Drilling to Begin Soon in Deep Water Off Cuba

Say hello to my little friend:  Scarabeo-9 arrives to begin deepwater drilling off Cuba.  Photo courtesy Shipspotting.com.

The Scarabeo-9, a big semisubmersible drill rig owned by Italian company ENI, just built in China, and currently under contract to the Spanish oil company Repsol, has arrived in the Florida Straits off the north coast of Cuba to begin exploratory oil drilling.  The rig will begin its work in exploration block N27 (see map after the jump) just 90 miles from Key West, in water about 6,500' deep.  That's 1,500' deeper than the site of the BP / Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf in 2010. 

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Taylor / 23051 Chronic Leak Site in Gulf: Oil Analyzed

Back on September 15, a team from National Wildlife Federation piled onto a small boat on the Louisiana coast.  Their destination: the chronic leak site about 12 miles offshore where a cluster of wells operated by Taylor Energy has been steadily spilling oil into the Gulf since 2004.  Check out this aerial video of the site, shot by On Wings of Care on December 9, 2011.

Their objective: to collect samples of the Taylor oil slick for analysis, to see if it's chemically distinguishable from the oil that gushed from BP's infamous Macondo well about 30 miles away.  We wanted to know if other samples of oil collected in this region of the Gulf, on beaches and barrier islands and from slicks observed offshore, could possibly be coming from the Taylor site since it's a well-documented source of oil pollution. 

The upshot:  oil leaking from the Taylor site should not easily be confused with relatively unweathered oil from the Macondo disaster.  But it would be very helpful to collect more and better samples from the slicks being observed in the vicinity of the Macondo well site. [Read more....]

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