Posts Tagged ‘Arctic’

By Emily Pickrell, HOUSTON CHRONICLE

Published Thursday, January 12, 2012

Shell Oil Co. expects to clear remaining regulatory hurdles and begin drilling later this year in the Chukchi Sea near Alaska, company President Marvin Odum said at a scientific conference on Thursday.

Shell received conditional federal approval last month to drill six exploratory wells in the Arctic offshore region but still must secure permits for individual wells.

Among the requirements for Shell to obtain those permits will be selling regulators on its plan for responding to spills or other accidents at the sites.

Odum said Shell is mindful of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, and the wide criticism BP and others involved received for the conditions leading to the accident and their response.

“We will have every piece of response in Alaska available on a one-hour notice,” Odum said in a keynote address at the ninth conference of the Academy of Medicine, Engineering and Science of Texas.

“The access to the equipment will provide for a much different response than what the world watched in the Gulf of Mexico.”

Environmentalists who oppose the drilling contend that no proven technology exists for cleaning up a spill in the slushy Arctic environment.

The area about 70 miles off the Alaska coast is more remote than the Gulf, and winter ice causes additional challenges.

Odum noted, however, that the drilling will be in about 150 feet of water – far shallower than the well under a mile of water that blew out in the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

He said that Shell is also working with Norwegian experts on how best to clean up any potential spills in colder climates.

On another subject, Odum predicted that Shell will soon get into the gas-to-liquids business in the U.S., with plants similar to its $20 billion Pearl plant in Qatar, which converts natural gas to liquid transportation fuel.

“With very low natural gas prices, we have a market that still has to import much of its liquid fuels,” Odum said. “It is high time to do something like that in the U.S.”

A view of the wind

In another panel Thursday, Shell Wind Energy President Richard Williams presented an optimistic view of the opportunities in wind.

“Everyone asks us if a wind farm makes money,” Williams said. “The answer is yes.”

The cost of turbine construction has decreased about 30 percent, and installation costs have gone down about 10 percent, Williams said, while improvements in safety and additional technical education programs have made it easier to find and train employees to run wind farms.

Odum emphasized, however, that while Shell is continuing to explore opportunities in renewable energy, growing demand will mean continued reliance on oil and natural gas.

“Thirty percent of global energy could come from alternatives to oil and gas, but at the same time, the world will need twice as much energy as today,” Odum said.

emily.pickrell@chron.com

SOURCE ARTICLE

Any serious oil spill in the ice of the Arctic, the “new frontier” for oil exploration, is likely to be an uncontrollable environmental disaster despoiling vast areas of the world’s most untouched ecosystem, one of the world’s leading polar scientists has told The Independent.

By Michael McCarthy, Environment Editor: Tuesday, 6 September 2011

Any serious oil spill in the ice of the Arctic, the “new frontier” for oil exploration, is likely to be an uncontrollable environmental disaster despoiling vast areas of the world’s most untouched ecosystem, one of the world’s leading polar scientists has told The Independent.

Oil from an undersea leak will not only be very hard to deal with in Arctic conditions, it will interact with the surface sea ice and become absorbed in it, and will be transported by it for as much as 1,000 miles across the ocean, according to Peter Wadhams, Professor of ocean physics at the University of Cambridge.

The interaction, discovered in large-scale experiments 30 years ago, means that the Arctic oil rush, which was given a huge boost last week with a $3.2 billion (£1.9bn) investment from Exxon Mobil, is likely to be the riskiest form of oil exploration ever undertaken, said Professor Wadhams, who is a former director of Cambridge’s Scott Polar Research Institute.

“If there is serious oil spill under ice in the Arctic it will be very hard, if not impossible to stop it becoming an environmental catastrophe,” he said. “It will be very much harder to deal with than a major spill in open water.”

The world’s oil companies are now turning to the Far North as supplies elsewhere across the globe start to run out or become harder to extract, and both the potential profits from Arctic oil, and the fears about the damage that extracting it may do, are enormous.

The area north of the Arctic Circle is thought to contain as much as 160 billion barrels of oil, more than a quarter of the world’s undiscovered reserves. Some of it is under land, as in Alaska’s North Slope field, but large amounts of it are known to lie under the seabeds of the Arctic Ocean and Baffin Bay off Greenland, which are ice-covered for all or part of the year, depending on the region.

It is this offshore oil which is now the focus of a new exploration rush, with Royal Dutch Shell and Exxon among the strongest contenders, focusing on the Arctic Ocean itself, while the first wells in the sea off Greenland are already being drilled by Edinburgh-based Cairn Energy.

