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 A cleanup of shore areas will take up to two weeks.
The crack and subsequent leak occurred on Friday at a quay off
Yeosu, more than 300 km (185 miles) south of Seoul, while the
318,445 deadweight tonne Very Large Crude Carrier Wu Yi San was
preparing to berth and offload crude.
Oil remaining in the pipeline leaked, but none spilled from the
tanker, which did not hit refinery production at GS Caltex,
according to the refiner and the Korea Coast guard.
"A clean up would be completed within today, while a clean up of the
seashore would take one or two weeks," a senior official at the
Yeosu Coast Guard of Korea told a press briefing broadcast live on
television.
The prime minister's office, in a statement issued on Sunday, said
an oil boom to control the spillage would be expanded to a diameter
of 9.5 km from 5 km, and 201 vessels and five planes would work on
the clean up.
The coast guard official said the tanker was suspected of
approaching the quay at a higher than recommended speed, but the
exact cause of the accident was under investigation.
He added that crude oil, naphtha and other oil compounds leaked from
three cracked pipelines at the quay.
The tanker is operated and managed by Singapore's Ocean Tankers,
which said the vessel was under the control of two port pilots and
assisted by five harbor tugs when it struck the shore jetty and
pipeline.
Surveyors from ship safety classification society ABS and the ship's
insurer, the North of England P&I Association, are helping the
investigation and assessing damage to the ship, said Ng Kwang Chiau,
senior vice president at Ocean Tankers' fleet management division.
He said the ship's voyage data recorder, or "black box", would be
analyzed as part of the investigation.
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NO SPILL FROM SHIP
There were no injuries to the crew, Ng said. The front of the ship
sustained minor damage, but the vessel was safely anchored.
The ship was chartered to Shell, Ng said and talks would take place
with the oil major about unloading options, he told Reuters.
A spokesman at GS Caltex said: "The tanker needs to go through
safety tests before unloading the crude and unloading might be done
through a jetty nearby or ship-to-ship, which the shipper is in
charge of."
He declined to comment on the type of the crude in the tanker.
South Korea's second-largest refiner, with a 775,000-barrels-per-day
(bpd) capacity, GS Caltex is equally owned by Chevron Corp, the
second-largest U.S. oil company, and South Korea's GS Energy, owned
by GS Holdings.
In 2007, South Korea's worst oil spill occurred off the coast of
Taean, when 10,500 metric tonnes spilled from a Hong Kong-registered
tanker whose hull was punctured in a collision.
In November 2013, a small amount of oil leaked into the sea east of
South Korea from a cracked pipeline run by the country's top
refiner, SK Energy, owned by SK Innovation.
(Additional reporting by Jane Chung in Seoul;
editing by Ron Popeski)
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