Itta responds to approval of Shell plan

Is pleased with measures built into the plan but wants same measures in future permits, consideration of cumulative impacts

Alan Bailey

Petroleum News

In the wake of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement’s conditional approval of Shell’s Beaufort Sea exploration plan, Petroleum News asked David Harding, spokesman for North Slope Borough Mayor Edward Itta, about Mayor Itta’s views of the plan. Although there are some plan details that Itta greatly cares about but which still require pinning down — the specifics of the authorization for incidental harassment of marine mammals, for example — Itta likes the concept of limiting the exploration program to the use of a single drillship drilling a one or two wells, Harding said.

However, as interest grows in the search for oil on the Arctic outer continental shelf, Itta wants to see measures agreed to in the Shell plan set precedents for the future, perhaps with some of these measures being built into future regulation for OCS exploration and development. The mayor has worked hard to obtain the best possible protections for subsistence hunting, including a requirement that drilling operations cease and the drilling fleet move away during whale hunts, Harding said. These protections should be built into future permit stipulations, rather than treating each new permit application as a blank slate, starting from scratch again, he said.

Harding said that the mayor is also very concerned about the cumulative impacts of multiple projects, if Arctic OCS exploration gains momentum. Historically, government agencies have tended to consider each exploration project individually — there needs to be a second level of analysis, evaluating the total impact of multiple projects in an area, Itta thinks. Add a second project to an initial project, and then perhaps a project or two more, and cumulative impacts soon build up, Harding said.

The risk of an Arctic offshore oil spill remains a significant concern for the mayor. Itta would like to see demonstrations of oil spill response equipment carried out in situations that closely mimic the conditions likely to be encountered in a real oil spill situation, Harding said. The Environmental Protection Agency’s refusal to allow field testing of oil spill response technology using actual oil in the water has prohibited the type of field test that the mayor would like to see — people need to convince EPA that doing field tests would ultimately protect the environment more effectively than would the prohibition of testing, Harding said.

Harding said that Mayor Itta is very pleased with Shell’s commitment to scientific research in the Arctic, and in particular with the joint science program that Shell is carrying out with the North Slope Borough. The strength of the joint science program is that it is designed to address North Slope community needs, thus going a long way to building trust and confidence among local communities, Harding said.