LONDON -- A flare near Total's Elgin drilling platform has gone out, reducing the threat of explosion at a massive gas leak from a North Sea well, the company's chief executive said on Saturday.

"The flare on the Elgin platform was extinguished last night,'' Christophe de Margerie wrote on Total's Twitter account.

A spokesman confirmed the tweet, saying the flame had gone out by itself without technical intervention.   

The flare had been lit as part of Total's response to a gas leak at the Elgin drilling platform off Scotland's east coast, to relieve pressure in the well.

"We received the first indication that the flare may be out at 12:07 (7:07 p.m. ET Thursday) yesterday from our first surveillance of the day," a spokesman told the BBC.

"The news was then reaffirmed at 16:36 (11:36 a.m. ET) following our second flight of the day. We received what we consider final confirmation at 8:20 (3:20 a.m. ET) this morning, when our sea vessels on location reported no further flare activity through the night."

Located about 110 yards away from the rig, it raised fears of a massive explosion were it to ignite the natural gas that has been leaking below the platform for six days.

Oil company says it has found source of gas leak off Scottish coast

While Total had dismissed the risk of a blast, one engineering consultant warned that Elgin could become "an explosion waiting to happen''.

Options to extinguish the flare had included dropping water from a helicopter or spraying nitrogen overhead to starve the flame of oxygen. In the end, the flare went out by itself.

Highly explosive gas cloud
The leak, which began on Sunday, is spewing an estimated 200,000 cubic metres of natural gas into the air per day, forming a highly explosive gas cloud around the platform.

It began after pressure rose in a well that had earlier been capped.

A team of international experts is advising on how to plug the leak and Total said on Friday it would drill two relief wells, a process that could take six months and cost up to $3 billion.

Total evacuated its 238 platform workers, and set up a two-mile exclusion zone for safety reasons, with fire-fighting ships on standby.

North Sea exclusion zone set as gas surges from leak

A senior union official said on Friday that Total had repeatedly assured workers a leak was impossible until just hours before evacuating them.

Msnbc.com staff and Reuters contributed to this report.

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LONDON -- Experts who worked on the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico have been called in to halt the flow of natural gas from a rig in the North Sea.

All 238 workers were evacuated from French oil group Total's Elgin platform, which is located about 150 miles off the coast of Aberdeen, Scotland, after the leak was detected on Sunday. An exclusion zone has also been established around the site.

Total has said it may take six months to stem the flow of gas, according to Reuters.

ITV's Scotland correspondent Debi Edward reports.

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Antoine Agasse / AFP - Getty Images file

A file picture taken on May 29, 2009 shows the Total Elgin-Franklin oil and gas platform in the North Sea 150 miles off Aberdeen on Scotalnd's east coast.

A cloud of explosive natural gas boiling out of a leaking drilling platform off the Scottish coast has led to the evacuation of hundreds of workers and the creation of a two-mile exclusion zone.

Coastguard officials ordered shipping to come no closer than two miles from the abandoned Elgin platform, located 150 miles off Aberdeen, and said there was a three-mile exclusion zone for low-flying aircraft such as helicopters, the BBC reported.

Energy firm Total UK, which operates the platform, said it did not know the source of the leak and was considering all options including drilling a relief well – a solution that could take six months.

“We have mobilised experts from elsewhere in the Total Group to offer additional assistance and help us deal with the incident,” it said in a statement.

It evacuated 238 workers from the platform after the leak was spotted on Sunday, according to a report in The Scotsman. The report said Shell had reduced its workforce on two nearby offshore installations because of the drifting gas.

Reuters reported that the company has enlisted the services of Wild Well Control, which was heavily involved in the BP's Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.

In a statement, Britain’s Department for Energy and Climate Change said the environmental impact of gas condensate leaks is substantially lower than from oil spills.

Aerial surveillance flights have confirmed the presence of a sheen on the water, which is thought to be gas condensate, a petrol-like substance that normally evaporates naturally.

Workers’ union leader Jake Molloy warned there was there was the potential for a "major event" if the gas ignited.

"You're looking at something on the scale of Piper Alpha here,” he told Scottish channel STV, referring to the huge 1988 oil rig blaze that killed 167 workers. "On the positive side, nobody's there. So the human side has been dealt with. But the potential remains for an ignition source and for the complete destruction of that installation.”

Reuters contributed to this report.

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