"Mexico's Pemex admits offshore oil spill, downplays size and impact", 27 July 2023

...The chief executive officer of Mexican state energy oil Pemex on Wednesday sought to downplay an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico this month, saying it was quickly fixed and less serious than academics had calculated.

Pemex has been under intense pressure from non-governmental organizations and researchers from the country's top university to explain an oil spill recently detected from satellite images.

"I never said that there wasn't a leak, there was," Pemex CEO Octavio Romero told reporters during a press conference. Romero said the leak first detected internally on July 3 was much smaller than reports - and completely fixed by July 10.

Researchers at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) had backed Greenpeace and other non-governmental organizations that first published the satellite images...Researchers at UNAM's Institute of Geography and its National Earth Observation Laboratory calculated the patch of oil was some 467 square kilometers (180 square miles) in size - equivalent to about 140 soccer fields...Greenpeace had calculated a similar size; Greenpeace also noted there had been other oil spills of varying sizes from Pemex's vast oil and gas infrastructure.

Pemex issued a statement last week saying only 58 cubic meters (2,048 cubic feet), or 365 barrels of oil, escaped from two small leaks that would have affected an area of 0.06 square kilometers...