Staring day after day at images of oil billowing from an undersea well in the Gulf of Mexico, many Americans are struggling to make sense of the numbers.
On Monday, BP said a cap was capturing 11,000 barrels of oil a day from the well. The official government estimate of the flow rate is 12,000 to 19,000 barrels a day, which means the new device should be capturing the bulk of the oil.
But is it? With no consensus among experts on how much oil is pouring from the wellhead, it is difficult — if not impossible — to assess the containment cap’s effectiveness. BP has stopped trying to calculate a flow rate on its own, referring all questions on that subject to the government. The company’s liability will ultimately be determined in part by how many barrels of oil are spilled.
The immense undersea gusher of oil and gas, seen on live video feed, looks as big as it did last week, or bigger, before the company sliced through the pipe known as a riser to install its new collection device.
At least one expert, Ira Leifer, who is part of a government team charged with estimating the flow rate, is convinced that the operation has made the leak worse, perhaps far worse than the 20 percent increase that government officials warned might occur when the riser was cut.
Our press corps is all titillated that Obama said “kick ass.” Should be an interesting day.
El Cid
The Onion: Massive Flow of Bullshit Continues to Gush from BP Headquarters.
Comrade Javamanphil
By interesting I assume you mean “Nice day to become a meth addict and smash your head in with a hammer.” Meanwhile CBS morning news show had a 5+ minute segment on a woman pimping her baby’s Lady Gaga parody. We are doomed.
stuckinred
Here’s the blog from our UGA research team on the plume.
demo woman
My President said Kick Ass? I had on the Today Show and sat here fuming that Lauer compared the fiasco in the Gulf to the capture of embassy workers during the Carter Presidency. The kick ass comment just went over my head.
me
He actually said “whose ass to kick”. Somewhat different connotation.
stuckinred
@me: It’s like a fucking English class around here today. “She said, she meant, he said, he meant”. . .
dmsilev
I think you meant to say ‘looks like I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue’.
You’re welcome.
dms
Cat Lady
I don’t know how y’all subject yourselves to morning teevee. It hasn’t been turned on in my house for months, and it hasn’t occurred to me to do so once since then. I know what’s waiting for me – stupidity, vapidity and misinformation from talkbots who don’t know half as much as I do, and it’s not even my job to know. No thankya.
DBrown
I don’t get it so please, someone, explain – BP could have easily stopped the leak within a week by simply crimping the tube (well, maybe 99.9% stopped.) Since they cut it, those shears could have been blunted to crush, not cut and the pipe is closed. This makes no sense!!!! Please, tell me why this was impossible!
Nick
@Comrade Javamanphil: Here in New York, our Fox affilate interrupted this natural disaster to bring you another school choir who wants to be like the kids in Glee.
and now here they are singing “I Got a Feeling”
Brian J
Since everyone in this thread probably hasn’t placed their face in their palm just yet, here’s something to get that started, via the No More Mister Nice Blog. From The Washington Post:
After reading stuff like this, I wish I were dead.
4tehlulz
@DBrown: IIRC crimping the pipe would have caused increased pressure in the BOP and completely blown it out, making things much worse than they already are.
Michael
@Brian J:
Can we just line up the top five tiers of BP executives on a wall? It isn’t like they’re not fungible – they can be easily replaced, and shooting them seems to work for China.
Brian J
@Michael:
I was going to suggest we have them camp out on the beach and be heavily involved in the clean up, but they’d probably figure out a way to fuck things up even more.
ChrisS
@DBrown:
My guess is that the pressures probably would have blown the riser right back open if they crimped it.
Michael
@Brian J:
Right on top of the surf line.
Comrade Dread
Free Markets, bitches. Free Markets.
USA! USA! USA!
D-Chance.
How can they be collecting 11,000 barrels per day when they claimed the well was only leaking 5,000 per day?
4tehlulz
@D-Chance.: Because what everyone needs to understand is ZOMG LOOK OVER THERE OBAMA SAID ASS ON THE TEEVEE
Hypnos
@DBrown: I have no idea, but I’d say pressure. You can’t just put a plug in the hole and call it a day, because the stuff is gushing out with sufficient pressure to cut through steel.
So if they want to cap it, they need to use a cap equipped with a hose to siphon off the crude without letting the pressure build.
