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Charlotte Amalie
Friday, March 29, 2024
HomeNewsArchivesHovensa: Oil Spill Unlikely at V.I. Facilities

Hovensa: Oil Spill Unlikely at V.I. Facilities

As oil pouring uncontrollably from a sunken deep water drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico begins to lap onto the Louisiana shore, questions are being raised about whether it could happen on St. Croix, where the 8th largest refinery in the world processes 500,000 barrels of crude daily.

Alex Moorhead, vice president of Government Affairs for St. Croix’s Hovensa refinery said no — the two situations are very different and the refinery has huge advantages when it comes to preventing and containing a spill.
The BP oil rig sank in mile-deep water after an explosion. Emergency shut-offs failed to close, and if the wells cannot be closed, almost 4.2 million gallons of oil could spill into the Gulf before a new well can divert the flow, according to a recent report from the Associated Press.

Deep water, rough, open seas and the size of the spill are all hindering efforts to contain it. But conditions are very different at the refinery, Moorhead said Friday.

"The similarities between the two facilities are not substantial," he said. "We are an on-land facility. We have an emergency response organization and a response plan on which we drill periodically. Also we have a number of emergency response people who live onsite, ready to respond quickly in the event of an emergency."

About 100 people at Hovensa are dedicated to emergency response, including command staff, fire brigade, hazardous materials handling unit and rescue unit, he said.

A spill at the refinery would not necessarily be in the water, because most of the operations are carried out inland, he said. And in fact, the refinery spilled more than 43 million gallons of oil from its start of operations in the 1960s and the spill’s discovery in 1982, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. But because the spill was on land and where it was, the oil was contained. Since 1987, Hovensa has reclaimed more than 40 million gallons from beneath the refinery, according to the EPA.

Oil comes to and from the refinery by tanker, however. The worst oil spill in U.S. history was not from an oil rig but the wreck of the Exxon Valdez oil tanker off Alaska in 1989 which sent 11 million gallons of oil into the waters and devastated the delicate marine ecology of Alaska’s Prince William Sound. The Hovensa refinery’s port facility can accommodate two super tankers. A single super tanker can carry 2 million barrels or 80 million gallons.

First, large tankers are carefully guided and controlled, so a Valdez-type wreck is very unlikely, Moorhead said.
"We require any tanker coming in or leaving to have one of our pilots on board because they are most familiar with our channel," he said. "Also there is always a tug, so there is no possibility of a tanker losing power and being carried by the currents onto the reef."

But accidents occur, so what if something happens at the dock?

"If a spill occurs in the harbor, we have a plan by which we would quickly seal off the harbor with an oil spill containment boom," Moorhead said. "That would be done by ship, with crews and materials kept onsite at all times."
The natural layout of the land makes containment around the refinery an easier task than that faced by crews out on open seas above the sunken drill platform.

"That it is a harbor, one which is to some extent in an inlet, means we have the ability to deploy an oil spill containment boom to keep any spill in the inlet so it does not get out to the open sea or to the shoreline downstream from the facility," he said.

With the BP drill platform spill in the Gulf, BP’s own crews were the first and primary responders. Since then, it has asked the U.S. government for help. On Thursday, President Barack Obama said BP is ultimately responsible under the law for paying the costs of response and cleanup operations, but the U.S. Coast Guard, Navy and other resources may come into play with the cleanup.

Similarly, any incident at Hovensa would primarily be Hovensa’s responsibility, but local and federal agencies may be brought in both to oversee and help.

In the event of any emergency that could have an impact on the environment or community, Hovensa would notify the V.I. Territorial Emergency Management Agency, which is the designated emergency response agency for the V.I. Government. The Department of Planning and Natural Resources, U.S. Coast Guard and V.I. Fire Services would be notified and updated too, he said.

"They are always welcome to send a representative on-site to monitor our emergency response to satisfy themselves we are in control of the situation and responding appropriately. That is standard procedure," he said.

The tragic loss of life and growing environmental catastrophe unfolding in the Gulf is a reminder of the dangers of large-scale petroleum processing. With the volume of oil moving in and out of St. Croix’s Hovensa refinery, a large spill is possible if not likely.

But according to Moorhead and Hovensa, limiting any spill is dramatically easier at the land-based refinery and its containable harbor. There are considerable resources already on hand — so the territory may be relatively safe from that sort of environmental catastrophe.

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