On Wednesday, Oct. 11, the Delta House oil production facility began spilling oil into the Gulf of Mexico, about 40 miles southeast of Louisiana. While not widely reported, this may be the largest oil spill since the BP Deepwater Horizon in 2010. As Bloomberg Business explains, the initial reports are conservative at best.
The Delta House floating production facility about 40 miles (64 kilometers) southeast of Venice, Louisiana, released 7,950 to 9,350 barrels of oil from early Wednesday to Thursday morning, according to closely held operator LLOG Exploration Co. That would make it the largest spill in more than seven years, data from the U.S. Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement show, even though it’s a fraction of the millions of barrels ejected in the 2010 incident.
The LLOG spill was triggered by a fracture in a flowline jumper, Rick Fowler, the company’s vice president for deepwater projects, said in an email. That’s a short pipeline used to connect nearby subsea structures. Multiple barriers placed on either side of the fracture stopped the release, but the the flowline jumper hasn’t yet been repaired, Fowler said.
So while the Deepwater Horizon oil spill oozed more than 3 million barrels (over 200 million gallons) of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, this recent event is believed to have “leaked” a little less 10,000 barrels (under 400,000 gallons), according to Mississippi’s The Sun Herald. There have also been no deaths reported at Delta House, compared to the 11 people killed during the Deepwater Horizon event.