New estimates expand size of spill

WASHINGTON – Government scientists Thursday said as much as 40,000 barrels of oil have been flowing daily from the blown-out BP well, doubling earlier estimates and greatly expanding the scope of what is already the largest spill in U.S. history.

The new figures could mean 42million to 84 million gallons of oil has leaked into the Gulf since the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded on the night of April 20 – nearly four times the size of the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill.

The flow estimates were released by Marcia McNutt, director of the U.S. Geological Survey, and do not count any increases that may have occurred since the cutting of the well’s riser pipe, a step that was expected to boost the flow.

Teams using a variety of technologies are trying to calculate how much the riser cut has increased the well release, but they will not have that information for several more days.

The new flow numbers are the latest in a series of estimates that have steadily grown as scientists analyzed live video feeds. The earliest figure, 1,000 barrels, was supplanted by 5,000 barrels. A government-appointed scientific team then pegged the flow at 12,000 to 19,000 barrels.

That same group has now concluded that “given the limited data available and the small amount of time to process that data, the best estimate for the average flow rate for the leakage … is between 25,000 to 30,000 barrels per day, but could be as low as 20,000 barrels per day or as high as 40,000 barrels per day,” McNutt said in a release.

In a sign of the difficulty of estimating the flow, one team believes that the upper range could be as high as 50,000 barrels. There are 42 gallons in a barrel of oil.

The new flow numbers confirm the suspicions of engineers who have watched live feeds of the billowing flows from the well over the last few weeks, and who questioned the government’s and BP’s earlier estimates.

BP has said it will be unable to plug the well before August, when relief wells will be completed. But a containment cap installed on the well last week is capturing about 15,000 barrels, or 630,000 gallons, a day and pumping it to a ship at the surface. Officials predict that by next week they will be able to collect or burn off nearly double that amount.

Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the Obama administration’s point man for the spill, sent a letter Thursday to Carl-Henric Svanberg, BP’s Board Chairman, summoning “any appropriate officials from BP” to meet with President Barack Obama and other senior officials on June 16.

Family members of victims of the rig explosion met with Obama at the White House Thursday. They wore blue ribbons, each with 11 stars – one for each of the workers killed.

Peggy Kemp, whose son Roy died in the explosion, said Obama assured them: “We will not be forgotten.”