Birds, fish and other marine wildlife will likely be affected as the 185km wide spill from Royal Dutch Shell's Bonga field approaches Nigeria's southern shore line. The spill is said to be the largest in the last decade.Peter Idabor, who leads the National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency, told The Associated Press that officials expect the slick to reach beaches by Thursday afternoon, likely affecting birds, fish and other wildlife in the area. Shell, the major oil producer in Nigeria, said Wednesday the spill likely occurred as workers tried to offload oil onto a waiting tanker. The company published photographs of the spill, showing a telltale rainbow sheen in the ocean, but said it believes that about 50 percent of the leaked oil has already evaporated.The source of the leak has been plugged and experts from Britain were coming to help with the cleanup, Idabor said.Shell estimates the Bonga spill likely was less than 40,000 barrels, or 1.68 million gallons. That's about the same amount of oil spilled offshore in 1998 at a Mobil field. The 1998 spill saw oil slicks extended for more than 100 miles (some 160 kilometers) to Lagos, the country's commercial capital."Since the Mobil spill, this is just about the most major one," Idabor said.Nigerian authorities hope to use oil booms and chemicals to disperse or collect the spilled oil, Idabor said. In a statement, Shell said its Nigerian subsidiary already had sent ships out to the slick to use dispersant on the oil sheen. The company also said it would use infrared equipment to trace places where the sheen is the thickest.However, the size of the spill may be even larger. SkyTruth, a nonprofit group based in West Virginia that uses satellite imagery to detect environmental problems, estimated the oil spill might stretch across roughly 570 miles (920 kilometers) of ocean ' five times what Nigerian authorities believe."The spill could be near the upper limit of what Shell has stated," John Amos, SkyTruth's founder and president, told the AP on Thursday. However, he said he needed more information to determine the spill's true scope.Bonga sits about 75 miles (120 kilometers) off Nigeria's coast. It can produce about 200,000 barrels of oil and 150 million cubic feet of gas a day, according to Shell's Nigerian subsidiary. Production at the field, which Shell operates in partnership with Italy's Eni SpA, Exxon Mobil Corp., France's Total SA and the state-run Nigerian National Petroleum Corp., has been halted since the discovery of the spill.Environmentalists blame Shell and other foreign oil firms for polluting the country's oil-rich Niger Delta. Some environmentalists say as much as 550 million gallons of oil poured into the delta during Shell's roughly 50 years of production in Nigeria ' a rate roughly comparable to one Exxon Valdez disaster per year. An estimated 11 million gallons was released during the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska.Shell in recent years has said most of the spills in the delta are caused by militant attacks or thieves tapping into pipelines to steal crude oil, which ends up sold into the black market or cooked into a crude diesel or kerosene. Company statistics kept by Shell show spills have dropped as militant attacks in the region subsided, though this single spill at Bonga roughly doubles the amount of oil spilled by Shell this year.Online resourcesRoyal Dutch Shell PLCShell's Nigeria spill websiteSkyTruth
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