The Coast Guard is coming down hard on the owners of a broken oil platform that has been allowed to leak off southeast Louisiana for more than 14 years. 
 
 New federal estimates put the leak rate at the Taylor Energy Co. well at 10,500 gallons to 29,000 gallons of oil per day. That’s five to 13 times larger than government’s estimate from just a year ago, and would rank the Taylor Energy leak as one of the largest and longest-running oil spills in North America. 
 
 Last week, the Coast Guard directed Taylor Energy to decide on a new containment plan and a contractor to do the work. The new method of containment “must eliminate the surface sheen and avoid the deficiencies associated with prior containment systems,” the Coast Guard wrote in an administrative order. The company will be fined up to $40,000 per day for failing to comply. 
 
 Full containment of the leak could cost upwards of $1 billion, according to Taylor Energy. The company disputes the new leak estimates and the cause of the chronic sheens that often stretch for miles from the well site. According to scientists employed by Taylor Energy, the sheens are caused by oil and gas bubbling up from the oil-saturated seafloor, and not from leaky wells. 
 
 Site of the Taylor Energy platform. 
 
 Taylor Energy’s platform, known as MC-20 Saratoga, was destroyed by Hurricane Ivan on Sept. 15, 2004. The storm triggered an underwater mudslide that snapped the 550-foot-tall platform’s legs and buried a cluster of wells. Taylor plugged some of the 28 wells and added three containment domes. 
 
 Several environmental groups have for years disputed Taylor’s claim that its multimillion-dollar containment effort had limited pollution to just a trickle. 
 
 In 2013, Skytruth, an environmental group based in Shepherdstown, W. Va., that specializes in remote sensing and digital mapping, measured the sheen at more than 20 miles long. The Gulf Monitoring Consortium, made up of Skytruth and other groups, estimated a daily release rate of between 100 and 400 gallons. 
 
 It wasn’t until 2016 that federal regulators began investigating how oil and gas was still leaking from the site. That same year, Taylor Energy sued the federal government over the remaining $432 million from a $666 million trust, which the company was required to create to pay for the leak response. Taylor Energy argued that its response worked and that the remaining funds should be returned. 
 
 12 years after Gulf oil platform destroyed, feds start investigating environmental damage 
 
 In a 2017 legal filing, the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement estimated the leak’s range at 42 to 2,300 gallons per day. But this year, the government cited the vastly larger daily estimate of up to 29,000 gallons. 
 
 The Coast Guard noted the new rate in its recent order for additional containment work. 
 
 “The worst-case estimate of the daily volume of release far exceeds previous estimates and is in the order of hundreds of barrels per day,” the Coast Guard told Taylor Energy in a letter. 
 
 The Coast Guard’s order is long overdue, said Dustin Renaud, communications director for the Gulf Restoration Network. 
 
 “The time to clean this up was 14 years ago,” he said. “Taylor Energy has shown nothing but negligence all this time.” 
 
 Taylor Energy says the government won’t reveal how it arrived at the much larger estimate. The Coast Guard declined to share details on the estimate with NOLA.com | Times-Picayune until it can determine whether the information is “publicly releasable.” 
 
 Will Pecue, Taylor Energy president, said the new estimates are “ridiculous” and “based on erroneous science.” He believes the larger estimates are aimed at bolstering the government’s case for retaining the trust’s remaining $432 million. 
 
 “There is intent to dismiss the past record,” he said. 
 
 The wells at the Taylor Energy site were relatively low in pressure. The former platform’s production of 1,100 barrels, or about 46,000 gallons, of oil per day, the company required pressurized gas injections. It’s unlikely the platform site could leak at the new estimated rates without pressurization, said Christopher Reddy, a marine scientist hired by Taylor Energy to assess the site. 
 
 A more likely source of the sheen is the sediment, which Reddy described as “heavily contaminated” with oil. Recent sediment sampling showed traces of drilling fluid, likely used during the work to plug and decommission wells after Hurricane Ivan. The sheen on the water’s surface was also found to have drilling fluid. The fluid’s presence indicates the sheen is coming from the sediment and not subsurface wells, which would be pure crude oil and contain no drilling fluid, Reddy said. 
 
 Large sheens on the water’s surface often correspond with disturbances on the seafloor, such as when a remote observation vehicle or divers collect samples. 
 
 “When you touch the bottom, you create a sheen,” he said. 
 
 Buried oil from Deepwater Horizon disaster still harming wetlands 
 
 Reddy cautioned that any restoration or cleanup work at the site could release a large quantity of oil. 
 
 Based on the high end of the new leak estimates, the site may have released 150 million gallons of oil over the past 14 years. That would make the total release on par with the estimated 168 gallons spilled during the BP oil oil disaster in 2010. But, as Taylor Energy’s representatives note, the sheen has never been documented reaching the shore, nor has it caused large-scale damage to fisheries or wildlife. 
 
