Number du jour: 172 million

From Bloomberg -

BP Plc’s Macondo well released 4.1 million barrels of oil in the waters of the Gulf of Mexico before it was capped, a team of scientists said today.

An additional 800,000 barrels that flowed from the well after it started leaking were captured by BP, the U.S. government-appointed group said in its most specific estimate yet of the magnitude of the worst oil spill in U.S. history.


At 4.1 million barrels, the spill would be about 16 times the amount leaked by the Exxon Valdez, which released an estimated 257,000 barrels in a 1989 accident.

 As there are 42 gallons in a barrel of oil, that means that approximately 172,000,000 gallons of oil spewed into the Gulf of Mexico.

The sad part is, as devastating to the Gulf Coast spill has been to the environment and people living and working in the Gulf and along the coast (and will be for at least a generation), the volume of the spill is a little more than 21% of the volume that the U.S. uses in one day.