However, many observers are seriously alarmed about the spill risks in the extreme conditions, especially in the wake of BP’s calamitous leak at the Deepwater Horizon platform in the Gulf of Mexico last year, which could not be controlled for three months, released as much as five million barrels of crude, and came close to wrecking the company.

“A spill in the Arctic would essentially make dealing with something like Deepwater Horizon look almost straightforward,” said Ben Ayliffe, polar campaigner for Greenpeace.

“There are problems with ice encroachment, the remoteness of the Arctic, darkness, extreme weather, deep water, high seas, freezing conditions and icebergs. Basically it would mean that responding to a Gulf of Mexico-style spill off somewhere like Greenland would be impossible.”

Yet Professor Wadhams, who was the first civilian scientist to travel under the Arctic ice in a submarine, in 1971, and who has made five more under-ice trips, is spotlighting an even greater level of concern with his knowledge of how oil and ice interact – with potentially calamitous consequences.

It stems from large-scale experiments he took part in off the coast of Canada in the 1970s, in which substantial quantities of oil were deliberately released into the frozen sea, to see how it behaved. “What we found, and one of the great difficulties, is that spilled oil becomes encapsulated in the ice and is then transported around the Arctic by it,” he said.

“The oil is caught underneath the ice, so you can’t get at immediately to clean it up or burn it off. You don’t know exactly where it is, and then it gets encapsulated in the new ice which grows underneath, so you then have a kind of oil sandwich inside the pack ice.

“And that’s being transported around the Arctic and isn’t released until spring, when it may be several hundred or even a thousand miles from the source of the spill, so you can have a huge area of the Arctic becoming polluted by oil without initially it being clear where that oil is.”

He added: “Once it is released in springtime, it’s very toxic, because the encapsulation in the ice preserves the oil from weathering, so that instead of the lighter fraction evaporating and the heavier fraction becoming just tar balls, you have fresh oil being released exactly where the ice is melting, usually round the edge of the pack ice where you’ve got a lot of migratory birds.

“Not great for the environment. In fact, I think the appropriate word would be ‘terrible’.”

Professor Wadhams is so concerned that he is helping to organise a high-level scientific workshop on the subject of oil spills in sea ice, in Italy later this month.

While companies such as Cairn Energy stress that they will be drilling exploratory wells only in the summer months, in areas of sea which are ice-free, it is likely that once oil production actually begins, it will be a year-round business and continue through the winter when production facilities are ice-bound. “We would need to produce all year round, in order to make the whole thing worthwhile,” a spokesman for Shell said at the weekend.

The oil companies insist that they are aware of the risks and have prepared detailed oil spill response plans, but Professor Wadhams, who has read several of them, said they did not amount to comprehensive plans for dealing with oil in ice.

The expert

* Professor Peter Wadhams, of Cambridge University, is an oceanographer and glaciologist and one of the world’s leading experts on polar ice. He is celebrated for submarine voyages beneath it.

His concern about how sea ice will interact with oil from a spill as the Arctic is opened up for drilling is so great that he has helped to convene an international high-level academic seminar to discuss Oil Spills in Sea Ice – and Future at Italy’s Polar Geographical Institute in Fermo, Italy, from 20-23 September.

SOURCE ARTICLE

JUNE 22, 2011

By TENNILLE TRACY

WASHINGTON—The House voted Wednesday to streamline the issuance of clean-air permits for offshore oil-drilling projects, representing another attempt by Republicans to pressure the Obama administration into speeding up domestic oil production.

The bill passed Wednesday night by a vote of 253-166, with votes falling largely along party lines. A majority of Democrats voted against the measure, saying it would strip regulators of their ability to determine whether drilling projects pollute the air and pose a risk to human health.

The bill is unlikely to pass the Senate, where Democrats hold control.

Introduced by Rep. Cory Gardner (R., Colo.), the bill seeks to resolve challenges faced by Royal Dutch Shell PLC as it sought, and continues to seek, clean-air permits for drilling projects off the coast of Alaska.

Specifically, the bill requires the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to either approve or deny clean-air permits within six months of receiving an application. It also requires opponents of the permits to file objections in a federal court, as opposed to a less-formal appeals board that is currently available to them.

Before passing the bill, the Republican-led House voted down 10 amendments offered by Democrats, many of whom were looking to overturn various segments of the underlying bill.

On Tuesday, the Obama administration came out against the bill and said it “could result in increased air pollution from [outer continental shelf] sources” and would “deprive citizens of an important avenue for challenging government action.”

