Experts disagree on oil spill

May 15, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Associated Press

NEW ORLEANS

Just how much oil is spewing from the ruptured well in the Gulf of Mexico and how important is it to know that? Experts can’t agree on either question.

Some scientists who have studied a new video of the gusher estimate the leak could be 14 times worse than the government says. The feds say stopping the spill, not measuring it, is key.

But does the size matter now anyway?

Many veteran spill experts say trying to figure out how much oil is spewing is like trying to assess the damage of a house fire while firefighters are still trying to put it out. The size will matter later when the damage is tallied.

Others — especially lawyers, environmental advocates and the media — say numbers are needed to get a handle on how big the problem is. But a National Academy of Sciences report seven years ago said the size of a spill doesn’t directly correlate to how bad the environmental damage is.

When BP, which owns the well, released a video Wednesday of the spewing oil, the whole magnitude of the problem seemed to change.

Soon after the explosion three weeks ago, the government said oil and gas were flowing from the seabed at a rate of 210,000 gallons — or 5,000 barrels — a day. Now, after viewing the video, some scientists calculate it at 2 million gallons a day or even higher.

But those estimates come with giant-sized asterisks. Because the video doesn’t give experts a proper look, they could be off by millions of gallons of oil a day.

Still, most experts agree it is probably worse than the government acknowledges.

President Barack Obama addressed the issue Friday. “I know there have been varying reports over the last few days about how large the leak is,” he said, “but since no one can get down there in person, we know there is a level of uncertainty.”

In any case, the government says it has enough equipment to deal with a spill many times bigger than even the highest estimates.

“If you’ve already amassed all of the resources, booms and skimmers that you can, knowing the amount doesn’t make much of a difference,” said Wes Tunnell, a 35-year veteran of oil spills at Texas A&M University Corpus Christi.

That’s the tack the government is taking.

“We’re attacking it as if it were a much larger spill, anyway,” Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen said Friday.

Others see it differently, with a prominent House committee chairman demanding better numbers from BP.

“The amount of oil leaking is a big, big deal; it’s not to be taken lightly if it really is off by the factors that we’re hearing. Ten times as much is 10 times as bad — at a minimum,” said Darryl Felder, a University of Louisiana at Lafayette biology professor.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration declined repeated efforts by The Associated Press to explain in detail its 210,000 gallon-a-day estimate, except to say “in the absence of direct measurements, NOAA made an estimate of flow rate based on aerial observations.”

Initially, BP and the government put the leak at 42,000 gallons a day. That changed a couple of weeks ago to 210,000, which BP and government officials say they aren’t changing.

“We’ve used satellite imagery, overflights, visual observation,” said BP spokesman John Crabtree. “All the methods of calculating how much oil that’s leaking are inexact.”

Once the video came out, scientists looked at the flow and challenged each other to calculate how big it was.