Australian authorities yesterday scaled back a three-week operation to disperse oil and gas leaking from a Timor Sea drilling rig operated by Thailand’s PTTEP company.
Oil and gas has been leaking from the West Atlas drilling platform, 690km west of Darwin, since a rupture in an undersea pipe on Aug. 21.
The slick from the rig is 170km from the coast but is reducing in size and requiring less dispersant, a spokeswoman for the Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA) told national broadcaster ABC.
AMSA said scaling back the clean-up operation was appropriate now that a mobile rig towed from Singapore was 2km from West Atlas and preparing to drill 2.6km into the sea bed to intersect the leaking well and plug it with drilling mud.
PTTEP expects the drilling to take at least four weeks.
Last week Resources Minister Martin Ferguson said concerns about the environmental impact of the leak had been overstated.
“The latest report available to me indicates no oil-affected wildlife and no evidence of contamination in the area, which is pleasing,” he said.
AMSA has been using C-130 Hercules aircraft flying from Darwin each day to keep the spill in check.
PTTEP, which has not revealed what caused the leak, has 300 staff deployed working on the problem and cleaning up the spill.
Speaking at a press conference in Perth on Saturday, PTTEP director Jose Martins said the leak, initially around 400 barrels a day, was diminishing and that his company would cover the cost of the clean-up.
Ferguson said a new agency would be set up to investigate accidents at offshore drilling rigs.
“We want to learn from this incident and take the measures necessary to stop it happening again,” he said. “While this is the first blowout in offshore Australia since 1984, and around 1,500 wells have been drilled safely over the last 25 years, there’s no room for complacency.”
Geochemist Bob Kagi of Perth’s Curtin University of Technology said that oil leaked from the seabed even without the intervention of humans, and that dispersants sprayed onto slicks might be more of a problem than the oil itself.
“I think the reason they’re using dispersants is to be seen to be doing something,” Kagi said. “Dispersants are often more toxic than the oil itself.”
Environmentalists criticized the government for what they perceive as the slow speed of PTTEP in plugging the leak.
They said it already posed a threat to whales, dolphins and turtles, and warned that the slick could easily reach the coast and cause ecological damage.
With much pomp and circumstance, Cairo is today to inaugurate the long-awaited Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM), widely presented as the crowning jewel on authorities’ efforts to overhaul the country’s vital tourism industry. With a panoramic view of the Giza pyramids plateau, the museum houses thousands of artifacts spanning more than 5,000 years of Egyptian antiquity at a whopping cost of more than US$1 billion. More than two decades in the making, the ultra-modern museum anticipates 5 million visitors annually, with never-before-seen relics on display. In the run-up to the grand opening, Egyptian media and official statements have hailed the “historic moment,” describing the
SECRETIVE SECT: Tetsuya Yamagami was said to have held a grudge against the Unification Church for bankrupting his family after his mother donated about ￥100m The gunman accused of killing former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe yesterday pleaded guilty, three years after the assassination in broad daylight shocked the world. The slaying forced a reckoning in a nation with little experience of gun violence, and ignited scrutiny of alleged ties between prominent conservative lawmakers and a secretive sect, the Unification Church. “Everything is true,” Tetsuya Yamagami said at a court in the western city of Nara, admitting to murdering the nation’s longest-serving leader in July 2022. The 45-year-old was led into the room by four security officials. When the judge asked him to state his name, Yamagami, who
DEADLY PREDATORS: In New South Wales, smart drumlines — anchored buoys with baited hooks — send an alert when a shark bites, allowing the sharks to be tagged High above Sydney’s beaches, drones seek one of the world’s deadliest predators, scanning for the flick of a tail, the swish of a fin or a shadow slipping through the swell. Australia’s oceans are teeming with sharks, with great whites topping the list of species that might fatally chomp a human. Undeterred, Australians flock to the sea in huge numbers — with a survey last year showing that nearly two-thirds of the population made a total of 650 million coastal visits in a single year. Many beach lovers accept the risks. When a shark killed surfer Mercury Psillakis off a northern Sydney beach last
‘CHILD PORNOGRAPHY’: The doll on Shein’s Web site measure about 80cm in height, and it was holding a teddy bear in a photo published by a daily newspaper France’s anti-fraud unit on Saturday said it had reported Asian e-commerce giant Shein (希音) for selling what it described as “sex dolls with a childlike appearance.” The French Directorate General for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control (DGCCRF) said in a statement that the “description and categorization” of the items on Shein’s Web site “make it difficult to doubt the child pornography nature of the content.” Shortly after the statement, Shein announced that the dolls in question had been withdrawn from its platform and that it had launched an internal inquiry. On its Web site, Le Parisien daily published a
RSS