{"id":576841,"date":"2010-05-24T10:35:16","date_gmt":"2010-05-24T14:35:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.earthportal.org\/news\/?p=3346"},"modified":"2010-05-24T10:35:16","modified_gmt":"2010-05-24T14:35:16","slug":"federal-task-force-assembled-to-measure-volume-of-gulf-of-mexico-oil-spill","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/576841","title":{"rendered":"Federal task force assembled to measure volume of Gulf of Mexico oil spill"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Times-Picayune:<\/a> BP admitted Thursday that a figure it has been citing for weeks as its best estimate of the total amount of oil flowing into the Gulf of Mexico<\/a> — 5,000 barrels a day – is too low<\/a>. A tube inserted into a hole in a broken riser pipe is now capturing 5,000 barrels of oil per day, but oil is still gushing from that hole as well as from another leak nearby, BP spokesman Mark Proegler said.<\/p>\n

<\/a>BP is measuring the oil as it is siphoned onto a drill ship on the water’s surface, Proegler said.<\/p>\n

“Five thousand was always understood to be a very rough estimate. That number was useful and sort of the best estimate at the time,” said Jane Lubchenco, administrator of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, the federal agency that came up with the 5,000-barrel, or 210,000-gallon, per day estimate.<\/p>\n

NOAA has no immediate plans to revise its estimate and will wait until a recently assembled team of scientists concludes a study of the oil flow and releases its findings.<\/p>\n

Oil has been escaping the well since the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded and sank in the Gulf of Mexico a month ago.<\/p>\n

Lubchenco said the spill amount does not impact response efforts, which are focused primarily on stopping the flow of oil and preventing it from washing ashore. Thick, dark oil was spotted this week in a Louisiana marsh<\/a> near the mouth of the Mississippi River.<\/p>\n

“The response to the spill has never been pegged to that estimate of 5,000 or any other estimate,” Lubchenco said. “We’ve always pegged our response to the worst-case scenario and had much more significant effort than would have been required if it would have been 5,000.”<\/p>\n

BP has been working for about a month to contain two oil leaks on a pipe attached to the sunken Deepwater Horizon rig. The rig, which BP leased from Transocean, exploded about 50 miles off the Louisiana coast on April 20 and subsequently sank. Eleven people on the rig were killed.<\/p>\n

Although BP and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had estimated up until Thursday that 5,000 barrels of oil are gushing into the sea each day from the leaks, some outside experts have put the amount at five times that much.<\/p>\n

Steve Wereley<\/a>, a researcher at Purdue University, told the House Energy committee Wednesday that he believed about 70,000 barrels of oil are leaking each day from the larger leak, based on an analysis of video of the spill.<\/p>\n

A live video stream of the leak<\/a> released by BP Thursday shows oil and natural gas continuing to pour from the pipe despite the insertion tube, which is surrounded by a rubber flap to prevent oil from escaping.<\/p>\n

Oil spewing from the hole in the riser pipe accounts for about 85 percent of what is pouring into the sea. The remainder is coming from a hole hundreds of feet away near an apparatus called a blowout preventer.<\/p>\n

A task force has been assembled to determine exactly how much oil is leaking every day, Lubchenco said. It is not known when that team will have a new estimate available.<\/p>\n

“They don’t have a precise timeline, but everyone understands the importance of having a good number and one that is scientifically credible,” Lubchenco said.<\/p>\n

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The Times-Picayune: BP admitted Thursday that a figure it has been citing for weeks as its best estimate of the total amount of oil flowing into the Gulf of Mexico — 5,000 barrels a day – is too low. A tube inserted into a hole in a broken riser pipe is now capturing 5,000 barrels […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7025,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-576841","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/576841","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7025"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=576841"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/576841\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=576841"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=576841"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=576841"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}