and was not capped until ten months later. It spilled 10000-30000 bbl/day, making it the biggest accidental oil spill ever.

I love how things like this are called "spills" as if a ship tipped over and deposited it's cargo into the ocean. This isn't a "spill"...its a ****ing disaster!

Kind of like when two cars run into each other...it's far from an "accident"...it's a "crash"...and in some cases it's a ****ing disaster too!

Right. Calling it a "spill" suggests that you just mop it up in a minute and forget about it. THAT'S. NOT. TRUE.

My only question is why there wasn't some kind of preventative measure released as soon as they found out it was pissing oil/gas all over the place?

Suggestion: How about a tanker with a pump on it to suck up the water/oil and take it back to a shoreline refinery that could separate/utilize it? Sure, this won't get it all, but it could have curtailed a large portion of it so that the problems we're facing now might have been off in the future a while, still.

Suggestion: Kelp netting around projected affected area. Very expensive, but helps to prevent the millions in land/wildlife cleanup that will most certainly come at the expense of the taxpayer. (Yeah, BP's not going to give a solid answer as to what "legitimate" claims they're going to cover, nor will they mention who gets to decide what's "legitimate". Good luck locking that one down, Obama.)

It is not a spill, I spilled my orange juice today, it is a LEAK, a huge one.

Christopher,

They had a so-called fail-safe device, called a "blowout preventer" on the well -- it is the *only* thing they had in place. And obviously, it failed.

The pressures are enormous -- there is ~5,000 feet of water above the well head, and they drilled it at least 13,000 feet below the ocean floor. They were licensed to drill as deep as 18,000 feet, and there are some people who claim that BP had drilled this well as deep as 25,000 feet (illegally). So, the temperatures of the oil, and the pressures on the methane compress it about 3,000:1, but it then expands which cools it, causing ice to form. The methane *may* be being absorbed in to the water, but this will cause dead zones because it depletes all the oxygen in the area.

This is an epic disaster. Some people are predicting that the oil cannot be stopped, and it will continue to gush until the oil/gas is depleted, OR until the pressures are equalized! By BP's own estimate, that would mean that about 50 MILLION BARRELS in total will be in the water.

That is 2,100,000,000 GALLONS of oil, and who knows how much methane....

They have been dumping in chemical dispersants willy-nilly -- these are probably toxic and they will break down the oil into smaller droplets -- so that it will affect smaller animals and plants. The dispersants may also have numerous other more subtle affects, like endocrine disruptors -- which affect the hormones and may produce a myriad of reproductive distortions...

Ixtoc. -that sounds toxic to me.:(

Let's Put That In Perspective...
 

I did a quick graphic to show how big that amount of oil is. It's a cube, 655 feet on each side.


http://www.kurtstruve.com/images/Total_Oil_Spilled.jpg

The price is always right... when some one else is made to pay!

There's no way the entire field is going to bleed out for decades until it's dry. The relief wells will be completed by the end of summer, and the experts' consensus is that that will be just about the end of the oil spill.

Assuming a million gallons a day all summer, you're looking at roughly a cube 270ft on each edge.

BP will be made to pay $1100-4300/bbl per the Clean Water Act. The fine per barrel depends on whether or not they are found to be "grossly negligent". That will be a $5 billion to $20 billion fine, on top of any liability claims they're made to pay, plus cost of the cleanup, lost revenue from the oil that's spreading across the Gulf unsold, and the loss of the $0.5 billion Deepwater Horizon.

BP doesn't have many friends right now, and I don't think they'll be able to talk their way out of any fine that the government wishes to hand them.

I remember when BP started buying out RE companies it said it's no longer British Petroleum but is now Beyond Petroleum.

Or just flip us the bird...

The problem of course is that any billion $ fine that BP pays we pay when we buy fuel and oil. Fortunatly for many of us on this site we pay disproportionately less. Let me tell you a storey about years of legal rangeling about billion $ fines which take up enough time for BP to earn all the money they need for the original fines and the legal costs... how long will that take? 2 years or 5 years? you be the judge...
I am always amused by people who complain about the price of fuel and want the government to step in to keep the price down so they can keep driving there gas guzzeling vehicle. For my part; like so many of you, desided long ago to reduce my need for the stuff. Does that make me a tree huger, an economist, or just an other ecomodder...?

