COMMON DREAMS– The view from space indicates that the oil may be leaking at a rate of 25,000 barrels a day, dwarfing the figure of 5,000 barrels that US officials and the British oil giant BP have used in recent days.

A Northern Gannet bird, which is covered in oil from a massive spill in the Gulf of Mexico, pokes its head out from under a towel as members of Tri-State Bird Rescue and Research and the International Bird Research Center prepare to hydrate it in Fort Jackson, La., Saturday, May 1, 2010.

That would mean that some nine million gallons may already have escaped from the underwater well following the April 20 explosion that killed 11 rig workers. It suggests the disaster will almost certainly prove greater than the Exxon Valdez tanker spill off Alaska in 1989, which released 11 million gallons and was the worst previous spill at sea.

President Barack Obama will visit the region on Sunday morning, aides have announced. The trip comes amid mounting criticism that the White House has been slow to react to the crisis.

His predecessor, George W Bush, faced similar anger over the federal government’s handling of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. But the government has emphasised that responsibility for the clean-up rests with BP, which leased the rig and initially played down the scale of the leak.

As the administration steps up its operations, the Pentagon will spray the slick with chemical dispersants from military C-130 planes, although environmental groups warned that these could also seriously damage the eco-system.

Menwhile Eric Holder, the country’s attorney general, is dispatching a team of lawyers to New Orleans to assess whether any laws have been broken. BP, which leased the rig and owned the oil rights, had downplayed the possible danger of any spill – predicting “no significant adverse impact” – when it submitted its exploration plan last year.

The scale of the looming catastrophe was still unclear yesterday as strong winds hampered an emergency operation to mop up the 2,200 sq mile slick being blown towards the coast of five US states.

Even BP has acknowledged that the 5,000-barrels-a-day figure for the leak – already a five-fold increase on the 1,000 barrels that it initially gave – is only a “guesstimate”. The Coastguard has also said that that leak rate could turn out to be much greater than 5,000 barrels.

The implications of the higher figures for the fishing waters, wildlife and beaches of the Gulf – and the residents whose livelihoods depend upon them – are potentially devastating.

John Amos, director of SkyTruth, a satellite data monitoring outfit that supplies analysis to environmental groups, told The Sunday Telegraph that the images and information made public by BP indicated that the slick was made up of at least six million gallons of oil.

“That is a conservative estimate and it would mean that oil is leaking at a rate of 20,000 barrels a day,” he said. “That’s a real eye-opener. And I believe the true figure is significantly higher.”

Ian MacDonald, a Florida professor of oceanography who tracks maritime oil seepage, estimated that more than nine million gallons may already have escaped into the sea on the basis of higher industry estimates of the rate of leakage. BP engineers have been desperately and unsuccessfully trying to use unmanned submarines to initiate a failed switch-off device on the well about a mile beneath the surface of the water.

In the absence of such a quick-fix solution, the company is pursuing two other remedies to stop the leak, but both will take weeks or months.

In the medium-term, the company is hoping to cover the leaks with 100-ton steel domes that would capture the escaping oil and funnel it back to a ship at the surface through pipes. The technology has been deployed for leaks at much shallower depths but has never been used for a deep-sea spill.

It has also dispatched a drill ship to the area to begin digging a relief well that would intercept the oil from the existing pipes at about 18,000 feet below the surface. This will allow the company to close off the leaking well, but the process will take at least three months and possibly much longer.

At the same time, investigations have been launched into the two crucial failures – why the rig exploded and then why the automatic switch-off device did not then activate. Oil industry analysts believe the explosion was caused by a “blow-back” when a pressure surge thrust natural gas up to the rig platform. One area under focus is a recently-completed cementing operation by the company Haliburton, which was intended to prevent oil and gas from escaping by filling gaps between the outside of pipes and the inside of the hole drilled into the ocean floor into which they fitted.

According to a 2007 US government report, cementing was a factor in 18 of 39 well blow-outs in the Gulf of Mexico over a 14-year period. And investigators have also been told that cementing was a likely cause of a major 10-week blow-out in the Timor Sea off Australia last year.

Haliburton has declined to comment while the cause of the accident is being investigated and lawsuits are pending.

The second disastrous failure occurred when the rig’s “blowout preventer” – equipment that should have automatically blocked the well when the explosion occurred – failed to work. It has since emerged that the device did not have a remote-control shut-off mechanism – these are commonly required in most offshore oil producing nations, but not the US.

Fifty miles away, on the Louisiana coastline, communities that rely on the sea for their existence are now braced for the worst. Oyster beds could take 20 years to recover and world shrimp supplies will plummet as the Gulf waters are the largest source of the seafood.

There is widespread anger, not just at BP but also the federal government for what is perceived as a hopelessly tardy response. Locals have expressed disbelief that the deployment of booms – special floating barriers – to protect the coast only began nine days after the explosion.

Continue reading about how the Oil Spill May Be Five Times Bigger Than Expected.

© COPYRIGHT COMMON DREAMS, 2010

Photo by flickr user jeferonix.