Wednesday’s votes marks at least the fourth time this year that House Republicans have passed legislation aimed at expediting or expanding domestic oil production. With oil prices above $90 a barrel, Republicans have accused the Obama administration of discouraging oil production and have presented themselves as the party that would boost domestic drilling to bring down prices at the pump.

In May, the House passed a bill that forced the Interior Department to make decisions on offshore drilling permits within 30 days of receiving an application.

The bill that was passed Wednesday was developed in response to challenges faced by Shell in obtaining clean-air permits for exploratory drilling in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas. The company invested over $3 billion to prepare for the drilling, but regulatory hurdles and other challenges has prevented the company from moving forward.

In May, EPA assistant administrator for air and radiation Gina McCarthy said her agency was “very close” to granting three permits to Shell. Earlier, Shell executives had met with senior EPA officials and President Barack Obama’s top energy aides about the matter.

Wednesday’s vote won the praise of the pro-business group Chamber of Commerce. By imposing deadlines on the EPA, the bill provides “companies a predictable approval timeline, rather than a costly stream of seemingly arbitrary delays,” the chamber’s executive vice president for government affairs, Bruce Josten, said in a letter to House lawmakers.

Write to Tennille Tracy at tennille.tracy@dowjones.com

WSJ SOURCE ARTICLE

ANCHORAGE, Alaska, June 17 (UPI) — Shell sees a “clear path” to getting approval to drill in arctic waters off the coast of Alaska as early as July, an executive said.

Warming trends have resulted in less sea ice in arctic waters and exposed areas believed to hold vast reserves of oil and natural gas.

Shell Alaska President Pete Slaiby told the Platts news service that the company was close to getting approved to work on the outer continental shelf in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas.

“We can now see a clear path toward getting final approvals for drilling,” he said.

Environmental groups worry about the consequences of potential disasters in arctic waters, a concern exacerbated by last year’s oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Slaiby said his company was working closely with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to get approval for its planned drill ships contracted for work in the northern seas.

Work in the region by Shell is expected next summer.

© 2011 United Press International, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

SOURCE ARTICLE

POSTING BY GOLDEN TRIANGLE WATCHMAN

John D, you want to engage with a true activist that has been a pain in the rear for Motiva, read this article. Motiva and the Purves gang are busy building the project. They had to buy this guy off to get the permit…. Might be worth connecting with him and seeing if he truly understands Shell’s equity position on crude when the project completes. They won’t be running the Saudi crude as much since it is going to China… where do you think they are going to get the crude…. Answer another question… Where is Shell’s investment of late north of the border in Canada…. oil sands…. on it’s way to PAR…

By Matthew Tresaugue, Houston Chronicle
Published 07:45 a.m., Monday, April 11, 2011

Port Arthur activist Hilton Kelley speaks out in 2008 about Veolia Environmental Services, which is asking permission from the EPA to reverse a longtime ban on importing PCBs. James Nielsen/Houston Chronicle / Houston Chronicle

The public housing project where Hilton Kelley was born and raised sits in the shadows of two refineries that belch toxic chemicals into the air.

His mother moved him away from Carver Terrace long ago, but he is still here, waging what seems to be a one-man crusade in one of America’s most polluted places. With many of this Gulf Coast town’s poorest residents suffering from asthma, skin irritations and cancer, he has neither forgotten nor forgiven.

“He is one of the best environmental activists in the country because he takes his marching orders from the community,” Tejada said. “It’s not born out of idealism. It’s about seeing the state of a community he loves and grew up in and doing something about it.”

SOURCE ARTICLE

RELATED ARTICLE:

THE WASHINGTON POST: Goldman Environmental Prize goes to Texas man who took on refineries over pollution

John, he sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee and they have already received your email with that Navy/ONR memo.

http://begich.senate.gov/public/

I read the article about Begich of Alaska trying to strong-arm the EPA on behalf of RD Shell.  I have attached a link to his webpage.

This is just a suggestion, but you may want to drop him a line and let him know about the email received from the DoI’s Inspector General office regarding the ongoing DoI investigation of RD Shell as it pertains to the Navy’s espionage investigation of RD Shell. You could include a link to that Navy/ONR memo listing the classification authorities. Just a suggestion, but there is no harm in stirring the pot.

He may not want to get on the wrong side of this issue and end up looking like he was ‘RD Shell’s Boy’.  Espionage is nasty business. You could also send a list of those folks who have already received notification. Let him chew on that for awhile. Politicians don’t like to be ‘played’.

