Government Experts reveal 420 MILLION to 840 MILLION gallons of BP oil have flowed into Gulf

Thats a LOT of oil. it takes 840000 gallons of dispersant to take care of 840 million gallons of oil. Both the oil and the dispersant are highly toxic. Click the link for the full article


www.floridaoilspilllaw.com...

Wow. Isn't this a lot higher than the 100,000 barrels a day high estimate BP gave us? Even as big as the gulf is, there is no way this is not having negative impact. No way.

reply to post by ~Lucidity


The final impact will take months. If the government says 840 million it is probably much higher , I mean considering their penchant for understatement.

The establishment has already laid the groundwork for reducing BP's liability for any long-term/long-range problems that may arise.

Recently the news has begun to spread of hundreds upon hundreds of old unserviced poorly capped wells. Leaks and slow leeching has been found everywhere the oil companies have operated.

I am fairly certain that this will be the main counter to any future claims against the oil barons.

Of course, if not for the infiltration of corporate shills in government via political appointment, we might have had an opportunity to at least reduce (at least some of) the damage from this slow-bleed of industrial black water into the oceans of the world.

The estimates we have been given have been PR lies from the onset, and our government played along because like the banks... this oil giant is too big to fail. It is clear that our elected officials and tax-payer funded officiates have absolutely no sense of shame, or they are too feeble-minded to address the problems with anything other than bureaucratic acquiescence.

Originally posted by gem_man
Thats a LOT of oil. it takes 840000 gallons of dispersant to take care of 840 million gallons of oil. Both the oil and the dispersant are highly toxic. Click the link for the full article


www.floridaoilspilllaw.com...

Good find. I too, am wondering if there was a typo in the paper. If he meant gallons instead of barrels, it would be a huge mistake (an extra 41 gallons per unit). Well worth watching though. Based on their speculation of the spill size, it would correlate with other projections that it was actually leaking over 150,000 barrels per day (possibly up to 200,000). Last week I did some 'spot calculations' based on how much was visually exiting the BOP. Based on 4 barrels per second coming out, it works out to be about 170,000 barrels per day. But any way you slice it, the dispersant is still being dumped pretty heavy. At 150,000 barrels per day, it's 6,300,000 gallons per day, which is still pretty ugly.
By the time all the numbers are crunched (years down the line) it will probably be in the neighborhood of a billion gallons.

Do you all remember when the MSM said it was only 1,000 per day on Day 2 or Day 3 of the spill?

I think this is a better number, but come on, isn't BP doing everything it can to hide the true amount spilling out? COREXIT?

reply to post by ~Lucidity

Originally posted by ~Lucidity
Wow. Isn't this a lot higher than the 100,000 barrels a day high estimate BP gave us? Even as big as the gulf is, there is no way this is not having negative impact. No way.

For maximum one-page-ease: the numbers 420 million and 840 million are derived from two variables; the amount of dispersant used (1 million barrels or 42 million gallons according to Christopher Reddy), and the ratio of dispersant to oil (1:10 to 1:20 according to Christopher Reddy and Ed Overton). If both variables are correct, then the 42 million gallons of dispersant has been used to 'disperse' a whopping 420 million (1:10) to 840 million (1:20) gallons.

At the latest official estimate of a constant 100,000 barrels or 4,200,000 gallons a day, the amount of oil spilled into the Gulf so far would be 85 * 4,200,000 = 357 million gallons, 85% of the dispersant-based calculation above. Of course 100,000 barrels a day has been held as the maximum estimate, 60,000 bl/d being the minimum estimate. When we compare the official higher estimate to the higher estimate of the dispersant-based estimates, the previous number of 100,000 barrels a day accounts for only 42%.

According to the dispersant-based calculation, between 117,647 and 235,294 barrels of oil flows from the leak each day.

