6-24-10 by dugan
BP is touting restoral of its robot-damaged "cap" (which looks like a giant hat for the Tin Man) to corral a large fraction of the company’s Gulf oil spill, but is staying as silent as possible about its other big engineering feat–a gravel island it built off the Alaskan coast for the express purpose of evading federal rules for offshore drilling. The project was rubber-stamped by the same regulatory agency that let BP drill with no disaster plan for its cursed rig in the Gulf.
Nothing that BP does now in the Gulf will stop the toxic, gooey disaster that is spreading across the shores of the Gulf. No one knows what the new normal will be for at least years, maybe decades. Decades later, fisheries and coastal areas even hundreds of miles from the Exxon Valdez spill are still plagued by oil deposits.
Yet on a tiny gravel island in the Beaufort Sea, BP may be taking an even greater risk, with no tourism industry around to demand a re-do on the permits and safety checks. As stories in the New York Times and Rolling Stone magazine detalied this week, BP evaded tougher rules for drilling in Alaskan waters by dumping a large pile of gravel in the shallows of the Beaufort Sea, from which it is drilling diagonally for miles to a large oil deposit. It is doing so on a scale never before attempted, with unknown risks, from artificial gravel flats that barely poke above sea level, built only to pretend that BP wasn’t drilling "offshore."
How’d that happen?
As the New York Times summarized it,
All other new projects in the Arctic have been halted by the Obama administration’s moratorium on offshore drilling, including more traditional projects like Shell Oil’s plans to drill three wells in the Chukchi Sea and two in the Beaufort.
But BP’s project, called Liberty, has been exempted as regulators have
granted it status as an “onshore” project even though it is about three
miles off the coast in the Beaufort Sea. The reason: it sits on an
artificial island — a 31-acre pile of gravel in about 22 feet of water
— built by BP.The project has already received its state and federal environmental
permits, but BP has yet to file its final application to federal
regulators to begin drilling, which it expects to start in the fall.Some scientists and environmentalists say that other factors have helped keep the project moving forward.
Rather than conducting their own independent analysis, federal
regulators, in a break from usual practice, allowed BP in 2007 to write
its own environmental review for the project as well as its own
consultation documents relating to the Endangered Species Act,
according to two scientists from the Alaska office of the federal
Mineral Management Service that oversees drilling.The environmental assessment was taken away from the agency’s unit that
typically handles such reviews, and put in the hands of a different
division that was more pro-drilling, said the scientists, who discussed
the process because they remained opposed to how it was handled.
Given that the cookie-cutter, consultant-written environmental assessments of BP and other oil companies in the Gulf talked about the safety of walruses, I wonder if the Alaskan environmental plans describe the protection of dolphins?
The revamped version of the Minerals and Mining Service says it will now go back and take a look at those BP-provided environmental plans an documents. But given the circumstances of the original permits, a criminal investigation would make more sense.
BP isn’t the only oil company that got a pass on all environmental inspections in the Arctic. A Rolling Stone story published online this week says:
Shell has received all the environmental permits it needs to drill five
exploratory wells in the Arctic — but in light of the BP disaster in
the Gulf, the documents read like a sick joke. According to the
Environmental Assessment that Interior conducted last December on
Shell’s drilling plan, "A very large spill from a well-control incident
is not a reasonably foreseeable event, and therefore, this EA does not
analyze the impacts of such a worst-case scenario." The response plan
that Shell put together in case of a disaster is equally disturbing:
The oil giant says it is only prepared to respond to a spill of 5,500
barrels a day — a fraction of the 60,000 barrels currently estimated to
be pouring into the Gulf. Shell, the eighth-largest corporation in the
world, has a disturbing record when it comes to the environment: Its
operations in Nigeria spilled at least 100,000 barrels of crude last
year alone.
In these remote drilling areas, how long could a spill go on before the rest of the world even found out about it? The distance from the BP rig in the Beaufort Sea to the nearest Coast Guard station is 1,000 miles. The company could report a spill, as required by law, and underplay it by the same orders of magnitude as it suppressed the truth on the size of the Gulf spill. Few media outlets would even have the resources to travel to the spill area, even days later.
We may never fully understand the magnitude of the risk allowed by regulators that supposedly oversee oil drilling–and coal mining–in the U.S., much less what’s happening in oil-rich and corrupt states like Nigeria, new oil powers like Brazil and other risky spots like Newfoundland. For a global perspective on what could happen, here’s a nightmare scenario from world security expert Michael Klare, the author of "Blood and Oil."
What we can understand is the urgency of replacing fossil energy as fast as possible. We can keep debating whether solar energy arrays damage desert lands, whether ethanol actually cuts global warming gases and how much danger wind farms pose to birds, but there’s no doubt that all are as safe as mothers’ milk in comparison to oil or coal. It’s time to have a different debate.