Go With The Flow

Ahead of the President's speech tonight, the Coast Guard, Energy Department, and Interior Department have put their heads together and come up with a new oil flow estimate: 35,000 to 60,000 barrels a day.

Today’s improved flow rate estimate brings together the work of several scientific teams and is based on a combination of analyses of high resolution videos taken by ROVs, acoustic technologies, and measurements of oil collected by the oil production ship together with pressure measurements inside the top hat.  Over the weekend, at the insistence of Secretary Chu and the science team, pressure meters were added to the top hat to assist with these estimates.

The scientists stressed the need for continued and refined pressure measurement, but emphasized that today’s improved estimates have a greater degree of confidence than estimates that were possible prior to the riser cut.  There are several reasons for this, including:

1. More and different kinds of data is available now: The improved estimates are informed by newly available, detailed pressure measurements from within the Top Hat taken over the past 24 hours. In addition, scientists could draw on more than a week of data about the amount of oil being collected through the top hat.

2. A single flow is easier to estimate: Prior to the riser cut, oil was flowing both from the end of the riser and from several different holes in the riser kink.  This made estimates – particularly based on two dimensional video alone – more difficult. 

“We need to have accurate and scientifically grounded oil flow rate information both for the purposes of the response and recovery and for the final investigation of the failure of the blowout preventer and the resulting spill,” said Interior Secretary Salazar.  “This estimate, which we will continue to refine as the scientific teams get new data and conduct new analyses, is the most comprehensive estimate so far of how much oil is flowing one mile below the ocean’s surface.”  

In other words, the good news is they can clearly see the damn thing now and estimate correctly.  Even better, some of that oil is being captured. The bad news is that any dangerous and stormy weather shuts down all collection and all that oil goes free whenever that happens.  The worse news is that means if those estimates are right, we're looking at a total of anywhere from 75 to 135 million gallons of oil that has leaked, splitting the difference and calling it 100 million or so still means this is roughly an order of magnitude worse than Exxon Valdez.

And it's still going.  Two million gallons a day is still a new Exxon Valdez every five and a half days or so.  There's little we can do to stop it anytime soon, and all we can do at this point if pray the containment options start working.

The Gulf Coast is screwed.