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Tackling an Arctic spill
By Gary Park For Petroleum News
Proposals to clean up oil spills in the Canadian Arctic carry the hint of a military exercise in submissions by Imperial Oil and Chevron to an offshore drilling review being conducted by the National Energy Board.
The solutions include deploying helicopters to burn the oil, using the propeller blades of icebreakers to disperse the crude and applying “herding agents” to chemically coalesce the slicks.
Imperial estimates that 20 percent of an open water spill in the summer could be burned off, or a similar amount could be chemically dispersed, compared with last year’s BP Macondo well blowout when the U.S. government estimates only 5 percent was burned and 16 percent dispersed.
Studies began in 1970s But industry submissions defend Arctic cleanup capabilities based on decades of studies that began in the Canadian Beaufort Sea in the 1970s and followed up since then in various jurisdictions, such as Norway, and oil cleanups from ice in the St. Lawrence Seaway.
“It’s not doom and gloom,” said oil spill specialist Ed Owens, who has worked with Imperial on its Arctic plans. “The impression that people get is of a fragile Arctic, where the threat is going to be of devastation. That’s not very realistic.”
Chevron made a similar case, suggesting Arctic conditions can even “enhance oil spill response” because of a cold environment where oil evaporates at a slower rate, making it easier to set alight.
The company said frozen ice can trap oil inside its layers, allowing crews to track crude-impregnated ice floes over winter, setting the stage to burn the oil in spring.
Icebreaker propeller blades could “provide sufficient energy to create lasting dispersion of any exposed oil, even in close pack ice,” Chevron said.
t said its own efforts to pre-engineer a capping device that could be attached to a blown-out well would require far less spill response infrastructure because the amount of dispersant needed for a two-week spill would be less than one extending over 90 days.
A Chevron Arctic Center spokesman in Calgary told the Globe and Mail that “everything becomes simpler” if a capping system can reduce the spill.
He said concerns that people raise are generally related to containing large continuous spills and “that’s where we need to move away from utilizing technology.”
But the two companies diverge on some claims about dealing with a spill.
Imperial said a C-130 Hercules aircraft could be used to spray and disperse 15,000 barrels per day of “relatively fresh oil,” while Chevron argues properly applying dispersants from the oil would pose such “extreme difficulty” that it would not be worth attempting.
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