In the May 5, 2010 blog, Spill, Baby, Spill, the oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico was discussed. Oil is still gushing from the Macondo Project in the Mississippi Canyon Block 252, a joint project of Beyond (British) Petroleum (65% share), Andarko (25% share) and MOEX 2007 (10% share). The oil is gushing at a rate of 200,000 gallons daily (or 5,000 to 100,000 barrels of oil per day). Multiply that over the 35 days since April 20, the day of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion that sank the rig and caused the subsequent environmental disaster. The amount of oil has now reached six million gallons according to Coast Guard and BP estimates. What does this oil number mean in the big picture?
- 11 men died in the initial explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig
- 22,000 personnel of BP, government agencies, and private companies are working in the Gulf area on containment
- 1.8 million feet of containment boom and 990,000 feet of absorbent boom have been deployed
- 22% of Gulf of Mexico federal waters is closed to fishing
- According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), there were 5.7 million recreational fisherpersons who took 25 million fishing trips and commercial fishing harvested over one billion pounds of fish and shellfish in the Gulf in 2008
- 20,680,000 barrels of oil per day is consumed in the US
- 8,457,000 barrels of oil per day is produced by the US
- 1,165,000 barrels of oil per day is exported by the US
- 8.35 tons of oil equivalence is consumed by each US citizen per year
- 2 relief wells are currently being drilled and will take three months to complete according to BP sources as the oil continues to gush
- 333 birds found dead and 44 birds have been captured according to the International Bird Rescue Research Center as of May 24, 2010
See Deepwater Horizon Response Unified Command for more detailed information. See the Boston Globe's The Big Picture for news stories in photographs.