FROM A FORMER EMPLOYEE OF SHELL OIL USA: REPUBLISHED WITH UPDATED INFORMATION SUNDAY 9 JANUARY 2011

The Nanuq, a 301-foot, Arctic A-1 ice class, oil recovery platform supply vessel, built by Edison Chouest of Houma Louisiana, owned by Shell

By a former employee of Shell Oil USA

I read the article about Shell’s skimmer vessel the ‘Nanuq’.

Shell apparently thinks it is ready to deal with a spill. Somebody needs to prove that.

Got an observation and a question –

The observation is that some of the structures that Shell wants to drill have already been drilled and have been shown to be oil and/or gas bearing. Undoubtedly some sort of tests were run and liquids were recovered.

Got a question? What were/are the pour points for the oils in those reservoirs at atmospheric conditions? I have seen oils so full of paraffin they solidify at 140 degrees F. This kind of stuff makes great candles.

If the pour point on the oils in those reservoirs is too above water temperature Shell’ ‘skimmer’ probably won’t work worth a darn. It is hard to skim solid wax or tar, or anything like molasses in the winter. Somebody should check that data to see whether Shell’s contingency plan accounts for the fact they may not have a system capable of slurping up almost solid goo.

Could be they might have to build the ‘vacuum cleaner from hell’ to deal with stuff like that. Just a suggestion, but someone might want to check this out ‘a priori’ to any incident.

I am sure those geniuses at DOI are utterly clueless about such issues, and Shell most defnitely won’t let on if there is a problem. They want to get on with the drilling ASAP.

You might want to send this off to WWF. Let them ask DoI about all of this.

Article by a former employee of Shell Oil USA

UPDATED WITH COMMENTS AND MORE INFORMATION

December 4, 2010

I would like to point out that Shell Oil USA (and other operators) safely drilled a number of exploratory wells in the Arctic waters of offshore Alaska in the late 1980′s and early 1990′s without mishap. These wells were drilled in areas Shell now wants to drill. In some cases, these new wells will be delineation wells for discoveries already made by Shell and others.
 
However, RD Shell’s contentions that they are drilling in shallow water, not mile deep water, and that drilling is therefore much safer, ring hollow given Shell’s past and ongoing record in the shallow Gulf of Mexico, and even onshore. If water depth was the critical criteria Shell’s shallow water and onshore drilling operations worldwide should be ‘defect free’. They are far from that. Safety issues continue even onshore. And we only need to recall the Bay Marchand blowout in 1970 in very shallow Gulf of Mexico waters to understand that water depth is no guarantee of either safe drilling or production. That blowout was due in large part to an effort by Shell USA to develop that field as cheaply and quickly as possible.
 
However, given all the scrutiny that has fallen upon the oil industry for its slipshod ‘safety culture’ (if any real ‘safety culture’ actually exists) since the BP disaster, Shell and their partners could most probably be trusted to safely drill their desired exploration wells in both the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas.
 
Actually, the US government is legally obligated to let Shell and its partners drill at some point in time. If just cause is found that would prohibit that exploratory drilling, then Shell, et al, should be refunded their lease payments, with interest. The government must act in good faith in this regard.
 
Clearly, any mishap/screw-up by RD Shell or others that caused any sort of ‘significant’ release of hydrocarbons into the fragile Arctic environment would doom any further drilling in those regions for decades to come. RD Shell along with the rest of the industry are well aware of that reality. In fact, drilling in the Alaskan Arctic must be a ‘mishap free’ affair, for there will now be no tolerance for ‘typical’ industry conduct after the BP Affair.
 
Exploratory drilling is a very short term endeavor. The bigger concern, and one that has yet to be adequately addressed, is how to exploit any significant reserves that may be discovered without serious risk and damage to the very fragile Arctic environment. That is by far the more serious and more problematic issue the government, RD Shell and the oil industry face. RD Shell and the oil industry have yet to demonstrate they can meet the technical challenges and operate safely.
 
One need only look at how BP and their partners (Exxon, et al) have operated on the North Slope and have maintained the Alaska pipeline over the years to see where the industry has placed and continues to place its priorities. And we only need to look to the Russian Arctic to see what the consequences of serious releases of hydrocarbons will be. That is not a matter of speculation. And Shell USA’s past operational record in Alaska, RD Shell’s environmental record in the Arctic in Russia are indicative of the company’s attitude toward environmentally safe operations in the Arctic. Shell USA had diesel fuel spill issues associated with the improper abandonment of discovery wells (induced by improper internal ‘reserve bookings’ issues) at a prospect called Seal Island (now renamed Northstar by BP I believe). And recently the Russian government took harsh action against Shell as a consequence of environmental issues at Sakhalin II. How RD Shell operates and has operated in the Alaskan and Russian Arctic are very relevant because this conduct is indicative of Shell’s corporate attitude regarding environmental issues. And this is senior level management’s attitude. After all, they lead that company.
 
