Offshore Pipe’s Leaks Leave Oil Sheen in Ocean

More than 200 gallons of oil--the latest residue from an offshore pipeline shut down in June--leaked into the ocean near Huntington Beach, leaving a mile-long sheen on the ocean’s surface, federal officials said Monday.

Crews working since the leak was discovered Sunday expect to stop the seepage of oil from several small holes today by flushing the closed line with water, said a spokeswoman for the pipeline’s owner.

The corroded pipeline is the same one that was shut down after it leaked about 42 gallons into the ocean late last spring, sending gooey tar balls onto several county beaches.

“This is all stemming from the line that was shut down in June,” said Mark Stephens, a chief petty officer with the Coast Guard’s Long Beach station. “The big problem is that it’s in very deep water and you can’t send a diver down to work on it.”

The pipeline connects platform Eureka with platforms Ellen and Elly about 10 miles offshore. Water depth near the three-platform complex drops sharply from 265 feet to more than 700 feet.

The Coast Guard, U.S. Minerals Management Service and the pipeline’s owner, Aera Energy LLC of Bakersfield, are working to contain the 100-foot-wide sheen by using absorbent materials and floating barriers, Stephens said. Once the oil is clustered, it will be skimmed off the ocean surface.

Aera hired five emergency ships, which recovered half of the spilled oil Monday, said Susan Hersberger, an Aera spokeswoman.

The company was planning to convert the pipeline into a water pipe for its production of both oil and natural gas. The company had been cleaning it with an internal hydraulic gauge that pushed out residual oil.

A small amount of oil leaked when the cleaning began Wednesday, said Rishi Tyagi, a U.S. Minerals district manager. The current spill began Sunday when the device pushed oil through six or seven small leaks in the pipeline, he said.

Tyagi said his department cited Aera for polluting the ocean and will investigate to see whether criminal or civil charges are warranted.

The agency already has recommended that the oil company pay a civil fine for the June leak. A hearing officer is expected to rule on that case by early next year, Tyagi said.

“What we learned from the last time a pipeline leaked was the degree of risk we face from existing oil development in California,” said Susan Jordan, a board member with the League for Coastal Protection, a statewide private environmental group.

Though the leaks from the corroded pipeline were relatively minor, they nevertheless affected the coast, she said.

“The oil industry likes to talk about advances in drilling, [but] there’s one thing they haven’t figured out yet--how to get oil out of water,” she said.

Her group is fighting to halt further exploration under state and federal oil leases for areas that haven’t yet been tapped. The U.S. Department of the Interior is expected to decide this month the fate of 36 unexplored federal oil leases off California’s coast, Jordan said. Those leases could tap an estimated 1 billion barrels of oil, she said.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Second Leak

About 200 gallons of crude oil has seeped from a leaky oil pipeline between Elly and Eureka platforms about nine miles off Huntington Beach. Earlier this year, a leak from the same pipeline sent black balls of oil washing ashore from Huntington Beach to Dana Point.