Gulf oil rig explodes off Lousiana shore. NOT Deepwater.

[dragon]

Here we go again

An oil rig has exploded 80 miles off the coast of Louisiana, with 12 people overboard and one missing, the Coast Guard said Thursday morning.

Rescue attempts are underway for at least 12 people, Coast Guard spokesman John Edwards told CNN. 13 people were on board the rig total, Edwards said, noting 12 have been accounted for, but one person was missing.

The accident took place 80 miles off the coast of Louisiana on the Vermilion Oil rig 380, which is owned by Houston-based Mariner Energy.

The Coast Guard has multiple helicopters, an airplane and several Coast Guard cutters en route. It's unknown if there are any injuries.

link

[General Zod]

Louisiana just can't seem to catch a break.

[Mr Bean]

Oh for fucks sake, It's a damn shame half the story comments are asking if this story is a repost from April. My thoughts go out to the poor bastards on the rig since the story does not say the 12 accounted for were dead or simply counted in.

*Edit 12 men in the water, 1 missing, no injuries yet reported

An offshore oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico on Thursday, west of the site of the April blast that caused the massive oil spill.

A commercial helicopter company reported the blast around 9:30 a.m. CDT Thursday, Coast Guard Petty Officer Casey Ranel said. Seven helicopters, two airplanes and four boats were en route to the site, about 80 miles south of Vermilion Bay along the central Louisiana coast.

The Coast Guard said initial reports indicated all 13 crew members from the rig were in the water. One was injured, but there were no deaths.

The platform owned by Mariner Energy is in about 2,500 feet of water, the Coast Guard said, and was not currently producing.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-o ... le1693940/

[DarkSilver]

For one, it's not a drilling site, it was a work over rig going to cap the well, or a production platform that had people doing maintence on it. They aren't even sure if there was anything in the hole worth producing (thus what we term a Dry Hole in the industry). For one thing, you can't run a offshore drilling platform on 13 people.

Can't.

Be.

Done.

All 13 people on the platform are accounted for, and are at Terrebonne General Medical Center undergoing observation and treatment. There is no leak, as of yet.

[DarkSilver]

After checking information some information out, it's a Mariner Energy Production Platform, NOT a drilling rig or a actual well.

The men who left the rig there in protective suits, which means they were involved in repairs on the platform or it's equipment. Nine out of ten either a valve opened, or proper procedure for Hot Work was not followed, and sparks caught either a minor gas leak from one of the on board pipes, or more likely, some sparks caught on some leaking diesel fuel. (again, not following proper Hot Work procedures). Shut In procedures for the pipelines leading into the platform means the flow of oil and gas to the platform, if not shut off already, should be relatively simple to shut off remotely.

Mariner Energy stocks dropped like a rock after new of this broke.

Request for the thread title to change to correspond to proper information (read: the fact it's not a oil well).

[SirNitram]

Link

GRAND ISLE, La. —An offshore petroleum platform exploded and was burning today in the Gulf of Mexico about 102 miles south of Vermilion Bay on the central Louisiana coast.

The Coast Guard says no one was killed in the explosion, which was reported by a commercial helicopter flying over the site around 9 a.m. CDT. All 13 people aboard the rig have been accounted for.

The owner of the platform, Houston-based Mariner Energy Inc., said no one was injured and no oil was leaking into the Gulf.

Coast Guard Cmdr. Cheri Ben-Iesau says seven Coast Guard helicopters, two airplanes and three cutters were dispatched to the scene from New Orleans, Houston and Mobile, Ala.

Ben-Iesau said all 13 people were rescued from the water by an offshore service vessel, the Crystal Clear, and taken to a nearby platform. All were being flown to the Terrebonne General Medical Center in Houma for examination.

The Department of Homeland Security said the platform was known as Vermilion Oil Platform 380 and is in 340 feet of water.

Mariner said the cause of the explosion and fire had not been determined. The company’s statement said production recently averaged about 9.2 million cubic feet of natural gas a day and 1,400 barrels of oil and condensate.

The Coast Guard earlier reported one person had been injured but the company said no one was hurt.

It was unclear whether the platform was in operation at the time of the incident.

"This platform was authorized to produce oil and gas at this water depth. The facility has not been recently in active production; there were ongoing maintenance activities under way," said Melissa Schwartz, a spokeswoman for the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement.

Ben-Iesau says some of those from the rig were spotted in emergency flotation devices.

