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BP Well May Be Spewing 100,000 Barrels a Day, Scientist Says
WASHINGTON — BP's runaway Deepwater Horizon well may be spewing what the company once-called its worst case scenario — 100,000 barrels a day, a member of the government panel told McClatchy Monday.
BP's runaway Deepwater Horizon well may be spewing what the company once-called its worst case scenario — 100,000 barrels a day, a member of the government panel told McClatchy Monday. (McClatchy) "In the data I've seen, there's nothing
inconsistent with BP's worst case scenario," Ira Leifer, an associate
researcher at the Marine Science Institute of the University of
California, Santa Barbara, and a member of the government's Flow Rate
Technical Group, told McClatchy.
Leifer said that based on satellite data he's examined, the rate of flow from the well has been increasing over time, especially since BP's "top kill" effort failed last month to stanch the flow. The decision last week to sever the well's damaged riser pipe from the its blowout preventer in order to install a "top hat" containment device has increased the flow still more - far more, Leifer said, than the 20 percent that BP and the Obama administration predicted.
Leifer noted that BP had estimated before the April 20 explosion that caused the leak that a freely flowing pipe from the well would release 100,000 barrels of oil a day in the worst-case scenario.
The oil was not freely flowing before the top kill or before they cut the pipe, Leifer said, but once the riser pipe was cleared, there was little blocking the oil's rise to the top of the blowout preventer. Video images confirm that the flow of black oil is unimpeded.
"If the pipe behaved as a worst-case estimate you would have no visual change in the flow, and I don't see any obvious visual change," Leifer said. "How much larger I don't know but let's just quote BP."
How much oil is gushing from the well has been the subject of heated debate for weeks, with independent scientists suggesting that as much as 95,000 barrels could be gushing into the Gulf of Mexico each day. For more than a month BP and the Obama administration placed the figure at 5,000 barrels a day.
On Monday, Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the Obama administration's point man on the unfolding disaster, said that the government and BP still don't know how much oil is escaping. The "top hat" containment device captured 11,000 barrels of oil on Sunday, Allen said, and that BP was moving a second ship into position above the well to bring to 20,000 barrels the amount of crude that could be processed daily.
Allen also said that BP is moving a production platform with far greater capacity to the Gulf though that equipment may not be in place for several weeks.
“We just know that's their capacity. We still haven’t established what the flow rate is,” he said. “That is the big unknown that we’re trying to hone in and get the exact numbers on."
Even so, BP’s videos of the gusher showed black oil continuing to flow heavily from all around the wellhead as the crude leaks from around the cap’s edges.
A team of experts from government science agencies and universities estimated last week that at a minimum 12,000 to 25,000 barrels a day were flowing from the well, but the team declined to estimate an upper end for the flow because the information they received from BP was inadequate.
Leifer, who is described in the flow rate's preliminary report released last week as a "world reknown researcher" who's published more than 60 scientific articles, said BP still has not delivered the data that scientists need for an accurate appraisal of the spill's size.
"We're still waiting," he said.
Allen said that one reason it was important to be able to estimate the rate of flow was so that officials could know how much flow the cap could handle and how much would be lost into the Gulf. Officials say the gusher won’t be over until BP finishes drilling relief wells, probably in August.
Allen said the containment cap would have to be watched “very, very closely.”
“We ought to be ruthless in our oversight of BP, and trying to understand what oil is not being contained that's leaking out around that rubber seal, once we know what that flow rate is,” he said. “And we need to understand completely that if we have severe weather in the form of a hurricane, there may be times where we’re going to have to disconnect that operation and re-establish, and during that time we’re going to have oil coming to the surface again.”
Allen said early Monday that BP had closed one of the four vents on the cap and would try to close the others to get more oil flowing to the containment vessel. However, Wells, the BP vice president, later in the day said that the company had changed its view about the need to close the vents.
At first glance, it seemed that closing the vents was necessary to maximize the amount of oil and gas that could be collected, but that didn’t prove to be the case, he said. Keeping some vents open gave the company more flexibility when it had to shut down temporarily during a storm, as it did during a thunderstorm Sunday, he said.
Allen and Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, said during the news briefing that they didn’t know whether BP was required to pay federal royalties on the oil it was collecting from the runaway well.
