Stop Shell’s Dangerous Offshore Drilling Exploration in the Arctic
Ted Danson with Oceana
Royal Dutch Shell’s efforts to drill in the U.S. Arctic have been plagued by mistakes and problems. Yet after years of failure, Shell recently requested that the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) retroactively suspend its leases.
If BSEE grants the request, the deadline for Shell’s leases would be extended by five years – giving Shell the opportunity to prolong the Arctic’s exposure to drilling danger for free.
In 1984, I became committed to protecting our planet’s oceans after my family and I moved to Santa Monica Canyon, about ten blocks from the Pacific. At the time I was starring on the show “Cheers” and was taking a walk with my daughters on the beach when we came to a sign that read: “Water polluted, no swimming.” I didn’t know how to explain to them why the beach was closed. That was my call to do whatever I could to protect our oceans.
Shell already has a dangerous track record, and if it’s allowed five more years to drill on the leases in question, the Arctic's polar bears, ice seals, belugas and many other iconic inhabitants will be thrust further in harm's way. The oil industry cannot adequately contain or clean a spill in the Arctic Ocean, and a single accident could cause serious harm to the sensitive ocean environment and the communities and wildlife that depend on it.
Shell is the only oil company still actively exploring drilling in the U.S. Arctic Ocean. If BSEE denies Shell’s request for an extension, it will deal a major blow to Shell’s efforts.
Polar bears and hundreds of other majestic creatures depend on a healthy Arctic Ocean for survival, but their habitat is at risk. If the federal government continues to allow Shell to explore and drill in this wild and wonderful environment, we can be sure that spills will follow.
Just because Shell has spent a lot of money trying doesn’t mean the government should bend the rules toaccommodate them or any other company.
Please sign our petition calling on BSEE to deny Shell’s request for five additional years of dangerous offshore oil exploration in the U.S. Arctic.
Letter to
Director of the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement Brian Salerno
I ask that the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) deny Shell’s request for five more years to drill for oil in the U.S. Arctic Ocean.
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Updates
1. 4 weeks ago
Featured in USA TODAY
Arctic drilling invites disaster
Arctic drilling invites disaster: Column
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.
View full article on USA TODAY
U.S. Will Allow Drilling for Oil in Arctic Ocean.
Just yesterday, Monday, May 11, the Obama administration gave conditional approval to allow Shell to start drilling for oil in the Arctic Ocean’s Chukchi Sea...
http://www.nytimes.com
https://www.change.org/p/stop-shell-s-dangerous-offshore-drilling-exploration-in-the-arctic
22/06/2015
BY Clara Chaisson | @ClaraChaisson | 5 days ago
Despite the blockading efforts of dozens of “kayaktivists,” the Polar Pioneer, Shell’s 400-foot drilling rig, left the port of Seattle yesterday. It’s on its way north to the Chukchi Sea, where later this summer, and for the first time ever, the company could tap the seabed for oil. The paddling activists, who have been staging colorful protests in the bay since May, brought national attention to the behemoth’s plans. While the Coast Guard detained and fined many of them, the kayakers had good reason for taking up oars against the oil giant.
Here are five reasons Shell has no business being in the Arctic.
1) Spills, spills, and more spills.
The Department of the Interior’s environmental impact statement for Shell’s project concluded that if the company drills in the Chukchi Sea, there’s a 75 percent chance (75!!!) of a large spill. (That figure doesn’t include the also-very-likely “small” spills of 1,000 barrels or less.) Those are really, really good odds, meaning they are terrible.
2) They can’t clean up after themselves.
Oil spills are never easy to deal with, but the Arctic Ocean is a particularly hairy place to deal with a disaster. The weather is unpredictable, ice renders tools like booms and skimmers useless, and oil can get trapped beneath sea ice. Plus, who’s going to rush to the scene? The region doesn’t have the infrastructure to support a spill response—the nearest Coast Guard station is 1,000 miles away, and the nearest airport is in Anchorage, more than 700 miles away.
3) Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
Shell’s track record up north is a shoddy one. Its attempt to drill there in 2012 was fraught with mishaps, including the snafu involving its rig, the Kulluk, which ran aground during a storm, threatening the lives of the workers onboard. Another rig, the Noble Discoverer, had numerous mechanical issues and nearly got beached itself. Noble Drilling, the company responsible for operating both rigs, paid more than $12 million after pleading guilty to eight felonies that led to pollution and unsafe working conditions. At the time, these incidents proved that drilling in the Arctic is extremely dangerous and, well, they still do.
4) I got some news to tell ya…about some wild, wild life.
The Chukchi Sea is essential habitat for a diverse array of wildlife—including many endangered species—such as polar bears, ringed seals, Pacific walrus, puffins, and migratory whales. Alaska Native communities rely on the Arctic Ocean for food and age-old cultural traditions. Oil exploration alone would disrupt this fragile ecosystem, and a spill would devastate it.
5) The climes, they are a-changin’.
Drilling in the Arctic, which is warming twice as fast as the rest of the world, would contradict President Obama’s commitment to fighting climate change. A report released this week by the International Energy Alliance found that current emissions targets—including the United States’—aren’t going to prevent global temperatures from rising by 2 degrees Celsius. The Arctic may hold about one fifth of the world’s undiscovered oil and gas reserves. Now is the time to invest in clean energy sources, not look for more fossil fuels to dig up—and definitely not in risky, remote ecosystems already reeling from our collective carbon mess-up.
22/06/2015 r.
Barrow, Alaska
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The Arctic
A last great unprotected wilderness, safe haven for endangered species and home to native people whose subsistence lifestyle has survived in harmony with nature for thousands of years.
It is here that Shell plans to drill for oil, pulling the detonator on a carbon bomb which eventually could spray 150bn tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
The irony is that the drilling is only possible because manmade climate change is already causing this region to grow warmer twice as fast as the rest of the planet. The melting ice makes these huge reserves of oil and gas more accessible.
It could set major oil companies against each other but also superpower against superpower as they scramble to exploit the last untapped giant reserves in a part of the world where territorial boundaries remain unclear. No wonder some fear a new cold war.
By Chris Mooney June 25
The surface of Helheim Glacier is incredibly rough and large. (Credit: Nick Selmes, Swansea University)
If Greenland goes, it is becoming clear that it won’t go quietly.
Scientists have already documented entire meltwater lakes vanishing in a matter of hours atop the vast Greenland ice sheet, as huge crevasses open beneath them. And now, they’ve cast light on the mechanisms behind another dramatic geophysical effect brought on by the rumbling and melting of this mass of often mile-thick ice: earthquakes.
In a new paper in the journal Science, a team of researchers from Swansea University in the UK, the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, and several other institutions explain how the loss of Greenland’s ice can generate glacial earthquakes. In brief: When vast icebergs break off at the end of tidal glaciers, they tumble in the water and jam the glaciers themselves backwards. The result is a seismic event detectable across the Earth.
[Scientists finally have an explanation for why huge lakes atop Greenland are vanishing]
“These are all around magnitude 4.6 to 5.2, they’re all pretty close to magnitude 5,” says Meredith Nettles of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, a co-author of the study. “Which is a pretty big earthquake.”
Granted, these earthquakes aren’t caused by faults – they’re caused by massive movements of ice and how those impact the ground beneath. Compared with the early 1990s, Nettles says, scientists are now measuring seven times as many of these glacial earthquakes coming from Greenland — the rate has shot up as the ice sheet has begun to lose more mass from the calving of icebergs at the front end of glaciers.
To understand the dynamics behind how these glacial earthquakes are happening, the researchers put GPS instruments atop Greenland’s fast moving Helheim Glacier, which is located in the southeast part of Greenland, across the Denmark strait from Iceland. They also monitored the glacier’s calving front, where it meets the water, by camera, and used global seismic data to track earthquake occurrences.
