Fires burn around the site of the BP Deepwater Horizon rig in April 2010. Scientists who measured the flow of oil from the leaking well, originally said to be 5,000 barrels per day, were asked to release numbers at the low end of the spectrum, though high-end numbers of almost 70,000 barrels per day were later found to be accurate. The flow is now estimated to have been about 62,000 barrels per day before it diminished. (Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times) |
Estimates of the amount of oil spewing from BP’s blown-out deep-sea well were an ongoing subject of debate and controversy during the Deepwater Horizon disaster, which wound up on the record books as the nation’s largest offshore oil spill.
Early official estimates pegged the flow at 5,000 barrels a day, a figure that was based on satellite images of oil pooling on the surface of the Gulf of Mexico. When live video footage of the damaged wellhead system was publicly released, independent scientists analyzing images of the oil plume billowing from nearly a mile below the gulf’s surface concluded the leak was far larger. There was criticism that the federal government and BP were downplaying the size of the spill, which at that point remained mostly offshore, away from gulf beaches and relatively out of sight.
Nearly a month into the spill, a group of federal and university scientists was assembled to devise more precise numbers. Teams within the group employed different techniques to estimate the flow, and on May 27, 2010, some preliminary results were announced.
A U.S. Interior Department USGS%20Web%20Site%20Per%20BW%27s%20Request.pdf%20">news release said the group’s “overall best initial estimate for the lower and upper boundaries of flow rates of oil is in the range of 12,000 and 19,000 barrels per day.” That same day, Marcia McNutt, the group’s chair and the director of the U.S. Geological Survey, held a news briefing to discuss the results, providing a somewhat confusing explanation and different sets of numbers.
One team, she said, pegged the daily release rate “between 12,000 to [sic] 19,000 barrels.” But she added that a second team concluded the flow’s lower bound was 12,000 to 25,000 barrels a day. Then, later in the briefing, she said that “the flow rate could be as much as 19,000 barrels per day.”
In an e-mail McNutt wrote to members of the second team two days later, she complained that the Interior news release was misleading and that she had gotten “suggestions” of how to present the findings from the spill’s National Incident Command and the communications staff at the White House and the Department of the Interior.
“From a White House communications person: How about saying that several lines of evidence suggest that the flow is 12,000 to 19,000 barrels per day but that the rate could be as high as 25,000 barrels per day?” McNutt wrote in the e-mail, which was obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by a whistleblower group. “No,” she remarked in parenthesis, “because the 25,000 is a LOWER bound, not an UPPER bound.”
In a scientific integrity complaint filed this week by the group, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility contends the e-mail is evidence of White House pressure to low-ball the size of the BP spill, which ultimately totaled 5 million barrels.
The complaint, filed with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, targets a NOAA senior scientist who PEER says prepared a July 2010 report summarizing the findings of one of the flow teams. PEER accuses the scientist, William Lehr, of selectively representing the team’s work to highlight low flow estimates at the expense of higher ones that were more accurate. Lehr, PEER alleges, wanted to “accommodate the desires of … the White House and the National Incident Command.”
NOAA declined to comment on the PEER complaint and a White House spokesman did not respond to a request for comment. In a statement, McNutt said PEER had taken her e-mail out of context.
“I was expressing to the [group] my frustration with how to simply convey the results from multiple methods for measuring flow rate. This is clearly not a simple problem. The [group] worked as quickly as possible to develop accurate estimates of flows five thousand feet below the surface, mindful of the importance of this information to the response effort. We communicated complex scientific information. The public information for the May 27 flow rate announcement reported fast-breaking results from experts in multiple time zones across the nation as part of a real-time, nonstop response effort. We were constantly working with the press and the public to improve information, fill in details, provide clarification, and answer questions about difficult concepts. The record, the report and my comments on the May 27 press call clearly document this."
PEER, which advocates for environmental employees of all levels of government, has previously asserted that the Obama administration has meddled with the work of government scientists despite promises to end the sort of political interference that was documented under the Bush administration.
McNutt’s group revised its flow estimates upward several times during the course of the three-month spill. Ultimately the government said the wellhead leak spilled 62,000 barrels a day, slowing to 53,000 barrels.
It turns out that was not the last word, however. In a paper published online last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, McNutt and other scientists conclude the well gushed 50,000 to 70,000 barrels a day. Of the total spilled, they say more than 2 million barrels of oil remained in the deep sea.
The authors also found that the analytic method that yielded the low flow estimates (and which Lehr’s report emphasized) “was inappropriate for this application and resulted in oil flow rates that were biased too low by a factor of two.”
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