Alberta Oil Incident Worsens

This story is starting to get some legs: the Alberta oil incident worsens. I first posted this story/link a few days ago. This may be the straw that breaks the camel's back as President Obama continues to dither on approval/disapproval decision for the Keystone. This is a most troubling headache for the Canadian producers:

Canadian Natural Resources Ltd., Canada's largest independent oil producer, raised the amount of oil released from an uncontained series of leaks at an oil-sands site in Alberta to nearly 6,000 barrels of heavy crude, up from an initial report of 175 barrels, regulators said.

"Because it's ongoing, the volume will continue to increase," Cara Tobin, a spokeswoman for the Alberta Energy Regulator, or AER, said Monday.

Late Saturday, the province's regulatory authority changed the status of the incident to "ongoing" from "over" and raised the reported volume from four separate leaks to a total of 5,975 barrels of oil. That came more than a week after local media said more than 4,500 barrels of oil had leaked, citing internal company data. 

The Calgary-based company hasn't confirmed any figures regarding the size of the leaks and has said little about the scope of the problem. On July 25, it released a statement attributing the cause to unspecified "mechanical failures of wellbores in the vicinity of the impacted areas." Wellbores are holes drilled to explore for or recover oil.