A pre­lim­i­nary re­port from the In­sti­tute of Ma­rine Af­fairs of sam­ples col­lect­ed from oil spilled on the coast­line in the La Brea area and from ma­rine fa­cil­i­ties at Pointe-a-Pierre last week re­vealed it is a "Bunker C type oil," a prod­uct of the crude oil re­fin­ing process.This is ac­cord­ing to a state­ment is­sued by the Min­istry of En­er­gy and En­er­gy Af­fairs yes­ter­day.The re­port is cur­rent­ly un­der re­view and the min­istry was await­ing the find­ings of the IMA's fi­nal re­port.

The pre­lim­i­nary find­ing sug­gests that the source of the La Brea spill is un­like­ly to have been dis­charged from an oil well or a crude oil pipeline, the state­ment said."With re­gard to man­age­ment of the spills, ag­gres­sive clean-up ac­tiv­i­ty con­tin­ues at ar­eas af­fect­ed through­out the south-west penin­su­la and there has been sig­nif­i­cant progress with these clean-up op­er­a­tions. The for­eign ex­perts from Oil Spill Re­sponse Lim­it­ed (OS­RL) are pro­vid­ing tech­ni­cal sup­port and ad­vice with re­gard to the clean-up ef­forts on a dai­ly ba­sis."

A sep­a­rate state­ment is­sued by state-owned oil and gas com­pa­ny Petrotrin list­ed nine sep­a­rate oil leaks be­tween De­cem­ber 17 and 26.To date, pre­lim­i­nary lab­o­ra­to­ry tests con­duct­ed on sam­ples of oil tak­en from the spill in the La Brea area sug­gest that this spill did not orig­i­nate from Ris­er Plat­form 5, from Plat­form 17 in the Point Fortin Ma­rine Op­er­a­tions or from the Trin­i­ty op­er­at­ed Brighton Ma­rine field.

The com­pa­ny has sent sam­ples, in­clud­ing those from La Brea and Pointe-a-Pierre, to the USA for full iden­ti­fi­ca­tion and fin­ger­print­ing, Petrotrin stat­ed.