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
January 2010

Vol. 15, No. 1 Week of January 03, 2010

Shell goes for reduced OCS footprint

Macrander says using advanced technologies to minimize environmental impacts makes business sense and protects the Arctic offshore

Alan Bailey

Petroleum News

The use of advanced technologies that reduce environmental impacts and improve business efficiency distinguishes Shell in the oil and gas industry, Michael Macrander, Shell’s Alaska lead scientist, told Petroleum News Dec. 16.

“The investment that Shell makes in technology and the willingness to embrace new technologies is quite apparent,” Macrander said, especially referencing Shell’s operations in the Gulf of Mexico and the company’s efforts to address the environmental issues relating to operating in offshore Alaska. “… Shell was a leader in technologies that enabled deepwater exploration and development. … We view technology as a difference maker.”

And the use of technologies and techniques that minimize the environmental footprint of oil and gas operations is nowadays a requirement and expectation, forming an essential component of Shell’s “license to operate” in places like the Arctic offshore, he said.

“It’s our view that it gives us a competitive advantage if we can demonstrate to the community that Shell takes these things seriously and we’re willing to invest the time and resources to minimize our footprint,” Macrander said.

Shell is planning to drill exploration wells in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas in 2010 and the company has already conducted seismic surveys around its targeted exploration prospects.

But the Arctic offshore is subject to especially heightened environmental awareness, while also presenting some significant physical challenges for a company such as Shell.

Better understanding

And a first step in addressing environmental concerns is to gain a better understanding of the Arctic offshore environment, gaining knowledge that includes baseline data that will enable projects to be timed for minimal environmental impact and that will enable the impacts of projects to be measured when those projects take place, Macrander said.

With that in mind Shell, in conjunction with ConocoPhillips, has deployed a network of subsea acoustic recorders to pick up sounds made by marine mammals in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas. In the Beaufort Sea five lines of seven or eight recorders have been deployed over the past three years, while an initial deployment of 25 recorders in the Chukchi Sea in 2006 has also now grown to about 40 recorders, Macrander said.

“We’re learning a lot about marine mammals,” Macrander said. “We’re learning a lot about sound in the environment. We’re learning where animals are, what they’re doing, how they’re responding to not only industry activities but also things like climate change. We’re finding animals that have expanded their range.”

And, among other things, the recorders are providing insights into the movement of walruses, as these animals react to ice leaving the Chukchi Sea, he said.

Each recorder sits anchored on the seafloor, operating autonomously to record subsea sounds, together with the timing of the sounds, for later analysis after the recorder has been retrieved from the ocean. The Beaufort Sea recorders can detect the direction that a sound comes from, thus enabling recordings of the same animal sound on multiple recorders to pinpoint the location of the animal.

“The reason for doing that was to understand how migrating bowhead whales react to industry activity,” Macrander said.

Seismic sound

One of the initial applications for the acoustic recorders was the determination of the impact on marine mammals of offshore seismic surveying that Shell and other companies were doing.

And although generally speaking there was little observed impact, it turned out that the sound from the seismic surveys traveled much farther through the ocean than the company’s sound models had originally predicted — the nature of the seafloor probably causes greater sound reflection than anticipated, Macrander said.

“We had to adjust to that by altering our (wildlife) monitoring capabilities,” he said. “We added more observers … including additional vessels, so we could observe over a larger area, follow what was going on with the marine mammals and protect them.”

Subsistence hunters have expressed particular concern about the possible deflection of bowhead whale migration routes as a consequence of industrial activities such as seismic surveying — past studies have indicated a deflection in whale migration, with the industrial disturbance causing a hole in the migration pattern. However, the acoustic evidence that Shell has assembled indicates that the whales’ migration path tends to flow around the industrial activities and that the whales do not back up and stop, Macrander said.

“Over the last two-and-a-half years the data … have pretty strongly indicated that there is a deflection, but it’s probably less than what people had thought it would be,” he said.

The data are also addressing the vexed question of what level of sound impacts the whales, following a debate regarding whether sound at a 120-decibel or 160-decibel level has a significant impact. Sound levels of 120 decibels extend for tens of kilometers from a seismic vessel, while 160 decibel sound extends just six to eight kilometers.

“Our data seem to indicate that 160 is a much more relevant number,” Macrander said. The sound does not cause a major hold up in whale migration or deny significant areas of habitat to the whales, he said.

But acoustic monitoring is just one of a series of observation techniques that together can assemble multiple layers of environmental data, Macrander said. Other techniques include wildlife observation from the air and the tagging of animals.

“There’s no one monitoring or study technology that’s going to deliver all the information,” Macrander said. “You really need to have multiple capabilities.”

Drones

A potential new technology being actively investigated by both Shell and ConocoPhillips for the observation of wildlife, ocean conditions, ice conditions and weather in the Arctic offshore is the use of unmanned aerial systems, or drones, Macrander said. Drones could perhaps enable observations to be made far out in the Chukchi Sea, for example, in locations where the distance from land and the lack of support infrastructure make a manned airborne operation unacceptably dangerous. Drones could also help with offshore search-and-rescue operations, where the use of manned aircraft puts rescuers at risk.

And a drone can fly very quietly for 24 hours on a single gallon of fuel, thus creating minimal environmental impact, while a conventional aircraft with observers on board creates noise that can disturb the animals being observed.

However, whereas conventional aerial wildlife observation enjoys long-accepted data collection protocols that lead to high levels of confidence in observation results, people still need to demonstrate that drones can act as effective wildlife observation devices.

“We’re working at that,” Macrander said. “We’re doing a lot of tests and experiments.”

