A few ways of looking at the Gulf oil spill

It's been confusing trying to figure out how much oil is spewing from the broken pipe from the Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf. Not only is the actual volume hard to figure, but the news media talks about gallons per day or barrels per day, and unless you're really paying attention, they're all just a bunch of big numbers. And then they'll say that the Exxon Valdez dumped 10.8M gallons of oil into Prince William Sound. How many barrels are in 10.8 million gallons and how does that compare to the spill in the Gulf?

What got me thinking about this when Megan the Elder asked me to put this all in perspective by putting it in terms of Olympic-size swimming pools. I figured that might make sense, so I did some number crunching. When the well first blew out, the amount of oil being spilled was estimated at 1,000 barrels/day. That was later revised upward to 5,000 barrels/day. Since then numbers like 10,000-20,000 barrels are tossed about, but I've seen guesstimates as high as 60,000 barrels/day. Nobody knows for sure.

I checked on the volume of Olympic-size swimming pools (OSSP), and found a number of 660,253 gallons. A barrel of oil is 42US gallons, so there are 15,720 barrels in a pool. That's well within the current range of estimates for the daily discharge from the blown-out well, so for the sake of argument, let's say the well is dumping out one OSSP of oil per day.

Another way of looking at it is in terms of acre-feet. That's the unit used for measuring large volumes of water stored behind dams or in lakes. An acre-foot, as the name implies in an acre of water (or whatever) one foot thick, or 325,851.4 gallons, or 7,758 barrels, or roughly half an OSSP. So the well in the Gulf is blowing out about two acre-feet of oil per day. Most residential lots are 1/4 acre or less, so imagine you and eight or ten of the lots in your neighborhood inundated with a foot of oil every day.

And yet another way of looking at it - Your typical tanker truck holds 9,000 gallons of whatever. In terms of OSSP's, it would take around 73 tanker trucks to fill the pool, or truck away the oil from the spill if that were possible. That's a truck full every 20 minutes, every day, for 43 days so far.  Something like 6,300 trucks and counting. If each of the trucks are 50' long, and if each of the trucks were lined up nose to tail, the line would be 60 miles long!

In summary, so far the spill has dumped these equivalent volumes of oil:
-43 Olympic-sized swimming pools
-430 big city lots covered 1 foot thick
-60 miles of tanker trucks lined up end to end
-2.6 Exxon Valdez tankers

It was a bit of fun to crunch the numbers and put everything in perspective, but that's about the only fun thing about the whole sordid mess.