I noticed "Patrick's Original Guide to Cleaning Up the Oil Spill," so I list it to the left. However, this Patrick is not me. This one was written by Patrick (and illustrated by Kayoko) Halliwell. This virtual publication (for your Kindle), of course, is specifically about the current spill and just came out this week.
What you can and can't eat is changed by nutritionists regularly. Sometimes it is one way, then the other, and back, and...
However, when it comes to the Gulf BP oil spill, the rate keeps going up:
........Media Reported.........Cumulative spill
(gallons/day) (million gallons)
Day 1 April 20 BP 42,000................... 0.042
Day 9 April 28 BP 210,000................... 1.9
Day12 May 1 PT 1,000,000................... 12.0
Day 58 June 16 Latest 1,470,000 (low)....... 87
2,700,000 (high)...... 157
Furthermore, the oil plume now appears to be edging to leave the Gulf through South Florida. If this occurs, the currents will take it up the Eastern Seaboard and towards Europe. While the high of 157 million gallons is not yet close to the 380-520 million gallons foisted on Kuwait by Saddam Hussein, BP has long been reporting that the relief wells will not be operational until August, perhaps another 58 days away, if not much longer. Plus, who knows for sure if even this tactic will totally stop the flow. Thus, if this output continues as above, the Gulf spill will begin to approach the worst ever. As a matter of comparison, the Alaskan Exxon Valdez disaster amounted to 11 million gallons, so this current Gulf spill is now about 8 times worse, and, maybe almost double that.
Yet, President Barack Obama yesterday in his Oval Office address to the nation did say that 90% of the leaking oil will be captured by BP in a short while. BP reports that yesterday, they succeeded in recovering 438,000 gallons of the stuff, or about a quarter of the low consensus. If the company succeeds, then the actual release to the marine environment will, ironically enough, be in the range of their earlier ultra-conservative leak estimates.
Let's round this off to 100 million gallons of oil now in the Gulf. At the cost of petroleum today, that is a sum now approaching $200 million. As BP today agreed to establishing a $20 billion escrow account to pay for damages, that is 100 times more than the oil they lost. The firm also announced that no dividends would be paid for the rest of the year. Yet, this day saw BP stock rise 1.4%, to just about 50% the value of its one year high. The obvious sentiment in the White House is, let's prevent BP from going bankrupt so they can pay their debt. I can see a market for a counter product--Buy BP: Let's keep them alive.
Anyway, to answer the question, then, let's us take the average of the high and low consensus. If you subtract the amount reported by BP as being recovered, the leak today is 1,647,000 gallons of oil. At $77/barrel, this loss is $3 million/day, nothing compared to the damages they face.
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The Dow Jones Industrials today stayed positive, up 5 to 10,409, and the Japan Nikkei, reflecting the world market, also snuck above 10,000 at 10,067. Gold dropped $5/toz to $1230 and crude oil is at $77/barrel.
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No hurricanes in sight for the Gulf of Mexico, but that weak disturbance heading for the Caribbean remains, and has a finite, but low, potential of making it into the Gulf. There are now three disturbances in the Pacific, all small, but I don't remember any recent occurrence of three at the same time in roughly the same place. They all are heading west and north.
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