BP: Let nature run its course with North Sea oil spill

LONDON, Oct. 3 (UPI) -- While it's too early to offer an estimate on volumes, British oil company BP said Monday it would let oil spilled in the North Sea disperse naturally.

BP in a statement confirmed a release from its Clair platform occurred Sunday morning local time. The company attributed the release to a failure of a mechanism meant to separate oil, water and gas.

The company said it was unable to determine the volume of material released, though observed oil was seen migrating away from land.

"At present, we believe the most appropriate response is to allow the oil to disperse naturally at sea, but contingencies for other action are being prepared," a spokesperson for the company said in an emailed statement.

With an estimated 8 billion barrels of oil in place, the company said the Clair field, located about 45 miles west of the Shetland Islands, is the largest reserve basin of its kind in regional waters.

The company said the first phase of operations there reached 100 million barrels of production two years ago. It was discovered in 1977, but BP said it took nearly a quarter of a century to figure out a way to tap into what was considered a challenging reservoir.

"The release was stopped within an hour once the issue had been identified and Clair production was taken offline," the company said in a statement. "We are investigating the cause of the technical issue and the field will remain offline for the time being."

The North Sea incident comes roughly two months after the semi-submersible rig, Transocean Winner, struck ground off the coast of Scotland.

The rig was last contracted to oil company Marathon for operations in the Norwegian waters of North Sea at a day rate of $498,000. The contract award was announced in late 2013.

A cascading series of failures at a well below Transocean's Deepwater Horizon rig, leased to BP, left 11 people dead and triggered the worst offshore accidental oil spill in the history of the industry in 2010.