BP and Obama administration officials have repeatedly downplayed the extent of the growing oil disaster in the Gulf, arguing that attempts to accurately measure the rate of flow at the seabed are impossible and unnecessary:

Jane Lubchenco, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Administrator: “Simply observing where the oil is coming out is insufficient to really calculate any flow rate with any degree of accuracy.” [White House briefing, 4/29/10]

Lamar McKay, President of BP America: “The volume estimates are based effectively on surface expression, because you can’t measure what’s coming out at the seabed.” [Senate testimony, 5/12/10]

Tom Mueller, BP: “We’re not going to take any extra efforts now to calculate flow there at this point. It’s not relevant to the response effort, and it might even detract from the response effort.” [5/14/10]

Doug Suttles, BP COO, Global Exploration: Since the beginning, we’ve said it’s almost impossible to get a precise number. But ourselves and people from NOAA and others believe that something around 5,000 — it’s actually barrels a day — is the best estimate.” [ABC News, 5/14/10]

Rear Adm. Mary Landry, U.S. Coast Guard: “If the well let go, the design engineers will tell you that it could be approximately 55,000 barrels per day. We don’t think we have that much, because we’ve got satellite imagery; we know what we’re responding to. We know how much we’re seeing on the surface; we can estimate that. So the upward bound of worst case could be approximately 55,000 barrels.” [Blogger call, 5/17/10]

Since April 29, the joint BP-federal command has relied on an estimate from NOAA scientists that the oil rate was increasing by 210,000 gallons (5000 barrels) a day, even though on April 27, independent scientists looking at the same satellite imagery estimated the flow rate was at least 850,000 gallons a day. Without explanation, the administration allowed BP to block scientists from observing the disaster and to suppress video feeds of the spewing oil.

On Wednesday, May 19, Purdue engineering professor Steve Wereley testified before the House Energy and Environment Subcommittee that the statements made by BP and administration officials are false:

There are two statements in the media that I’d like to take issue with and I think that many scientists take issue with. The first is that this leak can’t be measured, and the second is that it doesn’t need to be measured.

I think there’s no — I don’t see any possibility, any scenario in which their number is accurate. I could see potential scenarios in which our numbers could come down, particularly based on the gas to oil ratio. But from what I see in the videos, I don’t see the numbers coming down that significantly.

95,000 [barrels per day] is the baseline. That’s the expected value, there’s an error bound around that, which I put at about 20 percent. So it could be considerably lower, roughly something short of 70,000, up to somewhere around 115,000. I’m definitely happy with saying that it’s fully an order of magnitude higher than what BP projects, without question.

Watch it:

Surface analysis by Dr. Ian McDonald and Dr. John Amos, and subsea video analyis by Dr. Eugene Chang, Dr. Timothy Crone, and Dr. Steve Wereley all indicate the apocalyptic oil spill is growing at a rate between 840,000 gallons to 4,200,000 gallons a day. The surface analysis is clearly a lower bound, as an unknown percentage of the oil is remaining below the surface in the form of toxic plumes hundreds of miles long. Over ten Exxon Valdezes worth of oil may have flooded the Gulf of Mexico already.

There is not, as Dr. Wereley testified, “any possibility” that the BP-NOAA “best estimate” is accurate.

BP admits the obvious, sort of, and the smoking gun reappears

The news is coming fast and furious now — well, it’s coming fast, and all of us should be furious:

BP Admits They Underestimated The Amount Of Oil Leaking As More Washes On Shore

A BP spokesman “said a mile-long tube inserted into a leaking pipe over the weekend is capturing 210,000 gallons a day – the total amount the company … [has] estimated is gushing into the sea – but some is still escaping. He would not say how much.”

Duh.  At least they can still do simple math.

BP Smoking Gun? Oil Giant Skipped Critical Testing Hours Before Explosion

Read more

Quotes IEA: “Every year the world fails to seriously deal with climate change raises the price tag by $500 billion — a lot of which, no doubt, Americans will be on the hook for”

Sens. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) and Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.) have provided Congress with an opportunity. Their climate bill, released last week, is imperfect. But it offers a start, very much in the right direction. Contrary to popular wisdom, acting on global warming is not going to get easier after this year’s election. Legislators should seize this moment.

Since its opinion pages have been quite dreadful on this issue, the Washington Post‘s editorial on the climate and clean energy jobs bill deserves to be read in full:

Read more

Investigation must be free, clear, and complete

CAP’s Daniel J. Weiss, who first proposed the commission idea on May 4, offers his answer to the question of what areas the investigation should pursue.

