Think the Gulf Spill Was Bad? Wait Till It Happens in the Arctic

The release last week of a draft report from the Oil Spill Commission, appointed by President Obama, contained many important findings about what happened in the Gulf. But it also told volumes about the hazards of oil drilling in the Arctic.

Typical of a media and political culture that focuses more on impressions than on actions, most press reports instead discussed apparent disparities between what the administration knew about the magnitude of the spill and what it said, rather than what it had actually done to clean it up. This is a knee-jerk response left over from Watergate and Iran-contra—"What did the president know, and when did he know it?"—that misses the point of the issues at hand.

Working paper no. 5 in the draft report is titled, "The challenges of oil spill response in the Arctic." This matters a teeny bit to the people who live there, so I'm gonna turn it over to Bill White of the Anchorage Daily News, who summarized the reports key findings thusly:

The challenges include:

• Extreme weather.

• Finding oil trapped under an ice sheet.

• Containing and cleaning spilled oil in broken ice.

• Corralling oil within fire-proof boom before burning it.

• Rapidly responding to a spill in a remote area that lacks nearby ports, airports and Coast Guard presence.

• Response plans that rely on chemical dispersants whose true effectiveness in icy waters, heavy winds and weathered oil is insufficiently understood.

Space prohibits a detailed analysis of the Working Paper, so let's focus on just one area —which should by itself be enough to dispel any ideas about drilling in this area (but probably won't).

There are two areas currently on the table for drilling in the far north: The Beaufort Sea, which is off the north shore of Alaska and the Yukon, and the Chukchi Sea, north of the Bering Strait between Alaska and Siberia. On the plus side, the report says, the Beaufort is more accessible, so responders could get there more quickly; on the minus side, it's more sensitive ecologically.

As for the Chukchi, it's "more difficult to access, let alone contain and clean up," the report found. Shell, which is petitioning to drill two wells in the area, has "pre-positioned assets" to help with cleanup, but once the area freezes "any spill would be impossible to access." However, as long as it's under ice, the oil can't do much ecological damage.

The bad news is, everybody in the industry knows that the area is at high risk for a spill, and the Coast Guard—which ran the response in the Gulf—has told them they won't be much help if there is one. (It only has three icebreakers, only one of which is operational; dozens of USCG vessels responded to the Gulf disaster.)

And yet, Shell, which has spilled an equivalent of the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster every year for the last 50 years in the Niger River Delta (far from the prying eyes of the US media) wants to go ahead and do it anyway.

Is this some kind of joke? In which logical universe is this a rational line of thinking?

Let's review:

1) The very industry whose job it is to operate oil drills says this is a dangerous area to work in. Quoting Offshore-technology.com: "The Arctic offshore ecosystem…is not so favourable [sic] for oil drilling because of…risk of oil spill."

2) In the likely event of an accident, it will be hard to fix.

Therefore,

3) Drill, baby, drill!

You can expect in the coming months to hear all kinds of wonderful commercial messages from the oil polluters about how much they are so not like BP. They have great technology! Sensitive engineers! Caring executives!

Don't believe a word of it. These companies exist for one reason and that's to return maximum profit to their shareholders. As long as there's no price on carbon emissions, that means getting at as much oil as they can, damn the consequences. Spills are just a necessary cost of doing business. And given what we know from the Commission and the industry itself, drilling in the Arctic is an invitation to disaster.

By the way, how much oil are we talking about in the Chukchi, where Shell is aiming its borers? According to the Minerals Management Service, there could be as little as 4 billion barrels.

That sounds like a lot, but given that global oil consumption is about 100 million barrels per day—um, not so much.In other words: Enough to slake the world's thirst for 40 days. 40 days.

You can tell the Interior Secretary to put an end to this madness by signing this petition.

Photo credit: Courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey

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