Gulf Oil Spill: Latest Federal Government Estimate Still Understates Oil Flow

[Junkdrawer]

Last week's much-ballyhooed new federal estimate of how much oil is spewing into the Gulf of Mexico -- 12,000 to 19,000 barrels a day, or two to four times as much as the original estimate -- remains a low-ball figure.

The numbers released by the government last week and quickly adopted by the mass media actually represent the lower range of "lower bounds" generated by using conservative assumptions and flawed measures, according to documents released on Thursday.

The newly-released summary of the report from the Department of Interior's "Flow Rate Technical Group" doesn't disclose the higher bounds, however, declaring that a reliable upper figure was incalculable due to -- get this -- "known unknowns" and "unknown unknowns."

....

One of the methods the team used to arrive at its numbers was based on an estimate of the oil detected on the ocean surface. The new report states that: "The team then corrected the value for oil evaporated, skimmed, burned, and dispersed up to that day and divided by time to produce an average rate."

....

Another estimation method involved calculating the size of the plume based on video from the sea floor. It had a whole different set of challenges, including a limited window of data (seven minutes!), poor quality footage, an untested methodology and a series of assumptions that may or may not have been correct.

The scientists pursuing that method also found their guesswork limited by "the effect of the unknown unknowns" which "made it more difficult to produce a reliable upper bound on the flow rate."

.....

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/06/03/gulf-oil-spill-latest-fed_n_599615.html

Bottom line: If you believe, like Tony Hayward, that all the oil is on the surface, 12,000 to 19,000 bbd is a good number. Otherwise the true number is much, much higher.

[Junkdrawer]

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