First 300 tons of oil sucessfully removed from sunken tanker Prestige

Saturday, June 5th 2004, 12:39 pm

By: News On 6

MADRID, Spain (AP) _ The first 79,000 gallons of tar-like oil from a sunken tanker off Spain's northwest Atlantic coast have been successfully extracted, Spanish officials announced Saturday.

The project is considered one of the most difficult cleanup operations ever attempted because the tanker, the Prestige, is resting 2.5 miles beneath the ocean surface.

Spanish oil company Repsol-YPF developed a pioneering technique that involved drilling small holes in the wreckage and having the oil float out _ since it is less dense than sea water _ into giant bags that take it to the surface for recovery.

Deputy Prime Minister Maria Teresa Fernandez de la Vega said the extraction work had started on Thursday and that the first bag full of oil from the bow area had been brought to the surface early Saturday. The extraction project is expected to take months and cost $122 million.

The Prestige split apart in a storm off the Galicia coast on Nov. 19, 2002, disgorging most of its 20 million gallons of thick, toxic fuel oil onto the beaches of northern Spain and southwestern France in what was Spain's worst environmental disaster.

The Spanish government says nearly 3.7 million gallons of oil remain inside the two pieces of the ship.