Total's Elgin Platform Gas Leak: Well Pumped With Mud In North Sea

LONDON, May 15 (Reuters) - France's Total started pumping heavy mud down its leaking well in the North Sea on Tuesday to try to stop an escape of gas that has lasted nearly eight weeks and could deprive Britain of nearly 6 percent of its supply this summer.

"The well intervention operation got underway at 09hrs20 (0820 GMT) this morning with the pumping of heavy mud into the well from the main support vessel," the oil and gas major said in a statement.

The work, at the Elgin platform, 240 km off the coast of Scotland, is expected to last several days before engineers can determine whether the leak has been stopped, Total said.

The leak is costing the company around $3 million a day in relief operations and lost net income.

The Department of Energy and Climate Change, which gave the go-ahead for the "well kill" work earlier this month, said it was monitoring the situation closely.

The company said last week the amount of gas leaking from the platform had shrunk to a quarter of the original quantity and that parallel work to drill a relief well continued.

In the meanwhile, a nearby gas field run by Royal Dutch Shell has had to be closed, initially as a precaution and now for maintenance. Other operations on smaller fields have also been affected.

The total loss in gas production from Elgin and nearby fields could cut British gas production by as much as 6 percent this summer, Britain's energy network operator has warned.

Environmental impact from the leak has been minimal with fish and water samples from just outside a two-mile exclusion zone around the platform have not shown any signs of hydrocarbon contamination, the Scottish government said.

Total has said it saw a possibility for production at Elgin to gradually restart later this year.

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Comments

[silverwolf13]

08:23 PM on 05/15/2012

"Environmental impact has been minimal." Except for the minor fact that the well is releasing several million tons of methane into the air, and that methane is 30 times more potent a greenhouse gas than CO2. Other than that, everything's just peachy keen.

[Kenz300]

04:04 PM on 05/15/2012

Can big oil drill in deep water safely? It does not appear so....

There have been many problems around the world in the past 2 years......

Do they not learn any lessons from these disasters?

Better regulation is needed.

[MoreThanMeets The Eye]

03:14 PM on 05/15/2012

You mess with any system long enough and it fails, or shuts down, or resets. Hint: see planetary systems.

[Kenz300]

11:54 AM on 05/15/2012

How long has this leak been going on?

The big oil and gas companies do not have enough safety procedures in place to prevent these disasters from happening. They need to spend more money on safety and prevention. There also needs to be more regulation.

[oil patch]

12:30 PM on 05/15/2012

Oil and gas companies spend billions of dollars a year on health, safety and environmental training and prevention.

[Kenz300]

03:53 PM on 05/15/2012

And will still have the BP disaster in the Gulf and others around the world.....

Seems like they need to do more and change their procedures.

[sichuan]

08:39 PM on 05/15/2012

"Oil and gas companies spend billions of dollars a year on health, safety and environmental training and prevention."

Documentation, please!

[Max Load]

11:39 AM on 05/15/2012

"Fish and water samples from just outside a two-mile exclusion zone around the platform have not shown any signs of hydrocarbon contamination"?

Since when do fish pay attention to exclusion zones? Or ocean currents for the matter?

[ash1987]

04:42 PM on 05/15/2012

They don't... which is kind of the point. The fish tested would have passed through the exclusion zone. An exclusion zone is simply an area defined by wind direction and the chemical in question, in which concentrations of a released material would cause some sort of harm to people.

You set one up when your starting cleanup of a site, or in this case, attempting to contain an issue.

[LeftInTheWest]

11:07 AM on 05/15/2012

Natural (NG) Gas is becoming the target for exploration where it used to be the by-product of drilling for oil. It is still the case that a significant percentage of NG is considered "wet" in that it is polluted with Sulphur or Carbon Monoxide/Dioxide and subsequently either flared off or re-routed back down the ground. Technology is being developed to transform NG, wet or dry, into mixed alcohols via a catalyst.

[jenniferkizzy]

10:55 AM on 05/15/2012

not looking too good for my home country of europe not in the least

[Mike Block]

10:41 AM on 05/15/2012

Only eight weeks?