The other solution – the only one that actually stands a chance to work, that was known since the beginning was the only credible solution – is the relief well, which means taking out pressure by sucking the oil up through a second hole that hopefully doesn’t blow up.
Which means leak fixed by late August at best. If the relief well hits the oil field in the right place, which is far for certain – over at The Oil Drum folks are saying 3+ relief wells should be drilled, to be on the safe side.
Goes without saying that each relief well can blow up just like the main one did, effectively doubling the leak overnight.
Hope the south eastern USA wasn’t planning on going to the beach or eating fish for the next couple generations. I mean those SUVs will have to be fueled somehow, don’t you think?
Brian J
@D-Chance.:
Shut up, that’s how!
El Cid
@Brian J: Do they snicker and call him “Fu Man” Chu and pretend it was a mistake?
Morbo
@4tehlulz: That is what fluid dynamics suggest would happen.
Maude
@DBrown:
The Oil Drum
You can find out a lot of information there.
Brian J
@El Cid:
Possibly. I also heard that they asked him if he had any contraptions like the Asian kid in The Goonies.
Michael
@Hypnos:
Over at the FReak, they’re sill bitching about the moratorium, pretending that oil isn’t a globalized commodity.
My vote is that Paul Shanklin and Rush Limbaugh be placed in a Ford Expedition. Shanklin’s hands would be duct taped to the steering wheel, Limbaugh’s body duct-taped into the passenger seat. The SUV would be hauled into an oily patch about 20 yards off the beach and dumped into about 10 feet of oil fouled water while Shanklin’s “In a Yugo” plays on the CD changer.
You could have pay per view of the fun in the interior of the SUV.
WereBear (itouch)
it’s one lowest common denominator after another. I know that’s all they offer. That’s why I don’t watch.
Punchy
I’m glad someone else noticed. Been watching the BP/CNN feeds, and it looks worse then before the cap was used. There’s no way the GOM can withstand that amount of leakage for 2-3 more months.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Maude: Exactly.
Lots of info there, been fascinating lately.
mark boggs
I had the unfortunate timing to be stuck in front of a TV at the gym as the fine folks on Fox and Friends decided to go off on Obama about his “leadership.”
.
Then Laura Ingraham came on and talked about how we needed government to solve this problem and the fact that government hadn’t solved this problem was Obama’s fault. Laura Ingraham is a socialist…who knew? And she sneered down her nose about the fact that Obama was trying to be a tough guy by uttering an expletive. Can you imagine the pre-seminal dripping, cod-piece bulging hard-on these folks would have had if Bush had said something similar about Muslim turrists?
Paris
Doesn’t BP know how much their tanker holds, and how long it takes to fill, and therefore how much they’re capturing with their latest anal sex colloquialism.
Face
Peeps on TOD that know a lot more than we do say the backpressure would have so FUBARd the whole contraption that it may have just more or less exploded and there’d be a free-flow of shit, uncontrolled by anything.
Which is only slightly worse than what’s happening now.
Robert Sneddon
@4tehlulz:
There’s a lot of damaged pipe and connections in the hole leading from the reservoir up to the wellhead. If they crimp off the wellhead then that pipe will start to leak because of the trapped pressure and the oil and gas coming out from those leaks can’t be collected. The gusher at the top of the wellhead can be intercepted, mostly.
Analogies are bad OK but imagine a length of garden hose with a lot of pinholes along its length. Connect it to a tap and nearly all of the water will flow out the end into a bucket. Block the end and the pinholes will start spraying water everywhere.
BTW the relief wells aren’t being drilled to relieve the reservoir pressure, they are going to be used to backfill the original drillhole with mud followed then concrete to seal it off permanently from the bottom up. The “top kill” operation tried to do that from the top down but it failed, in part because the top of the well was open to the sea through the damaged riser and most of the mud escaped rather than forcing the oil and gas back down the hole far enough for concrete to be injected. That was the the reason for the “junk shot” to try and block the riser enough for the top kill to do its job. Didn’t work.
As for drilling more relief wells, there are two rigs being used right now. The area above the blowout is very crowded with ships and rigs — I saw one picture that made it look like a mall carpark on a Saturday. I’m not sure they could fit another rig into the area safely.
