USCG: Deepwater Horizon Is NOT Source Of Gulf Oil Sheen

HOUSTON (Dow Jones)–The U.S. Coast Guard said Friday the wreckage of Transocean Ltd.’s (RIG) Deepwater Horizon rig, which sank last year, isn’t leaking oil and is not the source of oil sheens seen recently in the Gulf of Mexico.

A Coast Guard spokeswoman said a team of experts that viewed the video footage taken by an ROV agreed that nothing shown in the feed “provided any indication that there was release of oil from the riser, the fuel tanks or any other debris at the wreckage site.

“Furthermore, there was no oil product either on the surface or subsurface that could be sampled,” the spokeswoman said in a statement.

The Coast Guard said last week that a series of oil sheens–basically a thin carpet of petroleum floating on the surface of water–spotted in the Gulf in recent months indicate the possibility of a release from the riser pipe or other debris from Transocean’s rig, now on the ocean floor after the April 2010 explosion that killed 11 people.

The Coast Guard recently said that BP PLC’s (BP, BP.LN) doomed Macondo well wasn’t the source of the sheens.

-By Isabel Ordonez, Dow Jones Newswires

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