Mariner Energy focuses on oil and gas exploration and production company focused on the Gulf of Mexico. In April, Apache Corp., another independent petroleum company, announced plans to buy Mariner in a cash-and-stock deal valued at $3.9 billion, including the assumption of about $1.2 billion of Mariner’s debt. That deal is pending.

An Apache report said the well was drilled in the third quarter of 2008 in 340 feet of water.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said President Barack Obama was in a national security meeting and did not know whether Obama had been informed of the explosion.

"We obviously have response assets ready for deployment should we receive reports of pollution in the water," Gibbs said.

Responding to an oil spill in shallow water is much easier than in deepwater, where crews depend on remote-operated vehicles access equipment on the sea floor.

The platform is about 200 miles west of BP’s blown out Macondo well. On Thursday, BP was expected to begin the process of removing the cap and failed blow-out preventer, another step toward completion of a relief well that would complete the choke of the well. The BP-leased rig Deepwater Horizon exploded April 20, killing 11 people and setting off a massive oil spill.

Coast Guard spokesman Chief Petty Officer John Edwards in New Orleans said the rescued workers were wearing protective gear called gumby suits.

"These guys had the presence of mind, used their training to get into those gumby suits before they entered the water. It speaks volumes to safety training and the importance of it because beyond getting off the rig there’s all the hazards of the water such as hypothermia and things of that nature."

Associated Press writers Janet McConnaughey in New Orleans, Eria Werner and Gerry Bodlander in Washington and Chris Kahn in New York contributed.

Here we go again.

[General Zod]

Already posted.

[SirNitram]

More info, both in post and title. ESpecially as one could mistake that as a necro from the Deepwater.

[Temujin]

Shit, just found out about this and was going to post it.

Here's more detailed info:

Fire forces evacuation of Mariner oil platform in Gulf of Mexico

By William Branigin, Steven Mufson and David A. Fahrenthold
Thursday, September 2, 2010; 1:51 PM

An offshore oil production platform caught fire Thursday in the Gulf of Mexico, forcing 13 workers into the water and triggering an emergency response to rescue them, the U.S. Coast Guard said.

There were conflicting accounts of injuries among the workers and an oil sheen on the water near the rig. A Coast Guard official said one of the 13 was hurt, but Mariner Energy Inc., the oil and gas producer that owns the platform, said no one was injured.

Mariner also disputed a Coast Guard report that an oil sheen a mile long was sighted on the gulf. Coast Guard officials said it was not immediately clear whether the oil came from fuel aboard the rig or an undersea leak.

There were no immediate reports of a massive crude oil leak such as the one in April that resulted from the blowout of a BP well and caused an environmental disaster.

Patrick Cassidy, a spokesman for Mariner Energy, said the 13 crew members were painting and water-blasting the production platform when a fire broke out near the top of the facility, where there is an oil storage tank. He said it was not clear what caused the fire, but the crew evacuated. He said there were no injuries and that all 13 crew members were accounted for. One member of the crew was a Mariner Energy employee, and the rest worked for oil service firms.

Asked whether oil was spilling into the gulf, Cassidy said that "in an initial flyover of the facility, no oil sheen was seen on the water." He added that "it appears that the production was shut in" and that the company was "looking to confirm that."

Cassidy said that the production platform, in 320 feet of water, has seven wells that had been producing 7,000 barrels a day of crude oil and oil condensates and 9.2 million cubic feet a day of natural gas.

According to an initial report from Coast Guard Petty Officer Bill Colclough, one of the 13 people on board Mariner Energy's Vermilion Oil Rig 380 was injured.

Coast Guard spokeswoman Elizabeth Bordelon, in New Orleans, said the workers aboard the platform were rescued from the water by a nearby oil-rig supply vessel.

Colclough told CNN Thursday morning that it has not yet been determined whether there is a leak as a result of the incident.

Multiple Coast Guard and civilian vessels headed to the site of the fire west of the location of the April 20 blast on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig that caused a massive oil spill.

Bordelon said the first call came in to the Coast Guard at 9:19 a.m. CDT (10:19 a.m. EDT) from a logistics company that provides helicopters to service oil rigs in the gulf. She said that, in all, the Coast Guard had sent nine helicopters, one propeller plane and five cutters to the area, about 80 miles south of Vermilion Bay.

Bordelon said the fire on board the rig was still burning and that no firefighting efforts were yet underway.

Bordelon said about 12:45 p.m. EDT that Mariner Energy had just reported an oil "sheen" in the water near the rig. The sheen, she said, was about 100 feet wide and 1.1 miles long.

