NPR: Gulf Oil Spill May Be 70,000 Barells Per Day

Could be as high as 84,000 bpd, or an Exxon Valdez every few days.

The official, government estimate? 5,000 bpd.

Gulf Spill May Far Exceed Official Estimates (5/14/2010 NPR)

"The amount of oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico may be at least 10 times the size of official estimates, according to an exclusive analysis conducted for NPR.

"At NPR's request, experts examined video that BP released Wednesday. Their findings suggest the BP spill is already far larger than the 1989 Exxon Valdez accident in Alaska, which spilled at least 250,000 barrels of oil.

"BP has said repeatedly that there is no reliable way to measure the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico by looking at the oil gushing out of the pipe. But scientists say there are actually many proven techniques for doing just that.

"Steven Wereley, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue University, analyzed videotape of the seafloor gusher using a technique called particle image velocimetry.

"A computer program simply tracks particles and calculates how fast they are moving. Wereley put the BP video of the gusher into his computer. He made a few simple calculations and came up with an astonishing value for the rate of the oil spill: 70,000 barrels a day — much higher than the official estimate of 5,000 barrels a day.

"The method is accurate to a degree of plus or minus 20 percent.

"Given that uncertainty, the amount of material spewing from the pipe could range from 56,000 barrels to 84,000 barrels a day. It is important to note that it's not all oil. The short video BP released starts out with a shot of methane, but at the end it seems to be mostly oil.

"There's potentially some fluctuation back and forth between methane and oil," Wereley said.

But assuming that the lion's share of the material coming out of the pipe is oil, Wereley's calculations show that the official estimates are too low.

"We're talking more than a factor-of-10 difference between what I calculate and the number that's being thrown around," he said." [Emphasis is mine. The article continues.]

Two other scientists also have come up the similar number, according to NPR. BP vigorously dispute the number. (What else could they do?)

BP's share price, which has been taking the beating, gapped down today from the tenuous support it had for the past 2 weeks.

The NPR page linked above has the video of oil gushing from a broken pipe, as well as the audio file of the NPR program.

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