There were no casualties, but state television said oil had contaminated the ocean off the port city in Liaoning Province. The storage facility is jointly owned by Dalian port and China’s top oil company, China National Petroleum Corp (CNPC).
Workers are using skimmers and dispersants to break up the oil slick and stop it spreading, the official China Daily said. The pollution is concentrated about 100 km (62 miles) offshore. “By Sunday evening, about 7,000 meters of floating booms had been set up and at least 20 oil skimmers were working to clean the spill,” the newspaper quoted local officials as saying. There are no residents within 3 km (1.8 miles) of the affected site, and little “marine farming”, the report added.
The Xingang oil storage site, where the explosion happened, is home to one of the country’s first government-held emergency crude stockpiles. It is also a transfer spot for two nearby major refineries, Dalian Petrochemical Corp and West Pacific Petrochemical Corp (WEPEC), both operated by PetroChina with a combined crude processing capacity of 600,000 barrels per day. It was not immediately clear if the spill caused suspensions of new cargo off loadings at the port, oil traders said. The blast happened when a Liberian-flagged tanker was off-loading oil, the China Daily said. The cause of the blast is under investigation, and CNPC, the parent of PetroChina, said monitoring of the air and sea environment had been stepped up in the affected areas.
