BP / Gulf Oil Spill - Large Underwater Plume of Oil Described, Still Much Unaccounted For
Just back from a week’s vacation and look at what we missed:
Scientists at Woods Hole announced their discovery and detailed mapping of a large underwater plume of finely dispersed oil from the BP spill. Measuring 35 km long x 2 km wide x 200 m thick, it was about 900 meters (3,000 feet) below the surface and drifting slowly southwest from the leaking Macondo well. The team was tracking this plume in late June, up until Hurricane Alex chased them back to shore. The researchers said it appeared to be breaking down and dissipating much more slowly than expected.
The concentration of hydrocarbons in the plume was at least 50 micrograms (millionths of a gram) per liter. That’s very dilute, although it may have some toxic effects.
How much of the “missing” oil was in that plume? Please check my math, there are a lot of 0′s to keep track of:
- Plume volume = 35000m x 2000m x 200m = 14 billion cubic meters = 14 trillion liters
- At 50 micrograms per liter, that’s a total of 700 million grams (700 metric tonnes) of hydrocarbon
- Assuming the hydrocarbon is 100% crude oil, at one metric tonne = 308 gallons then 700 metric tonnes = 215,600 gallons.
We know there was a lot of methane emitted by the Macondo well, probably contributing to the hydrocarbon content of this plume, so the actual amount of crude oil in the plume is something less than this.
That’s not very much oil relative to the total amount spilled (172 million gallons), or the 74 million gallons we calculate stayed underwater or was driven underwater by the application of chemical dispersants. In other words, even with this significant discovery, the bulk of the oil (and natural gas) is still unaccounted for, breaking down but at an unknown rate.
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