Lust for Oil Sends Us to Reckless Extremes

An announcement by Royal Dutch Shell makes it likely that the company will not be able to begin its Arctic drilling program this summer. Its two drilling ships are to be towed from Houston to Japan for major repairs.

Shell expected to drill last summer, but persistent sea ice first delayed the company from drilling the five wells it had planned. Next, the containment dome it had constructed to cap a well in case of a blowout was damaged in a testing accident. The test had been conducted in calm waters, bolstering the arguments of environmental groups, who ask what would happen if the dome had to be deployed to contain a spill in treacherous rough seas and high winds? Plans to drill were put off until this year's summer.

But concerns then heightened when on New Year’s Eve, despite the threat of winter storms, Shell decided a drilling platform needed to be moved across the Gulf of Alaska to Seattle for maintenance, but the massive rig, a football field in length with no propulsion system of its own, broke its tow lines in 40-foot seas and could not be controlled by several vessels called to the scene. It ran aground near Kodiak Island. This ill-considered move told us something about Shell’s “highest safety standards”.

        Jonathan Klingenberg, U.S. Coast Guard
If you are wondering where Shell — and soon others — want to drill, the leases are so far north that they are north of Alaska. They are in the Beaufort Sea, north of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and the Chukchi Sea, off Alaska’s northwest coast (see map).

The Arctic region is thought to hold a quarter of the untapped oil and gas remaining on the planet, some 84% of it buried under ocean. The Beaufort and Chukchi are viewed as the last vast oil reserve, containing some 19 billion barrels of recoverable oil, nearly three times the amount thought to be in the Refuge. They could yield a million barrels of oil a day, more than 10% of domestic production , a tantalizing prospect that dangles before us the possibility of ridding the country of its need to import oil from the Middle East.

Half a dozen companies are vying for the prize. Royal Dutch Shell has spent $4.5 billion since 2005 building equipment and buying rights to prepare for sinking its first drill stem.

But they have been met with a succession of suits by environmental groups who use endangerment of species — the bowhead whale for one — and expected air pollution by Shell’s drilling rigs and support ships to block by any means what they fear will be high risk oil exploration in some of the most inhospitable regions on earth.

But our government seems to be paying no heed. The Minerals Management Service issued permits for drilling in 2010, prompting several concerned employees to quit, saying “they had been pressured to rewrite their work or have it rewritten for them and that they were perceived as obstacles in the way of drilling” while those who went along were promoted and given cash awards.

The worst offshore spill in history that began with explosions aboard BP’s Deepwater Horizon did not slow Shell’s efforts to move ahead in the Arctic. It lobbied in White House meetings even during the height of the BP crisis in mid-2010, undeterred by reservation’s about the company’s preparedness for dealing with a major spill. It took regulator’s promptings to get the company to strengthen spill prevention safeguards and build a containment cap along the lines of the bonnet that successfully throttled the BP Gulf outpouring.

The president’s own Deepwater Horizon commission gave Shell’s Arctic preparations a barely passing grade in 2011. No technique had been developed to removed oil from ice in the event of mishap, and the Coast Guard lacks an adequate presence in the region. The Congressional Research Service says at least $3 billion is needed for equipment and ships such as icebreakers, which would be critical for reaching a stricken drilling platform in a sea filled with ice floes, but the Obama administration has offered only $8 million “to study” building one. The Coast Guard has only one of medium size and two heavy-duty ships, both from the 1970s and both inoperative. Coast Guard Commandant Robert Papp wants six. He warned Congress in 2011 that we are dangerously unprepared to deal with a major spill in the Arctic.

But no brakes have been applied. Politicians have been in the forefront to urge that we “drill, baby, drill” — a phrase that caught hold at the 2008 Republican convention — urging that drilling permits be expedited in the Gulf and offshore drilling be approved along both ocean coasts. President Obama saw that the way the wind was blowing was not driven by wind power and ordered up an “all of the above” energy strategy from a menu of both fossil fuels and renewables. After an obligatory six-month (shortened to five) moratorium following the scary BP spill in the Gulf, his administration expedited issuance of permits to meet industry and local economic demands. True, he did delay approval of Keystone XL — the Canadian pipeline from the northern border to the bottom of Texas — but we have several times predicted that he will now, post-election, give the project the go-ahead. And, strange to say, he nixed drilling off the states along the Atlantic and Pacific, but gave the green light to drilling in, of all places, the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas.

Yet this energy plan was viewed as “sensible” by the oceanographic and meteorological experts who write The Times’ editorials from their desks in New York, praising the Obama administration‘s “carefully selected” lease locations in the Beaufort and Chukchi.

Drilling in ocean waters is never a placid undertaking, but saying no to drilling off the coasts of the “lower 48”, as Alaskans call the contiguous U.S., while approving drilling in such hostile and forbidding areas — how to explain that?

The BP spill occurred in the relatively calm waters of the Gulf of Mexico under the sunny skies of spring and summer. It evidently taught Shell, our politicians and this president nothing. Contemplate the planetary damage if a hurricane-force winter storm were to drag a drill ship from its anchorage and snap its drill string, or a blowout preventer were to fail as in the Gulf (we still don’t and never will know the cause of the BP preventer’s failure). In huge seas and below-zero temperatures, with drill ships battered by sea ice, a “spill” would be impossible to contain. For as long as the pressure of the sea and Earth’s mantle are enough to make the oil come up the pipe, it would flow indefinitely. The Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon would be all but forgotten in comparison.

The grail of energy independence has triggered a giddy and headlong rush to drill for oil in places we should set aside as too forbidding, too hazardous for man’s folly. Instead, we are left to await what may be the penalty for such extreme recklessness.