It really shouldn't be news at all. Several hundred years ago explorers were writing in their journals that they saw tar balls and oil slicks in the middle of the ocean. The oil has always leaked, seeped, and slopped to the surface.
Offshore wells are typically characterized by very high abandonment pressure (25% of OOIP was about all the industry ever got out of these wells) so with 27,000 abandoned wells drilled by hundreds of operators, operated by a different set of thousands of operators, and plugged by a third group (that was a subset of the second group) you can expect some botched handoffs and bad procedures.
My guess is that the daily "seepage" is on a par with what the BP well was spewing. The difference is that no one gets a Pulitzer for reporting on the seeps. There is another difference--the seeps are spread over a very wide area and natural biological processes take care of most of it. The spewing is too much, too fast for the bugs to deal with as quick as the armchair quarterbacks would like.
David
