Oil spill downs North Slope production in Alaska

Crews of up to 70 people have been working around the clock to clean up last week’s crude oil spill in the giant Prudhoe Bay field on the North Slope of Alaska.

Officials did not know how much crude leaked out of a large pipeline before a BP Exploration worker discovered the leak Thursday morning.

But the Anchorage Daily News reported that, by early Friday afternoon, vacuum trucks working the site had sucked up nearly 21,000 gallons of oil and water.

North Slope oil production remained down by 100,000 barrels a day, or 12 per cent, because the leak forced the shutdown of some wells and a major oil-processing plant. The oil is worth about $6 million U.S. per day at current prices.

The incident potentially could rank among the largest crude oil spills in 29 years of Prudhoe oil production.

Oil production will be reduced indefinitely because it wasn’t clear yet how much of the recovered liquid was oil and how much was melted snow.

The pipeline was plugged to prevent any more oil from leaking.