A 14-year oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is poised to become one of the worst in US history.

NEW ORLEANS – A spate of oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico has been unplugged for so long that it is now one of the worst disasters at sea in US history.

Between 300 and 700 barrels of oil a day are escaping from a site located 12 miles off the coast of Louisiana since 2004, when an oil production platform owned by Taylor Energy sank into a landslide caused by Hurricane Ivan. Many wells have not been plugged, and the federal authorities believe the spill could continue throughout this century. With no solution in sight, the spill off Taylor threatens to overtake BP's Deepwater Horizon disaster as the largest ever recorded.

As oil continues to pollute the Gulf, the Trump administration offers the largest extension of leases for the oil and gas industry, with the potential to open virtually the entire offshore continental shelf to offshore drilling. This includes the Atlantic coast, where drilling has not occurred for more than a century and hurricanes hit the Gulf twice.

Expansion plans come despite fears that the offshore oil industry is poorly regulated and that the planet must reduce the use of fossil fuels to combat climate change, as well as 14 years after dismantling the flat. Taylor's form of Ivan, the broken sinks release as much oil as researchers needed respirators to study the damage.

The spill was concealed for six years before environmental watch groups came across an oil spill while monitoring BP's Deepwater Horizon disaster.

"I do not think people are aware that this ocean in the United States is full of industries," said Scott Eustis, a Gulf Restoration Network ecologist, as his six-seat plane circled the tide site. black last summer. . On the horizon, a forest of oil rigs has risen in the waters of the Gulf and there remains only the condemned platform of Taylor, rainbow-colored oil slicks, often visible to kilometers. He can not imagine a similar development in the Atlantic, where the majority of coastal governors, legislators, attorneys general and residents have joined the administration's proposal.

The Taylor Energy spill is largely unknown outside of Louisiana because of the company's efforts to keep it secret in hopes of protecting its reputation and confidential information about its activities, according to a lawsuit that ultimately forced the company to reveal its cleaning plan. The spill was concealed for six years before environmental watch groups spilled into an oil spill while watching BP's Deepwater Horizon disaster a few kilometers north of the Taylor site in 2010.

The Department of the Interior opposes Taylor Energy's efforts to deal with the disaster. The company sued the Federal Court for approximately $ 450 million in a trust set up with the government to fund work to recover part of the wreckage and locate wells buried within 100 feet of mud.

Taylor Energy declined to comment. The company argued that there was no evidence to prove that one of the wells was leaking. Last month, the Department of Justice submitted an independent analysis showing that the spill was well above the 1 to 55 barrels per day claimed by the US National Coast Guard Response Center (NRC), using data provided by the oil company.

The author of the analysis, Oscar Garcia-Pineda, a geoscience consultant specializing in remote sensing of oil spills, said that NRC had repeatedly reported that the estimates were low on the same days, while he discovered heavy layers of oil on the ground.

"There is a lot of evidence to support the fact that these NRC reports are incorrect," Garcia-Pineda wrote. Later, he said, "My conclusion is that NRC reports are unreliable."

In an era of climate change and warming of open waters, storms are becoming more frequent and violent. Since Ivan in 2004, several hurricanes have hit or destroyed more than 150 platforms in just four years.

On average, 330,000 gallons of crude oil is dumped annually in Louisiana from offshore platforms and onshore oil reservoirs, according to a government agency that oversees them.

The Gulf is one of the richest and most productive oil and gas regions in the world, with more than 600 million barrels obtained this year alone, nearly 20% of total US oil production. Some 40 billion barrels remain underground, waiting to be recovered, according to government analysts.

A fire breaks out every three days on average and hundreds of workers are injured each year.

About 2,000 platforms are located in the waters off the state of Bayou. Nearly 2,000 more are off the coast of neighboring Texas and Mississippi. In addition, there are nearly 50,000 active and inactive pipeline miles carrying hydrocarbons and minerals to the coast.

And the costs are high.

Of the 1,000 wells in federal and federal waters, there are an average of 20 uncontrolled oil spills – or blowouts – each year. A fire breaks out every three days on average and hundreds of workers are injured each year.

BP paid or set aside $ 66 billion for fines, legal settlements and the cleanup of the 168-million-gallon leak – an amount the oil giant could painfully afford. However, many companies with leases in the Gulf and drilling activities are small, financially at risk and struggling financially to deal with an accident of this magnitude.

