The greatest risks can’t be measured in dollars; they are too priceless, the author writes. | REUTERS The real dangers of Arctic drilling

Shell Oil has called it quits for this year on its first Arctic drilling rig. First, there was danger of a city-size chunk of floating ice smashing into the rig just hours after exploratory drilling began. Days later, a test of its oil-spill containment dome ended in a tangled mess on the ocean bottom.

This is the same company whose spill-containment vessel hasn’t passed government safety inspections, whose drilling rig broke loose from its anchor and nearly smashed into the shore before it even left harbor and whose drilling fleet doesn’t meet U.S. pollution standards.


And this is the same company that Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar has given permission to begin preliminary drilling of the first offshore Arctic oil well in decades. Salazar conceded Shell has “many outstanding requirements” and, as a result, decided to allow Shell to do only exploratory drilling a few hundred feet beneath the Arctic Ocean’s Chukchi Sea.

Why drill at the top of the world when it’s never been done productively? Nobody needs a lesson on the economics of energy companies, nor do we need to be reminded that drilling is risky and accidents happen. Just this past spring, while drilling exploring holes on Alaska’s North Slope, the Spanish oil company Repsol hit unexpected gas pockets that spewed highly pressurized gas and 42,000 gallons of drilling mud. Severe temperatures of 35 degrees below zero Fahrenheit prevented the use of human operators or mechanical equipment to clean up the toxic mess.

This is the problem in the Arctic. Spills are going to happen no matter how careful oil companies and governments are. There simply are too many unknowns. America’s best scientists and engineers say we know so little about this deep freeze of an environment that we can’t fix it if Shell or any other oil company breaks it.

The new mineral rush is on in the Arctic. Oil companies are waiting to cash in on the melting glaciers and waterways — the results of the climate change they helped spur. Companies around the globe are waiting to see how the U.S. government responds.

BP announced this summer that it’s calling it quits on a $1.5 billion project 14 years in the making to drill in the same area as Shell.

Why? According to BP, the project “does not meet our test” for safety standards, and it would cost too much to make it so.

So what does BP know that Shell doesn’t?

Experience perhaps: the Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2010.

If Shell’s emergency-spill containment equipment doesn’t work, if its ships can’t meet pollution standards, if its rescue barges are substandard for Arctic conditions, if it can’t control a drilling rig in a calm harbor and if a 12-by-30-mile-wide chunk of floating ice forced it to bail on its well just hours after it started drilling, how can Shell possibly guarantee it can handle an oil spill in such a notoriously hostile environment with massive waves and gale-force winds?

The Government Accountability Office, the independent investigative arm of the U.S. Congress, has warned that even with the precautions that Shell Oil has promised, those “capabilities do not completely mitigate some of the environmental and logistical risks associated with the remoteness and environment of the region.” Translation: We haven’t learned anything from the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, where conditions were far less challenging.

The oil companies are complaining about the financial burdens of taking on the risk of drilling in this hostile, unpredictable environment with icebergs the size of major towns. But the greatest risks can’t be measured in billions of dollars; they are too priceless.

If there is a spot on Earth as critical to the future of our wild birds as the Gulf of Mexico, it is probably the Arctic. Hundreds of avian species arrive every spring from six continents and all four North American flyways. They mate and raise their young in one of the world’s most prolific avian nurseries. Many of America’s remaining polar bears make their winter dens along the coasts while the last herds of thousands of caribou roam the tundra. This is nature at its purist.

The Arctic seas are far too important to the preservation of birds, polar bears and other wildlife to chance an ice-locked, BP-style blowout. This is really an easy choice, once you decide that there are places for oil and places for nature. This is about choosing preservation of an irreplaceable treasure for future generations over breaking the ice for oil we can get from other, saner places.

David Yarnold is president and CEO of the National Audubon Society.

This article tagged under: Opinion

Environment

Arctic Drilling