A Washington-based Coast Guard spokesman, Lt. Commander Chris O'Neil, said he has received conflicting reports about whether the rig was producing oil at the time of the fire. O'Neil had said earlier that the rig was not in production at the time.

The incident took place even as senior BP officials were in Washington briefing Michael Bromwich, the head of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, on lessons learned in the protracted effort to plug the blown-out Macondo well drilled by BP. That blowout caused an explosion that killed 11 people on the Deepwater Horizon rig, leading to the largest oil spill in U.S. history.

The BP report will summarize the surface and subsea surface responses to the April 20 blowout, but a separate report on the causes of the blowout will not be ready until next week at the earliest. Thursday's report, about 75 pages with diagrams, photos of skimmers and boom, and descriptions of equipment that was used in efforts to stop the gusher, will be similar to presentations BP has already made.

The possibility of a second blowout and oil spill in the gulf was one of the justifications the Obama administration gave for its decision to impose a moratorium on deep-water drilling. In a recent interview with The Washington Post, Carol Browner, the White House climate and energy czar, called the moratorium a "responsible pause" while the administration studies how to respond to a future spill.

"We were using every single piece of available equipment" to cope with the Deepwater Horizon spill, Browner said. "So if there had been another leak, we couldn't have responded."

Environmental groups were quick to cite the latest incident as evidence of the need for caution on offshore drilling.

"This latest rig explosion underscores the need for the U.S. to maintain its moratorium on all new offshore oil and gas drilling," said Jacqueline Savitz, senior campaign director of the environmental group Oceana. "It's another reminder that drilling accidents happen all too frequently. We cannot afford to lose any more human lives, nor can we tolerate further damage to the gulf and its irreplaceable ocean ecosystems."

In an article in Wednesday's Financial Times, a Mariner Energy official criticized the Obama administration's moratorium on deep-water drilling.

"I have been in the oil and gas industry for 40 years, and this administration is trying to break us,'' said Barbara Dianne Hagood of Mariner Energy. "The moratorium they imposed is going to be a financial disaster for the Gulf Coast, Gulf Coast employees and Gulf Coast residents.''

According to the company's Web site, "Mariner is among the largest independent oil and gas companies operating in the Gulf of Mexico. At year-end 2009, the company had interests in nearly 350 federal offshore leases with more than 110 of those in development. The company has participated in more than 35 deepwater projects, operating more than half of them."

Mariner Energy has been exploring since 1996 in water from 1,300 feet to 7,100 feet deep. It effectively doubled the size of its operations in 2006, when it acquired Forest Oil Corp. The company says on its Web site that it is pursuing a two-pronged strategy of exploiting its "legacy assets," boosting production from older fields to generate cash for new exploration.

According to a Bloomberg News database, the largest shareholder in Mariner is John Paulson, a hedge fund manager who shorted subprime mortgage derivatives through Goldman Sachs before the housing market collapse and whose trades were mentioned in the Securities and Exchange Commission case against Goldman. He owned 9.7 percent of the firm at the end of June. Other shareholders include big mutual fund firms Vanguard, Fidelity and Prudential.

In its 2008 annual report, Mariner said the Vermilion 380 field -- in 340 feet of water -- was its largest in the Gulf of Mexico's Outer Continental Shelf. At the end of 2008, the estimated proven reserves in the field were half oil and half gas totaling an energy equivalent of 33 billion cubic feet of natural gas.

The Vermilion platform was damaged by Hurricane Ike in 2008, and production was shut down for the first six months of 2009.

In its recent SEC filing, the company said the Interior Department's moratorium on deep-water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico had affected Mariner's operations. It said its operations "may be impacted in the future by increased regulatory oversight, which may increase the cost of" Outer Continental Shelf wells "and delay drilling and production therefrom."

In April, Apache Energy announced an agreement to acquire Mariner Energy, but the transaction has not been completed.

Staff writers Joel Achenbach and Debbi Wilgoren contributed to this report.

[SirNitram]

Annnnnd it only gets worse.

CNN

(CNN) -- A well connected to an oil and gas production platform caught on fire Thursday, engulfing the vessel in flames about 100 miles off the central coast of Louisiana and forcing 13 people overboard, Gov. Bobby Jindal said Thursday.

All 13 people have been accounted for, said Petty Officer Bill Colclough of the Coast Guard. Mariner Energy, which owns the Vermilion Oil Rig 380, said none of the crew members was hurt in the incident, despite earlier reports of a single injured worker.