McClatchy reported Thursday that BP stood to make millions of dollars on the oil. The Department of the Interior’s Minerals Management Service wouldn't say at that time whether BP would pay royalties to the U.S government on the oil that it captures.
Department of Interior spokeswoman Kendra Barkoff said Monday, however: “The Department of the Interior will ensure that all royalties owed to the United States are collected.”
75 Comments so far
Show AllThey cut the pipe off and put a cap over it to catch oil. I'm wondering why they wouldn't lower a very large stopper down into the hole and stop the flow.
It couldn't be that they just want to collect oil till the relief wells are finished? Could it?
Here is a VERY ROUGH calculation, from off the top of my head numbers, to demonstrate the pressures involved. The pipe is roughly 22" in diameter. Oil is coming out of the pipe at roughly 13,000 PSI. The area of a circle is Pi x Radius x Radius. So 3.14 * 11 * 11 = 380 sq inches x 13,000 = a total pressure of 4,939,220 lbs coming out of the pipe. That makes stoppering it pretty much impossible.
Another more tangible way of getting an idea of the pressures involved was reported by divers on the last big Gulf oil spill back in the 70s. That spill was shallow enough to send divers down to work on it. Sadly one of them lost his life trying to plug the damn thing. But the ones that survived said that when they got near the leak, it sounded like the roar of dozens, if not hundreds of jet engines!
Another little tidbit I ran across was that there are some abrasives mixed in with the oil and gas so there could be some scouring of the inside of the pipe which could weaken it over time. This COULD cause issues with the injection of concrete which is planned in August to finally shut it down.
I suspect/fear the situation in the Gulf is far worse than both .gov and .com are letting on. Most of my life I lived in CT and boated, fished, and dove in Long Island sound. I thought it was a beautiful place that I valued dearly, so I can appreciate the loss the people in the Gulf are going through. They live in the Gulf, they are part of the Gulf, part of its environment, not separate from it, or presiding over it, as some people like to view things. As this spill destroys the Gulf it destroys them.
What we are doing to the Gulf's environment now, is a microcosm of what we are doing to the planets environment, which like the Gulf we are part of. As we destroy our planets environment we destroy ourselves.
I'm curious....where did the 13,000psi come from?
And if the well can't be plugged, then how could it ever have been contained?
I suspect you're right on about one thing though. We're not getting the whole story and things are far worse than we know.
I read somewhere that they estimate 10 to 20 billion barrels in that deposit. (not sure about that figure but there's a lot of oil down there) Hard to imagine what that volume of oil would do the gulf. And the rest of the oceans.
Scary stuff.
13,000 was an off the top of my head figure. I've heard 10,000 PSI, 15,000 PSI, and others, so who knows how much for sure, but I was just trying to give people an idea of the pressures involved.
Thats a good estimate and with 86,400 seconds in a day, it is over a barrel a second pushing through the edges of that top hat.
They need to have a rover take videos farther back so we can see the floor around the well and roam all the way to where the rig has sunk to check for any other damage.
At some point after they cut the riser that was the only time they showed a wider distant picture and it looked like the floor was not leaking but they don't show the floor now that the top hat is putting top pressure on the whole broken system.
Ya, very interesting stuff. I'll do some research on that.
I wasn't suggesting that they just stick a cork in it. I was thinking more of a 100 ft long alloy tube with teeth like you'd find on the emergency stop of elevator ways and a huge shutoff valve or something on the top.
But I guess with all their top flight engineers stuff like that has already occurred to them.
Or maybe they just don't care about stopping the oil, they're only concerned with collecting as much as possible till those relief wells are operational.
Pertinent comment. We're outgrowths on this planet, destroying ourselves as much as we destroy the biosphere.
Your calculation equals pressure of about 1 atm. This means a person put atop the gusher at sea level would essentially be weightless (1 atm up, 1 atm down). A human being placed atop of it could be buoyed forever at the point where the gusher falls back upon itself, fountain-like.
If you are referring to one ATM as 1 atmospheric pressure, one ATM is 14.7 PSI. So 13,000 PSI is 884 ATMs. Pressure washers operate with pressures of between 1,000 PSI and 7,000 PSI, so my guess is if you tried to stand on top of the rushing oil, within seconds it would strip off your cloths, then quickly your skin, and finally the muscle off of your bones.
