Oil spill barge gets final tests before heading to Arctic

September 17, 2012

After months of delay, a barge-mounted oil well blowout containment system built in Bellingham is undergoing sea trials before its final deployment to a Shell Oil Co. exploration project in the Chukchi Sea, north of the Bering Straits.

The Arctic Challenger barge project employed hundreds of workers at the Port of Bellingham's shipping terminal through much of the spring and summer. Its owner and operator, Superior Energy Services of Houston, had expected it to be on the job by now, providing an emergency oil well blowout response system meant to prevent the kind of prolonged oil hemorrhage that resulted when BP's Deepwater Horizon erupted in 2010 in the Gulf of Mexico.

But getting final safety approvals from federal officials took longer than expected, Shell spokesman Curtis Smith said in an email.

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