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Arctic drilling invites disaster: Column

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Screen Shot 2015-05-19 at 18.39.24Arctic drilling invites disaster: Column

Nick Jans: EDT May 27, 2015

An oil spill in sea ice is permanent. And Shell is nowhere near prepared for summer drilling.

I stood on the shore of the Chukchi Sea, at the far northern rim of Alaska. On that late May evening, a maze of shifting ice spilled off to the horizon; a world of the same stretched beyond that, more than 1,000 miles to the North Pole. Out in that vast expanse, Inupiat whalers waited in traditional camps for their first bowhead whale of the season; polar bears roamed, hunting walrus and seals. Slanting in, the midnight sun cast mirages and colors that have no earthly name. I squinted into the distance and tried to imagine oil wells out there, too — dozens, and eventually hundreds, scattered across the face of this harsh but fragile ocean wilderness.

Such development is far more than a mirage. Earlier this month, the Obama administration granted conditional approval to Royal Dutch Shell to begin exploratory drilling in the Chukchi this summer. The prize is one of the last untapped large reservoirs of oil on the planet — up to 23 billion barrels under the Chukchi and Beaufort seas. The potential economic reward is no doubt great, but the looming possibility (a government report says 75% probability) of a major spill in the process renders the administration’s go-ahead an invitation to an enormous and possibly irreparable ecological disaster.

The short, all-you-need-to-know version goes like this: There is no proven way to clean up a spill in sea ice, period. And in freezing water, oil dissipates so slowly that it essentially lasts forever — this in an ecosystem as dynamic and stressed by climate change as any on the planet. If President Obama is intent on cementing his environmental legacy, his administration has made an ill-advised and out-of-sync decision.

Nothing in Shell’s brief Arctic record points toward a positive outcome. Its exploratory foray in 2012 was appalling, whether you were watching as an Inupiat subsistence hunter, an ecologist, a government regulator or a Shell stockholder. Not only did Shell not complete one test well before suddenly advancing ice forced its retreat, one of its two drilling vessels nearly ran aground, and the other was so inadequately fitted and severely damaged that it was scrapped. The oil giant committed so many safety and environmental violations that the Department of the Interior demanded an independent audit to prove Shell could handle Arctic conditions in the future.

Now Shell is back for another go. Its officials say they have learned their lesson and corrected all shortcomings, and the government apparently agrees. But even if Shell and their contractors have remarkably improved their equipment, training and procedures, nothing has really changed. The Arctic is still the Arctic, and they’re still going to be drilling offshore in the Chukchi Sea — even in the brief open-water season (roughly July through part of October), it’s one of the most weather-lashed, remote and logistically challenging environments on earth. Massive seas, howling blizzards, banks of dense fog and powerful shifting pack ice are all part of a formidable mix. The nearest Coast Guard port will still be a thousand miles away. There still will be scant resources available in the few Inupiat villages on shore, far off the road grid; not even a single deep water port, let alone the fleets of tenders, barges and work boats, the miles of containment boom, and the armies of personnel that responded to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster.

Drilling for oil in the Chukchi Sea will still be a catastrophe waiting to happen. Yet, instead of learning from BP’s example in the Gulf of Mexico, Shell’s corporate hubris remains intact, and the government seems content to let big oil have its way once again.

As a former resident of northwest Arctic Alaska, who has traveled the near shore edge of the Chukchi Sea by snowmobile, skiff and small plane many times over the years, I naturally hold a stronger concern than most. But this is not a simple matter of NIMBY (Not In My Backyard). The Arctic Ocean, of which the Chukchi Sea is a part, is far more than some distant wilderness. Functioning as a gigantic thermostat, it’s an essential element of our planet’s health, and an ecological treasure. We all need to care as if it’s in our own backyard — because, in fact, it is.

Alaska writer Nick Jans’ latest book, A Wolf Called Romeo, is available at nickjans.com. He is a member of USA TODAY’s Board of Contributors.

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SOURCE

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One Comment

  1. Tara says:

    I do not understand why Obama vetoed Keystone, but approved this Arctic drilling?
    This is so awful.
    Leave it alone.

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