Funny, now our great TV Science guys are advocating traveling into a Black Hole in space so they can find another parallel dimension.
There is nothing like pressure to wake us up.
Funny, good correction. My bad. (Ooops - I forgot to multiply in the last factor of 1,000: that means roughly a thousand people could be balanced atop the gusher...)
My thought was to lower another BOP or similar device atop of the current one. Rather than go over the top of the gusher, have a pipe at the end to slide down into the current riser pipe, like a smaller straw inside a bigger one. Do not seal off the other BOP until the junction between the two is cemented in place. Then slowly cut off the pressure until the gusher is plugged. Someone pointed out that this would not work because the riser was sheered and not cut evenly and the opening is shaped more like a football than a circle.
Strong post. Thanks for the figures. It does not seem to have taken you long to have come up with those numbers yet neither BP nor the Obama administration have added up those numbers in over a month's time and counting. Also, what we're collectively doing to the planet's environment is really a reflection of what we have been doing to one another for a very long time. The prevailing "wisdom" has long been that it's easier to love an idea than to love one another...
Thats what I love about math. When done honestly it catches a liar every time. Here's another calculation. BP said they were spewing 5000 barrels/day. They said that when they cut the pipe it would spew another 20% more. So that should be about 6000 barrels/day.
But BP is now saying that they are capturing 15,000 barrels/day with their new Ronco oil sucker-upper, and from the pictures it is no where near capturing all of it. So who's bull sh!??ing who?
BINGO!
You got it glb.
For the past 50 days BP has been all about saving "their" oil.
Remember when they were saying it was 1,000/day?
I'm sure BP is considering the bottom line, how much the company can make out of each scenario. Any questions of responsibility or morality are left to the spin doctors that they pay outrageous salaries to. The oil gusher is not just in the Gulf, it is in the amount of profits oil companies make each year while they cut costs by ignoring any responsibility they have to their employees, to the public, to the poor fishermen who will be left destitute, and finally, to the environment that we all share. Oil companies have to be made to cap the financial gushers before anything can be done.
I live in a state (Arizona) where liberals are being attacked by hysterical and outraged neo-conservatives. Why aren't these people at least demanding that corporations act responsibly? Instead, they are wealth wannabes--the only thing that matters is the illusion that anyone can become rich 'in the land of the free' if they are just ruthless and greedy enough. Is this what the concept of freedom has come to? I'm sorry, but I'm thoroughly fed up with greedy ass holes, both the wealthy sort and their tea party followers. If everyone had just a smidgeon of compassion and concern for their fellow man, this world would not be in the awful mess it currently finds itself in. The greedy will never listen to reason, they have to be forced into submission. Until liberals have the balls to demand and enforce their 'agenda' (that is, of compassion and responsibility towards one's fellow man), we will never get anywhere. Liberals in the United States should be what liberals ought to be: people obsessed with making the world a place we can ALL live in, and willing to do what's necessary to make that a reality. I do believe in miracles, but if the miracle of getting the wealthy to 'go through the needle' is not possible, then we have to have bloody revolutions. I'm not talking about ideology now, I'm talking about the future and survival of our species.
Great post George. Yea I see the corporate spin-misters are plying their trade in that BP add. Clean Pelicans gazing across the ocean, bright colors, sunny skies, all kinds of good subliminal messages stuck into that piece of corporate bull crap.
Right wing fascists always look for a scapegoat to blame for the ills of the masses. During Germany's affair with Fascism it was the Jews. The American Right wing fascists have liberals and immigrants. You also nail it with the greedy wanna-bees. Yea don't tax the rich because when I get rich I don't want to have to pay taxes. (Dumb-asses IMHO.)
And I also agree with you that we are now talking about the survival of our species, and it doesn't look good if you ask me.
You wrote, "Until liberals have the balls to demand and enforce their 'agenda' (that is, of compassion and responsibility towards one's fellow man)"
With all due respect, you need to look more closely at what liberals really believe. They are as selfish as the tea-party followers you mention; they're just more hypocritical about it.
Several decades ago, liberalism in the U.S. was focused on compassion and responsibility towards one's fellow man, but it has since morphed into an ideology of the Self. Liberals like to brag about their compassion and social responsibility, all the while continuing to support politicians who engage in wars of aggression, torture, indefinite imprisonment without charges, the corporate rape of the Earth, and on and on.
