Beaudo said the confusion may stem from recent reports to the federal National Response Center of a sheen near Green Canyon Block 405, which is near the Macondo well site.
"Caller is reporting an unknown sheen discovered by an overflight," reads a report filed with the response center on Aug.. 5. The unidentified caller described the sheen as 6 miles long and rainbow-colored. Similar reports of a sheen in the Green Canyon area were filed with the center on Aug. 6 and Aug. 11.
Beaudo said Macondo was killed and plugged last July and it is “at least tens of miles away” from the sheen spotted by the Coast Guard, and BP had not hired any vessels to clean up any oil in that area of the Gulf of Mexico.
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Upon seeing the sheen, the Coast Guard notified BP, as well as Enterprise Products Partners and Shell Oil, which both operate subsea pipelines in the vicinity.
A spokesman with Houston-based Enterprise said this morning that the company sent a remotely operated submarine down over the weekend to check the integrity of one oil pipeline and one natural gas pipeline it has in the area. “The inspections turned out clean,” said Rick Rainey, a company spokesman, adding that operations were never interrupted by the tests.
Shell Oil stepped up inspections of pipelines in the region as a precaution after being notified, but so far has found no indication that its equipment is the source of the sheen, company spokeswoman Kelly op de Weegh said.
Cheri Ben-Iesau, commander of Coast Guard District 8 in New Orleans, said a Coast Guard plane was doing flyovers Thursday afternoon of the Green Canyon site as well as the Macondo well and was awaiting an update.
But she said the agency had so far found no evidence at the Green Canyon site that the sheen was linked to a leaking well head or subsea pipeline, nor that oil was still spilling into the water.
She said the Coast Guard gets roughly 10,000 reports a year of surface sheens in the Gulf, some of which are caused by natural oil seeps on the sea floor. Given the hot weather, the sheens tend to dissipate quickly, she said.
The Interior Department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, which regulates the offshore oil and gas industry in federal waters, is still collecting information about the incident, bureau spokeswoman Melissa Schwartz said.
“BOEMRE is working with area operators to determine if the sheen is associated with any permanently abandoned wells in the area. We will continue to investigate the situation and coordinate with the Coast Guard as needed,” she said.