On April 20th 2010 at 9:45 p.m. the British Petroleum Macondo well suffered a tragic blowout in the Gulf of Mexico. The Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded and burned until it sank. Eleven men lost their lives and their bodies have not been recovered.

The BP well blowout is now commonly referred to as the Gulf Oil Spill. The word spill implies that a container filled with a fluid has ruptured or leaked as in the Exxon Valdez Spill. I do not believe the use of the word "spill" is appropriate when referring to the Macondo blowout. The well continues to flow both methane and oil since the blowout occurred.

In the case of the Valdez spill, the total amount of oil spilled could not exceed the total amount of oil carried by the Valdez. The amount of oil spilled could have been calculated by simply taking the total amount of oil loaded on the Valdez minus the amount ultimately recovered from the ship.

How many barrels of oil have flowed into the Gulf of Mexico as the result of the BP Macondo blowout? How does this compare to the Valdez Spill. If the Macondo continues to flow for another sixty days what are the projected total barrels of oil discharged? The "BP Oil Spill Calculator" is an attempt to answer these questions.

System Requirements

The Free BP Oil Spill Calculator will run on any 32 bit Windows platform. This includes Windows 98, Windows NT, Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7.

You should have at least 2 Mb of free disk space to install and run this program.

Minimum System Requirements

VGA 800 x 600, 256 Colors
Windows 98
2 Mb of Free Hard Drive Space

Download Free Program

bpcalc20.exe (833 Kb) 2/4/2012, Ver. 2.0

• BP Deepwater Horizon Well Magnitude
• Wikipedia - Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill
• Be Careful What You Google
• Anadarko Petroleum Corp. (25%)
• Exxon Valdez Oil Spill