Oil spill update : Exploration under Arctic ice could cause ‘uncontrollable’ natural disaster
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A calamity is waiting to happen….. Michael McCarthy reports
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.
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Oilspill update : Birds threatened as Shell struggles to halt leak
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Engineers from Shell were last night still working to halt the biggest oil leak in the North Sea for more than a decade, as conservationists expressed fears for the safety of young seabirds in the affected area. Michael McCarthy of The Independent reports
Shell estimates that about 216 tonnes of oil (more than 1,300 barrels) have escaped so far, which would make the spill the most serious in the North Sea since 2000, when about 350 tonnes were released in the Hutton field.
The Gannet Alpha leak is in a pipeline on the seabed, 300ft down, which makes repair work extremely difficult. Shell has sent down a remotely operated vehicle and divers but by last night the leak had still not been fully sealed.
As soon as the leak was detected, the well was shut down, Shell said, so the only oil leaking is that remaining in the pipe. By yesterday the rate was down to about seven barrels, a day. This contrasts with a peak of 53,000 barrels a day which gushed from BP’s damaged Macondo well under the Deepwater Horizon production platform in the Gulf of Mexico last year. The full amount of oil spilled in the Gulf was between 2.2 million and 5.3 million barrels.
Shell said that rough seas over the weekend had dispersed much of the oil which had reached the surface and the area of surface “sheen” had been reduced to about half a square kilometre, from 37 sq km. The company believes it unlikely that any oil will reach the shore.
Stuart Housden, Director of the RSPB in Scotland said: “We know oil of any amount, if in the wrong place, at the wrong time, can have a devastating impact on marine life. Currently thousands of young auks such as razorbills, puffins and guillemots, are flightless and dispersing widely in the North Sea during late summer. So they could be at serious risk if contaminated by this spill.”
The leak, which began last Wednesday at the Gannet Alpha production platform 100 miles off Aberdeen, was “under control”, a Shell UK spokesman said yesterday, but had not been completely halted.
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- North Sea oil leak biggest in decade: Britain (calgaryherald.com)
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- North Sea oil leak biggest in decade: Britain (theprovince.com)
- Shell Reveals Size Of North Sea Oil Spill (news.sky.com)
- Shell Is Trying to Control Oil Leak in North Sea (nytimes.com)
- Michael McCarthy: Shell needs to come fully clean (independent.co.uk)
- Oil spill worst in decade for North Sea but no BP (msnbc.msn.com)
- North Sea oil spill off Scotland threatens wildlife (mirror.co.uk)
- Second oil leak discovered in North Sea (independent.co.uk)
- Shell struggles to shut down 2nd North Sea leak (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
- Shell struggles to shut down 2nd North Sea leak (seattlepi.com)
Deepwater Horizon oil spill – a year on….
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The Deepwater Horizon oil well in the Gulf of Mexico exploded on April 20 last year.
Eleven men were killed, and the well was not capped for over three months. Nearly 5 million barrels of crude oil leaked out into Gulf waters. This hour, we’ll look back at the oil spill one year later. What are the ecological and economic effects of the spill today? Did the heavy use of dispersant cause lasting damage? Has the area’s economy recovered? What can the science tell us?
full article :
http://www.kuow.org/program.php?id=23155
Related links :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepwater_Horizon_oil_spill
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Oil spill link suspected as dead dolphins wash ashore
COMMENT: The medium to long term effects of the deadly spill will take time to show, but show by bearing of their truth teeth …..
From The Independent today
The discovery of more than 80 dead dolphins in the Gulf of Mexico is raising fresh concerns about the effect on sea life from last year’s massive BP oil spill.
The dead dolphins began appearing in mid-January along the coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama in the United States. Although none of the carcasses appeared to show outward signs of oil contamination, all were being examined as possible casualties of the petrochemicals that fouled the sea water and sea bed after BP‘s Deepwater Horizon drilling platform exploded last April, killing 11 men and rupturing a wellhead on the sea floor. The resulting “gusher” produced the largest marine oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry, releasing nearly five billion barrels of crude oil before it was capped in July.
