I was doing a little research on the mess, and wanted to get some data on the Gulf. According to the EPA, it has a volume of 642 trillion gallons. This seems off by three orders of magnitude to me (that is, I think that its 642 quadrillion gallons — 1015th, not 1012th — which is what a trillion would be).
My calculation is based on the stated area of 600,000 square miles (which seems reasonable to me), and average depth of 1600 meters (why do they have to mix their units?), which is about 5100 feet. Multiply the square miles by 5280 squared, and you get about 17 trillion square feet. So the volume has to be three orders of magnitude more than that, and it’s another order of magnitude (7.5 gallons per square foot) when you convert to gallons.
Am I off, or are they?
Yeah, I want these people to be in charge of regulating carbon emissions (including, no doubt, my exhalations).
[Update late afternoon]
Why do I care, you ask? Because people are saying that with the new estimate of the leak rate, this is the equivalent of “n” Exxon Valdezes per week, where n varies with the commentator. But the Gulf isn’t Prince William Sound. Based on the number of 11,000 square miles affected in Alaska, and an average depth of a thousand feet (generous, I think — the deepest point in sound is 2000, and most of it is a lot less, even when you get out around the Kenai Peninsula), I get a ratio of volumes of on the order of 300, so we’d need a lot of Exxon Valdezes to make it comparable to that disaster. I don’t know whether the warmer temps of the Gulf make things better, or worse, though.
Why did you square the depth. It’s the area (L x W) x the depth, not the depth squared.
Close to half the Gulf is continental shelf, so not nearly 1600 meters deep…but that shouldn’t make 3 orders of magnitude difference.
Why did you square the depth.
I didn’t square the depth. I multiplied by it. What makes you think I squared it?
Close to half the Gulf is continental shelf, so not nearly 1600 meters deep
That’s a stated average, considering the continental shelf (some parts are much deeper than that).
My numbers match yours, Rand.
Assuming an area of 615,000 sq. miles and an average depth of 5000 feet, and at 7.5 US gallons per cubic foot (gotta trust you on this, I’m from Canada), the volume is 642.9E+15 gallons.
They got their data from Wikipedia, or vice versa.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_mexico
“Multiply the square miles by 5280 squared…”, and the answer would be in cubic feet, not square feet, though that’s an easy mistake to make what with working with miles and feet versus meters! I’ve done it myself on occasion. In any case, I agree with the overall premise. I don’t like these clowns being in charge either. I enjoy your website. Thanks.
To get their number the depth would have to average 5 feet. Not even the EPA is that dumb. Somebody doesn’t understand how big a trillion is.
Sorry, wrong. Rand’s numbers are correct.
Everyone who voted for Porkulus, that’s who.
Everyone who voted for Porkulus, that’s who.
Actually, I think I’m glad that they don’t know what a quadrillion is. They’d want to make it the target for the next budget.
“Multiply the square miles by 5280 squared…”, and the answer would be in cubic feet, not square feet
No, that makes no sense. Feet squared give square feet, not cubic feet.
Yeah,wikipedia got its information from the EPA, the retrieval date was december 17 2006.
Wolfram Alpha’s your friend for these sorts of calculations: 600,000 square miles * 1600 meters to gallons = 6.5 x 10^17 gallons = (650 quadrillion gallons)
Greetings,
Let us look at a similar event:
Summer of 1942
22 U.S. Tankers sunk in the Gulf of Mexico.
http://www.usmm.org/eastgulf.html#anchor474786
I don’t know the class of each Tanker. However, as the T-2 was the workhorse of the Mechant Marine for moving oil and its products, so I will assume the losses were T-2 Tankers.
http://www.usmm.org/tankers.html
Each tanker holds 141,200 Barrels of oil / fluid products. Approx 6 million gallons per tanker lost.
20 Tankers at 6 million gallons each. 120 million gallons of oil deposited in the Gulf Of Mexico in roughly 100 days – 1.2 million gallons per day (on average.)
The Gulf has survived this before.
Regards,
Rand, accepting your numbers, I would add that this is the kind of error that people who don’t work with numbers make. Journalists, lawyers and politicians are in this category. The bigger the govt, the more calculations of this type will be done by people who will make serious errors, and the more bad policy decisions there will be. Of course if the number-crunchers have political agendas, as they usually will, the calculations will be even less accurate.
