The largest offshore oil leak in the nation’s history has been belching thousands of gallons of oil a day into the Gulf of Mexico for nearly 15 years, and more platforms may be in danger at a time when the current administration is rolling back offshore regulations and pushing to open new areas for oil exploration.

Taylor Energy’s Mississippi Canyon site, about 19 miles off the southeast coast of Louisiana, was toppled by Hurricane Ivan in 2004 and has since been releasing upwards of 70,000 gallons of crude oil a day, recent estimates show.

One of about 3,000 oil platforms in the western Gulf of Mexico, it’s dumped more oil into the Gulf than did the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon, and the impacts are still being tallied.

“The issue is nobody was holding Taylor accountable,” said Chris Eaton with Earthjustice. “Taylor could have done more and should have done more and should have moved faster.”

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The Coast Guard has reportedly contained about 200,000 gallons of oil in recent months from the Taylor site, according to an environmental group.

But what about all that oil? Environmentalists wonder about the lack of urgency, regulation and public notice and outcry about such a spill. Some hotel owners worry Florida's pristine beaches and its $112 billion tourism industry is in grave danger from drilling interests. The owner, meanwhile, wants to walk away from it all.

Critics like Eaton say the lack of action by Taylor and the federal agencies that oversee offshore drilling is a result of a self-regulated Wild West industry that’s allowed to under-report spills while trying to shun responsibility to contain or clean up leaks.

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“Taylor’s been saying for a long time that there’s nothing they could do but I don’t think they thought of pursuing all the options available,” Eaton said. “They need to show that there’s absolutely nothing else that can be done.”

The company says it has done everything possible to stem the flow of oil and that it should no longer be held accountable for the leak.

Costs are extreme, and the technology needed to fix the massive leak does not yet exist, the company has argued in court.

It was an “act of God,” the company has said.

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Although the Taylor platform was toppled in 2004, major clean-up work on the site didn’t begin until 2010, after watchdog groups reported an oil sheen to the Coast Guard.

"It was during the BP oil spill and we were flying over to find out where that oil was going and we kept seeing a persistent sheen that was definitely different than the BP oil," said Dustin Renaud, with the non-profit New Orleans-based Healthy Gulf, which is a third-party litigator in the lawsuit between Taylor Energy and the Coast Guard. "Satellite imagery confirmed that it had been there a while and we contacted the Coast Guard and they said ‘Oh, it’s Taylor. It’s just a few gallons.’ It was 10 miles long, so that just didn’t add up."

The company, then owned by Phyllis Miller Taylor, stopped drilling in 2008 and was sold to News Orleans-based Ankor Energy in 2009. Taylor is now nearly defunct.

Forbes says Taylor is the 283rd richest person in the United States, with a net worth of $1.2 billion.

Ian MacDonald visits the Taylor site regularly to keep track of the leak.

“You see this continuous rainbow sheen and thicker oil until you see this oil slick that’s 100 meters or so wide,” said MacDonald, an oceanography professor at Florida State University. “It drifts in the current for miles and it’s continuously being replenished by new oil from the bottom.”

And it’s not just the Taylor Energy platform that’s threatening the health of the Gulf of Mexico.

MacDonald and others say hundreds of oil rigs that sit on underwater slopes in the Gulf are vulnerable to hurricanes and what are essentially oceanic landslides.

That’s basically what happened to the Taylor Energy platform in 2004, when Hurricane Ivan caused a massive mudslide that moved the platform 800 feet and opened about two dozen wells.

There are hundreds of oil rigs along the continental shelf that could be vulnerable to these types of mudslides, he said.

Parts of the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico look like mountain ranges, with depths varying greatly.

“There are many, many canyons and other features that were formed because there was a failure in the slope,” MacDonald said. “That’s a known geological process in this part of the world.”

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These types of failures, MacDonald said, could become more common as climate changes continue to create larger and more powerful hurricanes. More, bigger storms don't bode well for expanding an industry that's already under-regulated and not prepared to clean up leaks, some say.

