NPR's report suggests that the volume of crud spewing out of the mangled well-head in the Gulf of Mexico is not 5,000 barrels a day, as previously reported, but on order of 50,000.
How'd they come by that number? Well, they took some of that neat video from the bottom of the Gulf, showing oil and gas and stuff spewing out of broken plumbing down there, and they sent it to an analyst who uses particle image velocimetry. This is a nifty technique in which, apparently, you can use your computer to track visible particles as they move across the scene, and using some known parameters like the distance from the camera, you can model the movement of fluids.
Their expert's comment was really that he estimates 70,000 bbl/day, plus or minus twenty percent - so anywhere from 56kbbl to 84kbbl daily. That is a lot of crud.
(BP, for its part, says that it is impossible to measure the flow, so presumably there's no point in trying.)
A caveat applies here: we don't know the proportion of solid or liquid components of that crap to gaseous components. Obviously, gases like methane would not be considered "oil", because as soon as a commingled blob of this gunk reaches the surface, the solids and liquids stay in the water, while the gases float away on the breeze. Not that they aren't also pollutants, but still, they don't make slicks on the surface or wash up on beaches.
Anyway, what does it mean for the Gulf of Mexico as an ecosystem, complete with its economically exploitable resources (living or otherwise), that there might be ten times as much oil as previously thought?
I don't know how to quantify it, personally. It could mean the problem would be twice as bad, ten times worse, a hundred times worse, or ten to the tenth times worse - how the hell do you compute this stuff, anyway? But never mind.
What it says is: we're in a lot of trouble.
That's something we already knew, of course. But still, a lot of trouble. Two of the people who stood up to speak at a town-hall-style meeting with the clean-up people were concerned: one, a fisherman, asked how the use of dispersants will affect the fishing trade? Apparently, dispersants cause problems of their own, either killing fish or making their flesh poisonous. I assume this refers to fish who would not have been killed or made poisonous by the oil. And the other is a mother of two small children, concerned that exposure to the volatile compounds bubbling up from the seafloor and floating around on the breeze (like benzene, toluene, and all that good stuff) will cause debilitating or fatal disease in her kids, ten years down the line. I assume similar questions were asked by others. Basically, everyone's screwed, and really quite badly.
Part of me, as I was listening to this report, was imagining what the Gulf coast will be like. Ghost towns where there used to be centers of fishing industry, perhaps? Seafood prices rising across the board? More crushing poverty for the poor folks? Not that the last bit is likely to change much anyway...
I'm disappointed in us, as a nation and as a species.
On a related note, a BBC news article from the 11th or 12th of May quoted Bart Stupak in a discussion of the (apparently faulty) blowout preventer as a failsafe against flooding: "How can a device that has 260 failure modes be considered fail-safe?"
Links:
NPR story
Source of Stupak quote
From benevro, The New York Times on underreporting of oil flooding
From Kristina40, The Fresno Bee on an investigation into lax regulatory oversight
Diary update: While I was writing this diary, Tyto Alba published his own diary on the same topic. Please go read his too.
Diary update Pt 2: Thanks for the rec-list status, the reason I haven't been in the comments much is that I'm dead tired and I want to avoid drooling on the keyboard.
Quote from the comments:
Quote from that article: (16+ / 0-)
BP disputes these results, and maintains there is no reliable way to calculate the flow of oil from a broken pipe.
Bull. Shit. And they know it.
They could stick a a pitot tube over that leak, actually into the pipe just a bit, just holding it out there on a ROV arm, take 2 minutes worth of pressure readings, and as long as they have a reasonable idea of the GOR (they do) they could get within 15% +/- of the volume of that leak, both gas and oil. So if they read 20,000 BOPD, it could be 23,000 BOPD or 17,000 BOPD, but that's maximum error. The realistic range of accuracy would be more like 21,500 BOPD to 18,500 BOPD.
Not bad. But why would they do that when virtually ALL the media is going with 5000 BOPD and not asking question one? Read it off the BP press release, type it on the script, lets hit the bar.
Now BP would say that the pitot tube setup, under these conditions, isn't considered accurate. They'd be technically right. Standard oilfield measurement for SALES is +/- .3%
But this isn't for sales and BP knows it. They're lying without lying. And they're good at it.
That's the truth and as a measurement hand, I'll sign that and date it.
BP has measurement physicists pounding on their desks wanting to do that pitot tube trick. They would view how much was escaping around the seal and they would have a pool on who ended up closest (in the event they successfully pipe it to a ship and can have actual separation and real measurement to settle the bet).
The worst error out of the lot of them might be 15%.
They're told STFU. They're probably sent on vacation.
So BP DESERVES whatever estimate anyone comes up with. Hope they choke on it.
It rubs the loofah on its skin or else it gets the falafel again.
by Fishgrease on Thu May 13, 2010 at 09:29:16 PM EDT
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