The remains of 77 animals – nearly all bottlenose dolphins – have been discovered on islands, in marshes and on beaches along 200 miles of coastline. This figure is more than 10 times the number normally found washed up around this time of year, which is calving season for some 2,000 to 5,000 dolphins in the region. Another seven dead animals were reported yesterday, although the finds have not yet been confirmed by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
One of the more disturbing aspects of the deaths is that nearly half – 36 animals so far – have been newborn or stillborn dolphin calves. In January 2009 and 2010, there were no reports of stranded calves, and because this is the first calving season since the BP disaster, scientists are concerned that the spill may be a cause.
“The number of baby dolphins washing ashore now is new and something we are very concerned about,” NOAA spokeswoman Blair Mase said. She said that the agency had declared the alarming cluster of deaths “an unusual mortality event”, adding: “Because of this declaration, many resources are expected to be allocated to investigating this.”
The Institute of Marine Mammal Studies in Gulfport, Mississippi, has been tasked with examining the dead animals. “We are on high alert here,” said Moby Solangi, the institute’s director. “When we see something strange like this happen to a large group of dolphins, which are at the top of the food chain, it tells us the rest of the food chain is affected.”
Mr Solangi said that scientists from his organisation had performed full necropsies – the animal equivalent of autopsies – on about one-third of the dead calves. “The majority of the calves were too decomposed to conduct a full necropsy, but tissue samples were collected for analysis,” he said. So far the examinations have been inconclusive.
The spill was the greatest ever in the US – 20 times as big as the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska in 1989 – and initially it was thought it would prove the worst US environmental disaster, imperiling the rich wildlife of the gulf’s semi-tropical waters.
By the end of last year about 7,000 dead creatures had been collected, including more than 6,000 birds and 600 sea turtles. But this compares with the figure of perhaps 250,000 seabirds killed as a result of the March 1989 Exxon disaster.
The discovery of more than 80 dead dolphins in the Gulf of Mexico is raising fresh concerns about the effect on sea life from last year’s massive BP oil spill.
The dead dolphins began appearing in mid-January along the coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama in the United States. Although none of the carcasses appeared to show outward signs of oil contamination, all were being examined as possible casualties of the petrochemicals that fouled the sea water and sea bed after BP’s Deepwater Horizon drilling platform exploded last April, killing 11 men and rupturing a wellhead on the sea floor. The resulting “gusher” produced the largest marine oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry, releasing nearly five billion barrels of crude oil before it was capped in July.
The remains of 77 animals – nearly all bottlenose dolphins – have been discovered on islands, in marshes and on beaches along 200 miles of coastline. This figure is more than 10 times the number normally found washed up around this time of year, which is calving season for some 2,000 to 5,000 dolphins in the region. Another seven dead animals were reported yesterday, although the finds have not yet been confirmed by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
One of the more disturbing aspects of the deaths is that nearly half – 36 animals so far – have been newborn or stillborn dolphin calves. In January 2009 and 2010, there were no reports of stranded calves, and because this is the first calving season since the BP disaster, scientists are concerned that the spill may be a cause.
“The number of baby dolphins washing ashore now is new and something we are very concerned about,” NOAA spokeswoman Blair Mase said. She said that the agency had declared the alarming cluster of deaths “an unusual mortality event”, adding: “Because of this declaration, many resources are expected to be allocated to investigating this.”
The Institute of Marine Mammal Studies in Gulfport, Mississippi, has been tasked with examining the dead animals. “We are on high alert here,” said Moby Solangi, the institute’s director. “When we see something strange like this happen to a large group of dolphins, which are at the top of the food chain, it tells us the rest of the food chain is affected.”
Mr Solangi said that scientists from his organisation had performed full necropsies – the animal equivalent of autopsies – on about one-third of the dead calves. “The majority of the calves were too decomposed to conduct a full necropsy, but tissue samples were collected for analysis,” he said. So far the examinations have been inconclusive.
The spill was the greatest ever in the US – 20 times as big as the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska in 1989 – and initially it was thought it would prove the worst US environmental disaster, imperiling the rich wildlife of the gulf’s semi-tropical waters.
By the end of last year about 7,000 dead creatures had been collected, including more than 6,000 birds and 600 sea turtles. But this compares with the figure of perhaps 250,000 seabirds killed as a result of the March 1989 Exxon disaster.
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