LONDON ? A major gas leak on an offshore platform in the North Sea forced crews to evacuate it and other equipment in the area on Tuesday because of the risk of explosion, and ships and aircraft were ordered to stay miles away. Total, the French energy company that operates the platform, said it might take as long as six months to stop the release of gas.
The leak on the Elgin platform, about 150 miles east of Aberdeen, Scotland, developed over the weekend in a well that workers were in the process of capping and abandoning. No one on the platform was injured, the company said, and there appeared to be no immediate danger to anyone on shore. But the volume of gas escaping from the well threatened to make the air poisonous and potentially explosive over a wide area around the platform, and posed a danger of significant environmental harm.
Total evacuated 238 workers from the area on Tuesday. Royal Dutch Shell said it closed its Shearwater field, about four miles away, withdrawing 52 of the 90 workers there; it also suspended work and evacuated 68 workers from a drilling rig working nearby, the Hans Deul.
?All necessary measures are being taken to respond appropriately to the situation and to minimize its impact,? Total said in a statement. ?Preliminary assessments indicate no significant impact to the environment, and dispersants are not considered necessary at this stage.?
The company said that it was still investigating what had gone wrong at the platform, which stands in 305 feet of water and links several wells to a nearby production platform, from which gas and liquids are piped to the mainland. Total said an emergency relief well might have to be drilled to stop the well from leaking gas, a process that it said could take six months.
Total?s share price fell 6 percent in Paris on Tuesday.
The Elgin platform produces about 3 percent of Britain?s total gas output, Reuters reported. It has a reputation for being troublesome because of the unusually high pressure in the undersea gas reservoir that it taps.
The incident brought back memories of the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, which killed 11 men. That leak involved oil, whose environmental effects tend to be much worse and longer-lasting than those from gas leaks. Repair work on that well, where the sea floor was 5,000 feet deep, had to be carried out using remotely controlled submersibles, but the Elgin platform stands in shallower water that is accessible to human divers.
After the Deepwater Horizon accident, regulators who oversee drilling operations in the North Sea said they would review their safety rules. The worst previous incident on a North Sea gas platform was the explosion and fire that destroyed the Piper Alpha rig in 1988, killing 167 workers.
The leaking well on the Elgin platform was no longer producing gas, according to a statement by the Department of Energy and Climate Change, and workers carried out an operation on Sunday to plug and abandon it. Such work usually involves injecting cement into a well at several locations, including the top, to prevent any gas remaining in the reservoir from leaking.
After the work was done, remote monitoring of the well then revealed that gas continued to be released, according to the statement.
Total said that a surveillance airplane on Monday spotted a sheen on the water close to the platform. The sheen is believed to be coming from drilling mud or light condensate from the gas well, which would probably evaporate fairly quickly, and not from crude oil. The company said it believed the gas leak was probably on the platform, and not underwater.
If Total decides a relief well is required to seal the leaking well, a drilling rig would have to be brought near the site ? how near would depend on the hazard created by the leaking gas ? and the relief well would be drilled at an angle to intersect the leaking well at some depth below the seabed. Then cement or other material could be pumped into the bad well through the relief well to stop the leak.
Source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=c6db6d69aab8fabc5bf7e5376a0c7e25
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