MOSCOW (MRC) -- An oil spill off Russia's Black Sea coast over the weekend spread over an area of nearly 80 square kilometres and was much larger than initially thought, reported Reuters with reference to the statement of scientists at Russia's Academy of Sciences (RAN) that cited satellite imaging.
A leak occurred as the Greek-flagged Minerva Symphony tanker took on oil at the Yuzhno-Ozereyevka sea terminal near Novorossiysk in southern Russia, the Caspian Pipeline Consortium that owns the terminal said on Monday.
The consortium, which transports oil from Kazakhstan, said on Monday the spill had spread over 200 square metres and involved 12 cubic metres of oil. It said the spill was quickly contained and posed no threat to people or wildlife.
But on Wednesday, RAN's space research institute said a satellite image taken on Sunday and studied by two RAN scientists showed the leak had covered a much bigger area.
"The oil slick stretched from the shore into the open sea over a distance of 19 kilometres on Aug. 8," said the company.
The CPC consortium did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
As MRC wrote earlier, in June 2021, Taiwan's state-owned refiner CPC Corp started cleaning up an offshore oil spill caused by a pipeline that cracked during the discharging of oil from a vessel at its Talin refinery. The oil leak occurred on Tuesday, 22 June, at 2:18 a.m. (1818 GMT) and was likely caused by bad weather, the company said in a statement. CPC immediately halted oil discharge following the incident.
We remind that in January, 2021, CPC Corp bought a piece of land in Kaohsiung on which it plans to build a new naphtha cracker to replace its No. 4 cracker at a cost of NTD82.3 billion (USD2.94 billion). CPC's No. 4 cracker in Kaohsiung's Linyuan District has been in operation for 37 years and has an annual ethylene production capacity of 380,000 metric tons, which cannot meet the demand of its customers, CPC spokesman Chang Ray-chung said then.
Ethylene and propylene are the main feedstocks for the production of polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP), respectively.
According to MRC's ScanPlast report, Russia's estimated PE consumption totalled 1,176,860 tonnes in the first half of 2021, up by 5% year on year. Shipments of exclusively low density polyethylene (LDPE) decreased. At the same time, PP shipments to the Russian market were 727,160 tonnes in the first six months of 2021, up by 31% year on year. Supply of homopolymer PP and block-copolymers of propylene (PP block copolymers) increased. Supply of statistical copolymers of propylene (PP random copolymers) subsided.
MRC