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Improvements asked in spill preparedness Environmental groups, citizens’ advisory councils, North Slope Borough, recommend enhancements to prevention, response in state Kristen Nelson Petroleum News
Environmental groups want improvements in Alaska’s oil spill preparedness and response, as do coastal communities.
That was the message co-chairs Lesil McGuire, R-Anchorage, and Bill Wielechowski, D-Anchorage, heard Sept. 21at a Senate Resources Committee hearing.
The hearing was motivated by concerns raised by the Macondo Gulf of Mexico well blowout in April. The senators asked what was being done now and what changes were recommended to improve the state’s preparedness and response programs.
A panel from industry (see story in Sept. 26 issue) recommended waiting for results of investigations into the Macondo well blowout before the state moved with any changes, and reviewed plans for oil spill prevention and response for planned work in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas.
State officials responded to concerns expressed at the hearing and talked about recommendations for changes the administration is likely to present in the next legislative session (see related story in this issue).
Not if, but when A panel representing the environmental community — Oceana, The Wilderness Society and Trustees for Alaska — told the committee that while the state and industry have made strides in offshore oil spill prevention and response, there are no guarantees that a spill won’t happen or that oil in Arctic waters can be contained.
Jeffrey Short, Ph.D., Pacific science director for Oceana, an international marine conservation organization, said he recognizes and applauds all that industry has done to ensure safe oil operations in Alaska.
But, “we’re on the cusp of major decisions regarding the environmental fate of the northern coast of our state,” he said, and while recognizing all that industry has done, “there is one large fact that I think we all have to soberly recognize, and it is this — every major marine-dependent oil region in the United States has had at least one major unanticipated oil spill associated with it.”
Once development begins, projects run for decades, he said, and “it is prudent to expect that if we are going to launch into major development on the North coast of Alaska offshore that we will very likely experience another unanticipated major spill.”
These events are not anticipated, Short said, because “they they almost always are unique and they’re the result of human error that combines with an unfortunate set of circumstances that are impossible to predict.”
He said it’s not a question of if, but when, a major spill will occur.
The Deepwater Horizon was the combination of lax regulatory oversight, response performance plans based on ideal test conditions but have to be applied under conditions that are almost always less than ideal. “In the Arctic, it will often be far from less than ideal.”
And most often overlooked are the challenges posed by differences in scale. Tests of oil spill response preparedness are typically done under ideal conditions but they’re also small. “And there are big challenges that come into play when the size of the spill escalates,” creating logistical challenges that Short called “overwhelming.”
There is scant evidence of adequate technology in place for marine spill response on the North Slope, he said.
Short also said “we have very little idea of what we’re risking on the North Slope.” A lot more science is needed on the environmental side, including knowledge of what all the major species are; enough science is needed to be able to construct a quantitative food web model as a basis for an environmental risk assessment. More research is also needed to identify important ecological areas and habitats are so they can be prioritized for protection.
The coast has been inhabited for 8,000 years, and Natives have an intimate relationship with the marine environment that is threatened by an offshore oil spill because when a spill happens “people become terrified that the seafood is no longer safe,” and for coastal Natives this “severs the generational link between the young and the old because they no longer trust the food supply,” severing the transmission of culture from one generation to another, “and you end up with a problem that money can’t fix.”
If exploration goes forward, Short said he implored legislators to at least do three things: increase funding for science; require realistic response and rescue capabilities and demonstrate technology under realistic conditions; and “allow for meaningful community involvement.”
Problems with implementation Lois Epstein, Arctic program director for The Wilderness Society, told the committee she thinks there are good components to the Department of Environmental Conservation’s regulations for pipelines and contingency plans, and to Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission regulations for wells.
She said the key problem, as she sees it, lies “in regulatory implementation. We all know that even the best regulations are not valuable unless they are enforced effectively. This is the number one problem with the state’s oil spill prevention and response program.”