Liberalism as it exists today has only one true commandment: feel good about yourself.
I see your point and if "Liberalism as it exists today has only one true commandment: feel good about yourself", then Liberals and Conservatives are essentially united... except for the tool of labels which are the means of political manipulation of our oppression rather than our liberation.
Feeling good about ourselves or your own self is not so bad.... It should be explored more out in the open.
The Declaration of Independence had a very revolutionary concept "the pursuit of happiness" as in the road is the way.
"If everyone had just a smidgeon of compassion and concern for their fellow man, this world would not be in the awful mess it currently finds itself in."
This statement has the ring of truth for me. Thanks.
True
The oil gusher highlights the catastrophic effects of congressional sell outs. Congress allowed deep water drilling absent essential safeguards, for money. Now neither congress nor the president can decouple from direct blame. This represents one small sample of the potential hidden harm congress has done. The rest is yet to be discovered. My concern is lax regulation of nuclear power generating plants. Just imagine the land the size of a large state rendered uninhabitable for generations. Imagine the deaths, cancers, and economic destruction such an event could cause. Yet no one is talking about it, why? Congressional and Presidential behaviors are sociopathic and therefore extremely dangerous. The Gulf gusher is catastrophic but what about the Congressional mine field of little or no industrial regulation, inspections, and oversight? Whether it's the mining industry, oil industry, or nuclear energy industry, the worst ill effects of unregulated capitalism and technical triumphalism seem to be manifesting with increasing regularity. It's only a matter of time until the bad effects of congressional and industry corruption strikes again. Add to that a few natural disasters and two foreign wars and the United States is out of control. A sense of severe foreboding permeates this land.
stone says ~ A sense of severe foreboding permeates this land.
I agree, personally, but find myself agape at how many people don't seem to feel this way...
Even among close friends, when I really get going, they tend to blame my perspective...yet, when I ask them how they feel about specific issues, I find their answers either shallow or evasive...
no matter what their opinion on a number of things, no one can even conceive of living without work, or school, or property, or stores for everything from food to phones...
even supposed radical viewpoints still exist only within narrow frames of thinking, frames disastrous for the natural world...
I've never been to the Florida Keys, but my wife has...she has wonderful memories of that trip, and thought it was idyllic...I was surfing some pics of Key West yesterday, and it did look fabulous...what a shame...
thanks for your post...I recommend a giant shutdown of the whole planet...a united, unanimous, global effort on September 22, 2012...
it never hurts to plant something we can all eat from for years, assuming...apple trees are good, for example...things like that...
peace...
That botched job at the very bottom where it's leaking around the casing; might be eroding away the earth, making a bigger hole around the well pipe/casing.
That would change everything!
Feels like the point of no return for the gulf.
Too big to fail. (BP)
Hear talk on the financial news about if they liquidated BP; how that would look.
No amount of money will ever bring back the life in the gulf; time is the only way she will heal.
I think of the migrating birds passing through. The billions of creatures of the ocean never to be found by people or film crews. Looks like an agonizing death.
Like Hayward, said; it's a lot of water.
I don't think Floridians grasp yet life with oil. The people fish and work the ocean do.
All that deep oil is going to have to rise as it passes through the shallow water between Cuba and the Keys.
England! Were sending your oil back!
I'm not laughing; IT'S SO SAD.
It is worse than just poisoning the gulf.
It is poisoning the global water system.
the other day, for a moment, I was imagining a number of the hundreds of wells going wild at the same time...say, a violent earthquake, or something, that throws many into 'gusher' mode, simultaneously...
I'm sure that's impossible, though...even HAARP couldn't do it, I bet...
And then last night on NOVA, a program about super-volcanoes. Yellowstone is an example of a huge one in N.A.
But left me thinking (naively optimistically)...since super-V's have been known to create ice ages, could one going off actually neutralize our warming planet?
The job was not "botched" at the ocean floor - it was botched on the alst casing string. Get you facts stright.This is a man made disaster - caused by arrogant people and a "command and control" culture - the old British Empire. and a weak, poorly regulated US Government - put in place by GWB.
Last casing string; I assume you mean the BOTTOM of the casing string.
WOW! I hope it's not 100,000 barrels per day. Maybe it's time to build flipper an ark.
