By Dave Anderson:
Originally, the Gulf oil gusher was only 1,000 barrels a day.
Scientists not employed by BP as well as federal government employees later upped that estimate to 5,000 barrels per day.
Both those estimates may be massively optimistic. NPR reports that several fluid dynamicists are looking at the BP submersible video and are calculating much higher flow rates. One estimate has the current 5,000 barrel per day flow to be off by at least a factor or ten. The lower bound of the new estimates are a four-fold increase in daily flow.
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...
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.....
Timothy Crone, an associate research scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, used another well-accepted method to calculate fluid flows. Crone arrived at a similar figure, but he said he'd like better video from BP before drawing a firm conclusion.
This is more than a minor whoopsie. This is a cluster-shagg as the high end estimate would imply slightly less than two Exxon Valdez's per week instead of the current guess of one per month.
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