To get a better sense of what they discovered, you first have to wrap your mind around how big these calving icebergs actually are. The amount of ice mass that breaks off in large iceberg calvings from Helheim Glacier, explains Nettles, is around a gigaton, or a billion metric tons. “If you took the whole National Mall, and covered it up with ice, to a height about four times as high as the [Washington] monument,” says Nettles, you’d have about a gigaton of ice. “All the way down from the Capitol steps to the Lincoln Memorial.”
Measured in space rather than mass, a big iceberg breaking off Helheim can be 4 kilometers in length — or over two miles. So maybe it is no surprise that a body this large can shake the Earth when it moves — and especially when it throws its weight against another solid object, as occurs during iceberg calving.
[Alaska’s glaciers are now losing 75 billion tons of ice every year]
The iceberg, when it breaks off from the glacier front, is tall and relatively thin (compared with the glacier, anyway) and in effect “standing” up vertically. If you could see a cross section of what was happening when it breaks off, it might look like cutting a fairly thick slice from a loaf of bread. But as soon as the iceberg is detached, it quickly begins to capsize.
As that happens, its top (above water) falls and pushes back against the glacier, even as its bottom (below water) rises up to the surface, eventually leaving the iceberg floating flat in the water. Or at least, that’s the usual process. Here’s a video of the process being simulated, by the researchers, in a tank:
Emory University lab simulates capsizing with plastic glacier(0:48)
In this video, which has been slowed down by five times its real speed, a plastic iceberg undergoes capsizing while being digitally tracked through two black dots. The rigid wall to the right measures the hydrodynamic pressure in the water, which plays a major role in the source of glacial earthquakes generated by iceberg capsize. (Justin C. Burton and L. Mac Cathles)
During this capsizing, two massive forces are generated. The first and most obvious one occurs as the tumbling top of the iceberg pushes against the glacier, and actually drives the sheet of ice backwards and inland. “During the earthquakes, the region near the calving front shows a dramatic reversal of flow, moving upglacier for several minutes while simultaneously moving downward,” the authors write.
“The horizontal and vertical motion then rebound rapidly,” they continue. But in the meantime, it’s enough to shake the Earth. “That calving iceberg is pushing the remaining part of the glacier backwards hard enough that we can actually measure that, hard enough that it reverses the whole flow of the front of the glacier temporarily,” says Nettles. “And it’s that force pushing on the remaining glacier and the rocks beneath it that gives us the seismic [activity].”
There’s also a second force involved. As the iceberg separates from the glacier, that opens up a gap for water to rush into. The region has lower water pressure, so that lessens the push of water and ice downward on the Earth. And this results in “an upward force acting on the solid Earth, as observed in our seismic analysis,” note the researchers.
As if all of this not enough, the events also create a “big tsunami,” says Nettles. This occurs as the tumbling and rolling iceberg pushes water outwards through the fjord leading up to the glacier. “The tsunami is caused because the iceberg has to move a lot of water out of the way as it tips over,” Nettles explains.
Setting aside the drama of tsunamis and glacial earthquakes, what’s most fundamental is how all of this contributes to rising seas — because of course, it is happening over and over again. Over 55 days in the late summer of 2013, the researchers observed “ten large calving events and corresponding earthquakes” — and a total retreat of Helheim Glacier by 1.5 kilometers. And Helheim is just one of many Greenland glaciers that are losing ice.
Each gigaton sized iceberg would be equivalent to roughly a quarter of a percent of Greenland’s estimated 378 gigaton annual ice loss. It takes 360 gigatons to raise the global sea level by a millimeter, so Greenland is doing that roughly annually, as icebergs fall into the sea and glaciers retreat further. (In all, the ice sheet contains enough water to raise global sea levels by 6 meters, or 20 feet.)