BP got over 100,000 suggestions from people on how to fix the leak. Everyone is just trying to help. Here is my 2 cents. I sent it to Bobby Jindal a while back:
Think big to stop oil from further polluting the gulf. I suggest that the bottom be cut off a vessel - tanker, freighter, barge, etc. Cutting torches be used to make the internal areas of the vessel porous, like Swiss cheese, - so that oil would flow freely within the vessel. All external openings, hatches and doors, etc., of the vessel be welded shut to make it air tight. Pipes be welded to different areas of the surface of the vessel with remote control and manual open/close valves and fittings to attach riser pipes. The vessel should be transported between two ships to the site and lowered over the leak with cranes. All valves should be open when first lowered into place. The modified vessel would act as a big top hat. As many risers as required could be connected to tankers on the surface, (the rest closed off), and the oil collected till the well has bled out.
Talk about worst case, what if the relief wells being dug fail? The principle is to work with what is readily available and to think big and worst case. With real leadership, this could be done in 10 - 14 days.
A neurologist once told me that doctors opinions are like doctors noses. They all have one and they are all different. I guess oil spill fixes are no different.
Like the Ixtoc disaster thirty one years ago, the only thing that will kill this monster is drilling relief wells and pumping tons of cement in from the bottom. And that is still 3-6 months away.
BP knows what it has to do. They are just dragging their feet, trying to make a few million bucks along the way.
SJRyan,
That makes more sense than what they are waiting for now... they can do that and still drill the relief wells.
Maybe a ships size can reduce the PSI pressure.... They are trying to suck up too much oil and pressure with too narrow pipes.
Smaller the vessels and containers, the higher the pressure I imagine.
Jim Glover: That's what the multiple riser pipes are for. You could run ten risers if need be. They are trying to suck oil up "one" one mile long pipe. The pressure coming out of the well is 7,800 psi. Good luck with that.
There may be a leak around the well head at the base coming out of the sea floor. The pipe may be cracked below the surface of the ocean bottom from the unbelievably high pressure put on the pipe from the "top kill" operation. One big "top hat", tanker with the bottom cut off, could cover the whole mess.
It could be in place in two weeks and save the gulf from two to three more months of leak and be in-place if they are not able to "thread the needle" with a relief well.
You could run ten risers if need be. (Please Explain)
"they are trying to suck oil up "one" one mile long pipe"-- You can't suck any fluid up very far before you just create one big air bubble; it just doesn't work. The oil column in the pipe is lighter than the salt water column outside the pipe. Once you have enough oil in the pipe it kind of siphons up to the boat. Get too much water mixed with oil and you defeat the siphon effect.
"The pressure coming out of the well is 7,800 psi" That's a pretty exact number I haven't heard yet.
"One big "top hat", tanker with the bottom cut off, could cover the whole mess." -- They tried that first; and Natural Gas Hydrides (Natural Gas; frozen from extreme pressure, temperature and expansion.) formed and clogged up the works.
If you would of read anything we have been writing about you would of known these things.
Are you on crack? 10-14 days !?
So, when a hurricane comes a long and picks up that oil, my guess is that it will he raining oil all over the path of the storm. Hmmm! That is one I have not heard discussed at all.
Anyone have any ideas on that?
In general, the rain will knock the oil spray back down to the ocean surface.
However, if we get another 39 foot storm surge, that's when the sheen slides inland and stays inland.
Worse, the Gulf's current Sea Surface Temperature map correlates rather accurately with maps generated of the slick. Wind disruption of the slick may push a lot of water vapor into the air over a wide area, which fuels the hurricane.
I've heard and read a lot of opinions from both "experts" and laymen about what might happen should a hurricane hit the Gulf of Mexico and head into the Gulf coast. Sadly, I believe we are going to find out just exactly what happens when a hurricane arrives.
This well can be capped, but then BP would lose the production from that well. Everything they have done to date reveals that they are more interested in bringing that well into production. Iran has stated that it has the technology to do so, and has offered its assistance. Why not let them try? They certainly could not do worse than BP.
How much of the oil will evaporate and mix as oily rain, depends on the way the wind blows I would guess.
unsure which way the winds blowing, ask norman solomon
"Allen and Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, said during the news briefing that they didn’t know whether BP was required to pay federal royalties on the oil it was collecting from the runaway well."
