The fall out from Total S.A's North Sea gas leak intensified Tuesday as the U.K. coast guard maintained exclusion zones around the area and Royal Dutch Shell PLC (RDSA) evacuated some personnel and shut down a nearby installation.

The leak, the cause of which is still unknown, has halted around 180,000 barrels equivalent a day of U.K. oil and gas production at a time when fuel prices are already at all-time highs. Total said the shut down could continue for several weeks, even in the best case.

The incident, although handled without casualties and with only a modest volume of hydrocarbon spilled so far, highlights the continued risks of offshore oil drilling both in terms of safety and security of energy supply.

Total confirmed Tuesday that both the Elgin and Franklin fields, which produce around 130,000 barrels equivalent of oil a day, have been shut down because of the leak that was first detected Sunday. Shell said it was also shutting down 50,000 barrels equivalent a day of oil and gas production at the nearby Shearwater field as a precaution and to carry out planned maintenance.

Shares in Total fell by 6% Tuesday after the company said it was studying many options, including the time-consuming operation of drilling a relief well to intercept the leaking borehole and seal it with cement.

After its Gulf of Mexico oil spill in 2010, BP PLC (BP) took three months to drill a relief well under similar reservoir depth and pressure conditions to the ones Total could face at Elgin.

Total spokesman, Andrew Hogg, rejected comparisons to the blowout of BP's Gulf of Mexico well, which killed 11 men and spilled tens of thousands of barrels of oil a day from the seabed.

"The gas leak is at the platform level, not on the sea floor" as was the case with Macondo, Hogg said. Earlier reports of "the sea boiling" with gas released from underground were completely wrong, he said.

However, Jake Molloy of the offshore workers union OIL RMT said the incident was potentially the most serious safety risk in the North Sea since a gas explosion destroyed the Piper Alpha oil rig in 1988.

Workers on the nearby Shearwater rig, which was partially evacuated late Monday, reported to him seeing a visible gas cloud above the Elgin platform, Molloy said. "It's highly explosive gas and condensate. Total did the right thing evacuating everyone as soon as possible," he said.

Total believes the gas is leaking from a zone of gas bearing rock above the G4 well on the Elgin field, which was drilled in 1997 and was shut one year ago, Hogg said.

The company is unsure how much gas is leaking from the field. The sheen of gas condensate, which is similar to light oil, seen on the sea in the vicinity of the platform size hasn't grown since Monday, he said. It is six nautical miles long, representing 24 metric tons of condensate, he added.

The U.K.'s Maritime and Coastguard Agency said it had established two exclusion zones to enable Total better access to the leak area. A restriction has been put on flights within a three mile radius of the incident and ships cannot travel with two nautical miles of the affected area.

"Any leak we take very seriously and we think the right measures are being taken to address it," U.K. Energy Minister, Charles Hendry, told Dow Jones Newswires.

The incident has already hit the U.K. natural gas market. Prices have risen 2% since the beginning of the week and expected to rise further if Elgin's supply remains shut in over a long-term period, a U.K. gas trader said.

The total volume of oil and gas shutdown by the incident is equivalent to 8.7% of average daily U.K. production for the first three quarters of 2011, according to data from the Department of Energy and Climate Change.

The incident has reignited long-standing concerns over the integrity of infrastructure in the North Sea, where many facilities are operating long past their intended lives. The Elgin field, which started operations in 2001, is one the younger fields in a region where facilities built in the 1970s remain in service.

"This leak also shows how reckless [U.K. Chancellor of the Exchequer] George Osborne was to hand over billions of pounds of taxpayers' money to the oil and gas industry just last week to subsidize deep water drilling," said Vicky Wyatt, senior energy campaigner for Greenpeace.

A spokesman for the U.K.'s DECC said it is too early to assess the environmental impact of the leak. "We'll investigate any particular any incident like this very carefully," the spokesman said, adding that leaks of gas condensate have typically had fewer lasting environmental consequences than spills of crude oil.

-By Sarah Kent, Alexis Flynn and Geraldine Amiel, Dow Jones Newswires; +33 1 40171767; geraldine.amiel@dowjones.com

(James Herron, Selina Williams and Konstantin Rozhnov contributed to this story.)

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