Many Times Worse Than the Exxon Valdez

BP is claiming that they have had "some success" in capturing oil from their undersea gusher.

Let's ignore, for the moment, the question of how much oil they are going to be able to siphon off through a 4" hose.

Look at this nugget of information in the news story:

The announcement by BP came on the heels of reports that the spill might be might much worse than estimated. Scientists said they had found giant plumes of oil in the deep waters of the gulf, including one as large as 10 miles long, 3 miles wide and 300 feet thick.

That is one plume. There are others.

Assume, for the sake of argument, that this plume is uniform. Let's have some fun with math:

The plume is 10 miles long, three miles wide and 300 feet thick.

Let's convert to feet and figure the volume of that plume. Rounding off a little, that is 52,800' x 15,800' x 300' = 250,272,000,000 cubic feet. There are 7.48 gallons in a cubic foot. If that plume were comprised of 100% oil, that would be 1,872,034,000,000 gallons of oil, or nearly two trillion gallons in that one plume.

Even if that plume were comprised of just 0.1% oil by volume, that would still mean that this oil spill is approaching two billion gallons of oil, which is over two hundred times more oil than the Exxon Valdez spill. And that volume of oil would assume that the plume contains all of the oil spilled, which it does not.

Either my figures are very far off or BP is lying to us.

No wonder BP is resisting efforts to measure the amount of oil flowing out the well.