Marine scientists were scouring footage of oil and gas billowing out of a ruptured well on the ocean floor on May 13 to try and deliver the first reliable estimates of the amount of crude oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico.
The film could help resolve the increasingly contentious debate about the scale of the disaster in the Gulf, and the oil companies’ willingness to grant public access to information.
BP has claimed repeatedly there is no way of measuring the scale of the leak. The US Coast Guard, meanwhile, has stuck to an early estimate of 5,000 barrels a day.
Independent marine researchers have suggested the spill could be much larger. BP officials last week laid out a worst case scenario of 60,000 barrels a day when they were in a closed-door briefing with members of Congress in Washington.
But the release of the first footage from BP’s submersible cameras — under growing pressure from scientists and news organizations — could help scientists arrive at independent estimates of the scale of the leak.
Timothy Crone, at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, part of Columbia University in New York, a scientist who has spent years studying natural jets on the ocean floor, said he would be able to produce an independent estimate of the leak by analyzing the video and information from BP on the diameter of the leaking pipe.
“If they took about 20 or 30 seconds of video with a very specific purpose of measuring flow rates, which means having the ROV [remotely operated vehicle] stay completely still or parked on the bottom, and you got video of the plume close to the leak, and if it was illuminated and with high resolution, then you could get a pretty good estimates of the flow rates,” Crone said.
The scientists say that access to video from BP’s ocean-floor vehicles could become even more crucial over the next few days when it comes to gauging the success of various devices used to block the leak.
BP said On Thursday that it was going to try to fit a smaller tube inside the crumpled riser pipe on the ocean floor to siphon oil to the surface.
Engineers are also considering a smaller version of a failed containment box. The original device was abandoned because it trapped hydrate crystals that clogged the pipe.
“One of the really critical things is if you don’t know the flow, it is awfully hard to design the thing that is going to work ... This has been going on for weeks and we are just assuming the flow rate is the same,” said Norman Guinasso, director of the geochemical and environmental research group at Texas A&M University.
The Deepwater Horizon Unified Command — set up by the Marine Board of Investigation to report on the explosion on April 20 that caused the leak — posted the first clip on Wednesday. It said the oil and gas were flowing from the larger of the two known leaks from the riser.
“This leak is located approximately 460 feet [140 metres] from the top of the blowout preventer and rests on the sea floor at a depth of about 5,000 feet [1,524m],” the Command said.
Initial investigations by Congress and government agencies in Louisiana have pointed to a series of equipment failures on the Deepwater Horizon rig, and a culture of lax regulatory oversight of the offshore drilling industry.
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