She said it became clear to most Americans this summer that the Minerals Management Service “was dysfunctional. One of its biggest problems was a conflict of interest the agency had in regulating offshore drilling while simultaneously collecting federal leasing and royalty income.”
Without enforcement, “what you have is self-regulation which could lead to worst-case scenarios as it did this summer in the case of BP’s Deepwater Horizon tragedy.”
“Unfortunately the State of Alaska has the same conflict of interest in that the state seeks to increase its revenue by maximizing leasing and production and that means that in certain instances enforcement might not be pursued because that would change the revenue picture.”
She said some state leaders fear that if there is strong effective regulatory enforcement some oil and gas companies will relocate to areas with looser enforcement.
She said another way to look at this is that “industry leaders do not need to worry about enforcement, while … industry laggards might chose not to operate in Alaska.”
The 2006 leaks from transit lines at the BP-operated Prudhoe Bay oil field, she said, which resulted in revenue loss to the state, “could have been prevented with an effective state enforcement program.”
“Fair, clear, visible and consistent enforcement, including criminal enforcement in egregious instances, is critical to a well functioning regulatory system,” Epstein said.
Trustees concerned about BAT Nancy Wainwright, senior staff attorney, Trustees for Alaska, told the committee that “the best guarantee for not sustaining future oil spills is vigilance every year to ensure that our standards are met and that we take advantage of lessons learned from other spills or other near misses in the state,” and recommended that the committee review oil spill prevention and response issues on an annual or biannual basis.
That, she said, would ensure that the state is getting the best available technology.
Wainwright reviewed the state’s requirements for best available technology for prevention and response and said that a change the Legislature made in 1997, allowing DEC to make findings and a list of technologies considered best available, “has proven to be somewhat problematic,” because DEC held no BAT conferences for many years. Results of a 2004 conference were not released until 2006, so “the technologies that were evaluated in 2004 were already outdated by the time that the findings were released.”
She said DEC is under budgetary constraints, “but unless the Legislature mandates that this is a priority and mandates that DEC evaluate BAT in all aspect of prevention and response every five years and issue a timely report, we will forever be left behind with outdated technologies.”
After the Gulf blowout, the state should also require BAT for blowout prevention, and more frequent testing and inspection, she said.
She said Trustees is recommending that no offshore exploration allowed “until there is a drill rig present and under contract to drill a relief well.” The Wilderness Society also wanted a requirement for relief well drilling capability during offshore drilling.
The Legislature should also consider whether statutory changes are needed to require better coordination between AOGCC blowout preventer regulations with DEC’s contingency plan oversight rules.
Trustees (along with The Wilderness Society) also said the Drift River Terminal in Cook Inlet should not be allowed to reopen because of the continued threat of volcanic activity, and said the terminal should be replaced with a pipeline.
North Slope Borough The North Slope Borough, Cook Inlet Regional Citizens’ Advisory Council and Prince William Sound Regional Citizens’ Advisory Council presented local concerns to the committee.
“It’s cold here; it’s dark here; there’s ice here — and those three things really impact the ability to function outside,” Harold Curran, chief administrative officer, North Slope Borough, told the committee.
He said the borough has focused on broken ice, fall slush ice and solid ice conditions, and its first recommendation is to upgrade blowout preventer and well pressure control devices to assure the best technology and practices are used.
It’s pretty obvious, Curran said, that “you can’t just assume that these systems are in place and functioning.”
He said the borough is asking that blowout preventers have two sets of blind shear rams.
The backup system ensures a failsafe system, he said.
The borough also wants blowout preventers to be tested every seven days instead of the 14-day testing interval normal in the outer continental shelf, and wants BOPs to have “reliable emergency backup control systems.”
If a subsea BOP is used, the borough recommends that a second redundant BOP be available on the floating drilling rig.
The borough also wants seasonal drilling and a requirement for offshore pipelines as the transportation means; that, he said, is based on the fact that so many major spills come from tankers.
