Everything You Need to Know About Shell Oil and Arctic Offshore Drilling in Alaska

It's Exploratory Drilling

Royal Dutch Shell isn't really planning to drill for oil this summer; it wants to drill for data. The company will cap and permanently abandon any wells it drills before the sea ice returns. The company had planned to drill as many as two wells in the Beaufort Sea and three wells in the Chukchi Sea. (The Beaufort stretches to the north and east of Point Barrow, which lies in the center of the north Alaska coast, while the Chukchi is to the northwest.) However, unusually extensive ice in the Bering Sea this year means that even if the necessary permits are granted, drilling will being delayed and fewer wells completed.

Shell's ships are now gathering at Unalaska in the Aleutian Islands. One drill ship, the Noble Discoverer, dragged anchor and drifted perilously close to shore on July 14, heightening concerns among opponents of drilling.

Oil Companies Drilled Here in the 1980s and '90s

This isn't the first drilling in America's corner of the Arctic Ocean. Around 30 offshore wells were drilled in the U.S. portion of the Beaufort Sea in the 1980s and early '90s, and five in the Chukchi. (Details can be found here.) Some oil production already takes place on artificial islands in the Beaufort Sea. For instance, BP has operated the Endicott site in 14 feet of water, and the Northstar operation in 39 feet of water, for decades. (An overview of BP's operations in the area is here.) None of the wells previously drilled farther from the coast resulted in oil or gas production, mainly because the price of oil dropped roughly in half from the early 1980s to the early 1990s. Drilling in the Arctic is economical only when the price of oil is high.

Local People Depend on Subsistence Whaling

The 7500 Inupiat and others who live along the northern coast are heavily dependent on marine mammals, including whales, for food. A polluted Chukchi or Beaufort sea could destroy the backbone of their culture and devastate family budgets. Fresh food hunted at sea in an age-old tradition is a lot more palatable to locals than exorbitantly priced, shrink-wrapped food brought in by plane.

On the other hand, oil revenue from Prudhoe Bay helps to fund plumbing, electricity, medical services, and schools in the North Slope Borough. Prudhoe Bay's oil output was only 205 million barrels last year, down by more than two-thirds from its peak of 722 million in 1988. Just like the Alaska state government, local government bodies need oil money. But most Inupiat would be far less worried about drilling in ANWR or the National Petroleum Reserve than in the ocean. (Gwich'in Athabascans, who rely more on caribou for subsistence, may feel differently.)

Oil Spills Aren't the Only Risk

An oil spill is the greatest danger, but the Inupiat hunters also worry about noise pollution. Bowhead whales, in particular, are highly vocal creatures with astounding hearing, according to Craig George, a biologist who has spent 30-plus years living in Barrow and studying whales. "Bowheads live in an acoustic world far more than in a visual world," he says. The whales can communicate across 20 miles of ocean and have been shown to avoid industrial noises at nearly that distance. Inupiat will venture a few dozen miles offshore in open boats to hunt the whales; if the animals moved farther offshore to avoid noise, the hunts would become even more dangerous and perhaps impossible.

The Wells Will be in Shallow Water

The proposed wells are all in 150 feet of water or less, and according to Shell geologist Steve Phelps, any oil would likely be found 7000 to 10,000 feet below the seafloor. The figures vary with location. (In comparison, the Gulf of Mexico's Deepwater Horizon accident in 2010 took place in 5000 feet of water, in a well that stretched about 13,000 feet below the seafloor.) Commercial production of oil would lie a decade in the future.

This is Just the Start of Offshore Development

While only Shell would potentially drill this summer, ConocoPhillips is gearing up for the 2014 drilling season. The federal government plans to hold lease sales for additional sites in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas, probably starting in 2016.

Oil-Spill Response Would be Difficult

Neither the Coast Guard nor the offshore oil industry has permanent infrastructure in the Arctic Ocean to respond to emergencies. The Coast Guard's big C-130 Hercules planes take off from Air Station Kodiak, about 820 nautical miles to the south. The closest deepwater port is in Unalaska, or Dutch Harbor, the Aleutian Islands community made famous by the Discovery Channel show Deadliest Catch. The distance from there to Point Barrow is 1280 nautical miles. These distances worry opponents of drilling, especially given the slow response to the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. They reason that if corporations couldn't get drilling right in the heart of the offshore oil industry, they don't stand a chance in the remote and forbidding Arctic.

Lisa Speer, international oceans program director at the National Resources Defense Council, has likened an oil-spill in the Gulf of Mexico to a heart attack in a big New York City teaching hospital: The emergency resources are at hand. "In contrast," she says, "there's very little capability for offshore spill response" in the Arctic.

However, Shell would be bringing oil-spill response vessels to the drilling sites. The company argues that it could therefore respond to an accident faster than companies working in other parts of the globe.

In reality, it's hard to clean up an oil spill anywhere, and the Arctic is no exception. A study of Arctic oil-spill clean-up techniques was published by SINTEF, a Norwegian research organization, in 2010. Researchers found it most effective to burn the oil as it floated on the surface of the water. Mechanical recovery of oil was difficult; ice coverage of 10 to 20 percent interfered with the use of booms. The research was funded by Shell and other oil companies; the results are here.

Source: http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/coal-oil-gas/everything-you-need-to-know-about-shell-oil-and-arctic-offshore-drilling-in-alaska-10720112?src=rss

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