[edited to remove a mathematically misguided thought ]

[edit on 14-7-2010 by scraze]

If BP has really used ONE MILLION GALLONS of dispersant so far, how fast can the manufacturer of Corexit produce that stuff?
Where did they have any of it stockpiled?
I wonder which rich fatcats bought stock in the company that makes the stuff just before the blowout?

Follow THAT money!

STAR und FLAG!

[edit on 14-7-2010 by butcherguy]

Hey,
I just couldn't avoid asking my computer:
If that with the 840 Million Gallons is correct, and we pack that into the little 1-litre packages of milk we know and love - without milk, that is -, every second human on earth would get one, containing the oil that is currently killing the gulf of mexiko. Hooray.
Pray for good luck, banging your head against the walls or abducting the ones responsible is also an acceptable option for atheists.

In fact the Nalco outfit that produces Corexit was bouhgt out shortly before the big spill....
By goldman sachs no less!
plus other big players .......
Its pretty obvious that theres the hand of disaster capitalism at work here.....somebody is making huge dollars off of this catastrophe.
Halliburton also got into the act by buying up Boots and Coots the big oilspill cleanup company just before the big spill happened....strange coincidence considering that they did the cement job on the well.....and would know if the likelihood of a blowout was a high probability.!
Like 9/11 there were put options taken out on certain stocks as well....
the theory that this was a staged event, gathers more evidence as time goes by.....................................surprise!

reply to post by stirling
I have dealt with Nalco before.

Wow, nice work there. Imagine all of that just coincidentally happening before the spill ( or should we call it a dump! ).

reply to post by scraze

Thanks for both the explanation and the math. That's exactly what I got the other day in the thread about how many gallons were in the gulf. But math is not my strong point lol

[edit on 7/14/2010 by ~Lucidity]

reply to post by butcherguy

Originally posted by butcherguy
If BP has really used ONE MILLION GALLONS of dispersant so far, how fast can the manufacturer of Corexit produce that stuff?
[..]
[edit on 14-7-2010 by butcherguy]

While searching for confirmation of the variables in the dispersant-based calculations, I came across BP's May 20th response to EPA on the dispersant directive (to limit it's use and possibly change to a less aggressive type) as one of the results of this query for EPA documents regarding BP's spill. In it, BP reports the following:

BP has an inventory of 246,380 gallons of COREXIT that are available for immediate use, and the manufacturer is able to produce an additional 68,000 gallons /day, which is sufficient to meet all anticipated dispersant needs at this site.

from www.epa.gov...

If BP had 246,380 gallons or 5,866 barrels of COREXIT on May 20th - 55 days ago, they would have depleted that stock by now by only drawing 106 barrels a day from it. Combined with the 68,000 gallons or 1,619 barrels of dispersant produced every day, BP could use 1,726 barrels of COREXIT a day.

With a dispersant-to-oil ratio of 1:10 to 1:20, those 1,726 barrels of COREXIT could disperse between 17,260 and 34,520 barrels of oil each day*.

Ignoring the stock of dispersant, it would take 618 days to produce a million barrels (not gallons, see www.nola.com...) of COREXIT. The stock itself only contained 3.6 days worth of COREXIT on May 20th.

A lot of math, but sadly it raises more questions than it answers. I'm still browsing through all the files in abovementioned search, and hope to find some figures to explain this discrepancy.


* The last line of the quote above indicates that BP was either not transparent or ignorant of their inaccuracy.



reply to post by ~Lucidity

The pleasure's mine! Glad to have been of use.

reply to post by scraze


My guess is they are bringing it in from anywhere they can get it, plus dumping every variant they can find into the gulf. Right now, they're dumping it as fast as they can get their hands on it. CorExit has, what, 3 variants right now? It's also another opportunity for them to dump whatever toxic waste they have into the gulf too, since there's nobody there to watch.
Right now, we're having to deal with hydrogen sulfide, methane, arsenic, hydrocarbons, benzene, possible radiation, oil, dispersants, dead zones.... what's another 1000 gallons of mercury or lewisite or mustard gas? :/

reply to post by OuttaTime

Originally posted by OuttaTime
Good find. I too, am wondering if there was a typo in the paper. If he meant gallons instead of barrels, it would be a huge mistake (an extra 41 gallons per unit). [..]