"At a time when the administration is aggressively trying to open up the rest of the continental United States to offshore I think that’s a sign that it can’t be done safely and they’ve got this black eye that’s leaking oil," said Jonathan Henderson, with the non-profit Vanishing Earth.

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The offshore oil drilling industry is largely self-regulated when it comes to recording and reporting leaks.

If a company has a leak, it must report some number to the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, or BSEE, which accepts the number as being a true representation of what’s occurring in the Gulf of Mexico.

This arm of the Coast Guard tracks all spills greater than 1 barrel, or 42 gallons, and reports spills larger than 50 barrels, about 2,100 gallons.

The Taylor Energy leak was first tracked by BSEE in 2004 and then again in 2008, when it says the leak produced 72 barrels of oil between July 1 and Sept. 30 of that year.

The leak wasn’teven listed by BSEE on its 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2011 or 2012 report of active oil spills greater than 50 barrel, according to BSEE records evaluated by The News-Press.

Taylor reported a few gallons of oil a day for more than a decade.

“The idea that you can make a slick 100 yards wide and five to 10 miles long from a few gallons of oil is ridiculous,” MacDonald said.

The Coast Guard came out with a report last year that says the site may be spilling upwards of 30,000 gallons of oil a day.

Other scientists have come up with even higher estimates.

The Taylor Energy leak may not have forced oil onto Gulf beaches but the sheer volume of the leak rivals any in American history.

The BP Deepwater Horizon explosion killed 11 workers and caused an estimated 134 million gallons of oil to gush into the Gulf of Mexico over the course of 87 days, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA.

Viewers were riveted by a live camera feed of oil spewing out at the site, which was carried by major news networks. The world waited, and expected, that leak to be capped. No such camera, nor attention, exists for the mud-covered Taylor site.

Taylor Energy’s site, built in 1984, has produced between 10 and 70,000 gallons per day over nearly 15 years.

Ten gallons per day over the course of 15 years would equal about 55,000 gallons while the 70,000 gallons per day estimate would produce more than 320 million gallons over that same time frame, dwarfing the BP oil spill.

The high estimate is equal to more than twice the amount that flowed from what has been considered the nation’s largest offshore oil drilling disaster.

Shaojie Sun is a marine scientist who specializes in optical oceanography at the University of South Florida.

He’s been studying the Taylor Energy site for several years and was part of a team that used satellite imagery and oil sheen coverage maps to estimate the volume of the spill.

The team determined that the Taylor site was producing much more than a few gallons a day, upwards of 71,400 gallons daily.

“Forty-eight barrels per day (more than 2,000 gallons) is very, very conservative number, and even that is more than was estimated from Taylor oil,” Sun said. “Basically the volume is higher than BP already.”

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But not everyone is convinced that the Taylor leak is having as much of an impact on the Gulf of Mexico as the BP oil spill in 2010.

Edward Richards, a Louisiana State University law professor who specializes in government regulations, said the Taylor Energy situation is complex because platforms and piping systems are built to withstand certain storm events.

“Taylor was in a high-risk area because it’s fairly close to the mouth of the river,” Richards said. “They anticipated that and built for it, but they had a bigger event than they anticipated, which is becoming more common in the Gulf of Mexico.”

Richards said the Taylor leak may seem like a massive disaster when you look at the numbers.

But, more oil is released here naturally than the Taylor leak is producing, he said.

“The Gulf of Mexico has been seeping oil for millennia,” Richards said. “(The Taylor Energy spill) is a small amount of oil coming to the surface. It’s not great, but the estimate is you have a couple of Exon Valdez’s of oil seeping into the Gulf naturally every year. It would be better to not have it (the Taylor leak) but the difference between this and a BP type of spill is the difference of barrels of oil washing on beaches and an oil sheen that dissipates before it gets very far.”