One of them was Taylor Energy.

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Taylor Energy was a giant in New Orleans.

Owned by Patrick Taylor, a tycoon and philanthropist who launched an ambitious university scholarship program for low-income students, he was once the only individual research firm to mine and produce oil in the Gulf of Mexico, according to his eponymous foundation.

Taylor did what was arguably his most ambitious transaction in 1995, when he took over an oil production platform formerly operated by BP. Standing in over 450 feet of water, it was about 40 stories tall. His legs were sunk into the muddy bottom of the ocean and funnels were connected to 28 drilled oil wells.

At its peak, the oil company helped make Taylor and his wife, Phyllis, the richest couple in the Big Easy.

Less than two months after the storm, Patrick F. Taylor died of a heart infection at age 67, leaving a fortune for philanthropy and a massive bill for cleansing.

This investment was wiped out on September 15, 2004, when Hurricane Ivan unleashed 145 km / h winds and waves greater than 70 feet when it swept into the Gulf. Under water, the Category 4 storm melted tons of mud and deformed the platform.

The avalanche sank the colossal structure and projected it "at 170 meters from the slope of its original location," wrote researcher Sarah Josephine Harrison in a post-mortem report of the 39; incident.

More than 620 barrels of crude oil piled on his deck fell with him. The sleeves that drove the oil from his wells were mutilated and torn. A mixture of steel and oil leaks was buried in 150 feet of mud.

Less than two months after the storm, Patrick F. Taylor died of a heart infection at age 67, leaving a fortune for philanthropy and a massive bill for cleansing.

Taylor Energy reported the spill to the Coast Guard, which monitored the site for more than five years without informing the public of the disorder in which it was located. Four years after the leak began, in July 2008, the coastguard informed the company that the spill was considered a "continuous and unsecured crude oil spill" posing "a significant threat to the environment. According to a lawsuit between Taylor Energy. and his insurer.

Taylor Energy has reached an agreement with federal officials to establish a $ 666 million trust to stop the oil spill.

It would be a delicate and risky operation. Taylor and the hired contractors were asked to locate wells in an almost impenetrable tomb of mud and debris, and then cover them. Failing that, it could create a device to contain the leak.

But they were forbidden to be bored or to drill in the mud, for fear of hitting a pipe or a well, risking the same type of disaster the size of the BP disaster a few kilometers to the south. This precaution slowed down the pace of the rescue operation.

"We had no idea what was going on," said Marylee Orr, executive director of the Louisiana Environmental Action Network.

Taylor Energy has spent a fortune picking the deck of the ocean deck and butchering about a third of the wells. He built a kind of shield to prevent the crude from rising.

But anyway, the oil continued to flee.

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In 2010, six years after the start of the oil spill, scientists studying the BP spill realized that the oil slicks they were seeing were not working well.

"We were flying to monitor the BP disaster and we continued to see these slicks, but they were far from the oil spill," said Cynthia Sarthou, executive director of the Gulf Restoration Network, which monitors the water of boats and planes.

The satellite images confirmed the quirk.

"It was there all the time, longer than the BP spill," said John Amos, founder and chairman of Sky Truth, a nonprofit organization that fights pollution.

Under the Oil Pollution Act, companies are required to report hazardous spills to NRC, which maintains a database on chemical pollution.

There is no law requiring businesses or the federal government to educate the public, but the Clean Water Act clearly provides for citizen participation.

Environmentalists sued Energy Energy in court.

A fine for non-declaration, but no for under-declaration

In their legal action, environmental advocates have described the agreement between Taylor Energy and the federal government as a "secret transaction not in accordance with national policy".

This policy, they argued, was clearly stated in the Clean Water Act, which provides for "public participation in the. . . application of any regulation. "The law states that" citizen participation must be ensured, encouraged and assisted ".

Taylor Energy and the Coast Guard – part of a unified command of federal agencies including the Department of the Interior, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency – did not follow the policy. In fact, the public was not aware of the spill even after a private company tested the fish in the area and submitted an assessment to Taylor Energy in 2009 that "there is an acceptable risk to humans if the fish of the. . . zone are consumed. "

"Taylor has not provided the public with information on the rate and extent of oil spills and Taylor's efforts to control leaks," said the prosecution.

