While the world has been hearing of BP's spill into the Gulf of Mexico for the past month, China had its own spill this past week. In China’s port city of Dalian, two oil pipeline explosions sent crude oil gushing into the Yellow Sea. As of Monday, July 19, the oil slick was roughly 19 square miles. Here’s more.
The Dalian Xingang oil port—home to China’s largest oil reserves—was closed on Monday as maritime forces struggled to contain a massive oil slick off the coast.
Two crude oil pipelines exploded at the oil port. It lit a huge fire that burned over the weekend and sent thousands of barrels of petroleum gushing into the Yellow Sea.
The oil slick covers an area of roughly 19 square miles and is floating about 62 miles off shore.
The first pipeline blew when a Liberian tanker was offloading crude oil onto a storage facility, which then triggered the second explosion.
The petroleum storage facility is jointly owned by Dalian Port and China National Petroleum Corp—the parent company of PetroChina. Shares of Dalian Port fell 4.4 percent, while PetroChina stocks lost 1.3 percent.