text: 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.” ||||| On April 20, 2010, the oil drilling rig Deepwater Horizon, operating in the Macondo Prospect in the Gulf of Mexico, exploded and sank resulting in the death of 11 workers on the Deepwater Horizon and the largest spill of oil in the history of marine oil drilling operations. 4 million barrels of oil flowed from the damaged Macondo well over an 87-day period, before it was finally capped on July 15, 2010. On December 15, 2010, the United States filed a complaint in District Court against BP Exploration & Production and several other defendants alleged to be responsible for the spill. 
   
   This webpage provides information and materials on EPA’s enforcement response to the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, settlements with several of the defendants, including the record-setting settlement with BP Exploration & Production for an unprecedented $5.5 billion Clean Water Act penalty and up to $8.8 billion in natural resource damages. 
   
   This webpage is limited to EPA’s enforcement-related activities only, and does not cover all legal or other actions against BP Exploration & Production and other parties for the spill, such as private party/class action settlements for medical claims and economic damages, or other actions against those responsible for the spill. The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana has established the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill website for this purpose. In addition, links for additional information on the spill, cleanup activities and other responses are provided below. 
   
   On this page: 
   
   You may need a PDF reader to view some of the files on this page. See EPA’s About PDF page to learn more. 
   
   Case and Settlement Information 
   
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   Additional Information on the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill 
   
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target: – 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.)