Oil Leak in Gulf of Mexico.

No, another one.

Around 40 miles west of BP's Deepwater Horizon that exploded in April causing the infamous Gulf of Mexico oil slick another oil rig has caught fire. The Vermilion 380 rig exploded at around 13:30 GMT and is still burning. All 13 crew aboard the rig at the time have rescued with only one reported injury. A small oil slick about 1 mile long has also been reported.

The Vermilion 380 rig is owned by Mariner Energy, an independent Houston based oil company. Mariner have a lot of debt and there are rumours that a significant part of that debt is owned by Cairn Energy a Scottish based oil company. You may remember Cairn Energy as the company that angered Greenpeace and the UK Climate Camp by announcing plans to drill for oil off the coast of Greenland. Obviously those rumours are just rumours and I wouldn't treat them as fact until it can be investigated further.

However the Vermilion rig, like all the other rigs is not currently producing oil or gas due to a US government ban on drilling in the area. The entire oil industry, Mariner included, are really not happy about this ban and in fact have just had a legal challenge to the ban thrown out of court in the US.

Therefore I wouldn't be too surprised if Mariner purposefully blew up their own rig in order to prove to America, Greenland and the World that the Deepwater Horizon was a one off and the blowout preventers on offshore drilling rigs normally work really, really well.