LONDON — Pressure mounted Tuesday on Royal Dutch Shell to explain how 1,300 barrels of oil could have leaked from a pipeline into the North Sea, after the spill, which was discovered last week, tarnished a widely praised record for avoiding such incidents in Britain. Shell said it was still working on finding the source of a smaller leak from the same part of the pipeline that connects a well with the Gannet Alpha platform about 122 miles, or 196 kilometers, east of the Scottish city of Aberdeen. About one barrel a day was still leaking into the sea, Shell said.
The British Department of Energy and Climate Change said the spill had been “substantial” in the context of the U.K. Continental shelf, even though it was small in comparison to that caused by an explosion of a well in the Gulf of Mexico last year. Glen Cayley, Shell’s technical director in Britain, also said that it was a “significant spill in the context of annual amounts of oil spilled in the North Sea.”
The broken pipeline allowed about 218 tons of oil to flow out, making it the biggest leak in British waters for a decade. An oil sheen now covers about 26 square kilometers, or 10 square miles, of water, the company said.
Shell said Tuesday that it had shut the well and depressurized the pipeline, reducing the amount of oil that could still leak into the water to a finite amount, the company said. The leak was “under control,” Shell said.
Still, the leak “had proved difficult to find because we are dealing with a complex subsea infrastructure and the position of the small leak is in an awkward place surrounded by marine growth,” Shell said.
On Tuesday, Shell was under pressure to disclose the reason for the spill and to stop any oil flowing into the sea after it emerged that the company had waited three days to issue a public statement about the leak even though it had informed the authorities. Shell said it had started an investigation into the spill and was still working to establish its cause. The company’s shares closed 0.5 percent lower in London on Tuesday.
British safety records and regulation for offshore oil drilling won praise from officials in the United States after the accident in the Gulf of Mexico, which spewed 4.9 million barrels of oil into the water and caused substantial environmental damage. Stricter regulation in Britain was seen as the reason it had avoided larger spills in the North Sea.
After the Gulf of Mexico accident, the British energy secretary ordered an increase in inspections of drilling rigs and offshore compliance. A review last year by the Department of Energy and Climate Change found existing systems to be “fit for purpose.”
“We take any spill very seriously and we will be investigating the causes of the spill and learning any lessons from the response to it,” the government said.
The incident is likely to put pressure on London to stick to its pledge of relying more on renewable sources of energy. Greenpeace criticized Britain last year for approving a controversial deepwater drilling project by Chevron in the North Sea just seven months after the Gulf of Mexico accident.
The amount of oil spilled through Gannet Alpha is more than four times the total amount of oil spilled into British waters last year. The rig is operated by Shell on behalf of itself and Esso Exploration and Production, a unit of Exxon Mobil.
Shell said Monday that it regretted the incident. “We care about the environment,” it said, adding that oil was unlikely to reach the shore and would probably “disperse naturally due to wave action.”
Environmental groups accused Shell of being too slow in disclosing how much oil had leaked. “It’s shocking that in the wake of the BP disaster last year, Shell has tried to keep the largest North Sea oil spill for a decade hush-hush,” said Mike Childs, head of science, policy and research at Friends of the Earth.
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Source: New York Times
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