Green light: Chinese oil spill, British seas and BP’s Photoshop faux pas…

• Jonathan Watts, Asia environment correspondent
• guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 20 July 2010 17.48 BST

Oil washes ashore in the port of Dalian, China, 20 July 2010. Photograph: Jiang He/Greenpeace /EPA

Chinese authorities stepped up their efforts to disperse a major oil slick in the Yellow Sea yesterday by mobilising 800 fishing boats to help the clean-up operation.

The flotilla will join the 24 specialist ships that have been spraying dispersal agents, soaking up crude with panels of absorbent felt and using a floating barrage to prevent the slick from contaminating the beaches near Dalian.

Investigators have also launched a probe into the pipeline explosion that caused the seepage on Friday night and has subsequently forced the authorities to restrict access to Dalian Xingang oil terminal.

A 300,000-tonne crude oil tanker, owned by Singapore Pacific Petroleum which was unloading its cargo at the time of the accident, has been held for checks.

The domestic media said there have been safety concerns at the port for some time.

An environmental protection bureau study on the petrochemical industry in 2006 identified five projects at the Dalian Xingang Port as potential risks, according to Global Times.

Economic activity in the north-eastern port has been seriously disrupted. Six “very large crude carriers”, with about 12m barrels of oil, were expected to be diverted, possibly to South Korea or other terminals in China with the capacity for such large vessels. Ships carrying imported corn have also been forced to dock elsewhere.

Thousands of firefighters have doused the flames and port engineers have staunched the leak, but the clean-up mission will take at least four more days, according to the domestic media.

Officials said the dispersal operation was making progress despite rough seas. Considerably smaller in scale than the BP leak in the Gulf of Mexico, the slick has reportedly shrunk by more than a third from its peak of 50 square kilometres.

But local reporters said the crude was evident on nearby beaches, where patches of sand and rocks were coated in a layer of oil.

The leak is likely to add to persistent calls for tighter environmental regulation in China. The need for improved standards was also highlighted by a toxic spill from a copper mine in Fujian month that poisoned a major river, killed countless fish and threatened the drinking supplies of downstream communities.

The director of the Environmental Inspection Office, Zou Zhimin, told the local media that the state council – China’s cabinet – have arranged inspections of safety standards at petrochemical sites across the country.”

BP accused of ignoring internal report of Deepwater leak

Just as nightmare appears over, and cap on leaking well is holding, British firm’s official gives damaging testimony

Should a hurricane strike the Gulf of Mexico this weekend, work on cleaning up the oil slick and blocking the well would be disrupted. Photograph: Dave Martin/AP

BP came under fresh attack last night amid accusations that it had ignored internal safety reports of a leak on the Deepwater Horizon rig and had not used industry best practice for avoiding oil spills.

The news comes just as BP officials were hoping that their long nightmare was starting to be over as the new cap on the leaking oil well appeared to be holding firm and working well.

There had been concerns that the cap might damage the stricken well and allow oil to burst out of the seabed. However, BP officials said there was no evidence of oil from the damaged well forcing its way through cracks in the seabed. “We do not have any anomalies or evidence that we do not have integrity [of the well],” BP’s senior vice-president, Kent Wells, told reporters.

But, while the capping of the well may be going well, developments onshore continued to prove what an enormous task BP faces in trying to repair its public image. In Louisiana an investigative hearing into the leak heard testimony from a BP official who said the firm had ignored warnings ahead of the disaster.

Ronald Sepulvado, a BP well site leader, said he had reported a leak on a critical safety device at the rig to more senior company officials, but it seemed his warnings had not been passed on to the government regulating body, the Minerals Management Service.

“I assumed everything was OK, because I reported it to the team leader and he should have reported it to the MMS,” he told the hearing. The leak was on a control pod connected to the blowout preventer on the rig, whose failure proved critical in causing the disaster.

A congressional committee in Washington heard testimony from Gale Norton, interior secretary under former president George W Bush. Norton said BP had ignored rules put in place in 2003. “If regulations on the books and industry best practices had been followed properly, there might not have been a blowout,” she said. “It appears that BP violated all those regulations that were on the books.”

BP officials know that their best hopes lie in permanently sealing the well. A relief well being dug alongside is almost finished. “The relief well is exactly where we want it,” said Wells. The relief well is set to intercept the damaged well at the end of July.

But before then BP will attempt to shoot drilling mud into the damaged blowout preventer, to seal the well from the top. A previous attempt using this method failed. Wells said that the company was seeking permission to make the effort, possibly this week.

However, bad weather is building in the Caribbean and over the Atlantic, which could become a violent storm by the weekend, meteorologists said. A storm in the Gulf of Mexico could disrupt all efforts. “We certainly are going to keep a very close eye on this system,” said Dan Kottlowski, a hurricane expert at the website Accuweather.

Finally plugging the well would go some way to ending the damage to BP’s reputation globally. But this respite is unlikely to come soon. Mother Jones, a leftwing magazine, reported an unlisted BP phone number for politicians in California to ring for tickets to sporting events and music concerts.

The magazine said that BP had given away more than $300,000 (£196,000) worth of tickets in 10 years

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jul/20/bp-oil-spill-cleanup-threatened-tropical-storms