To me it looks like the fines are mearly gestures to appease the masses. Why? Because as soon as this goes down the price of gas will take a jump which will undoubtedly repay the oil companies for this disaster.

Why not freeze the price of gas and reduce it every week this continues? Make the companies take real loses that cannot be recovered in the next quarter? Or make part of their fine an agreement to invest agressively into alternative fuels to reduce our exposure to these mistakes.

Seems like our gov has no teeth rearding the oil business, I say push the auto manufacturers to create alternative energy vehicles and pass the bill for R&D directly to the oil companies as a result.

Ahhh to dream ...

Why on earth would you penalize companies that didn't have a hand in this disaster?

And, of course, the real result of price controls is SHORTAGES, which will effect us poor folk far more than the fat cats who own the oil companies. Although since our entire economy is dependent on oil, this would be a good way to bring harm to, literally, everyone who directly or indirectly uses it.

If you want real retribution, the lawsuits forthcoming (there was a plaintiffs' attorney conference last week,) will hit BP, and hit it hard. But I'm not much on railing against Big Oil in the abstract, because the truth is Big Oil only has the power we give it, and as long as we're burning oil for energy, using oil for lubrication, buying stuff made of plastics, or using any one of a number of petroleum by-products, Big Oil is US.

Judge orders Exxon oil spill payouts: Oil | adn.com

It took 20 years for the fishermen to get penny 1 from the exxon incident. It was a 5 billion dollar penalty, but all they paid was 151 million so far. The fishermen got $5k apiece.

This is from the wiki article on the Deepwater Horizon oil spill - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The BP wellhead had been fitted with a blowout preventer (BOP), but it was not fitted with remote-control or acoustically-activated triggers for use in case of an emergency requiring a platform to be evacuated. It did have a dead man's switch designed to automatically cut the pipe and seal the well if communication from the platform is lost, but it was unknown whether the switch activated.[59] Regulators in both Norway and Brazil generally require acoustically-activated triggers on all offshore platforms, but when the Minerals Management Service considered requiring the remote device, a report commissioned by the agency as well as drilling companies questioned its cost and effectiveness.[59] In 2003, the agency determined that the device would not be required because drilling rigs had other back-up systems to cut off a well.[59][60]

What that tells me is that the morons in our gov't are more directly responsible than initially thought. Shouldn't they have required this remote device, as other countries had?

I'm with you shadetree, but I think the root cause is in essentially letting the industry become the government regulators and then having corruption on top of that.

BP, the operator, failed to stop the oil. Bush was an "oil man" and regulation went to hell. We all use ridiculous amounts of the stuff.

Exxon gets fined 5 billion, the gubment lets them pay 151 million 20 years later. Consumers are stupid.

Don't forget Dick Cheney was/is also an "oil man" -- and he ran the secret meetings in the White House where it is alleged they made the agreements about the rules.

Thanks Dick!

I thought of Bush as being a good president except for the oil connection. Either way, I strongly believe in multiple safeguards when required, and the BP platform did not follow that common sense theology. Now people suffer through idiotic chasing after the dollar.

June 13, 1979

The more oil spills change, the more they stay the same. [VIDEO]

The 1979 Ixtoc 1 oil blowout was in just 160 feet of water -- and it took 10 months to stop it! The BP Deepwater Horizon is in about 5,000 feet of water -- that is ~31X more water pressure...

BP Sought To Ease Canadian Rule For Relief Wells
 

BP Sought To Ease Canadian Rule For Relief Wells : NPR

I know I won't put any Castrol in my engines anytime soon.

As a Note Castrol has a very large factory about 50 miles from my house, I haven't used their products in >5 years anyways though.

As an additional note, although I have 7 friends out of work now, I am still for the drilling ban. Tough times around here.

Piwoslaw -

Mmmmmmm, chocolate (I think).

CarloSW2