This week Shell Oil will present an ambitious plan to the federal government. They are seeking permission to drill up to 10 exploratory wells in the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas off the northern coast of Alaska. The Chukchi leases were purchased in 2008 for 2.1 billion, but due to court challenges and the inability to obtain permits, they have little to show for the investments. Environmentalists and native Alaskans have held them back,then the moratorium post Deepwater Horizon blowout, and now the new Bureau of Ocean Management and Regulation has placed a new obstacle in their way.
When applying for a permit prior to the Gulf blowout last April, Shell was only required to to prepare for a maximum spill of 231,000 gallons per day. The company said it was prepared to handle 504,000 gallons per day with a fleet of on-site responders. Now, based upon modeling of a hypothetical well in the area where Shell intends to drill, the BOEMRE says that Shell must be prepared for a "worst case" blowout that would initially release 2.6 million gallons per day!
The discharge at the hypothetical well in the report would decline rapidly as the oil reservoir depressurized and fall to about 790,000 gallons per day after a month, according to the report from the agency formerly known as the Minerals Management Service.
But the cumulative discharge over the quickest period estimated for drilling a relief well -- a span of 39 days -- would mean a discharge of 58.1 million gallons into environmentally sensitive Arctic waters.
Shell spokesman, Curtis Smith claims that the chance of a blowout is minimal because they are drilling in shallow water.
However, Shell does not expect wells of the flow rate listed the worst-case scenario for many years into the project, Smith said.
"We do not currently have plans to drill into deep, high pressure reservoirs," he said.
The company anticipates drilling in 120 to 150 feet of water to depths of up to 10,000 feet. The Deepwater Horizon rig operated about a mile below the water surface and drilled nearly 3.5 miles below the ocean floor.
Lois Epstein, of the Wilderness Society of Anchorage, disagrees.
"Even in shallow-water conditions you can have a spill that is in the same volume range as the Deepwater Horizon range," she said. "Not exactly the same but very close initially, and overall, depending on how many days it goes on, it could be of the same scale."
While Shell contends that its exploratory wells would not have the kind of pressure to cause a spill of that size, it insists that it will increase response capability as the wells progress into production. If the agency wants different numbers, he said, they will revise their response plan.
Previously, the EPA has held up a permit in the Beaufort Sea over air quality and a judge in Anchorage ruled that the old Minerals Management Service failed to follow environmental law before the Chukchi leases were sold in 2008. Shell's timing indicates that they are counting on high gas prices and a push for more domestic oil to facilitate the approval process.
Administration officials say only that they will thoroughly review Shell’s new proposal. “We need to continue to take a cautious approach in the Arctic that is guided by science and the voices of North Slope communities,” said Kendra Barkoff, a spokeswoman for the Interior Department, which oversees most of the process.
Shell is being careful to try and gain support of the native Alaskans in that remote area.
Pete Slaiby, Shell’s top executive in Alaska, was glad-handing last week in Savoonga, a village on an island in the Bering Sea. He passed out raffle tickets, bought a trinket and congratulated the Yupik hunters for harpooning two bowhead whales.
One hunter waved a copy of the movie “An Inconvenient Truth,” and launched into an attack on oil as a cause for the warming temperatures that are melting the Arctic ice. Other hunters pressed Mr. Slaiby on concerns that the migrating walruses they depend on for food would suffer from the noise if drilling operations began north of here.
Otherwise its the old jobs versus the environment argument.
Alaska once accounted for a third of the nation’s oil production, but its fields are now in steep decline. The decrease in production threatens the continued safe use of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System, also known as TAPS, which requires a steady flow of oil to avert corrosion and spills.
The Alaskan Arctic potentially holds 27 billion barrels of oil. “If we could open the Arctic to oil exploration,” said Alaska’s governor, Sean Parnell, “we can fill that TAPS line in a way to preserve it for another 50 to 100 years.” Major production from the Arctic would probably be a decade away, however.
And, luckily, environmentalists will continue to lobby for none or at least safer drilling.
They warn that hurricane-force winds, high seas, and frigid cold and ice would make cleaning up a spill far more difficult than in the gulf, and they say that oil operations could disturb migration and reproduction of marine mammals.
“We believe there need to be more spill drills, more testing, more inspections of the drill rig and blowout preventor before they begin,” said Marilyn Heiman, director of the United States Arctic Program of the Pew Environment Group.
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