In an email statement, oil campaigner Ben Ayliffe said "North Sea [offshore oil] is supposed to be ultra-safe, we're told spills can't happen there." In 1988, 167 workers on the Piper Alpha, a platform owned by Occidental Petroleum, were killed in the North Sea. Last year’s BP Deepwater Horizon disaster spewed nearly 5 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.
Shell announced the spill on Friday, August 12, but according to their press release the company had been trying to control the leak since at least Wednesday, August 10.
Shell has not been forthcoming in reporting details of the leak and environmental organizations like Greenpeace want the company to disclose more information so that contingency and clean-up plans can be formulated.
For its part Shell does not appear to be mounting a cleanup. In an online statement Shell said, “our current expectation is it will be naturally dispersed through wave action and will not reach shore.”
© 2011, Richard Matthews. All rights reserved.
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