By Terry Wade
TEXAS CITY, Texas (Reuters) - The closure of major Texas shipping channels that deliver crude to more than a tenth of the nation's refining capacity looked set to run to a third day as crews were still working on Sunday evening to clean up after an oil spill.
The Houston Ship Channel, which allows oil barges and cargo ships to sail from the Gulf Coast to refiners and terminals further inland, was shut on Saturday following a collision between a Kirby Inland Marine oil barge and a cargo ship, spilling some 4,000 barrels or 168,000 gallons (636,000 liters) of residual fuel oil.
In a sign of progress on Sunday, Coast Guard Capt. Brian Penoyer said cleanup crews have pumped all remaining fuel oil from the barge, which is partially sunken near the entrance to the channel. It has also forced the closure of the Intracoastal Waterway, which intersects a branch of the channel nearby.
The Channel will remain shut "until clean water is assured," Penoyer told reporters at a news conference in Texas City.
A local official said the channel was expected to be shut well into Monday. The official asked not to be identified as the information had not yet been made public.
The outage has yet to impact operations at Exxon Mobil Corp.'s 560,500 barrel-per-day (bpd) refinery in Baytown, Texas, the nation's second-largest, company spokesman Nicolas Scinta said.
Representatives for seven other refineries in Houston and Texas City, Texas, did not reply to requests for information about possible reductions in production.
As of Sunday evening, 40 ships were waiting to depart the port of Houston and 35 were waiting to enter. Another seven ships were waiting to leave Texas City; five were waiting to sail to that refining hub.
In addition to finishing the cleanup of the heavy fuel oil, some of which had begun washing ashore Sunday along Galveston Bay, the Coast Guard will have to move the barge out of the Channel.
CRUISING TO PORT
Late on Sunday, Carnival Corp. said the Coast Guard had given permission for Carnival Magic to sail up the lower part of the Houston Channel to the port of Galveston to dock on Sunday night. The cruise ship had been scheduled to dock on Sunday morning.
A Kirby-operated barge carrying fuel oil collided with a ship carrying rice at nearly the same location on March 14. In that accident, the cargo ship was damaged, but no fuel oil was spilled.
The Ship Channel is a 55-foot (17-meter) deep pathway for barges and deep-draft ships cut into the floor of Galveston Bay, which averages 20 feet in depth.
The spill is far smaller than that by the Exxon Valdez tanker, which struck a reef in Prince William Sound, Alaska, in 1989. A total of 11 million gallons of heavy black crude oil were estimated to have been released by the Exxon Valdez.
In contrast, only one tank on the barge was ripped open by the collision with the cargo ship in the Houston Channel on Saturday, releasing an estimated 168,000 gallons.
Wildlife Response Services, a Texas-based wildlife rehabilitation service, is helping affected birds and marine life. The service has not said how many animals have been received for cleaning.
In addition to four skimming vessels working on the spill, another 20 response vessels were standing by to help with the cleanup on Sunday, the Coast Guard said. About 90,000 feet of boom were staged along the Texas City dike for containment deployment.
Emergency response crews have also laid down floating barriers in hopes of containing the spill.
(Reporting by Terry Wade in Texas City, Erwin Seba in Houston, Kevin Murphy in Kansas City, Missouri, Alex Dobuzinskis in Los Angeles and Chris Michaud in New York; Editing by Edith Honan, Cynthia Osterman, Bernard Orr and Jan Paschal)