Tourism representatives in Florida aren't convinced that any level of drilling offshore of Florida will be acceptable to a state that relies on clean water and beaches to draw visitors and new residents.

Even the perception of bad water quality can turn people away from the Sunshine State.

It happened in 2010 when the Deep Water Horizon spill took place in the northern Gulf.

Most beaches in the state weren't impacted, but images of oil washing up on sugar sand beaches made national and international news.

"We have a long history of opposing drilling in the Gulf because of the potential impact to the hospitality industry and the environment," said Samantha Padgett with the Florida Restaurant and Lodging Association. "We want to make sure that the beauty that is our coastline continues to be a destination and people perceive them to be that. It needs to continue to be pristine not only in actuality but also in perception."

Many local fishing guides don't want to see offshore drilling, either.

They've seen the ecological and economic impacts from a red tide outbreak that devastated the region in the summer of 2018.

"You’re seeing a lot of resiliency in the system but there’s still long-term issues with the sea grass and oysters," said Daniel Andrews, with Captains for Clean Water.

Richards said it’s impossible to say whether additional regulations would have helped at the Taylor leak because it was caused by a hurricane and the resulting mudslide.

Taylor says it’s best to leave the site alone because any work there could re-suspend oil that’s may currently be trapped in the wells and sediment.

“The best, safest solution is not to risk an active release from a well by attempting any further plugging and not taking actions that would disturb the sediments and release trapped oil into the water column,” a site Taylor manages called mc20response.com reads. “The appropriate response posture is to monitor the site and maintain readiness capabilities while allowing for natural attenuation to gradually reduce the sheen and for sedimentation to encapsulate the trapped oil.”

Critics say the Taylor incident is an example of what can go wrong when regulations and policies allow an oil company to go unchecked.

Expanding that type of industry will only create more environmental disasters, said Henderson of Vanishing Earth.

"We’re still in the crosshairs of the Trump drilling plan," Henderson said.

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Some fear the leak will never be fixed, that Taylor Energy could eventually walk away from all responsibilities.

“In theory (they could), but that’s why you’ve got the Coast Guard and other agencies saying ‘you can’t walk away yet,’” said Chris Eaton with Earthjustice. “If there is anything you can possibly do to clean up the spill, you’re on the hook.”

Taylor Energy filed a lawsuit to keep the U.S. Coast Guard from proceeding to clean up the site because, the company says, trying to repair the damage will only cause more environmental harm.

“The Coast Guard … is committed to exploring all options to control and contain the oil that is discharging from the well site and to ensure Taylor Energy will work to permanently stop the ongoing oil spill,” a BSEE report says.

High costs and a lack of proper technology were reasons given by Taylor as to why the company should no longer be responsible for the leak.

After the spill, the company placed $666 million into a trust account.

More than $200 million of that money was spent trying to plug about two dozen oozing wells.

Taylor representatives asked a federal court to return the remaining $432 million to the company, but a judge dismissed the request in April.

The federal government says it could take 100 years for the leak to dissipate on its own.

But the Coast Guard, in recent months, has capped at least part of the leak, according to Renaud.

"I think right now they’re (the Coast Guard) taking a moment to celebrate that they’re containing oil that’s been spilling for 14 years," Renaud said. "At the end of the day (the work being done now) isn’t a permanent solution, so they’re going to have to drill relief wells. It’s really a mess under the mudslide. Pipes are kind of going everywhere."

The Coast Guard and other federal agencies involved in the cleanup and lawsuit did not return phone calls and emails to The News-Press and Naples Daily News.

Now that Renaud's group is a third party to the suit, more information is starting to leak.

"We have 10 years of evidence that’s there’s way more oil than they’ve been reporting for years," Renaud said of Taylor Energy. "It’s really a runaway situation that should have been remedied a long time ago. Either they’re really confused or their science just wasn’t very good, or they’re just trying to avoid the penalty of law."