May 29, 2010
By CARL BIALIK
The Gulf oil spill may be a good deal bigger even than the numbers issued Thursday suggest, some of the scientists who worked on the estimate said.
BP PLC’s oil well is leaking between 12,000 and 19,000 barrels of oil a day, according to initial estimates announced by the U.S. Geological Survey on Thursday. Even using the more conservative figure, of 12,000 barrels a day, the spill already has become the largest in U.S. history, surpassing that of the Exxon Valdez accident in Alaska in 1989. The USGS statement Thursday called the numbers “the overall best initial estimate for the lower and upper boundaries.”
But some of the researchers who came up with the range of 12,000 to 19,000 say that is merely the minimum amount gushing out, not the lower and upper limits.
“It would be irresponsible and unscientific to claim an upper bound,” Ira Leifer, a researcher at the Marine Science Institute at the University of California, Santa Barbara, said in an interview. Dr. Leifer is a part of the National Incident Command’s Flow Rate Technical Group, which produced the estimate.
UC-Santa Barbara issued a statement Thursday in which Dr. Leifer said that “it’s safe to say that the total amount is significantly larger” than 12,000 to 19,000 barrels a day. He urged that the statement be issued because “I wanted to stand up for academic integrity,” he said in the interview.
The university is providing, upon request, a document that explains how scientists who reported to the USGS arrived at their estimate by observing the plume of oil from the leak site on videos provided by BP. In the document, the research team, led by William J. Lehr, senior scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Office of Response and Restoration, states that it is providing “a range of values that represent an estimated minimum.”
“There are and will continue to be differing estimates and conclusions within the group,” USGS spokeswoman Julie Rodriguez said in a written statement. These disagreements “represent a healthy and important part of the process that will continue to help us get closer to more and more accurate estimates,” Ms. Rodriguez said.
Dr. Leifer, in an interview, and the report also said BP provided low-quality video of the leak site that hindered efforts to make an estimate. The footage had a resolution of 720 x 480 pixels, not much higher than that of a YouTube clip, and “appeared to be video of videos, rather than original high definition images,” the scientists wrote. BP later provided more videos, but too late for this round of estimates.
“After some initial hiccups around video resolution and file sizes, we have been supplying [researchers] with large quantities of data,” BP spokesman John Curry said.
The confusion over the initial estimate of flow rate highlights for Dr. Leifer the need, in the aftermath of such incidents, “for some kind of scientific SWAT team to go and collect data, independent of the cause of an incident,” he said. “That would be in everyone’s interest, because that would give everyone confidence in the numbers.”
Write to Carl Bialik at numbersguy@wsj.com