Statistics on Ice Mining, and Projections for Odyssey

How much ice is currently being harvested in highsec?  I am not aware of any real current data on this, but a year ago there was a spate of tweets from CCP Diagoras which contained this one:

Isotopes harvested in March? 2.67bn Nitrogen, 1.73bn Helium, 1.70bn Oxygen, 1.18bn Hydrogen.

Since these isotopes are products only of ice, we can back-compute the ice harvest.  Assuming that all ice was harvested in highsec (a close approximation to truth), there are 300 units of isotope per block.  So, over 31 days in March 2012, there were a total of 24.27 million blocks of ice harvested.  That averages out to 782.8 thousand blocks per day, or 32.6 thousand per hour.

a Mackinaw doing its thing

That's an impressive amount of ice.  A mackinaw going at it with full boosting from an orca can harvest almost one block a minute; a Hulk gets just over one block.  If we assume a ballpark figure of 1 block per ice-harvesting-ship per minute, 60 per hour, then the amount harvested suggests there were 543 ships across New Eden going at it 24/7.  (This seems a bit high to me, but with 25000 characters online at a time, it requires just over 2% of them.  Seems more reasonable in that light.)

How many ice belts are there in highsec?  Well, we can look them up at this site, finding as follows:

•   White Glaze (Caldari): 30
•   Blue Ice (Gallente): 23
•   Glacial Mass (Minmatar): 17

And finally, Clear Icicle (Amarr space) currently has zillions of belts, but these will be drastically cut back as per the dev blog, to 24 systems with ice anoms.  It is unclear whether any of these systems will have more than one anom.  I am assuming one anom per system.

So, there will be a total of 94 ice anomalies in highsec.  CCP implies ice will be roughly the same in all of them, so we predict 8328 blocks harvested per site each day.  CCP apparently believes each anom will be harvested fully five times each day, so the total amount predicted per anomaly per spawn is 1665.

For all ice to be mined, 5x per day, each anom must be tapped out in 48 minutes.  Ice mining will double its rate in Odyssey, so we expect rates of about 2 blocks per minute.  Thus, to tap out an anom requires 18 fully Orca-boosted exhumers.