Shell intends to start drilling this year after years of legal wrangling

Oil giant Shell last week overcame the last major legal obstacle to its plans in the Arctic Ocean this summer. On Wednesday, the US Department of the Interior (DoI) approved the firm’s oil spill response plan, effectively granting permission for exploratory drilling in the Beaufort Sea, north of Alaska.

Shell intends to drill from the start of July and must stop by the end of October, before the dark, cold and ice set in for winter. They received permission to drill in the nearby Chukchi Sea in February, and are now awaiting permits from environmental agencies.

The DoI upped the ante in the wake of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon leak in the Gulf of Mexico. It required Shell to prepare for a blowout three times larger. Shell’s response was that they would first deploy a cap similar to the one that eventually sealed the Deepwater well, and if that failed, employ extensive backup measures.

These are the strictest offshore measures the DoI has ever required, but is Shell really prepared for the nightmare scenario: a blowout at the end of the drilling season that extends into the Arctic winter? New Scientist asked some experts to assess the plans.


Prevention please

The best cure is prevention, and Kulluk, Shell’s rig, contains numerous sensors and automatic shut-off systems to detect early problems and deploy the cap. The technology is far more advanced than what the Deepwater rig had, says Arne Jernelöv at the Institute for Futures Studies in Stockholm, Sweden. “The DoI has done a good job by requiring that,” he says. “I think it’s likely to work.”

If oil did enter the water, Shell and the DoI agree that containing it with booms would be ineffective as floating sea ice would obstruct them. Shell says it has several backups, including dropping dispersants from helicopters, burning the oil, and skimming it off the surface.

Those plans have problems. Jernelöv points out that dispersants can leave fish more exposed to oil’s harmful effects. And it’s not clear how well they would work in the Arctic: even in mid-summer, low-angle sunlight and cold water could fail to activate the chemicals. The flammable materials that are added to oil spills for burn-offs would also be less efficient there, Jernelöv says.

Ice-breaker issue

Shell will have ice-breaker ships on hand to create a path for skimmers, but broken ice may create more problems. “On a good day, we can recover 15 per cent of the oil from a fixed release in open water,” says Richard Charter of the Ocean Foundation.

“If you get tar oil mixed with broken sea ice, you’re not going to recover it at all.”

And if oil gets under the ice, he says, it could stay there indefinitely since it won’t be degraded by sunlight or bacteria. Shell says they can track the oil under seasonal ice using radar and other sensors, and recover it in the spring. But recovering oil that’s carried out to sea would be too dangerous for skimmer ships.

Last resort

The last resort would be to drill a relief well – the only solution that has been consistently and permanently effective, says Jernelöv. Shell is required to be able to do this, but it takes three to six months – precious time they would not have if the blowout were late in the season. Ideally, they would drill two wells in parallel in order to have one ready, says Jernelöv. This would add hugely to Shell’s drilling costs, and they’re not required to take this precaution.

In the Gulf, the best cleaners were the natural ones: microbes that consumed both the oil and the methane gas that leaked with it. No one has done an extensive survey of the Beaufort Sea, says David Valentine of the University of California, Santa Barbara.

He guesses that many of the bacteria there will be similar to those in the Gulf, but at Arctic temperatures the bugs would be moving slowly and the ice might be a physical hindrance to them, curbing their ability to degrade oil and methane.