Hurricane Alex Waves Triumph Over BP Spill Efforts

With the first hurricane of the Atlantic season having entered the Gulf of Mexico, weather has begun to play a role in the BP oil spill mitigation effort. In the central Gulf, from Louisiana east to Florida, wave heights are expected to be 6-9 feet building to 7-10 and then subside to about 7 ft Thursday night. Friday and Saturday will see similar wave heights with Sunday seeing 2-4 ft waves. The Florida Gulf Coast will see wave heights of 4-6 ft subsiding to 1-3 ft by Sunday. The National Hurricane Center forecast is at this website.

This wave height prevents oil skimming operations and controlled burns. It will also drive booms off their locations, rendering them ineffective. Collection efforts, at this point, have not been affected.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has prepared a statement about the projected effects of a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico on the BP oil spill. The oil slick is not expected to affect either the development or the progress of a storm. While storm surge may carry a part of the slick inland, experience with spills during previous hurricanes suggests to NOAA that the effects would be widely dispersed. At sea, a hurricane is anticipated to mix and weather the oil in a slick, allowing natural biological processes to have a greater effect in breaking down the oil.

The numbers from the Deepwater Horizon / BP oil leak can be daunting. At day 71, it is believed that 30-60,000 barrels of oil are leaking from the well each day. That suggests a total volume leaked at this point of between 2.1 and 4.3 million barrels of oil. A barrel of oil is 42 U.S. Gallons.

To illustrate this amount of crude oil, it represents less than three tanker loads of crude oil carried by a ship the size of the former Exxon Valdez. The Exxon Valdez is believed to have leaked 250-750,000 barrels of its load so a very rough estimate of the BP leak suggests that it amounts to between 4 and 8 times the Exxon Valdez leak.

Mitigation efforts to date have involved collecting, skimming and burning the oil. BP states that as of June 29, the LMRP cap and the Riser Insertion Tube together collected about 508,700 barrels. The Unified Incident Command (UIC) states that 238,000 barrels have been burned in 275 controlled burns. They also report that over 28 million gallons of an oil and water mix has been skimmed, resulting in collecting around 67-101,000 barrels of oil.

The amount of crude oil leaking and uncollected flowing into the Gulf of Mexico appears to be in the range of 1.28 to 3.45 million barrels.

It is difficult to determine the effects of another mitigation effort, dispersants. They are being applied at the surface and at the LMRP cap on the ocean bottom. The June 29 UIC report shows 1.6 million gallons having been used to date. Despite some environmental concerns, surface application of dispersants has not ceased.

The UIC also reports as of June 29 that "Approximately 413 miles of Gulf Coast shoreline is currently oiled - approximately 259 miles in Louisiana, 48 miles in Mississippi, 47 miles in Alabama, and 59 miles in Florida." The UIC standardized its definitions concerning oiled shoreline in the past week, resulting in some changes in the miles reported as compared to earlier numbers.