by Dave Nocera

Created on: July 16, 2010   Last Updated: July 24, 2010

Now that the BP Gulf leak has been stopped all eyes are on the cleanup of 219 million gallons of oil that BP spewed into the Gulf [1].  However, the real doomsday trigger that was unleashed with the oil goes largely unnoticed.  A catastrophic legacy that we leave behind for future generations, with far greater long term danger to life on Earth than the leaked oil, is the impacts of the leaked methane from the failed 2010 Deepwater Horizon Spill.   

 Not to diminish in anyway the tragedy of the Exxon Valdez, but the Exxon Valdez did not release methane and 20 years later the Prince William Sound is largely recovered from the oil damage, admittedly with some heartbreaking consequences [2].  So if we look forward, we can expect that the BP Gulf disaster will hit the wildlife and local economies many times harder than the Exxon Valdez tragedy hit Alaska, but in 20 years we will largely recover from the oil damage.  But also in 20 years we can expect that the methane BP released is still warming the planet like a giant magnifying glass.

The media has reported that vast amounts of methane in Gulf spill pose a threat to life in the ocean [3], but they missed the most important point, methane’s role as the doomsday trigger. Even at great ocean pressures oil cannot be compressed [4], the amount of oil that exited the pipe at the sea floor is roughly equal to the oil that pollutes the environment at sea level.   However that oil was mixed with 40% methane [5] and the situation with methane is dreadful. 

Here are the calculations.  The methane that exited the pipe at the seafloor is estimated at 146 million gallons [10].  But since methane hydrate expands 164 times in volume as it rises from the ocean depths to surface, 146 million gallons of methane at the seafloor expanded to 24 billion gallons of methane entering into our environment [8]. Volume alone, the BP Gulf methane spill is 109 times greater than the BP Gulf oil spill. Also, methane is 10 times worse of a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide [9], so release of methane from the spill could eventually have the same effect on Earths atmosphere as 240 billion gallons of carbon dioxide. Clearly methane released from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon Spill has the potential to be the doomsday trigger that pushes Earth over the edge into a runaway greenhouse effect [13]. This explains why scientists are measuring as much as one million times the normal level

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