Earth Equity News

New Estimates Double Rate of Oil That Flowed Into Gulf. By Justin Gillis and Henry Fountain, NYTimes, June 11, 2010. “A government panel on June 10 essentially doubled its estimate of how much oil has been spewing from the out-of-control BP well... The new estimate is 25,000 to 30,000 barrels of oil a day. That range, still preliminary, is far above the previous estimate of 12,000 to 19,000 barrels a day... A barrel is 42 gallons, so 30,000 barrels would equate to nearly 1.3 million gallons a day. The Exxon Valdez disaster in 1989 is estimated to have spilled 10.8 million gallons of oil into Prince William Sound in Alaska.

"The higher estimates will affect not only assessments of how much environmental damage the spill has done but also how much BP might eventually pay to clean up the mess -- and they will most likely increase suspicion among skeptics about how honest and forthcoming the oil company has been throughout the catastrophe. The new estimate is based on information that was gathered before BP cut a pipe called a riser on the ocean floor last week to install a new capture device, an operation that some scientists have said may have sharply increased the rate of flow."