Quote Originally Posted by lizbud View Post
Yes & reports late today say the oil & gas are still "seeping". They will
watch for a spike in pressure before removing the cap.
There was a great explanation of "seeping" by Chad Myers on CNN this afternoon. This seeping goes on all the time. He said some really large amount of oil seeps into the Gulf every year. There are tar balls out there - even when nothing is going on.

The problem now - this current seeping they have found - is it normal seeping or is it due to the well being capped?

CHAD MYERS, CNN METEOROLOGIST: We've been talking here in the office all day long about this 40 million gallon normal leakage into the Gulf of Mexico. Is this true? Really, do 40 million gallons of oil naturally leak into the Gulf of Mexico every year without wells even being there, just in cracks in the surface, or is this just something that someone made up? Tell me the truth.

VAN NIEUWENHUISE (Don Van Nieuwenhuise, who is a professor of petroleum geoscience at the University of Houston.): Actually, I don't know what the actual number is, but that sounds about right. All over the Gulf of Mexico, you have formations that actually leak to the surface. And when we look for oil and gas, we're looking for situations. We call them trapping situations, where the oil that's being formed in the earth does not follow up faults or actually break through capping rocks itself and -- and leak to the surface.

A lot of oil that's formed naturally by the earth ends up escaping or leaking to the surface in the form of natural seeps. And yes, there are a lot of these all around the world.