Gulf of Mexico Oil leak

Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 13, 2010; 12:47 PM

The world has finally seen directly the turbulent plume of oil, gas and water billowing from a sliced steel pipe on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. But new video clips, released by BP Wednesday afternoon, haven't clarified one of the central unknowns in this crisis: Exactly how much oil is leaking into the gulf?

* Video of Gulf of Mexico oil leak from ocean floor




It's clearly a lot -- anyone can see that. But experts say that, without a meter, it's impossible to estimate the flow, particularly since it's a mixture of oil, gas and water.
"Anybody who can tell you how much oil is coming out of that thing is likely lying to you," Bruce Bullock, director of the Maguire Energy Institute at Southern Methodist University, said after reviewing the video.
But BP could use established scientific methods to measure the flow if it chose to do so, said Rich Camilli, an oceanographer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. One technique, for example, would use sonar in a manner quite similar to sonograms used in medical diagnostics, he said. Or BP could use the containment dome that was lowered to the sea bottom as a kind of measuring device.
"More information is always better. Right now there's only a very sketchy idea as to what the flow rates are. It's important to have very accurate numbers, if nothing else to scale the response for the oil slick," Camilli said.
The oil slick on the surface of the gulf is a moving target for scientists trying to estimate the rate of oil leaking 5,000 feet below. The slick has changed sizes in heavy seas. There is an unknown amount of oil below the surface. And as of mid-week the slick had been pounded with 428,000 gallons of chemical dispersants dropped from a fleet of aircraft, BP spokesman Andrew Gowers said. Another 28,000 gallons of chemicals have attacked the plume at the sea floor in three "tests" of deep sea chemicals, Gowers said.
This oil is on the lighter end of the density scale, Gowers said.
"It's not thick, heavy crude that goes glop. It's light crude that when it reaches the surface of the water, it's more like iced tea," he said.
The official number for the rate of oil leaking is 5,000 barrels a day. The figure, announced April 28 by the Coast Guard, is a National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration estimate, based on aerial imagery and scrutiny of video from the sea bottom.
But officials have repeatedly tried to back away from the suspiciously round figure. Jane Lubchenco, the NOAA administrator, told The Post that the estimate should be considered "5,000 barrels-ish."
The round figure has been called a "guesstimate" by BP's chief executive officer, Tony Hayward.
Two weeks ago, an outside researcher, oceanographer Ian MacDonald of Florida State University, used satellite images gathered by the organization SkyTruth to produce an estimate of 26,000 barrels of oil a day. But MacDonald has made clear that it's a rough estimate and hasn't been subjected to scientific peer review.
"I shouldn't be trying to estimate these flow rates in the media; we should be trying to do this in scientific papers," he said.

* The oil drilling rig Deepwater Horizon suffered a blowout April 20 and, after burning for two days, sank to the bottom of the gulf. The Coast Guard initially said that the oil slick at the surface was from the rig itself, and Rear Adm. Mary Landry said there was no sign of a leak from the well itself. On April 24, two leaks were found by robotic submarines, and the Coast Guard estimated the leak at 1,000 barrels a day. Four days later, another, smaller leak was discovered, and Landry announced the higher estimate of 5,000 barrels.


News organizations, scientists and environmental groups asked BP to make public the video of the main leak, which comes from a pipe called the riser, about 460 feet from the blowout preventer that sits atop the wellhead. BP complied Wednesday with two short video clips, one showing the pipe spewing oil and gas, the other capturing the moment when a containment dome was lowered onto the leak in an abortive effort to capture the oil. The dome quickly clogged with slushy methane hydrates, formed by the mixture of pressurized gas and cold water.
Greg McCormack, director of the Petroleum Extension Service at the University of Texas, said the one revelation in the new video is the abundant gas that can clearly be seen spewing from the pipe in tandem with the darker oil. That might be a good sign, he said.
"If this was an all-oil well, you'd have a lot more oil flowing into the environment. Gas getting into that atmosphere is not the greatest thing, but it's a lot better than getting oil into the environment."
MacDonald, meanwhile, thinks BP should make more video public and enable the world's researchers to eyeball more fully the plumes of oil and gas.
"We're fighting a battle against this spill, this leak. Any military person knows that good casualty reports are the key to victory," MacDonald said.
Asked why the video hadn't been released earlier, BP chief operating officer Doug Suttles suggested that the technicians fighting the leak had been too busy to take the time to prepare the imagery for public scrutiny.
"This data is not easy to capture," Suttles said. "We actually have to assign some of our technicians to gather that data."

Coast Guard Rear Adm. Mary Landry said the government has had access to the video in real time, but indicated that it was up to BP whether the video could be made public. "It's BP's video," she said.