The oil field the Deepwater Horizon had tapped is said to be the second largest deposit in the world
BP oil leak: Fallen Deepwater Horizon was tapping second largest oil deposit in the world
If there is a single aspect to the dangers of the BP oil leak, it lies in the question CEO Tony Hayward and other BP executives have been avoiding since the first drop of oil went rogue: How much oil is leaking?
The real answer is - more than anyone wants to admit, because the well holds enough oil to make Saudi Arabian drillers jealous.
The oil field the Deepwater Horizon had tapped is said to be the second largest deposit in the world. Viewzone.com reports, “The site covers an estimated 25,000 square miles, extending from the inlands of Alabama, Florida, Louisiana and Texas. “
The oil deposit is so large, it could produce 500,000 barrels of a day for more than a decade. Part of the reason the well exploded is because the site also contains large deposits of natural gas.
Speculation as to why BP has tried to hide the amount of oil spilling may be two-fold. There are legal issues and lawsuits in the works. The less said by BP now, the better it may play out for them in the future. The other, more alarming aspect, is the event of total wellhead failure before relief wells are completed in August.
Considering the size of the deposit, if BP loses control of the flow completely, the scope of the disaster would be unfathomable.
The New York Times has reported that scientists suspect the leak is thousands of times larger than what BP has been reporting. Some estimates are as high as one million gallons a day.
Rock particles, gas and oil escaping under pressure are pushing against the capstone on the sea floor that surrounds the actual well. If it collapses, the canyon of oil will escape with a vengeance.
Neither BP nor anyone else wants to say what will happen if the wellhead gives way or the sea floor around it caves in. All anyone is certain of is that the worst case scenario is the one everyone wants to avoid.
Gee, that's an awful lot of dead dinosaurs that somehow managed to end up all in one place, several thousand feet under solid rock. Maybe the dinosaurs were the first to drill that deep, and then squeezed their bodies down the hole so that they could all die and go to dinosaur heaven together. That is how I think the oil got there, because that is what my teacher told me in school, and my teacher would never lie to me.
ReplyDeleteOrrr...maybe oil is a product of the Earth Herself, isn't scarce, need not be expensive, and we've all been being buttfucked for all these years by the oil companies. And to top it all off, this is probably an natural event and the blowing up of the well is a cover-story/red herring because the oil companies are desperate to keep people from putting 2+2 together...you know "vast-quantities-of-oil + natural- spontaneous-oil-flows= oil-a-natural-product-of-the-Earth-not-scarce-and-should-be-cheap."
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