According to Shell yhe oil sheen on the surface has finally disappeared
The oil sheen on the surface of the North Sea that followed the UK’s worst oil spill for a decade has finally disappeared, according to Shell, after the company managed to plug its leaking pipeline on Friday.
Government officials are now launching an investigation into the leak as part of an effort to discover how the spill came about and how to prevent such damage recurring.
However, the successful plugging of both the primary and secondary leaks at the Gannet Alpha platform, 180km east of Aberdeen, came as a Scottish newspaper revealed Shell’s poor safety record in the region.
An investigation by the Sunday Herald found that Shell had been officially censured 25 times in the past six years for breaking safety rules, giving it one of the worst safety records of any major oil company in the UK.
Infringements by Shell include repeatedly failing to maintain pipelines – similar to the one that gave rise to the Gannet leak – as well as for failing to report a dangerous incident, and failing to protect workers from hazardous chemicals.
The revelations cited come from records held by the government’s health and safety executive (HSE), and include incidents in which Shell was fined or received an official reprimand.
Since 2005, Shell has been prosecuted four times: for an explosion at Bacton gas terminal near Norwich; an accident at Ellesmere port in Cheshire; a collision at the Mossmorran gas plant in Fife; and a fatality on the Clipper rig in the North Sea.
The company has been forced to pay out nearly 1mn in fines and legal costs.
No other major oil company has faced as many prosecutions in the last six years, according to the HSE.
Talisman was prosecuted twice in the period, while BP, Total, Amec and Nexen were each prosecuted once, the Sunday Herald reported.
Shell’s safety record is likely to come under scrutiny as the government’s investigation into the leak is launched this week.
First, Scotland’s procurator fiscal will meet experts from the HSE and officials from the department of energy and climate change (Decc) in order to set the initial scope for the investigation.
When Decc has completed the investigation, which will involve talking to divers, marine experts and Shell executives, the results will be taken back to the procurator fiscal who will have to decide whether to proceed with a criminal prosecution.
One of the key questions is whether Shell will have to pay for the government’s costs in containing the leak, including the cost of surveillance flights by Marine Scotland.
Shell said that after its divers closed a faulty relief valve on Friday, no further oil had been released.
However, the pipeline – which has been secured to the seabed with 26 concrete “mattresses” – could still contain as much as 660 tonnes of oil, three times more than the nearly 220 tonnes that has already leaked.
The company is looking at how to make that safe, as well as monitoring the area to ensure that no further oil is seeping out.
Decc has said a containment structure might need to be built in order to ensure that no further oil reaches the sea as the pipeline is dealt with.
Green campaigners criticised Shell for not being sufficiently open about the incident, which was discovered on August10 but not disclosed to the public for two days, and they said the incident raised questions over the safety of oil companies’ plans to drill in deep water in the Arctic, as the North Sea is generally supposed to be the safest in the world in terms of spills.
However, a Guardian investigation this summer found that there is an oil leak in the North Sea about once a week on average, though most of them are minor.
Source: Gulf Times