It will take another three years before the government reveals an even deeper truth. Taylor Energy minimized the severity of the spill. An investigation by Associated Press in 2015 revealed that it was about 20 times worse than what the company had reported.

Taylor Energy had argued that the leak was two gallons a day; Coastguards eventually said that it was 84 gallons or more, and almost certainly came from one of the 16 wells.

"There is a fine for not reporting, but not for underreporting," said Amos. "It's only three gallons a day, we do not care, it's an insignificant problem."

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Nearly ten years after the fall of the oil rig, the government determined that the actual volume of oil spills in the Gulf was between one and 55 barrels per day. Now the new estimate is less than 700 barrels a day. Each barrel contains 42 gallons.

Despite this finding, NOAA is still in the early stages of a marine resource assessment that could explain the impact of the Taylor Energy spill and is more than three years behind the deadline for biological determination of the impact of the BP spill on the marine environment. life.

In July, Earthjustice, a non-profit legal organization representing conservation groups, sued NOAA for failing to produce a study in a timely manner.

Like Eustis, Amos said the people on the Atlantic coast should be wary. But in this region, where beaches and tourism enrich almost every state, mistrust of leasing and offshore drilling is bipartisan.

Governors, state legislators, and attorneys general have protested against the administration's proposal. New Jersey passed a law banning oil and infrastructure in state waters three miles (4.8 km) from the shoreline, crippling any effort to move pipelines from oil rigs to shore. Other states have similar laws.

In the Carolinas, where the winds of Hurricane Florence reached 150 km / h and produced a monstrous wave of 10 meters on landing, the governors representing both political parties urged Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke , to rethink his plan.

Meanwhile, in the Gulf, Taylor Energy had more than one employee, its chairman, William Pecue.

At a public forum held in Baton Rouge in 2016, Pecue pleaded for the removal by the company of its obligation to clean up the mess. Taylor Energy had been sold to a joint venture of South Korean companies in 2008, the year of the creation of the trust, with a capital of $ 666 million. One-third of the money had been spent on cleaning and only one-third of the leaking wells had been repaired. But Pecue wanted to recover $ 450 million, arguing that the spill could not be controlled.

"I can say that we believe that it is an act of God according to the legal definition," Pecue said. In other words, Taylor Energy had no control over the hurricane.

But Ivan was not an extraordinary storm.

According to NOAA, this is one of more than 600 tracked in the Gulf since record keeping in the mid-1800s.

Fourteen years after the Taylor spill and 10 years after the Deepwater Horizon disaster, the federal government still does not know the full impact of these spills on marine life. And no economic analysis shows the value of oil entering the sea and any royalties lost to taxpayers. Activists also want an analysis to determine if the oil is destroying the marshes and heading to the beaches.

"Even if oil did not reach many of these beaches [during the BP spill]The fact that the public has heard about it has killed the economy of the beach for a while, "Sarthou said. "You do not want to go to the beach with tar balls or dishwashing oil."

At that time, Sarthou did not know that Garcia-Pineda was conducting a study in the Gulf that would show that the spill was much worse than imagined – up to ten times worse than what the federal government reported.

While the saga in the Gulf is being played out, skeptical leaders on the Atlantic coast are anxiously watching President Donald Trump's proposal to offer federal leases abroad.

It would take at least a decade for Atlantic drilling to begin. The industry would first want to conduct seismic testing to determine the amount of oil and gas in the soil. According to the results, companies would bid for leases. The interior has not yet approved seismic tests, which according to some studies would harm marine life, including large mammals, such as dolphins and whales.

Oil and gas expects energy development off this coast could generate $ 2.7 billion in annual economic growth for South Carolina, create 35,000 jobs and potentially reduce heating costs for residents have trouble paying their bills.

At a federal information hearing in South Carolina to explain Trump's administration plan in February, Mark Harmon, director of a state-run unit of the American Petroleum Institute , insisted on this point. "In the end, this represents a potential for jobs and reinvestment in the community," he said.

Once the oil industry has established a foothold in a region, the game is over, said Chris Eaton, Earthjustice's attorney.

"An important part of the economy is starting to change" as paid jobs close to $ 100,000 transform the tourism market into oil. "If it works, the train will not stop," he said. "Let's talk about what's going on in the Gulf before moving into the Atlantic."