While Shell and others may indeed be allowed to drill exploratory wells, there is absolutely no guarantee that they will be allowed to develop any reserves that may be discovered. Any such effort will ultimately end up in US courts and face legal challenge after legal challenge. I question whether they would ever be allowed to exploit those discoveries at anytime in the near future. It could take decades, literally, for the resulting political and legal challenges to be overcome.
 
Given the continuing development of massive gas reserves in the lower 48 States, and the rather limited potential for oil in the Alaskan Arctic offshore, estimated to be around 20 billon bbls, I don’t see any real imperative to develop those known gas and oil reserves given the potential ecological damage that could occur from slipshod industry operating practices. These oil reserves are spit in the bucket compared to the exploitable onshore oil sand reserves in Alberta and Venezuela. And there are serious environmental damage issues associated with the development of those reserves as well.
 
To further exacerbate the problem of drilling in the Alaskan Arctic is the fact that the US government has no agency capable of regulating the oil industry effectively. The Dept. of the Interior has been and is completely compromised by the coziness between the oil industry, politicians, and senior bureaucratic leadership. A great example of this completely improper relationship is the Gale Norton affair, and the other associated ‘sex and drug’ scandals that rocked MMS in recent years. DoI operates more like the corrupt bureaucracy of a third world country than they do of a modern democracy based upon the rule of law. And Shell has had a big hand in the deliberate corruption of that bureaucracy.
 
The modern US Republican party was born in large part in Harris County, Texas, home to Houston, Texas, the one-time capital of the world wide oil industry and still the capital of the US and North American/South American oil industries. The coziness between the oil industry and the modern Republican party is legendary. However, large sums of oil industry money flow to both political parties and to lobby organizations who effectively gut the regulatory power of governmental agencies and prevent the establishment of an effective regulatory agency.
 
Until the impotence of the US government to effectively regulate the oil industry is remedied, I see no possibility of development of hydrocarbon reserves in the Alaskan offshore, regardless of how much oil and gas may be discovered. The arrogance and corrupting influence peddling of the large major oil companies, which ultimately led to/contributed to BP’s latest offshore disaster have doomed that possibility.

RELATED ARTICLE

Murphy’s Law and Shell drilling in the Arctic Ocean

COMMENTS

From: jmm@thelastalaskanbarrel.com

Sent: Saturday, December 04, 2010 4:41 AM

To: john@shellnews.net

Subject: The Last Alaskan Barrel  

John: Saw your recent news post about arctic issues re Shell.

I want to inform you about a book I recently published: The Last Alaskan Barrel: An Arctic Oil Bonanza that Never Was. It is a case study of the profitablility of the first 50 years of Arctic Alaskan oil and gas development. My website is www.thelastalaskanbarrel.com. There are links to a bio, radio interview, speaking engagements, as well as Amazon where the book is available.  The book also takes a glimpse at future arctic OCS development.

Since the risk so far has not been worth the reward based on price, cost, and taxes, I wonder if Shell shareholders understand the OCS risks and lack of reward involved for their investment.

Perhaps you would consider a link to my website on your site.   Please contact me with any questions or comments.  

Regards,

John Miller

Posting by “mastermariner” on Dec 4th, 2010 at 3:16 pm

Petroleum is a way of World life – there needs to be a continuation to explore, discover, drill and bring to market the energy which keeps everything moving ahead… BUT we have seen there are problem areas and as humans mistakes are made, but that does not mean we continue to use old knowledge and policies to manage today’s risks. The Representatives we entrusted to oversight have failed – Alaska thought it best to create a Citizens Advisory Council – I also think we need more oversight to ask critical questions – SHOW US HOW YOU WOULD CLEANUP AN ARCTIC OIL SPILL – if the answers are not plausible then undoubtedly there needs to be more work and technology – we should NOT allow wildcat drilling – by SHOWING US it will provide a basis for real world demonstration, education and public trust which has been lost – DRILL BABY DRILL may be the cry but there is also a SHOW US FIRST drum beating louder and louder – accept the challenge and SHOW US not the Government who serves Political interests ahead of Citizens – GET CITIZENS INVOLVED AS A BETTER WAY TO REGAIN TRUST ! I volunteer to sit on a review group for a year – others would too… TRUST THE AMERICAN PEOPLE – SHOW US!

More info re Citizens Advisory at http://pwsrcac.info/citizen-oversight/