THE ARRIVAL OF GULF CRUD

Posted by BuelahMan
May 15, 2010

I pointed out early on how horrific this Gulf oil vomiting is.
How it could turn the Gulf (and possibly every ocean black).
How it could kill all living beings in her waters

and if the reservoir is as big as they claim,

might kill off every living being in ALL oceans

(thereby killing every other terrestrial being, as well).

What I am saying is that if this isn’t stopped,

it could be the very end of the planet.

I don’t think this is overboard, in any degree.

As I have said already a few times, this is far worse than what they have been telling us and even MSM is beginning to pick up this story. NPR had a fascinating story the other day and Common Dreams picked up on it.

Using a technique called particle image velocimetry, a computer program simply tracks particles and calculates how fast they are moving. Wereley put the BP video of the gusher into his computer. He made a few simple calculations and came up with an astonishing value for the rate of the oil spill.

He told NPR the actual spill rate of the BP oil disaster is about 3 million gallons a day ~ 15 times the official guess of BP and the federal government.

The method is accurate to a degree of plus or minus 20 percent.

Given that uncertainty, the amount of material spewing from the pipe could range from 56,000 barrels to 84,000 barrels a day. It is important to note that it’s not all oil. The short video BP released starts out with a shot of methane, but at the end it seems to be mostly oil.

“There’s potentially some fluctuation back and forth between methane and oil,” Wereley said.

But assuming that the lion’s share of the material coming out of the pipe is oil, Wereley’s calculations show that the official estimates are too low.

“We’re talking more than a factor-of-10 difference between what I calculate and the number that’s being thrown around,” he said.

At least two other calculations support him.

Timothy Crone, an associate research scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, used another well-accepted method to calculate fluid flows. Crone arrived at a similar figure, but he said he’d like better video from BP before drawing a firm conclusion.

Another scientific expert, Eugene Chiang, a professor of astrophysics at the University of California, Berkeley, also got a similar answer, using just pencil and paper. He calculated the rate of flow to be between 840,000 and four million gallons a day.

Without even having a sense of scale from the BP video, he correctly deduced that the diameter of the pipe was about 20 inches. And though his calculation is less precise than Wereley’s, it is in the same ballpark.

“I would peg it at around 20,000 to 100,000 barrels per day,” he said.

Chiang called the current estimate of 5,000 barrels a day “almost certainly incorrect.”

These estimates mean that the Deepwater Horizon wreckage could have spilled about five times as much oil as the 12-million-gallon Exxon Valdez disaster, with relief only guaranteed by BP in three more months.

Chiang is being pretty nice about that. For, as always, the lying liars are absolutely NOT telling us the truth. Of course their official estimate is untrue. To explain that they have ruined our planet irreversibly would never do.

BP disagrees with the figures, although they were the fastest to suggest that no one could accurately estimate the flow of oil, even though there is technology readily available to do such an estimate.

No matter what the lying criminals say, though, what is happening in the Gulf is far worse than the Exxon Valdez spill (which was about 250,000 gallons of oil). This hole is fast gushing that every day. Magnitudes worse in volume.

Guess what? Even the MSM is hinting that we were lied to about this:

This new, much larger number suggests that capturing ~ and cleaning up ~ this oil may be a much bigger challenge than anyone has let on.

And you want to know what else? It could do this for years or even decades before emptying its gut:

Matthew Simmons, retired chair of the energy-industry investment bank Simmons & Company, said that BP and the US military’s engineers are more or less clueless about cutting off the flow.

“We don’t have any idea how to stop this,” Simmons said. The former banker mocked a proposal to try and plug the leak with trash, saying it was a “joke.”

Simmons noted that the pressure at 5,000 feet undersea ~ where the well site is located ~ is so high, that containment efforts are likely often to fail. At 5,000 feet underwater, blocking elements have to be able to hold even with pressures off 40,000 pounds per square inch.

Incoming American Association of Petroleum Geologists chief David Resink says the oil reservoir that is feeding the spill is colossal.

“You’re talking about a reservoir that could have tens of millions of barrels in it,” Resink said. At the current spill rate, it “would take years to deplete,” he added.

Watch video of oil flooding out of one of the two remaining leaks, which BP had suppressed for weeks:

There is history with spills and as in the case of the Valdez, there was a cost associated with harm to humans. There is nasty stuff in that putrid slime (an estimated 50,000 gallons of benzene were released from the Alaska disaster. To those in clean up, it cost the their health (and lives):

THIS BP DISASTER

IS THE EQUIVALENT

OF TWO EXXON VALDEZES

PER WEEK

AUDUBON OF FLORIDA NEWS ~ information regarding endangered wild life, a very informative site

BP OIL SPILL: HOW YOU CAN HELP