HOME PAGE SUBSCRIPTIONS, Print Editions, Newsletter PRODUCTS READ THE PETROLEUM NEWS ARCHIVE! ADVERTISING INFORMATION EVENTS PETROLEUM NEWS BAKKEN MINING NEWS

Providing coverage of Alaska and northern Canada's oil and gas industry
August 2010

Vol. 15, No. 31 Week of August 01, 2010

Regulatory board says censorship a ‘mistake’

Newfoundland regulator concedes it blundered in limiting information made public on emergency response plan for deepwater well

Gary Park

For Petroleum News

The public may never have felt more certain about its right to know the details of blowout response plans by offshore explorers.

Amid the fallout from the Gulf of Mexico catastrophe, it would seem, at the least, to be unwise for a regulatory body to black some details of Chevron Canada’s plan to handle a spill, should one occur while it drills Canada’s deepest offshore well in the Orphan basin, 250 miles northeast of St. John’s.

And the stumble was quickly acknowledged by the Canada-Newfoundland and Labrador Offshore Petroleum Board, which has now decided it will release four response plans, covering 679 pages, “in the interest of the public’s right to know.”

This time the CNLOPB will make available the oil spill trajectory model and oil spill response management information — details that were previously denied to Postmedia News and the Canadian Broadcasting Corp.

CNLOPB Chief Executive Officer Max Ruelokke conceded the board realized that it had “been perhaps a little too cautious in terms of what we could release. By realizing that we made a mistake, we’ll acknowledge that and move on.”

He blamed the board’s decision on extra pressures and scrutiny since BP’s Macondo well blowout on April 20, adding the CNLOPB is also “spread pretty thin in terms of management resources.”

Third-party information

Ruelokke said board staff were advised that the trajectory model showing where an Orphan basin spill could extend was third-party information that couldn’t be released because it involved some work done and paid for by Chevron consultants — although the work was part of public documents.

Lorraine Michael, leader of Newfoundland’s opposition New Democratic Party, questioned whether the board’s about face would have occurred without public pressure.

“It’s definitely in the public’s right to know,” she said. “What shocks me is that they thought at some point that it wasn’t.

“Certainly our provincial government is known to be redacting quite a bit of material when it’s requested,” Michael said.

“So it’s a culture that’s out there in the bureaucracies and it may be in some corporations more than others, but it is definitely a mindset.”

The CNLOPB said that in future it will only redact information considered “personal, proprietary or security sensitive,” such as the layout of an emergency response center or the deck plans of ships cleaning up an oil spill.

One of the warnings contained in the response plan for the Lona O-55 well and Newfoundland’s three producing offshore fields — Hibernia, Terra Nova and White Rose — is the threat posed by pack ice in Chevron’s exploration license region.

Chevron warned that sea ice and fierce storms in the North Atlantic could hamper efforts to drill a relief well and clean up a major spill.

Chevron also said the region is susceptible to ocean cyclones known as “bombs” that exhibit characteristics similar to tropical storms, including hurricane-force winds.

“The feature that distinguishes the Orphan basin from other deepwater exploration and production areas is the combined occurrence of both storms and ice encroachment,” Chevron said. “Both elements can be limiting factors in an oil spill response.”

In its response plan for terra Nova, Petro-Canada (since taken over by Suncor Energy) estimates a blowout spilling about 30,000 barrels of oil per day would take 90 days to plug with a relief well. Suncor declines to say if that estimate still applies.

Chevron has told regulators it would take about 11 days for a drillship to reach the Orphan basin and start work on a relief well, but the company has given no estimate of how long that might take.

An environmental assessment commissioned by Chevron tested 14,600 possible trajectories for an oil slick and found that none would reach shore.

It said Chevron would “respond to a spill originating at the drill site and moving into international waters to the extent that logistical support is practical.”






Petroleum News - Phone: 1-907 522-9469 - Fax: 1-907 522-9583
[email protected] --- http://www.petroleumnews.com ---
S U B S C R I B E

Copyright Petroleum Newspapers of Alaska, LLC (Petroleum News)(PNA)©2013 All rights reserved. The content of this article and web site may not be copied, replaced, distributed, published, displayed or transferred in any form or by any means except with the prior written permission of Petroleum Newspapers of Alaska, LLC (Petroleum News)(PNA). Copyright infringement is a violation of federal law subject to criminal and civil penalties.