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Troubles in Canada’s eastern offshore
The Nova Scotia offshore regulator is coming under fire for what is perceived as a soft-line on offshore spills.
Marathon Oil has avoided facing charges for discharging 354,000 liters of oil-based mud during the drilling of its Crimson F-81 exploratory gas well a year ago in Nova Scotia waters.
The Canada-Nova Scotia Offshore Petroleum Board said the Marathon incident was due to an “unforeseeable and unpreventable mechanical defect” and that the company did not “violate any regulations during operations.”
The regulator also found that none of the high-density synthetic mud could have risen to the surface.
It said scientific knowledge of the effects of such discharges is limited, but it expects the impact will be “localized and short term.”
Others are less forgiving. A spokesman for the Ecology Action Centre in Halifax said the offshore records about 10 to 15 spills each year, but the board has not laid any charges in its 15 years of existence.
He said the companies always claim equipment malfunctions and the regulator never finds negligence on the part of the operator. Sheens confirmed around platform Meanwhile, Petro-Canada has confirmed there have been residual “oil sheens” around the Terra Nova platform offshore Newfoundland and more than 600 liters may be caught up in marine growth under the floating production, storage and offloading vessel. During an equipment malfunction last November, 170,000 liters of oil leaked into the ocean, killing an unknown number of seabirds.
Since then, three sheens have occurred totaling about 680 liters.
Petro-Canada has been charged with breaching offshore regulations, accused of allowing one of the largest spills in Canadian history to take place.
Compounding the frustrations was the release of a judge’s report, almost five years in the making, into a 1998 explosion at Newfoundland’s North Atlantic Refining Ltd. Facility that killed two workers.
Justice Patrick Kennedy wrote that several employees and supervisors believed the plant was an “extremely dangerous place to work,” but the explosion occurred two months before a scheduled shutdown and maintenance.
He made 57 recommendations, some of which have already been acted on.
But the United Steelworkers of America, representing refinery workers, said the investigation is incomplete “without clarity about what final link in the chain of events ignited the explosion.”
North Atlantic has already been fined after pleading guilty to nine health and safety offenses; eight other charges were dropped.
—Gary Park
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