Oil spill seen in Gulf platform explosion

HOUSTON (Reuters) - An oil and gas platform in the Gulf of Mexico exploded on Thursday, setting off a blaze and a small oil spill, but the accident does not appear to be as serious as BP's deadly rig explosion and oil spill in April.

The U.S. Coast Guard said an oil sheen of 100 feet by 1 nautical mile has been reported at the site.

All 13 crew members on the burning platform were evacuated to another offshore platform, the U.S. Coast Guard said. The fire has been contained but is not yet extinguished, the Coast Guard said.

The crew did not suffer any injuries, said platform and field operator Mariner Energy.

The platform is located more than 90 miles (145 km) south of Louisiana's Vermilion Bay, west of BP Plc's ruptured Macondo well that killed 11 people and caused the world's worst offshore oil spill.

At the moment, the accident does not appear to be another BP-style disaster, said Raoul LeBlanc, a senior director at PFC Energy in Houston.

"If it's an industrial accident and doesn't involve a well it's obviously still bad, and we hope that no one has been hurt, but it's unlikely to have long-term implications for production in the Gulf of Mexico," LeBlanc said.

The platform, located in 340 feet (104 meters) of water, was undergoing maintenance and was not in active production, the U.S. Interior Department said. The platform was authorized to produce oil and natural gas.

The cause of the explosion was not known.

The facility averaged 9.2 million cubic feet of natural gas per day and 1,400 barrels of oil and condensate per day during the last week of August, Mariner said.

The platform has seven wells that produce both oil and natural gas, company spokesman Patrick Cassidy told CNN.

The platform's output is a small fraction of the 1.6 million barrels of oil the region produces on a daily basis.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said he did not know whether the fire would affect the Obama administration's current deepwater drilling moratorium.

News of the fire helped push up crude oil prices 59 cents, or 0.81 percent, to $74.50 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

Shares of Mariner Energy fell 2 percent to $22.90 and shares of Apache Corp, which is expected to buy Mariner Energy, also fell 1.5 percent to $91.

Mariner has participated in at least 35 deepwater projects in the Gulf and operated over half of them.

Pritchard Capital analyst Stephen Berman said the market over-reacted to the news when it initially pushed Mariner's shares down 5 percent.

"As more details come in, it's an incident. It's unfortunate but it sounds like it's under control," he told Reuters Insider.

(Additional reporting by Kristen Hays, Anna Driver and Eileen O'Grady in Houston, David Sheppard and Joshua Schneyer in New York, and Tom Doggett and Ayesha Rascoe in Washington; writing by Andy Sullivan; editing by Lisa Shumaker)

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