There has been a lot of news on the BP oil disaster over the last few of months. Trying to sort through the misrepresentation of data and the rhetoric including the apology to BP from congressman Joe Barton has been a bit of a job in itself. Also, remember that BP continues to claim that oil plumes do not exist. Remember, too, after the first week the comparisons to the size of the oil slick to the size of states, but that comparison has disappeared. I would like to take a few paragraphs to put these into perspective.
The Gulf of Mexico is approximately 615,000 sq. miles in size. The best calculations on oil spread is that a single gallon of oil can create an oil slick up to a couple of acres in size, but that depends on the type of oil so I will use half of that to be conservative on the calculations of the size of the oil slick. The next parameter needed is how much oil is pouring out of the well. The latest estimates are close to 4.2 million gallons a day, though BP says that it is closing in on capturing half of it by mid July. The disaster has been going on for at least 70 days now. So we will use the conservative number of 2.1. million gallons per day in the calculations. Finding an up-to-date amount of dispersant being used was a bit hard but as of June 18 the estimates are about 1.3 million gallons and the ratio of oil too dispersant is 1:50 meaning that at least 50 million gallons of oil have been dispersed too somewhere.
Using this data, the amount of oil that has been dumped into the gulf, conservatively speaking, is about 147 million gallons which would cover an area of about 230,000 sq. miles or a third of the Gulf of Mexico. That is about the size of Texas. But then there is the dispersed oil which is approximately 50 million gallons or about a third of the total slick. The dispersed oil is about the size of Nebraska. So the size of the visual slick should be the size of Montana when we subtract out the dispersed oil. The big question is where is the dispersed oil? How can you hide an area the size of Nebraska? That is the oil plume that BP has continually denied exist.
Another piece of data that has been thrown around is that BP has spent $2.3 billion to clean up the oil spill. Again, we have conservative numbers to play with. BP has two drilling rigs trying to drill relief wells. A deepwater rig costs $500,000 per day and let's say they have been at work for 50 days totaling $25 million. That doesn't include the 100 workers per rig which would run around $6 million. I could not find the Coast Guard numbers but they have a dozen oil skimming ships in the gulf. There are 15 foreign ships helping in the cleanup contrary to some reports. That also doesn't account for the three robotic submersibles operating at the well head. BP also spent $50 million to tell people that they were going to clean up the mess while spending another undisclosed amount of money to secure Search Engine words and terms on the internet.
I cannot find numbers yet but I am sure that they will surface about how much money is being spent on law enforcement that has been keeping reporters from doing their job and reporting what is happening on the ground. If you haven't noticed, all reports are from sandy beaches and very few from mash lands. We are also seeing the cleanup of wildlife but very few dead creatures.
The Joe Barton apology has also been washed over. It seems that it wasn't off the cuff but was a prepared statement by the Republican Study Group which was signed by 119 members of the Republican House caucus and released the day before the apology.
When you look at spills in other parts of the world, the people of the gulf coast are lucky. In Nigeria, for more than 50 years of oil exploration, the equivalent of the spill in the Gulf of Mexico occurs regularly. Oil companies ignore them, governments whimper about the safety of the environment and the international community considers the matter too remote for its attention. One source calculates that oil spilled between 1960 and 1997 is in upwards of 100 million barrels and 546 million barrels (4 to 20 billion gallons) to date.
http://rsc.tomprice.house.gov/News/DocumentSingle.aspx?DocumentID=191125
http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2006/3/30/2289/12164
http://allafrica.com/stories/201006210097.html