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Natural gas billowing around a drilling rig Tuesday before it exploded.
An offshore natural-gas platform burned through the night off the coast of Louisiana following a blowout and explosion on Tuesday.
A drilling company was completing a sidetrack well 115 miles south of New Orleans on Tuesday morning, which likely means it was boring a new hole into an existing well, when gas began spewing uncontrollably from the seafloor. The rig’s crew of 44 workers was evacuated as natural gas formed a sheen in the waters around it and billowed dangerously into the air.
Hours later, while everybody was at a safe distance, the gas ignited, triggering a conflagration that still had not been extinguished as of this writing.
No injuries were reported as a result of the fire, Eileen Angelico, a spokeswoman for the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, told The Associated Press.
She said it wasn’t known what caused the gas to ignite. It also wasn’t clear early Wednesday how and when crews would attempt to extinguish the blaze. BSEE said earlier Tuesday that a firefighting vessel with water and foam capabilities had been dispatched to the scene.
Wild Well Control Inc. was hired to try to bring the well under control. Angelico said Wild Well personnel approached the well earlier Tuesday night, before the fire, but they determined it was unsafe to get closer when they were about 200 feet (60 meters) away from it.
What was the crew up to when it lost control of the well? We don’t know yet:
The purpose of the sidetrack well in this instance was not immediately clear. Industry websites say sidetrack wells are sometimes drilled to remedy a problem with the existing well bore.
“It’s a way to overcome an engineering problem with the original well,” Ken Medlock, an energy expert at Rice University’s Baker Institute said. “They’re not drilled all the time, but it’s not new.”
If only blowouts and explosions at Gulf drilling rigs were isolated incidents. But a blowout is how the Deepwater Horizon disaster got started. And earlier this month, we showed you a photograph taken by nonprofit On Wings of Care of a slick caused by an out-of-control natural gas well.
With the number of deep-sea rigs tapping the Gulf of Mexico for oil expected to nearly double in the next few years, the chances of more such disasters could yet grow.
John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.
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Sheens of oil atop the Gulf of Mexico have become a depressingly familiar sight — the result of reckless drilling by the oil and gas industry. Here is a photograph shot Wednesday of the latest such debacle. An old natural gas well off Louisiana’s coastline was being sealed shut Monday when it began leaking, 144 feet beneath the water’s surface. This photo is one of a series taken during a flight over the site by On Wings of Care, an environmental nonprofit.
From On Wings of Care’s blog post:
A badly leaking natural gas well in the Ship Shoal Lease Block #225 of the Gulf of Mexico has spread an ugly, toxic mass of oily rainbow sheen over several square miles not far from the top of Ewing Bank — an area once rich with marine life, especially large plankton feeders and many other species of marine life. We have flown that area in eight different five-to-six-hour wildlife survey flights just within the past three weeks, helping scientists find and study whale sharks. Today, despite mirror-calm seas, excellent water and air visibility, and clear blue water, we saw barely a trace of marine life in this area.
Fuel Fix reports that the well continues to leak a “briny mix” of natural gas, light condensate, and seawater:
Late Wednesday, workers were preparing to begin pumping drilling mud into the well, the first stage in an operation to kill it permanently, 15 years after it last produced gas commercially and four decades after it was drilled.
For much of the day, they were waiting for proof that gas at the platform the well serves had dropped to safe levels so that workers could board the facility. In the meantime, federal regulators and well control specialists waited at a neighboring platform.
The Coast Guard and the federal Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement said they plan to conduct an investigation.
John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.
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Look what the gas and oil industry did to the Gulf of Mexico — again
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