Great & Important News: a federal court just prevented oil and gas drilling operations from moving ahead in millions of acres spanning Alaska’s Chukchi Sea — one of our nation’s two "Polar Bear Seas."
The ruling is a huge victory – it will forestall a potential disaster that would make the Gulf look like child’s play and will immediately protect sensitive Arctic habitat for endangered polar bears, walruses and bowhead whales, already besieged by melting ice from climate change.
One of the last things the Bush Administration did in its final days was initiate a massive fire sale of drilling rights in the Chukchi Sea. Very unfortunately, the Obama Administration has adopted this reckless "drill everywhere" policy, including the Arctic, where BP is a main player.
In a successful federal lawsuit, NRDC, Earthjustice, Alaska Native groups and others charged the government failed to analyze the potential impact on the Arctic from an oil spill and in handing out the permits, broke US environmental law. The judge ordered the drilling rights be revoked until a science-based environmental analysis is conducted.
The fight continues to stop Shell from drilling off the coast of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in the Beaufort Sea — the second of the two Polar Bear Seas.
A recent Rolling Stone article, BP’s Next Disaster, describes the potential for unequivocal disaster in the Arctic if a spill occurs there. As in the Gulf, the oil industry is completely unprepared to respond, but unlike the Gulf, spilled oil would largely be irretrievable and would spread across many countries near the Arctic. Imagine polar bears covered in oil …
Here are some telling excerpts from the article:
Ken Salazar, the Interior secretary whose staff allowed BP to drill in the Gulf based on pro-industry rules cooked up during the Bush years, has made no secret of his determination to push the "frontier" of oil drilling into the Arctic. The region’s untapped waters are believed to hold as much as 27 billion barrels of oil – an amount that would rival some of the largest oil fields in the Middle East.
This fall, BP plans to begin drilling for oil near Prudhoe Bay via an oil rig it created by building an island – a glorified mound of gravel – three miles out in state waters. Because the island rig is connected to the mainland by a causeway, BP and Interior agree the "onshore" facility is not subject to restrictions on "offshore" drilling.
Here’s what BP has in store for the Arctic: First, the company will drill two miles beneath its tiny island, which it has christened "Liberty." Then, in an ingenious twist, it will drill sideways for another six to eight miles, until it reaches an offshore reservoir estimated to hold 105 million barrels of oil. This would be the longest "extended reach" well ever attempted, and the effort has required BP to push drilling technology beyond its proven limits.
Last September, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration urged the president to halt future leases in the Arctic, warning that federal regulators operating on Bush-era guidelines had "greatly understated" the risks of drilling.
Experts warn that a spill in the Arctic would be far worse than the disaster currently unfolding in the Gulf, where experienced contractors and relief equipment are close at hand. By contrast, the sites in the Arctic where Shell plans to drill are devilishly remote. The closest Coast Guard station is on Kodiak Island, some 1,000 miles away. The nearest cache of boom to help contain a spill is in Seattle – a distance of 2,000 miles. There are only two small airports in the region, and even if relief supplies could somehow be airlifted to the tundra, there are no industrial ports to offload equipment into the water. Relief equipment can realistically be brought to the region only by boat – and then only seasonally. The Arctic is encased in ice for more than half the year, and even icebreakers can’t assure access in the dark of winter.
Shell, in fact, has never conducted an offshore-response drill in the Chukchi Sea. Perhaps that’s because there’s no proven technology for cleaning up oil in icy water, which can render skimming boats useless – much less to cope with a gusher under the ice. In the worst-case scenario, according to marine scientists, a blowout that takes place in the fall, when the seas are freezing over, could flow unabated until relief wells could be drilled the following summer. In the interim, oil could spread under the sea ice, marring the coastlines of Russia and Canada, and possibly reaching as far as Norway and Greenland.
"Drilling in the Arctic should make the hairs stand up on the back of your neck," says Sylvia Earle, the former chief scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "There are values there that transcend the value of any fossil fuel we can extract – irreplaceable ecosystems that we don’t know how to put together again. There are some places you should not drill, period."
++++
Read the full article.
Loading...