NOAA
The Taylor Energy leak is a slow oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico that began in September 2004, when Hurricane Ivan set off an underwater mudslide that toppled an offshore production platform about 10 to 12 miles (16 to 19 km) off the coast of Louisiana. Oil kept seeping from the buried wells for well over a decade. When the US Department of Justice announced a settlement with the company in December 2021, it described the case as the longest-running oil spill in American history.
Most people remember the Deepwater Horizon blowout of 2010, with its burning rig and nightly news coverage. The Taylor leak was the opposite kind of disaster: quiet, far from cameras, and argued over for years. Here is what happened, why the size of the spill was so disputed, and how the federal government finally stepped in.
What happened at Mississippi Canyon 20
The platform stood in a lease block known as Mississippi Canyon 20, or MC-20, in roughly 490 feet (150 m) of water near the mouth of the Mississippi River. It was built in 1984, and Taylor Energy, a New Orleans company founded by oilman Patrick F. Taylor, took it over from BP in 1995. About 28 wells were connected to it.
On 16 September 2004 the eye of Hurricane Ivan passed within roughly 60 miles of the site. The storm waves destabilised the soft sediment of the delta front, and a submarine landslide knocked the platform over and dragged it hundreds of feet from where it had stood. The well conductors were bent and buried under mud, and oil began to escape from the damaged wells.
Patrick Taylor died in November 2004, only weeks after the storm. In 2008 the company sold its remaining oil and gas assets to Korea National Oil Corporation and Samsung C&T and set up a trust, reported at about $666 million, to pay for the clean-up and the decommissioning of the wrecked site.
Why nobody agreed on how much oil was leaking
The hardest question in this story has always been the size of the leak. A sheen on the surface could be seen from the air and from satellites, but turning a sheen into a daily volume is not simple, and the wells themselves lay under tons of mud.
Taylor Energy argued for years that the leak was small, at times putting it at only a few gallons a day, and later claimed that the oil was coming from contaminated sediment rather than from leaking wells. An Associated Press investigation in 2015 found that the leak was far larger than the company had reported, and the Coast Guard revised its own estimate to about 20 times the company's figure.
In 2018 federal government lawyers told a court, citing a scientist's analysis of satellite images and samples, that somewhere between 37,000 and 113,000 litres of oil a day might be escaping. That is roughly 9,800 to 29,900 US gallons. A June 2019 study from NOAA's National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science produced a lower range, reportedly 9 to 108 barrels a day. The spread between these numbers is itself the lesson: each method measures something different, and none of them could simply put a meter on a buried wellhead.
The public learned about the leak only gradually. Surface slicks near the site drew wider attention in 2010, when satellite images of the Gulf were being studied closely after Deepwater Horizon, and environmental groups began pressing for answers.
How it compares with Deepwater Horizon
Headlines in 2018 suggested that the Taylor leak could become one of the worst offshore disasters in US history. That comparison needs care. Deepwater Horizon released oil for 87 days in 2010; federal scientists estimated about 4.9 million barrels (around 210 million US gallons), while a later court ruling used a figure of 3.19 million barrels, close to 134 million gallons. NOAA's damage assessment linked the spill to the deaths of tens of thousands of birds and sea turtles and severe harm to dolphins, oysters and marshes.
The Taylor leak was far smaller per day, but it lasted for many years instead of months. Whether it ever approached Deepwater Horizon in total volume depends on which flow estimate you trust, so the fairest way to describe it is the one the Justice Department used: the longest-running spill, rather than the largest.
The Coast Guard takes over the response
Nine of the damaged wells were worked on by Taylor in the years after the storm, but the rest stayed open, and the sheen did not go away. In October 2018 the US Coast Guard reportedly ordered the company to contain the leak or face fines of $40,000 a day. The Coast Guard then ran a nationwide request for proposals itself and hired the Louisiana firm Couvillion Group to do the job.
Couvillion designed and installed a subsea collection system, essentially a large containment structure over the leak that captures rising oil so it can be pumped to the surface and stored. It started operating in April 2019. The surface sheen shrank sharply, and the system was soon collecting around 900 to 1,000 gallons of oil a day. By July 2022 the Coast Guard reported that more than a million gallons had been recovered at the site.
The 2021 settlement and the trust fund
The United States sued Taylor Energy in federal court in New Orleans in October 2020. On 22 December 2021 the Justice Department announced a proposed settlement. Under it, Taylor agreed to:
- hand its $432 million decommissioning trust fund to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, to pay for plugging the wells, decommissioning the site and cleaning up contaminated sediment;
- pay more than $43 million, described as all of its remaining assets: a $15 million civil penalty, $16.5 million for natural resource damages and over $12 million for the Coast Guard's removal costs;
- drop three lawsuits it had brought against the government and stay out of the way of the federal clean-up.
A federal court entered the consent decree in March 2022. Assistant Attorney General Todd Kim summed up the government's view: "Offshore operators cannot allow oil to spill into our nation's waters."
What the Taylor leak teaches
A few lessons stand out for anyone following offshore energy or ocean pollution:
- Decommissioning is part of the cost of drilling. Wells outlive the companies that drill them. When a platform is destroyed, someone has to pay to plug the wells, and the Taylor trust fund shows why regulators insist on that money being set aside early.
- Self-reported numbers need independent checks. The leak's size became clear only when journalists, government scientists and outside researchers measured it themselves.
- Containment is not a cure. Capturing the oil stops most of the pollution, but the wells still have to be permanently plugged. Federal agencies describe nine of the 25 affected wells as having been intervened on; full decommissioning is the remaining task.
- Slow spills matter. A leak that never makes the evening news can still release large amounts of oil over time.
For readers, the practical takeaway is to look at three things whenever an oil spill is in the news: the flow rate, how long it lasts, and who is responsible for stopping it. The Taylor case shows that the third question can take the longest to answer.
Sources: US Department of Justice: Taylor Energy settlement (22 December 2021); BSEE: Taylor Energy Mississippi Canyon incident; Valve Magazine: Coast Guard removes a million gallons of oil from MC-20; Wikipedia: Taylor oil spill; Wikipedia: Deepwater Horizon oil spill; Wikipedia: Patrick F. Taylor. Cover image: NOAA. Video embedded from Facebook.
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