Reply #20: Yeah - it is not like this is a big improvement over Tiber

[csziggy]

Just a different field.

I can't imagine what it would be like if they cannot cut off this flow and the thing keeps gushing. Even if only a percentage of the oil comes out, that will still be far larger than any other oil release.

Generally, oil companies can only get a percentage of the oil out of a deposit:

Kern River Oil Field was discovered in 1899, and initially it was thought that only 10 percent of its heavy, viscous crude could be recovered. In 1942, after more than four decades of modest production, the field was estimated to still hold 54 million barrels of recoverable oil. As pointed out in 1995 by Morris Adelman, professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and one of the few remaining energy gurus, “in the next forty-four years, it produced not 54 million barrels but 736 million barrels, and it had another 970 million barrels remaining.” But even this estimate was wrong. In November 2007 U.S. oil giant Chevron announced that cumulative production had reached two billion barrels. Today, Kern River still puts out more than 80,000 barrels per day, and Chevron reckons that the remaining reserves are about 480 million barrels.

Chevron began to achieve its miracle in the 1960s by injecting steam into the ground, a novel technology at the time. Later, a new breed of exploration and drilling tools—along with steady steam injection—turned the field into a sort of oil cornucopia. Yet, Kern River is not an isolated case. Most of the world’s oilfields have revived over time. New exploration methods have revealed more of the Earth’s secrets. And leaps in extraction technology have led to tapping oil in once-inaccessible areas and in places where drilling was once uneconomic. In a way, technology is the real cornucopia.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=squeezing-more-oil-edit-this

So if 10% comes out without special treatment, that would be about 4.4 barrels or 180,000 gallons. But that sounds like less than the estimates I have heard for what is already out into the Gulf. Of course, BP and the news have been switching around how much is coming out and changing the measurements from gallons to barrels and back, so it is hard to keep track.

And the oil field that humans have dealt with in the past are not under such tremendous pressure as this one, so estimates based on past experience could be wildly off.

In other words, we have no way to know how much has come out and how much more could come out.