Canadians require a same-season relief well plan. Shell has it in their plan, Curran said, and the borough thinks it should be required.
The borough would also like to see worst-case spill response planning.
Curran said Norway has some better standards and asked that the state look to other Arctic countries for standards and consider whether they should be adopted.
CIRCAC doing review Mike Munger, executive director, Cook Inlet Regional Citizens Advisory Council, said the council “has just undertaken a project to review Alaska’s oil spill statutes and regulations and develop recommendations for possible changes.”
He said because of laws passed after the Exxon Valdez oil spill, “Alaska is one of the best prepared states in the nation.” While Alaska has some of the toughest regulations in the nation, we “recognize there’s still room for improvement.”
He said the state has four “very capable primary response action contractors,” with an “impressive array of equipment and highly trained responders.”
But, Munger said, no matter how much response equipment and how many responders, “there will never be an adequate response to a catastrophic spill like we just witnessed in the Gulf of Mexico.”
And with Alaska’s harsh environment, “the basic physics of oil on water, means it’s not possible to put the genie back in the bottle.”
That means the primary focus must be on preventing a major spill for occurring, Munger said.
As for changes in state laws and regulations to improve spill prevention and response, the council will provide a detailed answer once its detailed review is complete, but initial thoughts include continuous improvement, and current laws and regulations “do not adequately force continuous improvement on oil spill response technology,” and recommended incentives for developing better response technology.
With some exceptions, the spill response technology in use today has not changed in 20 years, Munger said.
There is one exception, he said: The fuzzy disk skimmer system which was recently brought to Alaska through the efforts of Tesoro has a high-volume recovery capability, “but its greatest feature is virtually no water is recovered during the operation.”
Munger also said the council recommends transferring oversight and approval responsibility for well control blowout planning from DEC to AOGCC, which approves normal drilling operations. AOGCC has drilling engineers on staff, he said, and DEC does not.
He said the council also strongly recommends more funding for DEC’s spill response division.
PWSRCAC focused on BAT Mark Swanson, executive director, Prince William Sound Regional Citizens’ Advisory Council, told the committee that Alaska’s requirements for best available technology assessment and implementation for oil spill prevention have resulted in a number of improvements, notably tug escorts in Prince William Sound.
The same can’t be said for BAT requirements for oil spill response, he said, because 2002 statutory and 2004 regulatory amendments “eliminated the requirement to conduct a rigorous technical and economic assessment of best available technology for most mechanical oil spill response equipment,” affecting skimmers, booms and other mechanical oil spill response equipment.
Rigorous BAT assessments are now limited to communications; source control procedures; trajectory analysis and forecasting; and wildlife capture, treatment and release programs.
Swanson said the Department of Environmental Conservation’s 2004 regulatory amendments “weakened oil spill response requirements by allowing operators to substitute non-mechanical response techniques for mechanical response during severe weather,” changes opposed by the Prince William Sound RCAC and others.
“Additionally, dispersants and in-situ burning, another common non-mechanical response technique involving the burning of spilled oil while still in the water, suffer from the same limitations as mechanical response equipment in severe weather — they don’t work as well.”
Swanson said that over the past 16 years the erosion of BAT requirements has “left Alaska with an arsenal of oil spill response equipment based largely on late-1990s technology.”
While minor improvements have been made by some contingency plan holders, Swanson said DEC “has not compelled or alternatively provided adequate incentives to tanker operators and other contingency plan holders to drive more significant and much needed updates and changes.”
The council submitted a number of recommendations, with a requirement that all components of recovery systems undergo a BAT review, and including required inspection for equipment more than 20 years of age.
While Alaska’s standards are much higher than anywhere else in the U.S., there are holes, Swanson said, such as while the state has “tremendously good spill response equipment … they only really work in nice weather, and in easy weather and perhaps not so well in ice.”
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