A Short BP Item

Now that the small cap is on, and appears to be working, I did some re-figuring on the spillage numbers.

If you begin with the working rate of 9 gallons/sec. used while “top Kill” and this current effort were under way, you get 9 x 60 x 60 x 24 = 777,600 gl/day, or 17,672.7 Bbl/day. Once the riser was cut, the flow was expected to rise by 20%. this makes it 933,120 Gal/day or 21,207 Bbl/day.

Now lets consider what the “Cap” is doing and adjust the figures.

From here I read that “If earlier estimates are correct, that means the cap is capturing from a quarter to as much as half the oil spewing from the blowout each day.” Or if you read at Yahoo News, “The cap, resembling an upside-down funnel, has captured about 252,000 gallons of oil, according to Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the government’s point man for the crisis. If earlier estimates are correct, that means the cap is capturing from a quarter to as much as half the oil.”

 If you go with the 252,000 figure then we get 681,120 gal./day. If we go with 50% then we get 466,560 gal./day. This is the amount of oil that will spill from this disaster every day until “Some time in August”, and that’s if the weather holds out! Approaching storms will cause them to disconnect, run for shore, then go back out and resume pumping, and drilling.

Both of the articles I linked above are using an estimate of “24 million to 47 million gallons” for the amount of oil that has spilled since the April 20 explosion. Well, if you take the current rate that they are not collecting oil, vs. their most optimistic rate, this is still one hell of a lot of oil.

In fact, if you take the 466k figure above, times the 92 days remaining until the end of August, it means there is going to be yet another ~43 million gallons of oil to be spilled throughout the summer.

Now go look at what our government, and BP are doing to control the 24-47 Million gallons already out there. Then consider that there is another 43 million gallons coming!

Does it look like they are preparing for this? Is the rate at which they are ramping up “clean & control” for what’s already out there look like enough to handle a 67 to 90 million gallon catastrophe? Sure doesn’t look like it to me!

What to do?
Well I can come up with two suggestions.
First, according to yesterday’s news, we have some 411,000 people, employed by the government out taking the Census. Wouldn’t you say this is a bit more important? We can take the census later in the year, or even suspend it until Jan. 1. Saving the southern coast of the country has got to be more important. So let’s leave 111,000 workers on the census.

Second, we have 95,000 troops in Iraq; a country we should never have gone to, in the first place. Iraq has an operating government. Give them notice that, we have our own problems, right now, and they’re just going to have to figure it out. We can leave them say… 25,000 troops (similar to South Korea) as a trip-wire and be on our way.

Voila! We now have some 370,000 workers, ready to train and deploy. Also, they’re already on the payroll! Appropriations required Zero!  This is money we’re already going to spend.

All we need our government to exercise some courage, vision, and management skills.

Who’s toes should we step on?