Another explosion off the coast of Louisiana in the Gulf is being downplayed by the oil industry and the U.S. Coast Guard. Researchers say the explosion earlier has done more damage than the administration admits.
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Blast on oil and gas facility set structure on fire and threw workers into the water
Last Modified: 02 Sep 2010 19:08
Thursday's blast occured west of the site of where the Deep Water Horizon platform caused a oil spill in April
An oil and gas platform in the Gulf of Mexico has exploded, setting off a blaze and a small oil spill, the US Coast Guard said.
The blast on Thursday does not appear to be as serious as BP's deadly rig explosion and oil spill in April.
The US Coast Guard said that an oil sheen of 100 feet by 1 nautical mile has been reported at the site.
All 13 crew members on the burning platform were evacuated to another offshore platform, the US Coast Guard said. The fire has been contained but is not yet extinguished.
No fatalities
The crew did not suffer any injuries, said platform and field operator Mariner Energy.
The platform is located more than 145 kilometres (90 miles) south of Louisiana's Vermilion Bay, west of BP Plc's ruptured Macondo well that killed 11 people and caused the world's worst offshore oil spill.
At the moment, the accident does not appear to be another BP-style disaster, Raoul LeBlanc, a senior director at PFC Energy in Houston, said.
"If it's an industrial accident and doesn't involve a well it's obviously still bad, and we hope that no one has been hurt, but it's unlikely to have long-term implications for production in the Gulf of Mexico," LeBlanc said.
The platform, located in 104 meters (304 feet) of water, was undergoing maintenance and was not in active production, the US Interior Department said.
The platform was authorized to produce oil and natural gas. The cause of the explosion was not known.
The facility averaged 9.2 million cubic feet of natural gas per day and 1,400 barrels of oil and condensate per day during the last week of August, Mariner said.
The platform has seven wells that produce both oil and natural gas, Patrick Cassidy, a company spokesman, told CNN.
The platform's output is a small fraction of the 1.6 million barrels of oil the region produces on a daily basis.
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said he did not know whether the fire would affect the Obama administration's current deepwater drilling moratorium.
Market scare
News of the fire helped push up crude oil prices 59 cents, or 0.81 percent, to $74.50 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange.
Shares of Mariner Energy fell 2 percent to $22.90 and shares of Apache Corp, which is expected to buy Mariner Energy, also fell 1.5 percent to $91.06 Mariner has participated in at least 35 deepwater projects in the Gulf and operated over half of them.
Pritchard Capital analyst Stephen Berman said the market over-reacted to the news when it initially pushed Mariner's shares down 5 percent.
Source: Agencies
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