To Jonathan’s point:
An engineer is given two very different estimates of a data point – he demands a verification of which is correct.
A politician is given two very different estimates of a data point – he chooses the one that best illustrates his point.
From other websites: basin contains a volume of 2,434,000 cubic kilometers of water (6.43 * 1017 or 643 quadrillion gallons
You’re BOE calc seems spot on.
As somebody mentioned to me the other day, if you like Oysters, get them in now. Many come from beds in the hit zone.
The impact is going to be pretty significant whether its happened before or not, it’s the price of oil extraction. Frankly I’m impressed they got the leak under control in the time they did.
Anyhoo… all the more reason to move to nuclear and stop burning the remains of dead animals.
How big the Gulf is in relation to the spill is really quite irrelevant, for several reasons. The depth is fairly irrelevant (except for making fixing the problem harder) because oil floats; for these purposes it doesn’t really matter whether the Gulf is 100 feet deep or ten thousand. And the area is of limited relevance, because the spill is somewhat concentrated; it hasn’t spread evenly over the entire Gulf.
Mike, but what about all the whittle animals? Who will look after the whittle fury animals?
If that was milk instead of sea water and you had enough cocoa you could make tasty hot chocolate.
gives us an excuse to take them out of their “pristine” environments and pet them, Trent.
Not bad, Rand. According to Wikipedia the volume is 660 quadrillion gallons
Not excusing the boneheads who did the bad pour, but it seems natural seepage in the Gulf is significant – in the millions of gallons / hundreds of thousands of barrels per annum. It’s up to humanity to extract it properly and prevent this awful waste.
Given the discoveries of oil at the depths now routine underlying, do we still posit that it is the remains of dead animals? Coal, ok; but, oil?
I’m a retired engineer, and dug through some facts and figures the other day to put oil consumption into perspective.
The entire world uses 27 billion barrels of oil per year.
This amount of oil is only slightly more than 1 cubic mile of oil, (1.03 cubic mile in total).
If that amount was spread equally over the entire surface of the world (Earth’s surface is 196,940,400 square miles).
The resulting film of oil would be 0.000332 inches thick over the entire Earth’s surface.
A typical sheet of copier paper is 0.004 inches thick (500 sheets is 2 inches thick).
It would take 12 years worth of world oil consumption spread over the entire Earth to be as thick as a single sheet of paper from a copy machine.
Do you really think that thin layer of oil is going to effect the ten’s of thousands of feet of atmosphere above it when burned?
Careful, Jim. Continuing that line of thought leads to the Gold Hypothesis (which you should google if you don’t know it) and will get you ridiculed.
Regards,
Ric
Oil degradation is accelerated by higher temperatures for two reasons. Faster evaporation of the volatile fraction -30 to 40% of the total oil volume (broke down in the air by sunlight reactions) and higher temperatures lead to increased feeding and growth by the oil eating bacteria, fungi, plankton etc.
Oil is also dropped out of the water column by wind blown sand and in the fecal matter of plankton feeding on the oil.
The Gulf naturally seeps large quantities of oil. It has a biotic community adapted and evolved to eat oil (A large spill such as this could overwhelm such a system initially but recovery will be relatively faster)
Lighter crudes break down faster than heavier (Valdez crudes)
Dilution and rate are also important factors. Valdez was a catastrophic near shore release.
“tar balls” are a misnomer- they are actually made of the asphalt fraction of the oil. The same stuff we make our roads from. Tar balls are evidence that the volatile fraction of the oil is largely gone as well as some of the other more biodegradable elements. Asphalt does not bio- degrade quickly- which is a good thing for our highway system.
The above is only a few of the complexities related to an oil spill impact and the reason the National Academies Report “Oil in the Sea III” in 2003 stated:
“The reader is therefore strongly cautioned against inferring impacts from the mass loading rates. For instance, one might be tempted to calculate the “Exxon Valdez-equivalence” by comparing the quantity of petroleum released from a specific source to that released during the Exxon Valdez spill and then concluding that the impact of the petroleum release will be a corresponding multiple of the Exxon Valdez impact. This is a flawed analysis”.
Jim Bradley – coal and oil are frequently found in close proximity. The original oil fields were in Pennsylvania, right next to the coal fields, and southern Illinois has both oil and coal.
Rand – the oil is flowing mostly north – onto tidal estuaries and marshes. If it was flowing south, there would be less environmental concern.
