British Petroleum said that 5,000 barrels a day were leaking into the Gulf following the collapse of Deepwater Horizon.
British Petroleum said that 5,000 barrels a day were being collected by a 5 inch diameter siphon placed inside a 21 inch diameter pipeline.
If you believe the first number, you can't believe the second number.
If you believe the second number, you can't believe the first number.
If you believe British Petroleum's second number, then they have dumped 111 million gallons of oil into the Gulf.
According to BP, they are siphoning off 5,000 barrels a day. At 42 gallons per barrel, that equals 210,000 gallons a day.
Here's the problem.
The pipe they put the siphon in is 21 inches in diameter. The siphon is only 5 inches in diameter. Even at 5,000 feet under the sea, geometry still applies.
The area of a circle is pi times the radius squared (PI * r^2).
If you have a circle that is twice the diameter of another circle, it will have four times the area.
Try it:
pi * 1^2 = pi,
pi * 2^2 = 4pi
That means every time you double the diameter of a pipe, 4 times as much fluid can be pushed through it.
A pipe with a 21 inch diameter is more than four times the area of a 5 inch pipe. In fact, the bigger pipe will have more than 17 times the area of a smaller pipe.
(PI*10.5^2)/(PI*2.5^2)= 17.64
If they are really getting 210,000 gallons a day through the 5 inch siphon, then the total output is
210,000 * 17.64 = 3.7 million gallons a day.
This has been going on for 30 days now.
3.7 * 30 = 111.1 million gallons since the start of this environmental holocaust.
That's not counting the other two leaks. Estimates suggest they add another 15% to the total. That would make the total about:
127.8 million gallons of oil, so far.
Based on those numbers:
Every three days, BP spews as much as the Exxon Valdez.
Every two weeks, this one site spews as much oil into the Gulf as gets spilled in the entire Gulf in an entire year.
If the problem is fixed in the next 60 days, which puts it in their original time estimate, then they will have spilled over 500 million gallons of oil.
500 million gallons is about 12 million barrels. And we haven't even taken the gas into account.
Shell reported a major find in that area. It is estimated at 100 million barrels of oil. The Thunder Horse Field was originally estimated to have a billion barrels of oil. Production has never been close to the numbers expected. The production numbers suggest the actual yield in that huge field is closer to half or less of the original estimate.
When you compare those kind of large finds to the loss of this field's potential output, this catastrophe is certainly large enough to have an economic significance. Where is the spike in oil price we would expect to see with such a major disruption? We've seen oil spikes on bad economic news before. Why not this time?