I think you're right about it being a typo.. BP would've used approximately 500,000 gallons of dispersant each day (!) to get to a million barrels in 85 days, which is way more than Nalco can handle (reportedly). Even if they were to call in the help of other manufacturers and use each version of Corexit known, it would be an extraordinary amount of dispersant.

In addition:

"[..] So we are happy to have that conversation with BP about checking again on stockpiles of dispersants and what’s available in sufficient quantities to really be used given that as you heard, at the surface already we’re talking over 400,000 gallons used already and in the subsurface. [..] We had heard roughly 50/50 but we can’t confirm that so we’re a little uncomfortable with giving you -- this is Lisa Jackson, sorry -- giving you numbers. The data we had as of May 10, is that there another 805,000 gallons ordered and there were already 500,000 gallons staged."

- EPA, "Full Transcript of May 12, 2010 press conference call", www.epa.gov...

"a. Surface Application. BP shall eliminate the surface application of dispersants. [..]
b. Subsurface Application. BP shall be limited to a maximum subsurface application of dispersant of not more than 15,000 gallons in a single calendar day. "

- EPA, "Dispersant Monitoring and Assessment Directive - Addendum 3", May 26th 2010, www.epa.gov... *

"Approximately 1.61 million gallons of total dispersant have been applied—1.03 million on the surface and 577,000 sub-sea. More than 504,000 gallons are available."

- Deepwater Horizon Unified Command, "The Ongoing Administration-Wide Response to the Deepwater BP Oil Spill", June 30th 2010, www.deepwaterhorizonresponse.com...

"The company has used at least 1.8 million gallons of dispersants on the Gulf's surface and 5,000 feet deep at the source of the leak."

- AP, "Suit filed seeking more details on dispersants", July 15th 2010, www.google.com...


The transcript of the May 12th conference call tells us that 400,000 gallons of dispersant were used on May 10th, amounting to 20,000 gallons a day since April 20th. If we extrapolate this figure to today, we would end up with about 1,720,000 gallons - which fits perfectly with AP's report.

It seems more likely to me that the writer of the article accidentally used the word "barrels" instead of "gallons" than that all sources quoted above are wrong and BP actually used between 500 and 1000 times as much dispersant as reported. That's not a factor easily overlooked.

Since EPA has restricted BP's use of dispersants to a maximum of 15,000 gallons a day (without further authorization), the amount of dispersant used will not be proportional to the amount of oil, even if they exceed the allowed amount by a 'few' thousand gallons a day. I doubt we can calculate the amount of oil released in an acceptable range of confidence..


* I realise that EPA's directive are not much of an indication of BP's actions. Added for the total picture.

[edit on 14-7-2010 by scraze]

reply to post by scraze


The numbers do make sense that way, but we still cannot confirm how much was actually already in storage. There is sparse reporting of that and I can't say that I'm comfortable with their numbers since the MSM has been caught repeatedly underestimating quantities. Both Nalco and Exxon are probably making it. I'd still be confident that at least 2,000,000 gallons is floating in the water now.
I read in another post (may have been yours) that 68,000 gallons a day can be processed. I watched a CNN video (on the floridaoilspillaw site about how the EPA insisted the dispersant be reduced by 68%. So BP found the day (in May) where they sprayed 70,000 gallons, so they reduced THAT number by 68% so they could continue dumping 25,000 gallons a day. If BP and its handlers try to get away with that, it makes me wonder how incorrect they are about other vital figures.

reply to post by scraze
Nice work.

There is much more to this story than we are being told.

We may never know.

reply to post by scraze
Nice work.

There is much more to this story than we are being told.

We may never know.