I’ve been wondering how long that well in the Gulf would leak oil if nothing was done. Has a natural event ever caused such a leak?
Oil coming emerging from the ground, even underwater, is commonplace - it’s called seepage and the locations are called seeps.
since no one else has jumped in, the macondo prospect is listed as 50 million barrels by Wiki but I suspect BP isn’t telling anyone if they have a better estimate.
I understand that there is likely to be great pressure underground that is forcing some of the oil out, but don’t most oil wells need to be pumped? If left unattended, is the entire underground reservoir going to empty itself out into the ocean, or will it blow off some pent-up pressure and then subside?
Toadspittle, good question. Any oil well experts out there?
I’m no expert, but my brother is, and the short answer is that some do need to be pumped and some don’t. Where you do, you generally pump in water to push the oil up and out, because oil - at least the bits that most interest us - floats. I’m not sufficiently knowledgeable to explain further.
As a back 'o the envelope calculation, its trivial to estimate this.
Assuming the 5,000 barrels per day leak, and 50,000,000 barrels in the prospect, that is 10,000 days, or a little over 27 years.
Now, the leak flow is probably greater than 5,000 barrels per day. And the size of the prospect might be bigger or smaller. So put some slop factor into this.
Does somewhere between 10 and 50 years sound reasonable to everyone?
As a side question, are there any estimates about what proportion of the leaked oil has been and/or can be collected and refined?
Some discussion on this at The Oil Drum in this thread.
I’ve been doing a lot of reading over there since the accident happened, and it’s just about the best place I’ve found to get good solid information on it. They also have estimated the total volume of the formation, one could look through the various threads and find it.
I’ve never heard of this place before: Coal Oil Point
, but it sounds like a naturally occuring oil leak not unlike the current gulf spill.
Not a pretty thing and wildlife around it seems pretty non-exsistant but nobody seems overly concerned about it.
Of course you don’t want another area like it to exsist especially due to human carelessness but it seems like it can be dealt with being there.
Its quite unlike the gulf spill. This natural seep produces about 100 barrels of crude a day. The gulf leak is, at minimum, 50 times larger (and probably much more).
And in fact that one is the world’s largest natural seep.
I read an anectdote on the Oil Drum from a fellow who had worked on a rig which was near a natural seep. The oil company put a containment dome over the natural seep and captured the oil coming from it.
You’re also assuming a constant rate of seepage. The rate of seepage should decrease as the reservoir is depleted.
Let’s suppose (and hope it’s just supposition) that the BP oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico turned out to be unstoppable; nobody on earth could devise a way to prevent it.
How much oil would this thing end up spewing into the Gulf? I presume it’d keep doing it until the pressure in the oil reserve was too weak to keep spewing. How much is that? Given how much oil it would be, just how big could the disaster get? Could it cover the entire Gulf? The entire Atlantic? Destroy the world?
Identical thread from yesterday., with a less enlightening title. You might want to get a Mod to merge the or something.
BP estimated a reservoir of 50 million barrels -> 2 billion gallons.
200 gallons per square mile, on the surface, is enough to produce a bright rainbow sheen.
Some estimates put the current spill volume at 39 million gallons. That’s enough to cover 195000 square miles with a rainbow. That figure represents about 32% of the total surface area of the gulf of Mexico( 615,000 mi²).
If all 2 billion gallons is released, the resulting sheen could cover 10 million square miles, or about 24% of the combined north and south Atlantic.
Collected and refined?
None.
You aren’t going to put into a refinery a petrochemical feedstock that’s high in salt water and the volatile fractions have already evapourated off.
We would nuke it
What would that do?