Though BP sticks to the ludicrous number of 5,000 barrels per day, scientific examination of either the videos that the oil giant has reluctantly shared, or the all too visible slick spreading across the ocean tell a different story. The trouble is, right now they're telling two stories.
Because the video of the gusher, available to BP shortly after the explosion that killed 11 men on the Deepwater Horizon, was until very recently hidden from the public, the oil slick on the surface was for many days the only way to measure the size of the disaster. In fact, BP wouldn't have even bumped their estimate to 5,000 if it hadn't been for the actions of SkyTruth, which took the approach of simply measuring the oil slick and calculating how much oil it contained. While BP has kept its fingers in its ears since then, SkyTruth has been updating its estimates. As of yesterday...
It's Day 35 of this fatal incident. Our estimated spill rate of 1.1 million gallons (26,500 barrels) per day, now on the conservative end of the scientific estimates, leads us to conclude that almost 39 million gallons of oil have spilled into the Gulf so far.
Meanwhile, we were supposed to have an "official" estimate from the government over the weekend. Instead we got an official reshuffling of the members of the committee making the estimate. And we still have no number.
However, while SkyTruth is estimating that BP is off by a factor of 5, other engineers looking at the video of oil gushing from the broken pipe have placed the rate of flow closer to 100,000 barrels a day -- 20 times more than BP is pretending to believe. Just as with SkyTruth's estimates, this number isn't that hard to derive. Looking at the speed of the flow by going frame by frame through the video and knowing both the size of the pipe and reference objects in the frame, it's simple geometry to determine how much material is emerging from the blown well. So why the difference? If the rate underwater is really that high, how could SkyTruth be underestimating by such a degree?
Blame it on the other Gulf gusher.
BP has been using unprecedented amounts of Corexit in the Gulf — tens or thousands of gallons every day for more than a month now. But not much is known about the dispersant's long-term effects.
Corexit is a "dispersant" manufactured by NALCO. The purpose of this dispersant, in NALCO's own terms is to:
When the COREXIT dispersants are deployed on the spilled oil, the oil is broken up into tiny bio-degradable droplets that immediately sink below the surface where they continue to disperse and bio-degrade. This quickly removes the spilled oil from surface drift...
As NALCO indicates, removing the oil from the surface does mitigate some of the effects on birds and other animals that live near the surface. However it has another effect that's more beneficial to BP than to the Gulf's full time residents: it hides the size of the spill. BP hasn't just been spraying Corexit onto the oil that has reached the surface, it's been injecting tens of thousands of gallons a day of Corexit directly into the rising column of oil.
This is a technique that has never been used before. It has undoubtedly prevented much of the oil from reaching the surface, just as BP has said. And as a result much of the oil that has blasted out of the opening has traveled in "plumes" at varying depths below the surface. Scientists have encountered these plumes hundreds of miles away from the original well site, and now oil washing into the marshes of Louisiana isn't just moving along the surface, but actually flowing up along the bottom of the sea, rendering the usual booms and floats useless in stopping the advance.
Not only is this unprecedented use of dispersant hiding the true size of the disaster and making the oil impossible to contain, the effect on sea life is absolutely unknown. The EPA's safety sheet for Corexit lists only short term toxicity tests for silverside minnows and mysid shrimp. That's an astoundingly limited amount of study for something that BP has now deployed in quantities exceeding half a million gallons.
What is Corexit made of? That's a trade secret. Safety documents indicate that it includes 2-Butoxyethanol (the solvent that makes Windex smell like Windex), propylene glycol (another solvent) and organic sulfonic acid. But hey, that's what's it really using to break up the oil?
Surface Active Agents: CONFIDENTIAL
Finally, while BP -- and government agencies -- keep insisting that the largely untested and unknown Corexit is "less toxic than the oil," there's a slight problem. Dispersants don't make the oil less toxic. By breaking the oil into small droplets, dispersants actually cause the oil to present more surface area to the environment, causing them to release soluble and volatile chemicals more readily. They don't react with the oil to neutralize the toxicity. So at least in the short term, when you add any dispersant, you don't get it's toxicity in place of oil. You get its toxicity + that of oil. What about the long term? We don't know.
The indiscriminate use of Corexit in the rising plume of oil is:
- Untested and unprecedented
- Allowing BP to mask the true size of the gusher
- Reducing the ability of traditional methods to control the movement of oil
- Creating an unknown hazard to organisms in the Gulf
By injecting over half a million gallons of dispersant directly into the rising column, BP has prevented about 80% of the oil from reaching the surface. So SkyTruth, measuring the size of the oil slick, is estimating about 25,000 BPD. Engineers looking at the video of the flow are estimating up to 100,000 BPD.
Meanwhile, BP insists it's only 5,000 BPD; a fiction that would be hard to keep up if they weren't hiding the great majority of the oil in the increasingly murky waters of the Gulf. Pressured to reduce its use of Corexit, BP's response is interesting.
Jackson says BP will reduce the use of the dispersant on the water surface mostly. She says injecting it underwater into the stream of oil spewing from the blown-out well head has shown to be more effective and less toxic.
Less toxic? Well... less toxic to BP's bottom line.