Plume Team Draft Report, Flow Rate Technical Group -

While U.S. federal government officials insist that 12,000 to 19,000 barrels per day is still the official estimate of the amount of oil spewing from the BP well in the Gulf of Mexico, a draft report obtained by The Phoenix Sun, shows that a key government panel concluded that “at least” 12,000 to 25,000 barrels of oil per day was flowing from the well in May.

“The consensus of most of the experts is that the leakage at the time of the viewed video clips averaged at least 12,000 to 25,000 bbl of oil per day…and could possibly be significantly larger…”

The Plume Calculation Team (PCT) added that it did not have enough data at the time to make an upper boundary estimate of the total amount of oil coming from the well.

The Flow Rate Technical Group

The PCT is one of two teams in the Flow Rate Technical Group (FRTG) investigating the amount of oil flowing into the Gulf of Mexico from the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster. The PCT is using video of the ruptured pipe to make its calculations. The other primary team is the Mass Balance group which is using airborne imaging technology to work backwards from the amount of oil seen on the surface to determine the flow rate. According to a government press release, “This is the first time it has been used to measure the volume of an oil spill.”

The PCT report was released by the Department of the Interior after The Phoenix Sun requested the document. Julie Chavez Rodriguez, deputy press secretary at the DOI, said that the Mass Balance group is not releasing its draft report while the work is undergoing peer review. The final report should be available soon, said Rodriguez, perhaps as early as Thursday.

Calculations made by the two panels were “reality-checked” by a using data from the amount of oil brought to the surface early on by tube inserted into the riser. This method was used to estimate a lower limit value only — which was put at 11,000 barrels per day.

At a press briefing this morning, Adm. Thad Allen seemed to indicate that he considered the 25,000 barrel per day figure as reasonable, despite the official government estimate of 19,000 barrels as the upward boundary.

If you had been tracking the course of the BP-Deepwater Horizon oil gusher, or listening to media coverage about areas that were potentially threatened by the massive amounts of oil floating in the Gulf, you may have thought that experts knew where it’s likely to hit land. In a general sense, at least.

That was never true.

But it seemed correct. Since the April 20th explosion, the oil slick drifted slowly north and east as it grew.

Here’s a New York Times map of the slick three days after the explosion.

From the New York Times

And here it is three days later:

From the New York Times

Even jumping four days more, the trend continues:

From the New York Times

As recently as Saturday, the best data from NOAA and the US Coast Guard appeared to reinforce the notion that, if nothing else, the oil spill was predictable in its heading:

From the New York Times

And then came Sunday:

From the New York Times

The spill seemed to have caught even the Times‘ graphics department flat-footed, as the oil slick moved beyond the boundaries of the map. The gulf between the real world and our expectations of it grew again today:

From the New York Times

This faith in predictability — in our ability to predict — was evident in an October 22, 2007 determination by the Department of the Interior. The DOI issued a “finding of no new significant impact” for the site, allowing drilling to go ahead without a new environmental impact statement (EIS). Why? Because an earlier EIS had determined that drilling at similar sites was safe, and there was no evidence showing that this one was any different. Regulations were directed in one direction (self-monitoring and reporting by oil companies) while in the real world, hundreds of spills, malfunctions and poor safety records drifted silently off the map, creating the real gulf that is our problem.

A sense that the experts know what they’re doing, that companies can self-regulate because market discipline is sufficient, and that the government needs just to get out of the way — all of these are a beautiful dream.

The only problem is that, inevitably, something wakes us up. In this case, it was an explosion on April 20th . The challenge now is to do something to make sure our laws are changed to match reality, before too many grow tired and go back to sleep and the gulf widens again.

With all eco-eyes focused on the action (or, more properly, inaction) on a climate bill, other critical components of a clean energy economy can be overlooked. That was the case on Monday as the dominant news story concerned speculation about whether Republican members of the Senate Committee on Energy and Public Works would show up for Tuesday’s climate bill markup session (they didn’t).

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