Timor Sea Drilling Spill - Montara Well is Permanently Plugged

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 13, 2010

Timor Sea Drilling Spill - Montara Well is Permanently Plugged

Good news out of Australia - the well that blew out on August 21, spilled crude oil into the ocean and natural gas into the air for ten weeks, then caught fire and burned out of control for 2 days when the leak was finally stopped - has been permanently plugged and capped, according to a report from Upstream Online today. That's almost five months since the blowout occurred. No doubt the plugging operation was made a bit more complicated due to fire damage sustained by the Montara oil platform:

No word yet on what will be done with the other wells that had already been drilled at the Montara platform. Will they too be permanently plugged, capped and abandoned? Or will the operator, PTTEP Australasia, attempt to put them into production?

Read all about the Timor Sea blowout and spill on this blog, and see photos and satellite images of the spill in SkyTruth's gallery.

Timor Sea Drilling Spill - Cumulative Impact

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 8, 2010

Timor Sea Drilling Spill - Cumulative Impact

We've generated a sequence of maps showing the cumulative area of ocean covered by oil slicks and sheen during the 10-week oil spill in the Timor Sea off Australia last year. This is based on SkyTruth's analysis of MODIS satellite images obtained from NASA throughout the event.

Cumulative slicks from Timor Sea blowout and spill; state of Virginia superimposed for scale.

We calculate a total area of 22,163 square miles where oil slicks or sheen occurred at some time during the spill, which began when a well blew out during drilling operations on the new Montara platform on August 21, and ended when the damaged well was finally plugged on November 1. This is about the size of SkyTruth's home state of West Virginia. Because there were many days when the MODIS images weren't useful for mapping slicks (due to cloud cover or illumination conditions), the actual area is probably greater.