Dr. Omed
I don’t think it lessens the perfidy of BP and those in Gov’t that promoted deregulation to point out that it’s very, very hard to stop crude oil blasting out of a hole in the seafloor at a pressure of 13,000 pound per square inch, under a mile of water.
Very likely the relief well is the only possible remedy. There is no fix; no magical technological solution to this. The spill could have been prevented, but it happened, and no matter whose ass gets kicked, the milkshake has been spilled and we don’t have the straws to drink it all up. In fact, our straws are pathetic, and we simply don’t have the capability to suck up more than a small fraction of the spill.
No amount of bloviating or even real political will were it available can change the laws of physics, the geology, or the calamitous environmental fact of this massive, ongoing spill.
Wave bye bye to the Brown Pelicans.
Maude
@Robert Sneddon:
And the BOP is not a happy camper.
Your summary was a win.
Maude
@Dr. Omed:
But if I clap louder…
Shalimar
I’m not a scientist so my opinion on this means nothing, but it seems like if they still can’t even get an accurate estimate of how much oil is leaking after almost 2 months then they shouldn’t be drilling there at all because they obviously aren’t capable of doing even basic things effectively.
Linda Featheringill
@Cat Lady:
“I don’t know how y’all subject yourselves to morning teevee.”
May I recommend Animal Planet with your morning coffee?
Third Eye Open
This is an opinion of a Gulf coast resident, namely, Me:
Obama doesn’t want to be the guy left holding the bag as one of the world’s largest companies, a linchpin in the slowing economy of one of the few countries in the EU that can help to stabalize what is now one of the three largest economies in the world. I don’t think he cares one iota about what mean things people are saying about him, even if his polling wonks are telling him that the public wants spit and vinegar. He seems more afraid that the economic stability of a large part of the world is starting to really appear to be held together by baling-wire and hope. Shitty situation, but I have given up any hope of a real accounting of what is going on. We will have wonderful scientists and graduate students who will make careers and fortunes from this mess. But in the courts, the gov’t scientists will dither and equivocate for the official record. But, I would love to be proved wrong.
Liz
I’ll admit I was a little titillated too. :\
Linda Featheringill
@DBrown:
Why BP could not just crimp the broken riser pipe a long time ago.
According to the pros on The Oil Drum:
1. Apparently, the original blowout occurred down in the well, below the blow out preventer [BOP]. The “blowout” was in the form of an explosion. It seems that a piece of pipe or casing or whatever was pushed up from down below and into and through the BOP. [Some have guessed that this occurred about 1000 feet below the seabed.]
2. This extra whatever-it-is makes it very difficult to cut through or crimp the riser. It may also have caused the malfunction of the BOP, as it could not smash its way through the drill pipe.
3. There seems to be some leaking and lack of integrity between the BOP and the site of the original blowout. Any measures that stop the flow of oil above the bop will likely cause further blowout below the BOP. The result would be bigger holes and probably more holes in the bottom of the sea. The whole situation would be much worse.
Now – did that make you feel better? It doesn’t make me feel good, either.
BC
I think BP can actually gauge the amount of oil spilling but chooses not to because their liability is tied to the amount of oil spilled. There is a conflict of interest in having them determine what the spill rate is. I suspect that Obama is asking the USGS if they can get a better spill rate, one that is defensible in a court of law, but isn’t public with that.
Mr Furious
I’m not sure why anyone should be relying on “an estimate” of how much oil they are capturing…
The oil is being pumped into a tanker. If it’s empty in the morning, how much fucking oil is in there at the end of the day?
And all of that oil should be getting delivered straight to the Strategic Reserve, not BP’s bottom line. Obviously I want them capturing the oil rather than spilling it, but the thought that they might make a dime from this disaster makes me want to wretch.
Rosalita
@Cat Lady:
I’m with you. I dust the teevee but that’s about it. Can’t handle that crap, especially in the morning.
JGabriel
John Cole:
If Obama wants to know whose ass to kick, I’d say: start with every CEO, executive, and upper level manager who ever told an underling, “I don’t care how you get it done, just get it done, under budget. Cut corners if you have to, but don’t tell me about it. Do more with less.”
.