Despite earlier reports, Marine said the fire was not sparked by an explosion. The fire started at one of the platform's seven active wells.

Colclough told CNN that the platform apparently is still on fire from the explosion, saying Coast Guard helicopters and cutters are en route to the scene.

The company confirmed that a fire started on board the platform, but said that an initial flyover of the site indicated "no hydrocarbon spill." However, Jindal said there were reports of a "sheen" stretching just over a mile long.

A man who said he saw the oil platform blast in the Gulf of Mexico reported suddenly seeing "a bunch of smoke" coming up from the platform. David Reed, a paramedic on board a nearby oil rig, said radios started "lighting up like a Christmas tree" after the blast.

The explosion comes nearly five months after the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded April 20, killing 11 people and causing oil to gush into the Gulf of Mexico, leading to one of the worst environmental disasters in U.S. history.

That oil rig, contracted by BP, had 126 workers, and sank after three days of the U.S. Coast Guard's efforts to put out flames.

An oil rig drills the well, which usually takes a period of weeks; a production platform is built after the well is drilled, and remains there for years. It pumps pressure down the hole to keep the well flowing, and sometimes collects the oil or gas.

U.S. agencies and BP worked to stop oil spilling from the ruptured Deepwater Horizon well, an onslaught of oil into the Gulf waters that could hurt the region for years. The well has been capped since July 15, and no new oil is flowing into the Gulf.

The failure of the well's blowout preventer triggered the April 20 explosion, and crews are expected to remove the equipment from the well since it may hold valuable forensic evidence as to why it failed.

The Obama administration tried to impose a six-month moratorium on deepwater drilling in the wake of the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon in April, but the ban is currently in legal limbo.

A group of companies that provide boats and equipment to the deepwater drilling industry sued to overturn the ban and won in June.

The government tried again in July, imposing a new moratorium and asking for the suit to be thrown out. A federal judge refused this week to dismiss it.

The Vermilion platform did not violate the moratorium, said Melissa Schwartz, spokeswoman for the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, which replaced the Minerals Management Service.

"This was an oil and gas production platform in approximately 340 feet of water, 102 miles offshore Louisiana (80 nautical miles)," she said. "This platform was authorized to produce oil and gas at this water depth. The current suspension involves drilling rigs in water depths greater than 500 feet," she said.

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said Thursday that the federal government has "assets ready" to respond to any environmental problems resulting from the explosion of an oil platform off the coast of Louisiana.

Mariner Energy describes itself as one of the leading independent oil and gas exploration and production companies in the Gulf of Mexico. The company said it had interests in about 350 federal offshore leases last year, with more than 110 of the 350 in development.

The company has about 300 employees. Its most recent quarterly net income was $1.7 million.

Shares of Mariner Energy slipped 5 percent Thursday after the explosion. Shares of Mariner Energy fell $1.16 to $22.19.

The company is in the process of a planned merger with a larger company, Apache Corporation. The merger is about four to six weeks away, an Apache spokesman said.

It's leaking. And CNN's rolling updates had reported it was producing.

[Atlan]

A friend of mine works for Alfa Laval (oil/water seperators, heat exchangers, etc.) in the Netherlands. He recently got tagged for extra training which enables him to work on oil rigs too. So far he's been working on rigs in the North Sea.
Alfa Laval does a lot of work in the Gulf too, and the issue has come up regarding him also working in the Gulf, on US owned platforms. US owned rigs apparently have a BAD reputation over here regarding safety procedures, and he's fighting tooth and nail NOT to be send to the Gulf. His boss is backing him. This is just going to bolster him.

[Sea Skimmer]

Leaking isn’t nearly that big a deal in 320 feet of water because they can send down divers to fix it unless it blew out underground which is really unlikely in an active well. People have actually gone deeper then that with Scuba gear, though 200ft is about the limit for any practical use. ADS suits can go to 2,000 feet.

Also oil in the water also doesn’t necessarily mean the actual well is leaking, since latent oil in the piping and on the rig would make a fairly big slick on its own, as well as the rigs diesel fuel supply which is easily tens of thousands of gallons. Nothing anyone can to do but wait and see if it keeps getting bigger for the moment.

[dragon]

At least it's not gushing oil like the BP oil well. So thats a good sign but still two wells in such a short period exploding, you know the enviromentalist are going to raise a ruckus.

[General Zod]

Looks like it isn't really leaking after all. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38973757/ns/us_news-life/