Visualisation of data
I can’t recall how but I came across a web site that focuses on ‘translating’ data into pictures. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. The web site is called Information is Beautiful.
Anyhow, they have attempted to graphically portray the scale of the BP oil spill. (A thumbnail is below but please click on the link, or here, to see this as it was meant to be shown.)
But this image is an update of an earlier one here that is really powerful. Because it attempts to put the scale of the oil spill into context with global oil consumption.
If the Purdue University estimate of the oil spill is correct at 48,500 barrels a day (a barrel is approximately the equivalent of two car tankfuls of gas/petrol) and the spill is contained in 90 days then the total oil spilled will be:
90 x 48,500 = 4,365,000 barrels
That is an enormous quantity.
But have a guess as to how much that would represent in terms of hourly global oil consumption?
Any idea?
Well global oil consumption is 3,500,000 barrels an hour.
So 90 days at 48,500 barrels a day represents just 1 hour 15 minutes worth of global consumption!
If there was ever an argument for the world to wean itself off oil then this would appear to be it.
What has happened so far is tragic – tragic beyond measure. But if it turns out to be a ‘tipping point’ for nations to reconsider how we find and use energy then, perhaps, it will have been a horrible lesson that we all had to take.
And if the USA puts all it’s collective back into leading the world out of our addiction to oil then the damage and hardship will not have been in vain.
By Paul Handover
Learning from Dogs 
If only that oil spill could convince our financial regulators that there are other risks in life than the relatively benign risk of a company or a bank defaulting… then the spill might even be worth it.
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My sentiment as well.
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Mostly, USA is leading nothing, but in the wrong way. The problem is for the USA to stop dragging. Right now they are increasing like crazy their coal usage, and poisoning the giant Marcellus gas shales with “fracking”.
Only way: tax energy huge. But Obama’s adviser, Goldman Sachs, just wants to create themselves a new market.
PA
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But if it turns out to be a ‘tipping point’ ..
It won’t …
And if the USA puts all it’s collective back into leading the world out of our addiction to oil ..
It won’t …
Sorry, but there have been serious spills before and the self-evidence of the need to move away from oil has been ?…. errm self-evident for decades, so what leades you to suppose this will be any different? As I write, countries are desperately searching for more sources of oil and furiously extracting all they can from existing ones.
Yes, I am a cynic, but prove me wrong …..
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We are at peak oil, but not peak demand. They can search all they want, like mammoth swimming in tar sands… Them fossils are going nowhere fast.
Only solutions at hand are efficiency and advanced nuclear (gen IV and V)
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In May 2000, an environmental assessment for deepwater drilling in the Gulf presciently warned that “spill responses may be complicated by the potential for very large magnitude spills (because of the high production rates associated with deepwater wells).” The report noted that the oil industry “has estimated worst-case spill volumes ranging from 5,000 to 116,000 barrels a day for 120 days,” and it even anticipated the underwater plumes of oil that are currently haunting the Gulf: “Oil released subsea (e.g., subsea blowout or pipeline leak) in these deepwater environments could remain submerged for some period of time and travel away from the spill site.” The report ominously concluded, “There are few practical spill-response options for dealing with submerged oil.”
That same month, an MMS research document developed with deepwater drillers – including the company then known as BP Amoco – warned that such a spill could spell the end for offshore operations. The industry could “ill afford a deepwater blowout,” the document cautions, adding that “no single company has the solution” to such a catastrophe. “The real test will come if a deepwater blowout occurs.”
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What an interesting comment! Many thanks for that.
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