Pengie
@Linda Featheringill: Just to add some more sunshine:
4. The floor of the gulf is porous mud down to at least 1000 feet below the sea bed (again according to the Oil Drum gurus). If a blowout happens deep down, the released oil would be coming up all over the place, and nothing would be restraining it.
5. The BOP is containing some of the pressure, so if that were not in place or if a major rupture happened below it, the flow rate would be much much worse. It might be possible for them to top kill it with the riser cut off now, but that would increase pressure on the drill pipe and could risk a rupture down deep.
I think containing and processing as much of it as possible with the cap is the best they’re going to do until the relief wells are done. There’s just too much risk involved in monkeying around with anything below the blow-out preventer.
What I don’t understand is how we’re going to ever get an accurate idea of how much oil is coming out of the pipe. We know what’s being collected up top, but there have been a lot of changes in the plume coming out of the riser. Before the cap was installed there were multiple breaks along the riser, so you couldn’t see it all in one place. After they cut off the riser, it’s all coming out of the same hole, and maybe the total volume is increased, but maybe not. With the cap on, there will always be oil coming out around the collar because they can’t allow water to come in that way. Water coming in there could freeze up the pipe with hydrates, just as happened with the first top hat attempt. So we have a mix of oil and gas coming out all around the collar, probably at a higher pressure than what was coming out the BOP when it was exposed. I don’t know much about fluid dynamics, but I don’t think what we can tell by eyeballing the plume coming out of the collar will tell us much about volume. I’m sure they have some computer modeling in place that they are using to calculate throughput, and that’s probably the best we’ll get, but the fudge factors we’ve been seeing in the estimates so far are huge.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Paris:
Pretty much. There are detailed updates daily from them. They started capturing a few thousand barrels a day, the next day it was 10,500, then, 11,00 and this is the most recent report:
So that’s half a day, which means at that rate a full day would be 15,000. 15,000 BPD is the maximum capacity of the recovery ship, so they’re bringing in another one.
As far as what percentage of the total being released that is, or if they’re lying about any of all of that or etc, I’m not making a claim one way or the other and I’ll leave that to whoever wants to debate it.
One thing I can say is that after learning even a little about it all, the idea that anyone can make a scientific or even quantitative estimate of anything by watching videos of stuff swirling around and comparing it to last week seems pretty ridiculous.
That’s actually pretty much what James Cameron said the other day by the way, sort of the opposite of how he was quoted. The whole exchange is here, sort of interesting I thought:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036697/#37518189
Robert Sneddon
@Maude:
From what people with some knowledge of oil drilling have been saying it’s quite possible the Blow Out Preventer (BOP) wouldn’t have stopped the oil release happening even if it had worked properly. A blowout is when the oilwell runs away producing too much oil and gas, a “burp” if you like. The BOP could have perhaps stopped that happening but when the well pipes deep underground fail and break loose then that’s not something the BOP can actually stop. It might have reduced the damage and maybe saved the rig but there’s evidence to suggest that that chunks of pipe from over a mile down the borehole punched up through the wellhead mechanism and the BOP after they broke loose. That may be the reason the last-ditch shears didn’t work either.
Why the pipe broke loose and the well ran away is probably down to the engineering decisions on how to seal the connections down the bore, the disputed cementing and pressure testing reports on the Deepwater Horizon that have been mentioned on the news previously. That’s up to the engineers and the lawyers to determine once the evidence has been gathered. That will include recovery of the riser pipe and eventually the wellhead itself for thorough examination. That last part can’t happen until after the well is permanently sealed though.
Dog is My Copilot
What I’m afraid of is that no asses will ended up getting kicked at all. I listened to an NPR update report this morning on the oil spill. Not once was it mentioned how the oil is affecting the region’s wildlife. I’ve seen enough pictures already of oil-covered birds, turtles, fish and other creatures to make me totally disgusted. And totally pissed off that this happened in the first place. And what will be done about it in the end? The oil companies will continue to do whatever the hell they want because we need their product. In this day and age where we’ve put men on the moon, why is it that the technology to stop an oil spill of this magnitude has not been developed?
Robert Sneddon
@Mr Furious:
Points in order:
They know how much oil they are capturing. That’s why the daily reports give figures like 11,500 barrels of oil collected. It’s not guesswork, there are flow meters and such on the drill ship that is collecting the oil and gas. To forestall public outcries of “liar” they made sure a third-party monitors the operation and signs off on the daily reports.
