Bulletins

At approximately 5.30 a.m. Australian Western Standard Time (AWST) on Friday 21 August 2009, the Montara Wellhead Platform located 140 nautical miles (approximately 260 kilometres) offshore from the northwest Australian coast had an uncontrolled release of hydrocarbons from one of the platform wells. Consequently oil and produced formation water escaped from the riser on the platform then onto the surface and significant gaseous hydrocarbons escaped into the atmosphere. The oil spill resulted in the activation of the National Plan, managed by the Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA).

The estimate provided by the operator, PTTEP Australasia (Ashmore Cartier) Proprietary Limited (PTTEP AA) was that 400 barrels (or approximately 64 tonnes) of crude oil were being lost per day to the sea. What followed was the longest and in many respects most complex oil spill response operation since the National Plan was established in 1973. The uncontrolled release continued for 71 days until 3 November 2009 and response operations continued until 3 December 2009.

Asia Pacific ASA provided 24/7 spill trajectory modelling to AMSA for this incident over the entire duration of the response involving the use of OILMAP and CHEMMAP software, the Environment Data Server, satellite remote sensing of oil at sea and use of aerial reconnaissance confirmation of observed oil at sea. Learn more.

Recently the review of the Incident Analysis Team (IAT), established to provide strategic recommendations for improvements to the National Plan arrangements and identify any lessons learned during this incident to improve future major incident responses, was made public.

One of the highly effective aspects of the response, as expressed to the Incident Analysis Team (IAT) during the various debriefs and meetings around Australia, included the timeliness and accuracy of the spill trajectory modelling carried out for the spill response for over three months duration.