"Im thinking,,
,the size of the oil plume shown is grossly underestimated..."
Don't think so; if as stated, actually not "a lot" actually flowing out..
It was sometime the night after the sinking that oil leaks started appearing from buckles and holes in the riser. This was stated to be about 1,000 barrels per day. I would read that to mean the leak was between 250 and 3,000 bpd. And a 5,000 bpd leak is probably between 2,000 and 10,000 bpd. Until there is some way to measure the flow like capturing it into a tanker it is impossible to have any accurate measurement of the leakage.
There is almost certainly sand in the oil and as that sand passes the leaking portion of the BOP it acts as an extremely high pressure sand blaster eroding away the area around the leak and enlarging it. So there is a perfectly rational explanation why we could escalate from 1,000 bpd to 5,000 bpd to ???. Nobody was lying about the volume, the leak was, and is, getting worse.
How much is 1,000 bpd? It works out to 30 gallons per minute, about the output from 3 garden hoses running wide open.
shelburn on May 6, 2010 - 10:12pm |