The audacity is limitless.
yes, with compassion of inverse proportion...
First the well is leaking 100,000 barrels a day.
Then BP cuts the top off of the well, which streamlines the oil flow out the top, and it starts spewing 110,000 barrels a day.
Then they put a cap on the well and 10,000 barrels a day are being put into a tanker.
So in the end, nothing was done about the leak...
But BP made more money!
"For more than a month BP and the Obama administration placed the figure at 5,000 barrels a day."
Duh! Obomber is a corporate shill representing the interests of BP. The criminally low estimates are an attempt to reduce BP's financial liabilities and screw the public. S.O.S. in Washington.
A very interesting article with links:
Just how big is that gusher in the Gulf of Mexico?
http://pesn.com/2010/05/23/9501654_Gulf_gusher_size/
excerpt:
"The actual size of the gush coming out of the BOP is in the order of 2 to 3 times the Riser output. Everyone can argue any numbers but this is fudged down so far that it is probably wrong by a factor of 2 or 3 being too small for reality. The numbers suggest the possibility of a Million Barrels of Oil a day spill. (I am not willing to go that far out and prefer to suggest the 350,000 BPD rate)
As was first noted here (PESN Exclusive) the process of this spill is only bringing a small fraction of the oil to the surface. (Initially I suggested to Sterling Allan that it might be only 20% or so.) It probably is only 5%. Research ships have now found massive plumes of oil beneath the sea. The process of fractioning the oil is spreading out the oil separated by molecular weight in the saltwater column density anticlines. The exact volume of oil in these plumes as a percentage of their volume is not known at this time but even assuming a tiny fraction unbelievably large volumes of oil are escaping the well. The reported volume for one plume alone was 1.7 cubic miles. (Do your own math it was 10 miles by 3 miles by 300 feet thick) There were at least 5 similar plumes found."
Salazar went to DC Circuit Court April 2009 to allow this well to be drilled.
Its a month already and BP is with holding flow information from the impotent USA government that feels justified in killing anyone anywhere but not to commandeer information.
And the poor shrimpers of the Gulf are being forced to work, because of preshrimp season indebtedness, to not wear resperators and ruin their health for BP PR.
And Obomber says, "Let me make it perfectly clear bla, blah, blah...."
"For crying out loud, we should dispense with the pretense that we have an independent executive branch that represents all of the people, and simply replace Obama with a panel of corporate CEOs and wealthy financiers who are actually running the country."
You already have that.
They are called the United States Congress.
Well observed, Galenwainwright!
I'm forever carrying on about Congress devolving into a para-corporate service delivery system over the past few decades.
Money, Big Business, and Elected Misrepresentatives were never exactly strangers, but I'm still amazed that so few have noticed how the institutions of federal government have come to function like any other professionalized mercantile exchange.
The old-fashioned, reverent image of senators and congressmen solemly debating, writing, and disinterestedly voting on honest legislation still persists. The reality is more like the floor of a stock exchange, with each franchise owner pumped on the psychological steroids of greed and power-- screeching, jockeying for position, and generally flinging and grabbing whatever's at hand to fling or grab.
"Making sausage" is one thing, but making POISON sausage in the interest of furthering one's career and serving the overworld elite is another. In Amerika, the latter is considered "statesmanship".
A second oil rig(Ocean Saratoga)which is 38 miles from the BP oil plum is leaking oil. An attempt is underway to cover up the extent of the leak.(http://www.businessinsider.com/confirmed-there-is-a-second-leaking-rig-near-the-deepwater-2010-6)
Thanks, I have been looking for the second leak.
They found it and it is closer to the Mississippi than the BP one.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWHLrcxLVkg&feature=player_embedded
Now they need to check on seismic vibrations at the time of the BP explosion and all the way back to when this second leak was reported.
And I think this Horizon BP was not a new rig as we have been lead to believe... I could be wrong but i think they were doing repair work on the out of control well before and at the time of the explosion.
yay.
A ten percent success ratio, and people are congratulating the idiots who caused this disaster in the first place. Yet another example of the mendacity and mediocrity of the 'Average American'.
WIth this kind of 'success', the US should be bankrupt, embroiled in civil war and on the final path to complete Collapse by December.