Spilled oil would have kept the U.S. going for only about a quarter of a day
Amid a deluge of data
emanating from the investigations into the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, there
sometimes emerges a particularly stark and compelling statistic. For
example, at a daylong symposium on the Gulf oil spill last week, former
Florida governor and U.S. Sen. Bob Graham, co-chair of the National Oil
Spill Commission, said he fully expected supporters of a "drill, baby,
drill" philosophy to be back in full throat soon. But, he cautioned, "If
we were to adopt that and if the current estimates of reserves are
accurate, we will drain the last drop of oil out of the United States in
the year 2031."
View full sizeCopies of the report of the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling are seen at the National Press Club in Washington on Jan. 11. Meanwhile, Tyler Priest, a leading authority
on the history of offshore drilling, who served as a senior analyst to
the commission, has noted that the 4.9 million barrels of oil that
America watched gush into the Gulf from the uncontrolled BP well, would
have kept the United States, which consumes 20.1 million barrels a day,
going for only about a quarter of a day. "Large numbers with lots of
zeros -- 20.1 million barrels a day -- are too abstract to drive home
the scale and velocity of our oil consumption. But if you say that all
the oil that gushed out of Macondo, around the clock for half a school
year, would only have satisfied our nation's demand for merely six
hours, then you get a concrete sense of our relationship to oil," said
Priest, who teaches at the University of Houston.
But then again, the sheer volume of oil that poured out of the Macondo well may, in the view of Bob Bea, the University of California at Berkeley engineer who leads the Deepwater Horizon Study Group, suggest richer deposits in the deep waters of the Gulf than "the current estimates" Graham referred to in his ominous forecast.
Bruce Alpert can be reached at balpert@timespicayune.com or 202.383.7861. Jonathan Tilove can be reached at jtilove@timespicayune.com or 202.383.7827.