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Salazar announces steps to exploration Says safety standards and science will guide administration’s approach to allowing energy exploration in the Arctic offshore Alan Bailey Petroleum News
On Feb. 17, in parallel with an announcement of the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement’s approval of Shell’s Chukchi Sea oil spill response plan, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar outlined the various steps that the Obama administration is taking to allow energy exploration in the Arctic offshore in the coming summer. In its moves to allow this exploration to proceed the Department of the Interior is being guided by new safety standards and being informed by the latest science, Salazar said.
“Alaska’s energy resources — onshore and offshore, conventional and renewable — hold great promise and economic opportunity for the people of Alaska and across the nation,” Salazar said. “In the Arctic frontier, cautious exploration — under the strongest oversight, safety requirements, and emergency response plans ever established — can help us expand our understanding of the area and its resources, and support our goal of continuing to increase safe and responsible domestic oil and gas production. We are taking a cautious approach, one that will help inform the wise decisions of tomorrow.”
Response plan approval Especially prominent in Interior’s moves toward allowing Arctic exploration is the approval of Shell’s oil spill response plan for exploratory drilling in the Chukchi Sea. The Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, or BSEE, said its approval of that plan was based on a vamping up of earlier response plans, taking into account lessons learned from the Deepwater Horizon disaster and using more stringent planning requirements.
Salazar also emphasized that federal agencies have been making moves to ensure the implementation of federal command and control capabilities, should an offshore drilling accident occur. The U.S. Coast Guard would take command in the event of an accident and has committed to having an on-scene presence in the offshore, with land-based support, if drilling proceeds this summer, he said.
Contingency plans Government agencies have been updating federally mandated contingency plans for the North Slope area, plans that include the identification of sensitive ecological resources and the specification of required environmental protection strategies, Interior said. Coast Guard involvement in any offshore oil spill response would be supported by various agencies, including BSEE, the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and would conform with the government contingency plans.
Ongoing exercises to practice, test and review the contingency plans include annual summer deployments of vessels, aircraft and personnel for practice operations. And on Dec. 8 the Coast Guard and the State of Alaska conducted with Shell an incident-command-post workshop. BSEE is planning an additional exercise in the spring with Shell, and with federal, state and local representatives, Interior said. The Alaska Regional Response Team, a team that includes both federal and state agencies, is also planning to conduct a spill response exercise.
Prior to the approval of any of Shell’s drilling permits BSEE plans to conduct a deployment test of the company’s well capping stack, the device that Shell plans to have available as a back-up means of controlling and gathering oil from an out-of-control well. BSEE also plans to conduct unannounced inspections of Shell’s deployed spill response equipment, Interior said.
Scientific data Salazar also commented on initiatives to gather and obtain the best available science in support of energy related decisions for the Arctic. Those initiatives include a recent call to companies engaged in Arctic activities to make Arctic related data publicly available. The Department of the Interior, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Shell have identified “a large body of data” that Interior expects Shell to develop and make available if the company moves ahead with exploratory drilling, Interior said.
“Every step forward in the Arctic must both be supported by the best science available and serve to expand our knowledge and understanding of this new frontier,” said Deputy Interior Secretary David Hayes. “It is vital that as much information as possible be shared openly, so that scientists and decision-makers can benefit from the rapidly growing body of data in the Arctic.”
Management framework Salazar also emphasized the need for an ecosystem-based Arctic management framework, as recently agreed to by the Arctic Council, the intergovernmental forum of the eight Arctic nations. There is a need to jumpstart the U.S. commitment to this framework, Salazar said.
“The Arctic’s remarkable resources call for a landscape-scale approach to management that cuts across agencies, jurisdictions and boundaries,” Salazar said. “We need to work toward a long-term management framework for the Arctic that recognizes both the resource potential of the region and the irreplaceable natural bounty it contains, from the caribou herds of Teshekpuk Lake to the migratory birds that annually travel thousands of miles to the Arctic.”
Hayes said that the Interagency Working Group, the federal group that is now responsible for the cross-agency coordination of federal Arctic permitting, will explore the implementation of this type of management framework in the Alaska Arctic, focusing on areas of particular importance for wildlife; land and water resources; subsistence living; and the culture of local communities.
And as an example of Interior’s approach to managing areas of particular environmental sensitivity, the agency is in the final stages of completing a draft management plan for the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, with that plan identifying potential protections for the unique avian and terrestrial resources of the greater Teshekpuk Lake area of the North Slope, Salazar said.
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