U.S. Department of the Interior
Minerals Management Service
Office of Communications

National Oil Spill Response Test Facility Contract Awarded

The U.S. Department of the Interior's Minerals Management Service (MMS) today announced the award of a $4.8 million contract to MAR, Inc. of Rockville, MD to manage the National Oil Spill Response Test Facility in Leonardo, NJ. The facility, also known as Ohmsett, is the only one of its kind in North America that can test marine oil spill response equipment and procedures.

MAR, Inc. will manage and maintain the facility under a one-year $930,959 contract which has four option years. If all options are exercised, the total contract will have a value of $4,848,866.

Located on Sandy Hook Bay on the U.S. Naval Weapons Station Earle, the facility features an open-air concrete tank measuring 667 feet long, 65 feet wide, and eight feet deep with a capacity of 2.6 million gallons of water. Other major features include a towing carriage system, a wave generator, filtration and oil/water separation systems, and a system of storage tanks for test fluids such as crude oil.

The facility provides a safe and controlled environment for conducting tests and experiments on oil-spill containment and clean-up technologies, such as the performance of booms and skimmers, the performance of chemical treating agents, and remote-sensing and other innovative technologies. Over the past few years the facility has been used for testing funded by the Environmental Protection Agency, the Navy, the U.S. Coast Guard, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as well as Environment Canada and the Canadian Coast Guard. Private industry pays a daily rate to use the facility.

MMS is the federal agency that manages the Nation's natural gas, oil and other mineral resources on the Outer Continental Shelf, and collects, accounts for, and disburses about $4 billion yearly in revenues from offshore federal mineral leases and from onshore mineral leases on federal and Indian lands.

-MMS-

MMS Internet website address: http://www.mms.gov
24 hour Fax-on- Demand Service: (202) 219-1703