 It doesn’t take a BP-level disaster to harm the Gulf of Mexico, said Renaud of the Gulf Restoration Network. While the BP spill’s impact was heavily studied, the environmental damage from the Taylor Energy leak has largely been ignored. 
 
 “When you have 10,000 to 30,000 gallons of oil leaking into the Gulf there can’t help but be environmental impacts,” he said. “We just don’t know what they are yet, and we need to change that.” ||||| U.S. Coast Guard Response boats work to clean up crude oil where the Deepwater Horizon sank Thursday in the Gulf of Mexico. The mobile drilling platform was engulfed in flames after an explosion Tuesday. Share Print Share 
 
 A drilling rig that burned for more than a day before sinking Thursday has fouled Gulf of Mexico waters with a potentially major spill of crude oil, officials said. 
 
 The collapse of the oil rig could disgorge up to 336,000 gallons of crude a day into waters about 40 miles off the Louisiana coast. 
 
 U.S. Coast Guard Rear Adm. Mary Landry said the sunken rig, the Deepwater Horizon, increased the threat for environmental damage, which previously appeared minimal. 
 
 With new challenges from the collapsed rig, a growing assemblage of cleanup crews began to work in the area, hoping to stop the oil before the spill were to reach the shore. 
 
 Meteorologists predicted a change in the Gulf's current today that would push the oil toward the Louisiana and Mississippi coastlines. 
 
 But Landry said the spill isn't expected to reach the coast. “We have the ability to keep it offshore,” she said. 
 
 BP, the oil company that leased the offshore rig, said it had mobilized four aircraft that can spread chemicals to break up the oil and 32 vessels that can recover more than 171,000 barrels of oil a day from the surface. 
 
 BP officials also expected to have a million feet of boom in place to help contain the spill by today. 
 
 “We have contingency plans in place to respond to any anticipated situation, and the full resources of BP are being mobilized to implement those plans,” said David Rainey, vice president of Gulf exploration for BP. 
 
 Even then, federal and BP officials said it wasn't clear whether oil was flowing from the well after the platform sank because they didn't know what was happening underwater. 
 
 Water will dilute pollution 
 
 On the surface, cleanup crews observed a sheen of a crude oil mix on the water, a mile wide and five miles long, but it appeared to be from firefighting efforts at the rig, Landry said. 
 
 She said there's another 700,000 gallons of diesel fuel onboard the platform that could also spill. 
 
 The rig was in nearly mile-deep waters in an area known as the Mississippi Canyon. It's home to whales, dolphins, sport fish and sea birds. 
 
 Still, experts said the oil will do less damage at sea than along the coast because the water will quickly dilute the pollution. What's more, they suggested, the marine animals likely scattered after the rig exploded. 
 
 “It will affect some things on the surface, but it won't have the same devastating effect as one on the beach,” said Gilbert Rowe, head of the marine biology department at Texas A&M; University in Galveston. “I'm less worried about toxicity than annoying birds and animals with this slimy stuff.” 
 
 But Aaron Viles, of the Gulf Restoration Network, an advocacy group, said the spill demonstrated the cost of offshore drilling. He said the oil could affect a bustling fishery and the spawning grounds for the over-fished Western Atlantic bluefin tuna. 
 
 “There are always smaller spills that get overlooked,” Viles said. “This one puts the cost of offshore oil and gas exploration into focus.” 
 
 matthew.tresaugue@chron.com
– A massive cleanup effort has been ordered on a quietly devastating oil spill that's been contaminating the Gulf of Mexico for 14 years. The Washington Post reports the US Coast Guard has mandated Taylor Energy "institute a … system to capture, contain, or remove oil" from the affected site off the Louisiana coast, infused with up to 30,000 gallons (about 700 barrels) of oil a day since Hurricane Ivan destroyed a company oil platform in 2004, per DOJ estimates. Contractors commissioned by Taylor Energy had previously said the oil spill was minimal, at the most around 2,000 gallons a day. If the company doesn't comply with the Coast Guard's new decree, it could be hit with a fine of up to $40,000 per day. To put it in context, the BP Deepwater Horizon spill dumped 4 million barrels of oil into the Gulf before it was capped after 87 days in July 2010; the Taylor spill could be at 3.5 million barrels. The Taylor spill remained hidden from the public by both the company and the Coast Guard for six years after the hurricane. It was discovered only when nonprofits and environmental groups investigating the BP spill came upon oil slicks that didn't appear to be related to that particular incident. Taylor Energy—which contends the oil "sheens" on the surface of the water aren't from leaking wells, but from oil and gas floating up from the oil-heavy seafloor—says full containment of the leak could cost more than $1 billion, the Times-Picayune reports. Still, "the time to clean this up was 14 years ago," a rep for the Gulf Restoration Network says. "Taylor Energy has shown nothing but negligence all this time." (The largest tanker oil spill in three decades happened earlier this year.)