BP's Oil Disaster: The Numbers Will Shock You

Photo Credit: Public Citizen

When it comes to British Petroleum's Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, questions about the extent of the damage -- and how to quell it -- are spreading as quickly as the oil slick.

No one is quite sure just how many gallons of crude oil have been flowing freely into the Gulf since April 20, when the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded, killing 11 workers and allowing for an entirely indefinite amount of oil to gush from a damaged well as well as from the rig itself. (Is it any wonder that Halliburton was involved?)

BP has publicly admitted that 5,000 barrels are likely being injected into ocean waters each day -- but at a closed-doors congressional hearing on Tuesday, executives admitted that as many as 60,000 barrels may be contaminating the Gulf daily. If the last big spill -- Exxon Valdez in 1989 -- is any indication, experts say the best clean-up scenario is to recover 20 percent of the spilled oil. (Only 8 percent of the crude oil deposited in the ocean and coastlines off Alaska were recovered in the 1989 spill clean-up.)

On Wednesday afternoon, BP touted its having capped one of the three leaks in the pipe from the mangled oil well as a great success. But a Coast Guard spokesman told the Washington Post that having stopped that leak would not reduce the rate of oil spillage, it would merely make the oil come out stronger from the other two.

BP is also hyping up three giant steel containment domes that will be used to collect oil streaming into the Gulf and transfer it to a waiting tanker. But the domes look rather flimsy in the face of what may very well end up being the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history. And then there's the question of whether the domes could make things worse -- some experts fear that they may further damage the underwater oil pipes.

Tyson Slocum, the energy program director at Public Citizen, is worried about the chemicals being used to try and remedy the damage. "We're injecting a whole suite of chemical mixtures in an effort to neutralize the oil spill," he says. "This has the potential to make an ecological disaster worse."

Environmentally speaking, the worst effects of the BP spill have yet to be felt. Most of the known damage wreaked by Exxon Valdez came when the spill contaminated 1,300 miles of shoreline. But the extent of the damage it caused to marine life is not totally known, even 20 years out. Indeed, each day will give us a clearer picture of what short-term ecological destruction Deepwater Horizon has wrought -- on- and off-shore -- but environmental experts believe the damage made to the Gulf of Mexico will be very long-term.

On the economic side of things, estimated damages are slightly easier to tally. According to the Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies, approximately $1.6 billion in annual economic activity and services are at risk. Compare this number to the current cap on BP's liability for economic damages like lost wages and tourist dollars, which is $75 million. And compare that further to the first-quarter profit BP posted just one week after the explosion: $6 billion.

BP: Unregulated billionaire perpetrator

BP has a long record of oil-related disasters in the United States. In 2005, BP's Texas City refinery exploded, killing 15 workers and injuring another 170. The next year, one of its Alaska pipelines leaked 200,000 gallons of crude oil. According to Slocum of Public Citizen, BP has paid $550 million in fines. BP seems to particularly enjoy violating the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, and has paid the two largest fines in the Occupational Safety and Health Administration's history.

Fines are the primary mechanism for punishing corporations found of violating laws in our country, Slocum says. "The problem is that that the amount of the fine is generally miniscule when compared to the profitability [of breaking the law]." In other words: "A felony becomes a cost of doing business."