web analytics

Daily Archives: May 18, 2010

The Scope of the Gulf Disaster

May 18, 2010
By
The Scope of the Gulf Disaster

As of this morning, BP’s uncapped wellhead one mile below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico has spewed somewhere between 135,000 barrels of oil (using the official estimate of 5,000 barrels per day) and 1.62 million barrels of oil (according to a 60,000 bpd estimate by Austin-based research firm Stratfor) into the Gulf of Mexico. Just how much oil is that? Somewhere between 5.7 million and 68 million gallons, the latter enough to fuel the entire war efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan for a month. The Exxon Valdez, by comparison, released 250,000 barrels of oil, which ended up...

Read more »