This Gulf Oil Leak - How Long Could It Gush Until It Empties Itself?......

I haven't heard anyone address this question. Surely there is not unlimited oil down in this well. Surely at some time the leak - if it doesn't get plugged - will start to slow down and ultimately drain this well or whatever you call the cavity that they found the oil in. Has anybody ever said how long this thing could gush oil until it depletes itself? I can't believe that it could go on indefinitely. Has anyone heard this discussed?

there are X number of billion gallons of oil estimated in that well...I just forget what the X is.

Even though it won't last forever, it will last a LONG time considering it has gushed around 33 million gallons in one month.

And what will that do?

I'm not going to pretend to be an engineer, but I've come across a couple of articles that blow my mind. It seems that deepwater drilling began to take off around 2006 in the Gulf.

"Chevron on Tuesday estimated the 300-square-mile region where its test well sits could hold between 3 billion and 15 billion barrels of oil and natural gas liquids."

Check out the full article from September 2006:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14678206/

Now if the oil reservoir that Deepwater tapped into is available for 'emptying' from a single well-head - the one currently spewing death into the sea - and if you round off Chevron's estimates of the amount held in Walker Ridge to 10 billion barrels, and it's spewing - at last estimates - 10,000 barrels a day, my quick math says this COULD blow oil for 200 YEARS!

Now THAT makes it hard for me to go to sleep tonight. It's incomprehensible.
I've never typed OMG with more conviction.

how does this play into the Peak Oil argument or is Peak Oil a myth?

You can put more than one well into an oil field and it will drain much faster.

Most major fields have anywhere from a half dozen to 30 wells into the same field to increase daily production limit.

That said, the reason they are going for this inherently more destructive and dangerous deep water drilling is because the easy stuff is tapping out so now we have to go for the tough stuff, like this and the oil sands in Canada so the likelihood is that peak oil came and went and we forgot to celebrate, er, compensate. Now, if this is a big gusher and while BP seems to think they can keep scientists from figuring that out, they can't, then, if it isn't stopped, a very large amount of harder to get oil is going to be lost while it destroys the gulf, thereby making peak oil move a little farther into the past and still no card from you. If I were peak oil, I would be pissed at your lack of acknowledgment.

this could last two years at 100,000 barrels a day. Two scientists gave that estimate.

of the formation. It could be that it can produce it this rate for years, while opening up the well wide for a few hours will drop the pressure for an easy plugging. But BP would know that from the logs.

I agree with some posters around here that a lot of the decisions made early on were with the idea of saving the well.

The oil is spewing because the pressure of the oil deposit is much higher than the water pressure pushing down on the hole. At some point pressure equilibrium will be reached.