Houston: Tanker Being Prepared for Salvage
Plans to salvage the damaged chemical tanker Carla Maersk got underway on Wednesday after it collided with a the Conti Peridot, loaded with steel, in the Houston Ship Channel on Monday.
The double-hulled Carla Maersk was carrying 216,000 barrels of gasoline additive methyl tertiary-butyl ether, or MTBE, at the time of the collision.
The U.S. Coast Guard has detected a narrow, 2-mile long sheen of MTBE coming from the ship, although the actual volume of the spill is not yet known.
High density foam will be used to suppress any vapor still coming from the damaged tank on the anchored vessel. Efforts will then get underway to remove the liquid cargo and move the ship to a safe berthing area.
Extensive air and water tests have been conducted, and there are currently no public health or environmental concerns.
Conti Peridot was safely moved on Tuesday afternoon.
National Transportation Safety Board investigators are on the scene, checking the vessels’ steering, propulsion, weather conditions and maintenance records.
Refineries Impacted
The Ship Channel remains closed to all traffic from light 86 to the Fred Hartman Bridge, and ExxonMobil said on Wednesday that it cut production rates at the second-largest refinery in the United States as crude deliveries were held up by wreckage that partially closed the Houston Ship Channel for a third day.
Exxon said it was working with the U.S. Coast Guard and the Port of Houston to resume crude shipments as soon as possible to its 560,500 barrels per day (bpd) refinery in Baytown, Texas, which sits along the country's busiest petrochemicals waterway.
Royal Dutch Shell Plc also said it was evaluating the closure's impact on its 327,000 bpd joint-venture refinery in Deer Park, Texas, and LyondellBasell said its 263,776 bpd plant in Houston had experienced no operational impacts.
Shipping Suspended
J.J. Plunkett, port agent for the Houston Pilots, said 43 inbound and 33 outbound vessels were waiting to move on Wednesday, up from 36 inbound and 28 outbound on Tuesday. Those include all kinds of ships.
Enterprise Products Partners suspended docking operations for ships and barges at its Oiltanking Partners unit on the ship channel, applying force majeure retroactively to the shutdown on Monday, according to a Bloomberg story seen by traders.
One of two tankers carrying Mexican crude that had been waiting outside of Houston since fog held up deliveries for four days last week had started moving east to Nederland on Wednesday, according to ClipperData, which tracks crude movements. Sunoco Logistics Partners has a huge storage complex in Nederland.
Traffic in and out of Galveston, Texas City and Bayport on the south end of the waterway has been operating as usual.
Plunkett said the hope was to get traffic moving by daybreak on Thursday.