Read more

Recent polls show Latinos strongly support action on climate change and clean energy jobs.  On Wednesday, a group of Hispanic business leaders from Florida headed to the Capitol to urge their Senators – Bill Nelson (D-FL) and George LeMieux (R-FL) – to support comprehensive climate and clean energy legislation.

The group brought a petition signed by 2,000 Hispanic business owners from South Florida to bolster their cause.  CAP intern JT McLain has the story.

Read more

Let’s not forget that other risky, dirty oil business BP is part of

Canada’s large reserves of tar sands (or oil sands) are poised to become the number one source of U.S. crude oil imports in 2010, according to a new report from research firm IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates.

Oil sands imports could ultimately increase to account for 20 percent to 36 percent of U.S. oil and refined product imports by 2030 from the 2009 level of 8 percent, according to the report, “The Role of Canadian Oil Sands in U.S. Oil Supply.”

I’m so glad the Houston Chronicle still uses the term tar sands, unlike the semi-greenwashing term CERA is using (see Memo to all: They ain’t “oil sands.”)

The CERA report also seriously underplays the devastating environmental and human health consequences of the “biggest global warming crime ever seen.” See also Canadian bishop challenges the “moral legitimacy” of tar sands production.  Indeed, a major new study by Ceres, discussed below, comes to a very different view.

And these reports couldn’t be more timely, given which company is betting big time on the tar sands (see BP stand for “back to petroleum” “” oil giant shuts clean energy HQ, slashes renewables budget up to $900 million this year, dives into tar sands).

Read more

The Environmental Protection Agency informed BP officials late Wednesday that the company has 24 hours to choose a less toxic form of chemical dispersants to break up its oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, according to government sources familiar with the decision, and must apply the new form of dispersants within 72 hours of submitting the list of alternatives.

Well, better 600,000 gallons (!) late than never (see “Out of Sight: BP’s dispersants are toxic “” but not as toxic as dispersed oil” and “BP chooses more toxic, less effective dispersants“).

While this is clearly uncharted waters for many federal agencies, EPA should never have approved the Corexit dispersants for use in this quantity.  It just shows one more time that nobody is planning for the worst-case scenario — hint, hint swing Senators who stand in the way of climate action this year (see “Lisa Murkowski proposes to fiddle while Alaska burns” — and everybody swallowed the BP self-certified, self-delusion (see BP calls blowout disaster ‘inconceivable,’ ‘unprecedented,’ and unforeseeable).

The WashPost has more on this point:

Read more

JR:  Gives new meaning to GIGO.  Your jokes are welcome!

“The average cow makes enough waste per day to power a 100-watt light bulb.”

One Moos and One Hums, but They Could Help Power Google

Hey diddle diddle. Guess what the cow has done this time?

America’s dairy farmers could soon find themselves in the computer business, with the manure from their cows possibly powering the vast data centers of companies like Google and Microsoft. While not immediately intuitive, the idea plays on two trends: the building of computing centers in more rural locales, and dairy farmers’ efforts to deal with cattle waste by turning it into fuel.

Read more

Live video of the ongoing oil disaster in the Gulf will soon be available to the public. Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA), chair of the House global warming committee, called on BP to publicly release the live feeds of its Deepwater Horizon drilling disaster before a hearing Wednesday on the scientific efforts to understand the scale of the growing devastation to the Gulf of Mexico. The feed will be available at globalwarming.house.gov.

What few clips have been released have led independent experts to estimate two to four million gallons of oil are spewing into the gulf every day, many times greater than the official guess of 210,000 gallons. The federal government does not even have any copies of the video archives, which are being kept in BP headquarters in Houston. Questioned by the Wonk Room on Monday, US Coast Guard Rear Adm. Mary Landry said that despite requests from the Coast Guard and Congress, BP headquarters in Houston had not yet released any recordings of the live video feeds from their remote submersibles other than a few thirty-second clips:

After Senators Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Bill Nelson (D-FL) contacted BP, Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, and MMS Director Elizabeth Birnbaum calling for “public release of any and all video footage showing details of oil gushing from the broken pipe and wellhead 5,000 feet below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico, where the Deepwater Horizon rig sank last month,” BP released four more clips:

The disaster has now continued for nearly a month — 40,000 minutes — pumping tens of millions of gallons of toxic oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Independent experts have used what little video is available to confirm prior analysis that the official estimate of flow rate is five to twenty times too small. One expert analyst estimates oil is gushing out at four million gallons a day. There has been no legitimate reason the video wasn’t being streamed live this past month, so that elected officials, the media, the public, and researchers could provide much needed oversight and insight.