And, cautious about opening a door to the private operation of devices that don’t meet the basic see-and-avoid standards of aviation safety, the Federal Aviation Administration has been reluctant to approve the use of drones for offshore observations. Shell has been installing radar and collecting data to demonstrate that there is little risk in using drones in the Arctic offshore, Macrander said.

Mitigation

In parallel with environmental monitoring, Shell is taking a series of steps aimed at mitigating the impact of its activities on the Arctic wildlife, Macrander said,

For example, in 2007 Shell conducted an experiment to test the acquisition of offshore seismic data from floating ice in the Beaufort Sea, to determine whether it would be possible to do seismic surveying on ice in the depths of the winter rather than during the busy summer open water season when wildlife migration occurs.

The 2007 experiment did indeed demonstrate that gathering seismic data on the ice is possible, at least as far out as the limit of land-fast ice, but a lack of suitable winter ice cover in 2008 prevented a hoped-for on-ice seismic survey from taking place, Macrander said.

Shell is also investigating the use of unmanned submarines to reduce environmental impacts and improve efficiency in the Arctic offshore.

These unmanned devices, already a familiar and commonly used technology in the Gulf of Mexico oil industry, can carry sensing technology, for example, to survey for potential drilling hazards such as shipwrecks, seafloor historic sites and shallow gas. Currently, shallow hazard surveying is done using a manned surface vessel that moves continuously around the survey area: An unmanned submarine, driven almost silently by an electric motor, only requires a relatively stationary tender vessel on the surface and, thanks to its high maneuverability, would be able to complete a survey relatively quickly. In addition, the possibility of operating a submarine below the sea ice offers the potential to do surveying outside the open-water season.

Another way of minimizing on-water traffic and avoiding the need for aerial observation is to use satellite imagery for monitoring ice conditions. Satellite-based synthetic aperture radar, for example, can produce detailed images of sea ice, even on days when there is extensive cloud cover, perhaps enabling the early detection of a hazard such as an ice floe drifting towards an offshore operation. And, with satellites already in orbit, the use of the satellite imagery involves no new environmental impact.

Satellite imagery is already providing Shell with an improved understanding of Arctic ice behavior, an understanding that will translate to improved safety in offshore operations, Macrander said.

Drillships

Shell’s planned use of drill ships rather than fixed structures for Arctic exploration drilling also enhances safety because a drillship can shut down its drilling operation and move offsite if threatened by sea ice. And Shell is implementing new technologies to reduce drillship air emissions, Macrander said.

But the use of a drillship rather than a fixed structure for exploration drilling means that Shell does not have the capability to grind and re-inject into a well the rock chips and waste mud from the drilling. The company plans to dispose of this waste at sea, but the type of waste to be disposed of has long been known to be environmentally safe, and the waste disposal has been fully permitted, Macrander said. Disposing of the waste in some other way would involve the environmental impact of putting additional vessels on the water, he said.

“We don’t want to commit to an option that ends up being a bad choice,” he said.

If exploration results lead to offshore oilfield development, modern directional drilling, with wells splaying out from a central point to tap different areas of a subsurface reservoir, would minimize the number of offshore platforms needed, thus minimizing the environmental footprint and reducing the field costs.

But with many people concerned about the potential impact of industrial noise on the Arctic offshore environment, Shell is investigating technologies for reducing sound emissions from an offshore facility such as an oil platform. One possible technology consists of the generation of air bubbles that would reduce sound propagation by taking advantage of the fact that air transmits sound much less readily than water. Essentially, compressed air injected into a bubble generator on the seafloor would create a curtain of bubbles around the offshore structure.

“They are looking at the physics of different shapes of bubbles and whether they can produce specific shapes that will sustain themselves as they move to the surface,” Macrander said.

Oil spill prevention

Oil spill prevention is a key factor in protecting the environment. And when it comes to drilling, the use of state-of-the-art 3-D seismic data to delineate the subsurface geology, coupled with modern drilling technologies, including the use of high-tech drilling muds and downhole sensing, have together made the possibility of a spill from an oil well blowout extremely unlikely. And modern well blowout preventers have also significantly reduced the risk of an oil spill, were well control to be lost.

“There is a host of technologies that we employ to get us greater control and greater knowledge about what we’re doing when we drill,” Macrander said.

Shell has also pioneered the use of remote operating centers that enable experts in, say, Houston, Texas, to monitor what is happening in a drilling operation perhaps thousands of miles away, watching out for potential problems and providing advice on how to resolve any issues that arise.

Then, when it comes to developing an Arctic offshore oil field, the design of platforms, pipelines and other infrastructure components that can withstand the forces from ice and weather in the Arctic environment will be a critical component of oil spill prevention. And Shell has been surveying seafloor ice gouges, to obtain information essential to the design of structures that will not be damaged by the keels of moving ice floes, Macrander said.

However, to prepare for the unlikely possibility of an oil spill occurring, Shell has assembled an array of oil spill response tools, including new oil skimmer designs that can operate effectively in broken sea ice, Macrander said. New oil spill response technologies include high-frequency radar for detecting oil on water and airborne sensors that can sniff out oil; there are also techniques for detecting oil under ice.

And Shell is participating in a Norwegian-based joint industry project to test and improve the use of oil spill response technologies such as skimmers, in-situ burning and dispersant use in Arctic conditions.

But the real key is oil spill prevention.

“We’re in the business to get the oil out of the ground and to the consumer. We’re not in business to release it into the environment,” Macrander said. “If you have a spill it impacts you. It impacts your reputation. It impacts your ability to do business and it costs you a lot of money.”






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.