The limit on the collection rate is based in part on the oil processing gear on board the drill ship. It has to separate out the gas from the oil and maybe remove the seawater and that can deal with a maximum of about 15,000 barrels per day. They’re bringing in more processing capacity but it’s not off-the-shelf stuff, it has to be shipped in from other locations around the world and that takes time. The drill ship itself can hold about 100,000 barrels of oil, nearly 7 days maximum production and they can offload onto barges when necessary.
The US Strategic Petroleum Reserve is full. They’ve got nowhere to store any extra fuel. The SPR stores refined fuels like gasoline and diesel, not crude oil anyway. It is intended to enable the US to fight a major war with oil supplies cut off.
BP is going to need money to pay for the cleanup but the revenues from this oil collection are not going to be a spit in a bucket compared to the butcher’s bill coming up. Driving them into bankruptcy may make some folks feel good for a while but when the cleanup operation stops since no-one’s bankrolling it any more what then?
DanF
@Comrade Javamanphil: It’s not even just the broadcast shows … NPR last night had on a part one of a two part segment on this couple trying to determine the heritage of their mutt with DNA tests. Really?? How about saving it for a news day when: the Gulf isn’t being destroyed, primaries are set to happen in many states, Israeli-Egyptian-Turkish relations are imploding, the Bhopal disaster verdict FINALLY comes in and is a sham, Kim Jong-Il’s son gets the nod for succession, and England is about to alter it’s social safety net … and that’s just off the top of my head! Doomed indeed.
PTirebiter
@Dog is My Copilot:
and even more confounding to me is why they would pass on some of the back up systems for the technology they have? Seems like cheap insurance to me. And why weren’t the workers on the rig more appropriately paranoid making their rounds?
Is it just human nature to minimize the danger after a while?
PTirebiter
@Robert Sneddon:
Undoubtedly true, but it will be painful to hear that argument used by someone in Congress to promote some give away for big oil.
Elie
@Robert Sneddon:
This. Exactly.
Like it or not, the decisions around how to handle the financial and significant legal and political issues in this unprecedented situation should not be made without careful consideration. That to many seems like dithering or downright abdication of leadership by the Obama team, but if he and the administration screw this up, the government is left holding the bag and not only does BP escape, but it takes all the other companies with similar risk and exposure with it through the hole. Go easy, I say, and seal off all the escape holes first (like closing the vents on the relief dome)…
I too am very frustrated. It certainly would feel great to choke the living daylights out of the entire oil corporation executive leadership, but the longer I see things play out, the more that I think that our whole system in some ways is in blow out — all the thought of safeguards and controls are not working and after decades of being taken apart, reinstituting what is no longer there is going to be extremely difficult…I hope in fact, that its doable and that we won’t lapse into wanting some sort of authoritarian solution imposed fast because we don’t have the patience for the political process…
Bill H
What’s interesting to me is that article after article says that we don’t really know how much oil is escaping, that the only information we have is what BP is releasing and that the information is unreliable and inconclusive, so we don’t know how much has been dumped into the Gulf and we don’t know how much is still being dumped, and not one article makes the next step which is to demand that we find out what the accurate numbers are.
Why is the only underwater observation being made by BP? Why is there no one other than BP providing visual or other data upon which accurate estimates of the flow rate could be made? The question is not even being asked, much less an answer to it being demanded.
bago
@Michael: Like this?
Bokonon
[Cue Beavis and Butthead laughter]
Heh-heh. Heh-heh. Heh-heh. The President said “ass”!
Heh-heh.
Robert Sneddon
@Bill H:
We know exactly how much oil is being released by the Macondo well — a Jesus-load and a half. If you want real numbers then what you do is you take that cap off, the one that’s now funnelling about 15,000 bbd up to the surface and you spend three or four days putting accurate measuring gear down the hole while it continues to blow oil straight into the Gulf and then maybe you’ll get a real number plus or minus a percent or two. You’ll have to run it for a week or so to get a good average as the pressure and flow fluctuates up and down due geological reasons two miles underneath the wellhead. After that the engineers can get back to trying to collect the oil that’s flowing out and the number-wankers can all have their long-delayed orgasm in synchronisation.
