14-Year-Long Gulf of Mexico Oil Leak is Bigger Than Energy Company Claims, Federal Study Finds

The Weather Channel

The study, released this month by NOAA and done in conjunction with researchers from Florida State University and Florida International University, estimates that as much as 4,500 gallons per day could be leaking from the site.

The platform is owned by Taylor Energy, which says oil sheens on the water surface indicate that only about 2.4 to 4 gallons of oil per day are seeping out, the Associated Press reported.

“The results of this study contradict these conclusions,” scientists wrote in the report, funded by the federal Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement.

This isn’t the first time the energy company’s numbers have been refuted. A separate, independent study last year posited that even more oil – more than 70,000 gallons a day – could be pouring out of the site. Other reports have said it could be between about 9,000 and 25,000 gallons a day, according to the AP.

Twenty-eight pipes were broken as the platform was dragged across the Gulf floor, the study said. The energy company has capped some of the leaks, but has said the rest are buried under oily silt that could cause environmental harm if disturbed.

The leakage was first noticed by scientists studying the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill. Unlike that catastrophic spill, no coastal environmental damage or dying wildlife has been seen from the Taylor platform seepage.

Some have called it a “hidden” oil spill.

Ed Overton, a professor of environmental studies at Louisiana State University who was not part of the study, pointed out that seepage is slow.

“Whatever the volume … it doesn’t mean it piles up so that you’ve got a Gulf full of oil,” Overton told the AP.

Overall, some 330,000 gallons of oil make their way into the Gulf of Mexico off Louisiana every year, according to a state agency that monitors spills.

The NOAA team, from the agency’s National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science, measured output at the Taylor platform leaks for a six-day period in September, and noted that their results should not be used to measure the total amount leaked from the platform over the past 14 years. The said the numbers will be used along with further studies, and that NOAA will continue to investigate the leak.

“These are not final definitive government estimates,” Andrew Mason of the NOAA centers’ office in Silver Spring, Maryland, told the AP.

https://weather.com/news/news/2019-06-25-hidden-gulf-oil-spill