Posted on 05/27/2015 4:10:45 AM PDT by thackney
Plains All American Pipeline, the company which owns the pipeline at the centre of an oil spill off the coast of California, on Monday downgraded the amount of oil it says spilled in a worst-case scenario.
The company said the estimate of the worst-case volume of oil released was up to 101,000 gallons – about 4,200 gallons less than previously believed.
Plains All American is still cleaning up the spill along the Santa Barbara County coastline and recovering oil from the pipeline, so the calculations are not final.
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
ABC radio news was hyperventilating about this last week. 100,000 gallons strikes me as a pretty minor spill.
As spills go it’s not huge, but Santa Barbarans are pretty sensitive about this sort of thing.
A zit is just a zit, but when Katy Perry gets a zit, that’s NEWS.
Such a trivial spill that CNN wants to make into a global crisis.
Millions of barrels of oil naturally leak in the Santa Barbara channel every year. Nature takes care of it naturally.
I've heard the average daily output from natural seeps in the Coal Oil Point area is about 50,000 gallons. I drove past the spill site yesterday and caught of whiff of tarry Santa Barbara crude. The post-cleanup repairs were in progress. Looks like pretty small potatoes, not a reprise of the Torrey Canyon disaster the Guardian is pitching. You go walking around the beach there and you may step in tar from a natural seep. Despite the closed beaches there were surfers out there north and south.
With today’s technologies for mitigation and remediation, together with the popular and political sentiment that they be used, will nature recover? Yes. Time to move on.
Updated info. The amount of oil is immense that leaks in just these few places. Imagine the amount in the rest of the 70% of the ocean. Nature manages without our interference in cleaning up the oil.
There is effectively an oil spill every day at Coal Oil Point (COP), the natural seeps off Santa Barbara where 20 to 25 tons of oil have leaked from the seafloor each day for the last several hundred thousand years.
http://www.livescience.com/5422-natural-oil-spills-surprising-amount-seeps-sea.html
In the Gulf of Mexico, there are more than 600 natural oil seeps that leak between one and five million barrels of oil per year
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum_seep
Good point — probably wouldn’t even be news if it had happened twenty miles further up the coast.
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