The Deepwater Horizon oil spill dominated world news for months eight years ago. What few people knew then was that another drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico had been leaking oil for six years. It still does so to this day. The leak is located about 20 kilometres off the coast of Louisiana. As a result of a mudslide in the aftermath of Hurricane Ivan, a Taylor Energy drilling rig sank there in 2004. However, many of the platform's oil wells were not shut down. According to US authorities, there is a real chance that the oil leak will continue for the rest of the century. If a solution is not found, the Taylor oil spill will become more serious than the BP Deepwater Horizon rig.
Secret leak
Taylor Energy reported the oil leak to the Coast Guard in 2004, which monitored the situation without informing the public extensively about the disaster. The leak remained secret for six years, until environmental organisations spotted the oil traces while monitoring the Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster. However, Taylor Energy did everything possible to cover up the leak in the hope of protecting their reputation and information about their operations.
Taylor Energy was sold to a group of South Korean companies in 2008 and currently has only one employee left: CEO William Pecue. The company is now demanding $450 million back from the $666 million it gave to the government in 2008 to surface part of the rig's wreckage and track down oil wells located under a 30-metre-thick layer of mud. Indeed, according to Pecue, the leak cannot be plugged and only a third of the budget was used.
Up to 580 million litres of oil
Two months ago, the US Department of Justice launched an independent study into the extent of the leak. This showed that some 40,000 to 120,000 litres of crude oil are leaking into the sea every day. That is much more than the initial estimate by Taylor Energy and the US Coast Guard. How much oil has already leaked through the Taylor leak so far is unclear. According to an estimate by watchdog SkyTruth, between 3.2 million and 12 million oil spilled between 2004 and the end of 2017. Judging by the estimates in the report for the Ministry of Justice, however, that could rise to more than 580 million litres over 14 years.
Impact
Yet this does not necessarily mean that the impact of the Taylor leak is the same as that of Deepwater Horizon. "This is oil that has leaked slowly and steadily over time, so the environmental impact is very different," says John Amos, founder of SkyTruth. "One of the sad aspects of the Taylor leak is that the consequences remained covered up. There has not been much public or political pressure to investigate and find out what the long-term damage of a chronic leak is. "As oil continues to leak into the Gulf of Mexico, the Trump administration wants to issue more permits for the oil and gas industry and allow more deepwater drilling. These include in the Atlantic Ocean off the US coast, which is hit hard by hurricanes every year.
