#pemex

The Gulf of Mexico caught on fire because a pipeline ruptured.

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexico’s state-owned oil company said Friday it suffered a rupture in an undersea gas pipeline in the Gulf of Mexico, sending flames boiling to the surface in the Gulf waters.

Petroleos Mexicanos said it had dispatched fire control boats to pump more water over the flames.

Pemex, as the company is known, said nobody was injured in the incident in the offshore Ku-Maloob-Zaap field.

The leak near dawn Friday occurred about 150 yards (meters) from a drilling platform. The company said it had brought the gas leak under control about five hours later.

But the accident gave rise to the strange sight of roiling balls of flame boiling up from below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico.

It was unclear how much environmental damage the gas leak and oceanic fireball had caused.

Excerpt from this story from Earther/Gizmodo:

A huge oilfield in the Gulf of Mexico, which caused a hellish fire in the ocean last year, has been releasing massive amounts of planet-warming methane. Reuters reported last week on satellite data that shows that the Ku-Maloob-Zaap oilfield leaked 44,064 tons of methane into the atmosphere over the course of 24 days in August. That’s the equivalent of 3.7 million tons of carbon dioxide—what 653,106 homes emit by using electricity over the course of one year.

Researchers with the European Space Agency found that the platform released around the same amount in another ultra-emission event in December 2021. That’s around 3% of Mexico’s average annual emissions.

“In December, the flaring shut down, and they were venting gas almost constantly for 17 days,” Itziar Irakulis-Loitxate, a scientist from the Polytechnic University of Valencia and the lead author of the paper, told Reuters. “This time, however, they have been venting and flaring gas intermittently during the whole month.”

If the platform’s unusual name rings any bells, it’s probably because this is the oilfield that dramatically caught fire last summer, making images of a doomsday-looking crater of flame on the ocean go viral. The fire began after an underground pipeline ruptured.