Spending the effort to determine the exact flowrate out of the wellhead costs not just money but also engineers and time and ROV capabilities and working space around the top of the wellhead, all of which are in finite supply. Worst case: when trying to fit an accurate flow monitor the wellhead gets damaged and it fails completely. This is a scenario the engineers are terrified of and rightly so.
Once you’ve got the number +/- 5 bbd it doesn’t actually help the effort to stop the flow and clean up the mess. The only place that number’s really going to matter is in the courtroom when the fines are being adjudged and that is a long time coming.
Is it baseball that gets the US mind in a tizzy about exact numbers down to three digits after the decimal place, or what?
Elie
@Robert Sneddon:
Man, you are on a roll today…
Thank you.
DBrown
Damn, no where in the news could you directly get all this great information – no wonder they are losing $$$ to the blogs – really great and informative posts by all of you, thanks!
uloborus
I would like to interject a positive note here that people may find dubious. It’s not about the spill, it’s about the damage.
We have no idea what level of damage this will do to the Gulf. This is actually important, because assumptions have been ‘it will decimate it’, and they’re probably not true. The UGA blog was fascinating to me, because they’re looking primarily at factors that involve environmental damage, like how fast the oil is biodegrading. The answer is ‘Much, much faster than expected’. They were also looking at oxygen depletion, which is a big threat, and there’s no sign of dangerous depletion yet, months into the process.
I’m not an environmental scientist, but it was part of my coursework in college to an entomology degree, because all the bio-sciences tend to fit together. What I can say for sure is that the biome is much, much more resilient than you’d think, and so tremendously complicated that predictions are spitting in the wind.
The Gulf could be screwed, but don’t give up hope. It could also be nothing but a hiccup. We won’t really know until it’s over.
None of this will comfort the dead pelicans and walruses, of course, but it reassures me a little.
(Before someone screams, because people are quick on the emotions here, yes the ‘walrus’ bit was a joke at BP’s environmental damage estimate.)
tavella
The Gulf is a lot better than Prince William Sound at dealing with oil, so I don’t despair of recovery for the environment. Warmer, and a large population of microbes whose natural food is oil seeps. After Ixtoc I, the beach and bay recovery was pretty amazing.
However, the marshes are more fragile and already stressed than the Ixtoc locale. And the larger species will be hit hard — microlife breeds back fast, you wipe out bird rookeries and you may lose entire species. We might have lost the Olive Ridley after Ixtoc if it wasn’t for emergency efforts to airlift eggs and adults out of the death zone.
Elie
@uloborus: @tavella:
Thanks for your comments and I believe that your comments are examples of how we should at least begin thinking about recovery. One does not recover from a place of complete despair and capitulation. I agree as well that nature is resilient and our jobs are to be mindful of how to support that and to be energetic in doing so..
I am so sick of the negativity and digging more holes of despair and anger…
This is a transformational situation… and as bad as it is, I hope that we do work to transform our failed politics and oversight instead of finding voice to only the blame game… I continue to be disappointed in the progressives, sad to say…
Comrade Javamanphil
@DanF: That’s pretty bad but at least that might have a scientific progress angle. CBS was actually reporting on youtube comments. The only explanation I have is Baldrick appeared at a meeting of journalists in 1996, said “I have a cunning plan” and they all believed him.
ET
I am currently on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, Pass Christian to be specific, any my mother who loves the pelicans is so upset because most of them are nowhere to be found. Someone saw 2 the other day – when usually you would see 10+ depending on what you were doing.
It would really, really suck if BP managed to kill a species just when it came back from DDT.
Boney Baloney
I’d like to add my voice to those cautioning that, in economic terms, the liquidation of BP in detail + U.S. costs of wiping BP’s ass and actually fixing the problem IS LESS THAN U.S. costs of wiping BP’s ass and actually fixing the problem.
Don’t you see? The more BP’s butt hurts, the less money is available to minimize the horrifying disaster, and since the U.S. is willing and able to spend a king’s ransom to fix the problem, it’s un-American to expect the Syndicate to waste shareholder resources to do the job. And everyone has a share, even you, Yossarian. I’m appealing to you from my heart. Don’t you think I want my life back?