The loss of ice occurs both through iceberg calving — which explains almost half of Greenland’s total loss, according to the new study — and mechanisms like simple drainage. Here, as meltwater atop the ice sheet finds ways of flowing down to its base (sometimes through sudden lake drainage), it then makes its way to the ocean. But both mechanisms have their explosive elements — earthquakes, tsunamis, lake vanishings — albeit in very different ways.
“The earthquakes are not themselves destabilizing the ice sheet,” says Nettles, “but they are a marker of the fact that the ice sheet is getting smaller and retreating.”
And that’s where the admittedly tiny piece of good news from all of this comes in. Because these earthquakes are so big, and detectable anywhere with seismic equipment, they can actually be used to track how much ice Greenland is losing. They’re like the pulse of ice loss. So because Greenland will not go quietly, at least we will know how fast it is leaving us.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/06/25/giant-earthquakes-are-shaking-greenland-and-scientists-just-figured-out-the-disturbing-reason-why/
29-06-2015
episodes
Chapter 1
Ground zero
Barrow, the most northerly city in the US, is ground zero for the world’s most controversial oil drilling campaign. Less than 1,200 miles from the north pole, Barrow is also known as a base for climate change study.
Originally called Ukpeagvik, place where the snowy owls are hunted, the town of 4,500 residents was renamed in 1825 after Sir John Barrow of the British Admiralty by naval officers mapping the region for the UK.
Source: Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Alaska Region
Now a new British presence is being established by the Anglo Dutch Shell and it is also not one which is welcome by all, especially some of those who live in the tumble of wooden homes that hug the shoreline.
Rosemary Ahtuangaruak is one of them. She describes herself as an environmental justice adviser but is also a former mayor, trained health worker and stalwart defender of Inupiat culture.
“I work with nonprofit organisations that want to protect the Arctic Ocean and wilderness areas. It’s about raising the importance of health, tradition and culture in the venues of those (Shell and others) who want to change our lands and waters,” she says, one eye on three grandchildren she is minding.
“It’s about the (any future oil) spill. They cannot clear up in ice conditions which we have for eight or nine months of the year. The ecosystem renewal, which is needed for the many different animals that migrate here, is important because we are feeding our families from the ocean. We must keep this environment pristine.”
The wild rose of the Tundra, as one critic labelled her, is convinced the subsistence way of life practised by the Inupiat could be extinguished for future generations in the event of oil pollution.
She says she has seen at close quarters what happens in a community that is subject to an oil rush. Although many outsiders presume that fossil fuel extraction is new to the northern shores of Alaska, the contrary is true.
BP and others have been producing oil at Prudhoe Bay down the coast east from Barrow for more than half century. But that is no reassurance to Ahtuangaruak who worked as a health aide – and briefly as mayor of the small village of Nuiqsut, an Inupiat community right next door to Prudhoe Bay.
“I learned living in Nuiqsut there are some really serious health impacts that happen to our people living in the same area where this is happening (oil extraction): cancer rates have gone up ... acute sensitivity to chemicals and even suicides. I had to deal with the sick babies. That’s why I argue so hard now.”
Chapter 2
The lure of the Arctic
Shell is exploring its own small section of the far north but the US Geological Survey has estimated there could be 412bn barrels of oil equivalents reserves in the wider Arctic region.
The combined onshore and offshore acreage stretching across the top of the globe from Alaska through Greenland and Russia would be far more likely to be sought if Shell gets a good result in the Chukchi.
A successful strike by Anglo Dutch energy group will trigger a black gold rush to the wider polar region which is believed to hold the last remaining giant reserves in the world.
The US Geological Survey has estimated there is 30% of the world’s undiscovered gas and 13% of oil waiting to be found inside the Arctic circle.
Estimated territory holdings of undiscovered Arctic oil
US
32.6%
Russia
29.2%
Denmark
14.6%
Canada
11.1%
Norway
4.7%
Note: Unaccounted for Arctic oil includes Icelan...
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