Oil Rupturing In Tens Of Thousands of Barrels Per Day

A surfer just down the road from Topsail Preserve State Park in the Florida Panhandle yesterday reported a foul taste in the water along with an filmy texture – a possible sign of an advanced thin film from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. According to 1000 Friends of Florida, over 7 million tourists visit the Panhandle every year, spending an average of 128 dollars per day. Even if these visitors were to only spend an average of 3 days in the region, that would make Florida Panhandle tourism a source of billions of dollars of income for the region every year. How many of those dollars are going to come to the Florida Panhandle beaches this year, with a rank film of oil already at the beach, and a thicker slick on the way?

I’m betting that the loss will be at more than 27 million dollars. Yet, that’s the amount for damages that Transocean, the owner of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, says that it’s willing to pay – and that’s for the entire Gulf Coast, not just for the communities along the Florida Panhandle. What’s more, Transocean has already received hundreds of millions of dollars from an insurance company to compensate for the loss of the Deepwater Horizon. So, if Transocean gets its way, it would actually profit from the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

Gulf Coast communities would not profit.

In other oil spill news, the amount of oil spewing out of the main leak appears to be much more than the 5,000 barrels of oil per day that’s the official government estimate. Professor Steve Werely of Purdue University, using the process of particle image velocimetry, estimates the leak at between 56,000 and 84,000 barrels of oil per day. Professor Eugene Chiang of the University of California at Berkeley, using another method, has come up with an estimate of between 20,000 and 100,000 barrels of oil per day.

It’s safe to say, then, that the rate of oil release from the main leak is in the tens of thousands of barrels per day. Remember, though, that’s just the rate of oil rupturing from the main leak. There are two known other leaks on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico created by the offshore drilling rig.

That’s a good confirmation of the estimate by Dr. Ian MacDonald that the size of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill was already larger than the Exxon Valdez oil spill by the end of April.

Public relations employees from BP say that it’s all lies, lies, lies. Of course, Public relations employees from BP once said that there was no oil leak from the Deepwater Horizon at all.

With all this going on in the Gulf of Mexico, Senator John Kerry has chosen to release draft legislation that would increase the amount of offshore drilling along the coasts of the USA… and he claims that it would be good for the environment.