Mitsui Oil Exploration Mitsui Oil Exploration It was one of 17 Mitsui companies that were spun off on July 19, 1969. Its core areas are Thailand, where it drills principally in the Gulf of Thailand in conjunction with Chevron, and Vietnam and Cambodia. In the United States Mitsui's subsidiary is MOEX USA Corp and is headquartered in 9 Greenway Plaza in Houston. In September 2007 it established subsidiary MOEX Offshore 2007 LLC which entered into a partnership with BP for drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. On April 20, 2010, its rig the Deepwater Horizon exploded and sank, causing a massive oil spill.
Oil spill volume is a limited measure of damage or impact. Smaller spills have already proven to have a great impact on ecosystems, such as the "Exxon Valdez" oil spill because of the remoteness of the site or the difficulty of an emergency environmental response. Since 2004, between 300 and 700 barrels of oil per day have been leaking from the site of an oil-production platform 12 miles off the Louisiana coast which sank in the aftermath of Hurricane Ivan. The oil spill, which officials estimate could continue throughout the 21st century, will eventually overtake the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizion disaster as