Source of oil spill in Gulf remains a mystery

Two months after an estimated 1.1 million gallons of crude oil were released into the Gulf of Mexico, the source of the leak remains unknown.

The source and the cause of the spill, first reported Nov. 16, remains under investigation, the Coast Guard said in a statement Thursday. Without a clear indication of its source, a 67mile Main Pass Oil Gathering pipeline operated by Houstonbased Third Coast Infrastructure

remains shut down.

The investigation, which was expected to take weeks to complete, has dragged on for months, raising new questions about where the oil that caused a slick between 3 and 4 miles wide could have come from.

“This is really unusual,” said Daniel Nagala, a longtime pipeline leak detection specialist and founder of UTSI, a leak detection company based in Friendswood. “I wouldn’t have expected it would take more than a week or two to find where it was, so I’m really surprised.” The Third Coast pipeline was initially suspected of being the source of the release some 19 miles off Louisiana, near the mouth of the Mississippi River. But despite the pipeline being shut down, a second sheen was discovered last month in the same area. The Coast Guard said it was unclear whether the second sheen was related to the initial spill.

Oil found in the Gulf of Mexico can be coming from so many different places along a seabed dotted with old wells and pipelines, so it’s not uncommon for it to confound first responders, said Mark Davis, research professor and director of Tulane University’s Center for Environmental Law. The Taylor Energy spill, for example — the longest-running oil spill in U.S. history, which began when Hurricane Ivan triggered a mudslide that swallowed a production platform — was at first believed to be small but has surpassed the BP Deepwater Horizon spill in volume, he said.

It took more than a decade to realize how much oil was slowly leaking from Taylor’s wells, he said.

“Each spill is different, and understanding what kind of oil it is, where it’s coming from, who owns it and what can be done can be a real challenge,” Davis said.

Plus, the crews available to continue these investigations are limited, he said.

“It’s sort of like how many police are available to answer 911 calls,” he said. “At some point, the availability changes and the Coast Guard has other things that it’s supposed to be doing.”