|
Facing the Arctic spill response issues Shell says it is fully prepared and self-sufficient; USCG says it has no Arctic resources and depends on regulated industry Alan Bailey Petroleum News
The federal government does not have assets in place in Arctic Alaska to conduct an offshore oil spill response, were industry spill response contingency plans to prove inadequate in dealing with an oil spill accident, Admiral Robert Papp, commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard, told the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Oceans, Atmosphere, Fisheries and Coast Guard on July 27.
A key lesson learned from the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico is the need to plan for the worst possible oil spill scenario, to ensure the availability of all necessary response resources, Papp said. The response in the Gulf of Mexico required, for example, the requisitioning of thousands of fishing boats.
“None of that exists on the North Slope,” Papp said. “We have zero to operate with at present.”
Government oversight On the other hand, industry-funded oil spill response organizations will react to the business incentives to provide oil spill response assets, Papp said. And government oversight and regulation of industry oil spill prevention and contingency plans is critical to ensuring that industry is adequately prepared, he said. The U.S. Department of the Interior reviews industry contingency plans and the Coast Guard also reviews those plans, to use its judgment of whether the plans are adequate.
The Coast Guard has worked with the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement in the investigations of the Deepwater Horizon incident and will continue to work with the agency in reviewing plans for Arctic offshore oil and gas operations, Papp said.
“We will be joined at the hip as we approach these new drilling operations up in the Arctic,” he said.
Shell: self-supporting Pete Slaiby, Alaska vice president of Shell, the company leading oil industry efforts to conduct exploratory drilling in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas, described his company’s self-supporting Arctic oil spill response arrangements, saying that these arrangements are more than adequate to deal with the worst possible oil spill that could happen at any of the company’s planned exploration drilling sites. Shell has organized a spill response fleet, to be positioned on-site at a drilling operation, and has additional equipment for nearshore and shoreline response, Slaiby said. The company is also building oil well capping and spill containment equipment.
“I’m very, very content that we can do what we need to do in our exploration plan, including servicing oil spill response with the assets we have in place,” Slaiby told the subcommittee.
Need icebreakers Papp said that the Coast Guard is in the process of figuring out what resources it needs in northern Alaska, as Arctic seaways open up as a result of global warming. However, one of the biggest deficiencies is the lack of U.S. icebreakers, especially given the unique ability of icebreakers to operate independently in a region largely devoid of support infrastructure. The U.S. icebreaker fleet that peaked in size at eight vessels a number of years ago has now dwindled to just one operational medium-sized vessel, the Healy, primarily used for scientific research. A second, heavy-duty icebreaker, the 35-year-old Polar Star, is undergoing a major refit and is not expected to be back in service before 2013, Papp said.
It would take several years to build new icebreakers and other Arctic infrastructure components, he said.
Deepwater port One infrastructure component that some see as necessary in the Alaska Arctic is a deepwater port, to eliminate the need for larger vessels operating in the region to be self sustaining. The closest Alaska port of any size, at Nome, is too shallow for deep-draft vessels, and the granite floor of the Nome harbor would appear to preclude dredging the port to an adequate depth, Rear Admiral David Titley, oceanographer of the U.S. Navy, told the subcommittee.
Given the very shallow water around most of the Arctic Alaska coast, the construction of an offshore port on the federal outer continental shelf may be a good option and would appear to be feasible, avoiding the need to dredge far out to sea, said Andrew Metzger, engineering professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. One possible design would involve a fixed structure, capable of withstanding the onslaughts of winter sea ice; people have also been considering a portable facility that could be moved off site when the winter ice forms, Metzger said.
Scott Borgerson, senior fellow at the Institute for Global Marine Studies, said that a large deepwater Arctic port would have the potential to become a major international shipping hub, and that a private-public partnership would be an appropriate mechanism for building such a structure.
|
