The Environmental Appeals Board announced on Jan. 12 that it had rejected appeals against the Environmental Protection Agency’s air quality permits for Shell’s use of the drillship Noble Discoverer for exploration drilling in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas. The air quality permits are critically important to Shell’s ability to move forward with its drilling program, starting this year.
Four petitions
The board had received four petitions challenging the issue of the permits. One petition came from the Native Village of Point Hope and a group of 10 environmental organizations; one from the Inupiat Community of the Arctic Slope; and the other two came from private individuals. The Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission had originally been party to the Inupiat Community of the Arctic Slope petition but later withdrew from the case.
The board, the panel of judges with final authority over EPA decisions, said that the petitioners had failed to demonstrate that there was any need to review the validity of the EPA permits.
“Achieving usable permits from the EPA is a very important step for Shell and one of the strongest indicators to date that we will be exploring our Beaufort and Chukchi leases in July,” said Shell spokesman Curtis Smith in an email press release in response to the board’s announcement. “That our air permits for the Noble Discoverer withstood appeal is a testament to the robust nature of the work we have done to have the smallest possible impact on the Arctic air shed and further validates that Shell is a company uniquely positioned to deliver a world-class drilling program in the Alaska offshore.”
Kulluk still needed
Although Shell now has air permits for the use of the Noble Discoverer in both the Chukchi Sea and the Beaufort Sea, the company has been planning to use this particular drillship in the Chukchi. The company plans to drill in the Beaufort Sea using its floating drilling platform, the Kulluk. A separate appeal against an EPA air permit for the Kulluk was launched after the Noble Discoverer permit appeal and is still under review by the Environmental Appeals Board.
“The validation of Shell’s first air quality permits is almost the end of what has been a long and exhaustive process,” said Sen. Lisa Murkowski in response to the appeals board announcement. “I’m relieved that the EPA’s internal appeals board chose here not to drag out the process any further, and I hope that the permits for Shell’s second drillship, the Kulluk, are similarly confirmed in a timely manner.”
“This is excellent news for Shell and for moving forward on oil and gas production in Alaska’s Arctic,” said Sen. Mark Begich. “As we continue to push the Obama Administration to move permits and coordinate decisions that will allow us to use our own resources to fuel our nation’s economy and create thousands of jobs, I’m pleased to see the EPA give another key piece of regulatory certainty that Shell can work in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas this summer.”
Seven questions
In total, the petitioners in the appeal raised seven questions over the validity of the permits.
Two of the questions, the first involving the definition of when a drillship becomes a stationary emissions source, and the second concerned with the potential impacts of air emissions on local communities, had already been adjudicated on by the board in December 2010 in an appeal against previous versions of Shell’s permits. The board determined that EPA had complied with the board directives in 2010 regarding these questions. And in its new ruling, the board saw no new reason to raise further objections to these aspects of the permits.
The petitions did, however, raise five new questions. The board threw out two of these questions — a question over Shell’s ambient air quality analysis and a question over nitrous oxide emissions — because these questions had not been raised during the public review period for the draft permits. And the board rejected the three remaining claims on the grounds that the petitioners had failed to demonstrate that the EPA had erred in issuing the permits. Those three questions related to whether ambient air quality standards should apply inside a U.S. Coast Guard-imposed 500-meter public safety zone around the drillship; a lack of enforceable limits on methane emissions from the drillship’s drilling mud system; and a claim that additional public review time should have been allocated to the permit because multiple air quality permits were simultaneously out for review.
—Alan Bailey
