Posted on 05/23/2010 12:05:38 PM PDT by mojitojoe
BP’s ruptured oil well at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico could be spewing nearly 20 times more petroleum into the ocean than the company—with the Obama administration’s complicity—has claimed. Since the April 20 accident that caused the Deepwater Horizon platform to explode and sink, BP has steadily said the broken pipe is releasing 5,000 barrels of oil a day. But Steve Wereley, an associate professor of mechanical engineering from Purdue University, told Congress on Wednesday that the well could be spewing 95,000 barrels of oil daily into the gulf, based on video footage released by BP.
(Excerpt) Read more at allgov.com ...
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/05/20/94581/low-estimate-of-oil-spills-size.html
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/05/18/94415/bps-secrecy-keep-facts-on-gulf.html
"U.S. exempted BP's Gulf of Mexico drilling from environmental impact study"
"Obama admin exempted BP's Gulf drilling from environmental impact study "
"Obama sheltered BP's Deepwater Horizon rig from regulatory requirement"
"Red Flags Were Ignored Aboard Doomed Rig "
It’s pretty easy to figure out. Take the cross-sectional area of the pipe and multiply it by the exit velocity of the oil (which can be estimated from the video footing) and you’ve got the volume of oil per unit time exiting the hole. Convert to units of choice as needed. There shouldn’t be a variation of a factor of nearly 20 in the estimates. Maybe a factor of 2 or 3, worst case.
Oh good grief...you think obama gives a tinker’s damn about BP’s legal exposure? BP’s exposure will be based on actual and punitive damages, not some fantasy dreamed up by some ambulance chaser. People like to make outlandish claims (like the lawyers) in order to line their own pockets...obama has no reason to protect BP (a British Company.)
I hope he hooked it into the water, but since he is lefty, he probably sliced it.(Takes one to know one—left handed but conservative!)
The first people Obozo sent down to the gulf was a team of Justice department lawyers. The last thing Obama will do is protect BP. He will however proclaim himself to be the only thing standing between BP and the pitchforks.
We’ve seen Obama play this game several times already.
.obama has no reason to protect BP
________________
BS!
Obama biggest recipient of BP cash
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0510/36783.html
See post #3.
“obama has no reason to protect BP”
Are you sure? BP has donated heavily to BO.
I suspect that contributions will be less next year..
What a bunch of crap! There is NO WAY that anyone can make any kind of estimate with any degree of accuracy base on video footage. It's like looking at a fire hose squirting water and making a wild assed guess at how much is coming out.
3.5 million over 20 years? I suspect chump change for BP or obama. Heck the Unions are going to spend $100 million this year alone.
“I suspect that contributions will be less next year.”
I suspect they’ll be greater, the money they send to BO is a drop compared to what they are spending on the spill. Access/influence to the white house is expensive and you don’t give it up easily.
In few words... you bet your ass they are hiding the extent and magnitude of the Spill. Furthermore they are hiding just how bad it can get.
When the submersibles are reporting “volcanoes” of oil.... that HAS to be HUGE. Volcanoes do not come in small sizes.
I forgot to mention, there is talk of Nationalizing BP’s holdings in the gulf of Mexico to pay for the damages. Google BP and Nationalization and that brings up a lot of chatter.
I think they are hiding the possibilities until it becomes impossible to hide. THEN they will ramp it up into Rham’s “Crisis” level and use it as justification in Nationalizing BP. Shoot they did it with GM, don’t think they won’t do it here as well, constitutional or not.
The model also suggests that virtually all of the benzene — a highly toxic flammable organic chemical compound and one of the chief ingredients in oil — would be stripped off and quickly vaporize.
The model was not designed for deepwater spills like the one at the Macondo well in the Mississippi Canyon now threatening the Gulf Coast. But experts said the analysis might give a close approximation of what is most likely happening where the oil plume is hitting the surface nearly 50 miles south of Louisiana.
The size and nature of the spill also has been altered by response efforts. So far, about 436,000 gallons of chemicals have been sprayed on the oil to break it up into smaller droplets and about 4 million gallons of oily water have been recovered.
Of that recovered mixture, at least 10 percent is oil, BP and NOAA said. Smaller amounts of oil also have been collected after washing ashore, and crews have burned a negligible quantity off the surface.
That would leave as much as 2.7 million gallons at sea as of Friday, with about 210,000 gallons coming up from the well every day.
Larry McKinney, director of the Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, said the Deepwater Horizon spill reminds him of the last catastrophic oil flood in the Gulf.
In 1979, Mexico’s Ixtoc I in the western Gulf blew out and spewed about 420,000 gallons of oil a day for nine months. Large quantities of oil did not reach Texas beaches.
“This was a problem we ran into with Ixtoc, we never found the oil,” McKinney said. “But I think even today if you dig down in some sandy beaches you can find a layer of Ixtoc oil.”
Actually, if you knew the diameter of the hose and the pressure, you could figure that out. I don’t know if they know the pressure and I doubt the pressure is consistent.
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