I believe the typical N-Valdez comparisons are about volume of oil discharged, not about the body of water, whether volume or surface area, nor shore miles of affected land.
According to the wikipedia article (I have not checked the sources) the lodging of the Valdez on March 24, 1989 led to an oil spill estimated at a minimum 40,900 m³ (10.8 million US gallons) of crude.
10.8 Million gallons, at 42 gal / bbl is about 260,000 barrels. Discharge from the well at 40,000 barrels a day gets to one Valdez a week, more or less. At 5,000 barrels a day, it would be 50-plus days; call it two months.
On the surface area argument, eventually a significant fraction of the oil on the surface shows up on shore, localized by wind and current. The layer of oil, if ideally spread out is microns, in reality you get several components since unrefined crude has light (small molecule) and heavy (large molecule) fractions. Oone spill component becomes a frothy (and toxic) mousse of oil/water emulsion, several orders of magnitude thicker, and subject to arrival on land en masse.
Here’s an interesting 1981 Nature letter on oil mouse
Nature 290, 235 – 238 (19 March 1981); doi:10.1038/290235a0
“Ixtoc 1 oil spill: flaking of surface mousse in the Gulf of Mexico”
JOHN S. PATTON, MARK W. RIGLER, PAUL D. BOEHM & DAVID L. FIEST
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v290/n5803/abs/290235a0.html
Simple using Unix program units:
You have: 600000 mi^2 * 1600 m
You want: gal
* 6.5683438e+17
/ 1.5224538e-18
Meh – give it to me in Libraries of Congress or it’s meaningless.
That is 657 quadrillion gallons
Or 2.48 exaliters for the SI-inclined.
units is a wonderful program.
Chris Gerrib Says:
May 17th, 2010 at 6:00 am
“Jim Bradley – coal and oil are frequently found in close proximity.”
Which suggests a relationship, but is not dispositive. Jim’s point is that oil is now being found at depths which are difficult (though not impossible, I presume) to square with the idea that it all originates from living matter.
I do not know what the status of the debate on abiogenic oil is, but I know it is continuing, and I am, justifiably as we have seen in the climate debate, wary of “consensus science”, and willing to keep an open mind on the topic.
This whole mess makes me wonder why we humans aren’t doing more about the 400 trillion terawatts of power there are available for the taking.
Bart – quick googling on “abiotic oil” and “Gold hypothesis” reveals a number of problems with the premise. For example, nobody seems to be able to find any oil where the abiotic folks say it should be. Also, when I said “in close proximity” I meant “sometimes in the same hole.” See, for example, methane explosions in coal mines, or oil shale (oil-rich sedementary rock).
Regarding the Gold Hypothesis, there are all sorts of problems with the biotic oil hypothesis also.
IIRC the Russians at least sometimes use the abiotic hypothesis and do find oil. Gold wasn’t a great believer in biotic coal either. I read one of his books on the topic.
It seems to me oil spills are basically surface and edge phenomena.
The spill floats and washes up on shore.
BP has spilled enough to trash hundreds of miles of shore line
Mike Borgelt – I’ve personally seen fossils inside lumps of coal. Arguing against biotic coal seems to be a non-starter.
I’ve personally seen fossils inside lumps of coal. Arguing against biotic coal seems to be a non-starter.
Not that I’m a big proponent of non-fossil coal, but are you unaware of the logical fallacy here?
I’ve personally seen fossils embedded in stony cliffs. I guess those rocks were once alive./sarc Not that I am a big proponent of non-fossil coal either – seems to me it would have a harder time bubbling up from the mantle.
Sorry, Chris. Despite your extensive credentials and experience in the field (I assume your diploma from Google is in the mail), I think for the nonce I will continue to place greater weight on the opinions of experts, among the ranks of whom are some key notables who appear to believe the hypothesis of abiogenic oil production in significant quantities is potentially valid. I’m not saying I believe in it. I am saying I am keeping an open mind.
On this:
“Chris Gerrib Says:
May 17th, 2010 at 12:12 pm
Bart – quick googling on “abiotic oil” and “Gold hypothesis” reveals a number of problems with the premise. For example, nobody seems to be able to find any oil where the abiotic folks say it should be.”
Taking a page from your book, I found this (well, I used ask.com – Google’s just getting kinda’ creepy big to me) without much trouble. Key excerpt: