Sanctions on Russia to Freeze ExxonMobil's Arctic Drilling Efforts

Last week the U.S. Treasury Dept. issued new sanctions that are expected to force ExxonMobil to halt its current Arctic drilling operations, a $700 million dollar partnership with Russian energy company Rosneft. Earlier sanctions only applied to new financial transactions and therefore did not stop the energy giants from moving the West Alpha drilling rig hundreds of miles north of the Arctic Circle to begin drilling for oil in the Kara Sea. On August 9, Vladimir Putin gave the go-ahead to start drilling in the Universitetskaya (Университетская) Prospect, making this venture the northernmost oil well in Russia. However, ExxonMobil now has just until the end of the month to wrap up their operations.

ExxonMobil and Rosneft planned to complete the project during the brief ice-free season between August and October. In early July, barely a month before the West Alpha rig arrived from Norway, the Kara Sea was still covered in ice (above). 

As we've written before, there are a number of reasons to be concerned about drilling in the Arctic. We've seen the devastation caused by a blowout in the relatively calm waters of the Gulf of Mexico, and this drilling operation is 385 miles northeast of Gazprom's controversial Prirazlomnaya platform that Greenpeace activists boarded last year.

What is so worrying about drilling in the Arctic? Aside from the unforgiving weather that can tear a 28,000 ton drill rig from its support vessels and drive it ashore, there are no technologies proven to clean up spilled oil from the ice that covers the region most of the year. And this ice is always moving: consider what the Kara Sea looked like in July (above) compared to August (below). At 68² km, the 11 km long chunk of ice identified above is larger than Manhattan.  According to Rosneft, the West Alpha rig is outfitted with sensors to track advancing sea ice, and they claim to be able to shut-in the well and move the rig if necessary.

(Above) As of August 22 the ice had retreated. 

Clouds often block the view of electro-optical satellites like Landsat, but synthetic aperture radar on satellites like the European Space Agency's Sentinel 1-A can peer through clouds and collect data on vessel locations, oil slicks, and sea ice, day or night. While we wait for Sentinel to begin routine data collection, we are watching vessel activity around the West Alpha rig using satellite AIS tracking data. (To read more about our work with satellite AIS, click here)

(Above): AIS data show the path taken by the West Alpha rig as it was towed from Norway to its current location in the Kara Sea.

(Above): With our AIS data viewer we can "see" all of the broadcasting vessels operating around the West Alpha. This may also allow us to see if vessels appear to engage in oil-spill clean up operations. 

Looking at Landsat's 15-meter panchromatic band (Band 8), we can just make out the rig and several support vessels. We've been able to definitely identify the two vessels east of the rig. The furthest vessel to the east is the REM Supporter and the vessel in the middle is the Loke Viking. The identity of the vessel right beside the rig is unknown. 

It is worth noting that the West Alpha rig has not broadcast its location since August 14. It is not to clear to us from the IMO regulations if they are required to continually broadcast their location until they are safely back in port, but it is not uncommon for drill rigs to stop broadcasting when they are "on-station" and not moving.

According to Rosneft, drilling began in early August and was expected to take two months. But under these new sanctions Exxon has to wind down their activity and secure the well by the end of September. 

Arctic Drilling: Not Ready for Prime Time

The USCG said Friday that it is coordinating a response with Royal Dutch Shell representatives after the company’s brand new $200 million tugboat experienced multiple engine failures while towing Shell’s arctic semisubmersible drilling rig, the Kulluk, approximately 50 miles south of Kodiak Island Friday, in 20-foot seas. Rough but not unusual conditions for the Arctic.  

The tugboat M/V Aiviq towing Shell's Kulluk drill rig in better times. Photo courtesy gCaptain.

This is right on the heels of the Coast Guard discovering "several major safety and pollution prevention equipment" deficiencies on Shell's other Arctic rig, the Noble Discoverer drillship.

And remember when the Discoverer went rogue and ran aground in Dutch Harbor back in July?

And Shell crushed their supposed oil spill containment device "like a beer can" during a field test this summer in water just 120 feet deep?
 
After having multiple delays getting their oil spill response vessel to meet Coast Guard standards?

This is a surprising - alarming? - series of missteps, mistakes and outright failures for a company of Shell's size, talent, market cap and ambitions.  Especially considering how much time and money, and political capital, they've invested in this program.  But it's not too late to take a prudent time out to allow a thorough, critical evaluation of whether we are really ready to drill safely in the Arctic, and respond effectively to oil spills in that tough environment.

Because if Shell isn't ready after all this time and effort and investment, then who on earth is?

Drilling off Cuba, Drilling in the Arctic - And No Monitoring Capability. Really?!

Soapbox time!

Here at SkyTruth we've been concerned about the loss of the world's premier tool for offshore monitoring with the demise of the European Space Agency's excellent Envisat satellite in early April.  The successor, Sentinel, won't be launched until sometime next year at the earliest.  Meanwhile, we do have alternatives:  RADARSAT, Cosmo-SkyMed, and TerraSAR-X.  But these are all commercially operated systems and the images range in price from about $1200 to as much as $7500, making them prohibitively expensive for routine monitoring of large areas in the open ocean.  

Envisat ASAR radar image showing precise location of Scarabeo-9 drill rig in Cuban waters of Florida Straits.  Image courtesy European Space Agency.

This is all an unfortunate and inevitable consequence of the fact that, for reasons we can't fathom, the US has decided not to operate any civilian radar imaging satellites.  We led the world in this technology with the launch of SeaSat back in 1978, but now we're dependent on foreign-operated systems.  We consider this a national security fail of a high order: radar imaging satellites are a key tool for establishing and maintaining maritime domain awareness, and effectively managing and protecting our nation's vast ocean territory. Maybe the National Reconnaissance Office has a couple of extra radar spy satellites lying around that they could donate to NASA for civilian use.  The intelligence agencies seem to have plenty of $$ to build more toys than they can use while NASA's satellite program is starving for cash. But I digress...

The BP / Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico highlighted the value of satellite imagery for independently assessing the size and severity of the spill, tracking the day-to-day movement of the oil slicks, and identifying the ocean and coastal areas directly impacted by the oil.  Our work since then has demonstrated the value of radar imagery in particular for detecting bilge-dumping from oceangoing vessels, a major source of marine pollution worldwide; for detecting vessels that may be operating illegally in areas that are off-limits to fishing; and for comparing the pollution as reported by polluters, with what we can actually observe.  

Now companies from around the world are rushing to do deepwater drilling in Cuban waters close to Florida, with no agreement in place that will allow US companies to assist in the event of a major oil spill. Pemex, the state oil company of Mexico, has announced plans to begin high-risk ultra-deepwater drilling in the Gulf despite their alarming lack of deepwater expertise.  Drilling is set to begin as soon as July in the Arctic Ocean off Alaska, raising a host of questions about the impact of day-to-day pollution in that sensitive environment and our ability to effectively clean up an oil spill in typical Arctic ice and weather conditions, far from bases of operation.  And, as SkyTruth and our Gulf Monitoring Consortium partners have demonstrated, we continue to have spills every day in the Gulf of Mexico that are unreported, underreported, and rarely investigated: a continuing moral hazard of tolerating sloppy operations that, in our opinion, sets the stage for the next chain of error that leads to a catastrophic spill. 

Shell's Kulluk drill rig under tow, set to drill in the Arctic Ocean off Alaska this summer.  Source:  Fuelfix.com.

Now, more than ever, we need a public source of routine radar images for all of these areas to allow everyone to see what's happening, to provide assurance that there are no undue environmental problems associated with these innately risky developments, and to stand ready to immediately swing into action to support response efforts should a serious accident occur. 

We call on the US government to work with the commercial radar image companies to provide a publicly accessible stream of radar imagery until Sentinel, or some other radar imaging system, fills the big monitoring gap left by the demise of Envisat.  We would gladly participate in discussions to help make this happen, and soon.  

July is not very far off. And to let drilling proceed in the Arctic Ocean without a transparent, public monitoring system and spill-response tool in place strikes us as both reckless and irresponsible:  a needless escalation of the risks involved with drilling, and a willful disregard of the concerns that have been voiced by tens of thousands of Americans.  Let's fix this problem now.

Scientists Ask For More Arctic Science Before Drilling

573 scientists, including renowned oceanographer and National Geographic explorer-in-residence Sylvia Earle, signed a letter just delivered to President Obama asking him to follow the recommendations of a 2011 US Geological Survey report to fill in gaps in our understanding of Arctic Ocean marine science, before allowing full-blown oil and gas drilling in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas.

Shell and BP are two of the big players with big drilling plans for the Arctic.  Both have caused major oil spills recently, off Nigeria a few weeks ago and of course in our own Gulf of Mexico in 2010.

Why Isn’t the Administration Doing a Better Job on Pipeline Safety?

[With the recent massive oil spill in North Dakota from a pipeline carrying Bakken Shale crude oil liberated by hydraulic fracturing, we thought it was time to take a look at pipeline oversight.  And for this topic, we need an expert.  Say hello to today's guest columnist:  Lois N. Epstein, P.E. is a licensed civil engineer and Arctic Program Director for The Wilderness Society out of Anchorage, Alaska.  Previously, she served on federal advisory committees for oil pipelines and for offshore drilling since the BP Gulf spill.  Currently, she is the Vice President of the Board of the Pipeline Safety Trust, a non-profit organization.]

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Why Isn’t the Obama Administration Doing a Better Job on Pipeline Safety? 

Lois Epstein, P.E. 

Engineer and Arctic Program Director, The Wilderness Society

What’s going on with pipelines? Has there been a high number of major pipeline tragedies recently, or are such incidents just more in the news with widespread attention to potential federal approval of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline?

As someone who has worked on pipeline safety and associated environmental protection issues since I began serving on a pipeline federal advisory committee in the mid-1990s, I can say confidently that the period from 2010-2013 has had a very large number of serious transmission pipeline tragedies compared to the previous decade (serious in the lay-person’s sense of the term, i.e., not the relatively narrow definition developed by federal pipeline regulators). The worst of these incidents – Pacific Gas & Electric’s San Bruno, Calif., natural gas explosion in 2010 which killed eight and injured many; Enbridge’s Marshall, Mich., tar sands oil spill in 2010 that closed 40 miles of the Kalamazoo River for two years with the cleanup still ongoing; ExxonMobil’s Mayflower, Ark., tar sands oil spill in 2013 when oil flowed through a neighborhood; and Tesoro Logistics’ giant oil spill into a North Dakota wheat field with no leak detection mechanism in place – compare in scale to the biggest pipeline incidents of the past.  At a time of technology improvements including advances in leak detection and with a pro-government administration in place, why are we still experiencing preventable transmission pipeline tragedies of this size and scale?
 

2010 Enbridge spill soil excavation (U.S. EPA photo)

The federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA), part of the U.S. Department of Transportation, oversees pipeline safety and environmental protection nationwide. PHMSA performs this job through regulations and their enforcement, advisory bulletins, education, safety research, permit approvals, and partnerships with many state pipeline regulators. Congress guides PHMSA’s work, with the most recent pipeline safety law reauthorization signed by President Obama on Jan. 3, 2012.
 

San Bruno, California in the aftermath of the 2010 gas pipeline explosion (Source: Wikipedia)

According to PHMSA, in 2012 there were more than 185,000 miles of hazardous liquid transmission pipelines (generally crude oil and its products like gasoline and diesel) and nearly 303,000 miles of natural gas transmission pipelines in the United States. The following map shows the locations of these transmission pipelines. The map does not show federally-unregulated pipelines including extensive rural “gathering” line mileage– likely an up-and-coming problem in terms of safety and the environment as unregulated shale gas and oil gathering lines age and corrode.

500,000 miles of natural gas transmission and hazardous liquids pipelines in the US 

Early in the Obama administration, PHMSA began a review of its hazardous liquid (49 Code of Federal Regulations Part 195) and natural gas (49 Code of Federal Regulations Part 192) transmission pipeline regulations, and requested public comments on what changes should be made to improve those regulations. These “advanced notices of proposed rulemaking” (ANPRM) were issued on Oct. 18, 2010, for hazardous liquid transmission pipelines and on Aug. 25, 2011, for natural gas transmission pipelines. Commenters included industry, state and local governments, public interest organizations, and individuals. Despite extensive and broad interest in updating and streamlining these regulations, PHMSA has not issued the necessary follow-up rulemaking proposals. These regulations are needed reforms that have not progressed at all during the five years of the Obama administration.  PHMSA’s regulatory paralysis is unacceptable to those who lived through past transmission pipeline tragedies and to everyone who lives near or cares about pipeline safety.

These federal regulatory reforms, which have been under development since well before the ANPRMs were issued, include:

• Providing upgraded regulatory coverage for unregulated or minimally-regulated pipelines especially rural gathering lines, “produced water” lines which contain briny subsurface fluids, multi-phase pipelines containing oil, gas, and produced water, and pipeline segments not likely to affect “high consequence areas” (currently, integrity management requirements apply only to pipeline segments likely to affect high consequence areas).
• Leak detection requirements for oil and natural gas transmission pipelines. There are no federal leak detection performance standards at present (some states have such standards) so – if operators have leak detection at all – there are no standards for how well these mechanisms must perform, e.g., what their detection levels must be and the speed of detection. At the request of Congress, PHMSA has developed several studies on leak detection, however the report findings have gone nowhere (much to the dismay of leak detection equipment manufacturers).
• Instituting shut-off valve requirements for both natural gas and oil pipelines to minimize the sizes of releases. These regulations would include shut-off valve location requirements.

What will it take to get the Obama administration to move forward on these important regulatory initiatives? Sadly, relatively frequent, major pipeline tragedies do not appear to be enough. Congress should be concerned about this and may need to hold hearings on why there have been regulatory development delays, especially after it did its job in 2011 reviewing and passing the pipeline safety statute reauthorization with bi-partisan votes in both the House and Senate.  The new Secretary of Transportation, Anthony Foxx, also needs to be aware of, and to take action on, the unacceptable regulatory paralysis that currently prevents pipeline safety improvements.

As Michelle Obama says, “Let’s move!” and reform those old requirements.

UPDATED: The Blowout du Jour – Flaming Rig in the Caspian Sea

UPDATED – August 26, 2013: Last week we posted about a blowout and fire reported at the SOCAR #90 well in the Caspian Sea. Satellite-based infrared continues to detect heat from the location, and today's near-infrared MODIS image (below) shows yet another brilliant hot spot where we believe the flaming rig is located. News reports are extremely limited about this incident, but we are continuing to monitor this incident and have not yet detected any oil or chemical slicks on the water.

ORIGINAL POSTING – August 20, 2013: Even as discussion heats up for new offshore drilling in the Atlantic Ocean and Arctic Sea, another gas rig is blazing away, this time in the Caspian Sea. On August 17, Exploration Well No. 90 in the Bulla Deniz gas field  suffered a blowout as it neared a depth of 6,000 meters, and subsequently caught fire. Three days later, on August 20 at 22:37 UTC (6:30 PM Eastern), the Visible Infrared Imager Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) instrument on the Suomi NPP satellite continues to detect large amounts of heat radiating from the site. Clouds obscured the site on the most recent pass of the Terra satellite (MODIS), but we will continue to monitor what we can of the fire and for any evidence of oil or other pollutants on the water.

Above: An annotated, cloud-free Landsat 8 image from a week before the blowout shows the area in much higher detail than MODIS images. This oblique view looks north toward the Azerbaijani capital of Baku which is approximately 60 kilometers away. Near the detected heat from the burning rig you can see dense clusters of  production platforms in this area of the Caspian Sea, and to the northwest, platforms are so close together they are appear to be connected by a causeway. Raw VIIRS data from NOAA attempts to estimate the intensity of the heat emitted by the fire, but we are not yet confident how much faith we can have in the accuracy of these detections. We are sure they are hot and bright, but teasing out  accurate, quantifiable data is complicated.

Because this is a gas well and we have not seen any slicks on previous MODIS images, we believe the risk is presently low that a major spill will develop from this incident. Unfortunately, very little new information has been forthcoming except from an Azerbaijani financial news report stating that "SOCAR decides to put out a fire..." The report, which is using a stock photo of the burning Deepwater Horizon rig, explains the commission responding to the incident was hoping to keep the well for production once the fire is extinguished. Other details appear lost in translation. 

Low resolution images from MODIS reveal very little in the true color composite, but the near-infrared 7-2-1 band very clearly shows the heat of the fire, much like this rig off the coast of Nigeria that we spotted last year. 

Slide your mouse to the right to see a detail of the true color band of a MODIS image taken August 19 by the Terra satellite. Slide to the left to reveal the near-infrared version of the same image. 

This burning rig is yet another reminder this summer that offshore drilling is risky business. In early July, a rig at Ship Shoals Block 225  suffered a blowout while plugging a well that had been out of production since 1998. Later in July the Hercules 265 rig was also reworking an older gas well when the operators lost control of the well and had to evacuate. That night the rig ignited and blazed for three days until the well "bridged over" on itself, choking off the flow of gas to the surface. The risk of offshore oil and gas development in aging oil and gas fields, as well as the dangers of deepwater exploration, must be considered in any new proposition to expand offshore oil and gas drilling to waters off Virginia Beach, North Carolina's Outer Banks, and the unforgiving Arctic. 

This is a developing story, please check back for updates. 

Year in Review: Most Significant Articles of 2012

SkyTruth's vision is for "a world where all people can see and understand the environmental consequences of human activity everywhere on the earth, and are motivated to take action to protect the environment." 

In March we shared a particularly striking view of the Gulf Coast - some images illustrate problems, others are simply beautiful. Click here for the full image from NASA.

In the past year we made significant strides toward realizing this vision, and while we have already shared our Top 10 Most Viewed Articles, we thought it would be good to share what we think were our most significant accomplishments in 2012.

Offshore Oil Drilling and Infrastructure

Taylor Oil Spill: 7 Years, 1.1 Million Gallons, Still Going...

We have continued to document the ongoing spill at Taylor Energy Platform 23051, damaged by Hurricane Ivan in 2004. Still, the oil keeps coming with no sign of activity to finally plug this continuous leak.  We set up a website to document the unrelenting chronology of spill reports. 

Sea Ice Receding at Shell's Alaska Drill Sites

We closely followed Shell's attempts to drill in the Arctic Ocean during the brief summer season. Ultimately, a series of embarrassing failures (including both of their drill rigs running aground, a flattened spill containment device, criminal investigations on the drillship Noble Discover, and the drill rig Kulluk holed up in a remote harbor south of Kodiak Island awaiting salvage assessment and repair) reinforced concerns that we're not ready to drill offshore safely in this difficult region. 

On the left, sea ice retreating in early August, but still rather close to Shell's Arctic drilling operations this summer in the Chukchi Sea.

Possible Contamination from Stolthaven Chemical Facility, Braithwaite, LA 

The Gulf Coast is home to a significant amount of chemical plants, fed in part by petroleum resources pumped out of the Gulf. In the aftermath of Hurricane Isaac, members of the Gulf Monitoring Consortium flew over the Gulf and onshore infrastructure, documenting a number of slicks from storm-damaged facilities, as well as highly visible damage at Stolthaven that forced the evacuation of nearby residents.

"You would think that by now, major industrial facilities planted in the middle of Hurricane Alley would be better able to withstand such predictable storm exposure. But I guess you'd be wrong...."    - John Amos, Sept. 13, 2012

Incident Monitoring: SkyTruth routinely reports on slicks and spills that we observe, including:

• Jan. 20: Chevron Blowout and Rig Fire off Nigeria
• March 20: Slicks in Brazil's Campos Basin
• April 4: Blowout in the North Sea

Coal Mining and Export

Visualizing Elevation Change - Mountaintop Removal Mining 

Few human activities alter the natural terrain more thoroughly and permanently than  mining, and modern remote sensing allows us to visualize that and measure it very precisely. Using Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) created from aerial survey imagery taken in 2003, and from a Light Detection And Ranging (LiDAR) laser survey flown in 2012, we created detailed representations of the terrain before and after mountaintop removal mining at the Spruce #1 Mine in Logan County, West Virginia.

 
Growing Coal Mines in the Powder River Basin

 
Another area that we turned our attention to is the practice of coal export, predominately to Asian markets due to the growing demand for energy there, and cheaper natural gas prices here. If new coal-export terminals are approved in the Pacific Northwest and on the Gulf coast, coal mining here in the US could accelerate. In this article, we mapped the area that has already been impacted by mining on public lands in the Powder River Basin of Wyoming, compared it to a more familiar area -- San Francisco -- and showed the area under permit that could be mined in the future.

Smog (grey clouds) over China as seen by NASA's Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) in October 2010. Increased exports through the Pacific Northwest are expected to find a major market in China and Southeast Asia.

Oil and Gas Drilling and Fracking

 
Shale Gas Fly-Overs in Pennsylvania and West Virginia
 
As part of our work on shale gas development in North America, we coordinated two LightHawk flights over active shale gas drilling areas in the Marcellus Shale, documenting the impact shale gas development has on the landscape while showing stakeholders and partners the value of an aerial perspective on these complex issues. Check out the video and our photo galleries.

Waterdogs from The Downstream Project on Vimeo.

SkyTruth Releases Fracking Chemical Database

Worthy of an entire chapter of SkyTruth history, the FracFocus data release was the culmination of a major effort on our behalf and a significant contribution to the conversation on fracking. With it, researchers and decision makers can finally see the whole picture of reported fracking activity, at least as it is disclosed to the public. There are several critical shortcomings with the current state of "disclosure" (we made specific technical recommendations to the federal government to address some of those flaws), but using the aggregate database we released, anyone can quantify some of those problems and bring them to the attention of the public, regulators, policymakers and industry.

SkyTruth Alerts: Drills, Spills, and Fracks, Oh My!

Here, we plotted the centerpoints of all active Alerts subscriptions in the Lower 48 states and coastal waters. Most subscribers are apaprently interested in the Marcellus Shale play in the mid-Atlantic, and pollution monitoring in the Gulf of Mexico. SkyTruth Alerts are viewed and/or shared approximately 10,000 times each month.

We built this system as an internal tool to help us know when and where to look for spills, but we also realized this system had the potential to be a great resource for the public to stay informed about incidents in almost real-time. In 2012 we significantly improved the Alerts system, adding reports from industry about the chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing operations nationwide, and drilling-related safety and environmental violations issued by regulators in West Virginia and Pennsylvania. 

 
Other Environmental Issues

Monitoring Illegal Activity on the Open Ocean: Busting Polluters by Satellite

In April we noticed a 92 mile-long oil slick off the coast of Africa, but on this radar satellite image the likely culprit was revealed as just a bright, white spot headed west at the far end of the slick. Using other data collected by satellites, one of our enterprising Shepherd University interns was able to conclusively identify the mystery ship responsible for this mess. We were told, by folks who should know, that this was the first publicly documented case of detecting a pollution event on the open ocean and identifying the responsible party, using only space-based data. 

Micro-satellites tuned to listen in on the location data broadcast by ships (required by many insurance companies to help prevent collisions) recorded the path of the offending vessel. Read more on the blog.

In another first, we are now using the same approach to detect and assess illegal fishing activity in the South Pacific Ocean. This project is will continue throughout 2013, so stay tuned and check back here for updates on our progress! 
 

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Sea Ice Receding at Shell's Alaska Drill Sites

Last January, fellow SkyTruther Sara Scoville-Weaver wrote an article, Black Ice Is Never A Good Thing..., about potential drilling in the Arctic Ocean and how a large oil spill - like the one caused by Shell and spotted on satellite image by SkyTruth last December off the coast of Nigeria - could affect the waters off the coast of Alaska where Shell is now poised to commence drilling.

Wide view of Shell's drilling areas in the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas off the north slope of Alaska

Since then, we have been monitoring the changing sea ice using data published by the National Ice Center at NOAA. The sea ice extent varies dramatically from winter to summer, and even the daily variations can be substantial.

This graph that we got from the Danish Meterological Institute  shows the average Arctic ice coverage over the course of the year, in millions of square kilometers. As you can see, August (01/08) marks the beginning of the part of the year with the least ice coverage; the lowest being through the month September (01/09). The black line indicates this year (2012).

Yearly ice coverage data in millions of sq km. Source: Danish Meteorological Institute 

Shown below are a series of sea ice maps from the National Ice Center covering the last three weeks. The large white portions represent thick ice coverage, the grey is thin or broken up ice. Red squares show lease blocks which could be potentially drilled. The yellow points are Shell's planned drilling locations.

Slideshow showing recent weekly change in sea ice coverage in the vicinity of Shell's planned offshore drilling sites.

As you can see, even this far into the summer season, Shell's planned drilling sites are still impacted by sea ice, and the ice coverage is still changing drastically from week to week. We shudder (or shiver) to think what it would take to mobilize an oil spill response on the scale of the response to BP's 2010 disaster in these icy, unpredictable conditions.

Black Ice Is Never A Good Thing...

The recent oil spill by Shell off Nigeria's coast briefly brought to light the some of the most insidious consequences of the world's addiction to fossil fuels.

As our thirst for oil grows, companies are stretching the limits of depth and technology to drill wherever and however. Shell has recently received conditional approval to begin exploratory drilling in one of the world's most environmentally sensitive and valuable ecosystems - the Arctic Ocean. Drilling will begin this summer in northern Alaska's Chukchi Sea, leading many to wonder if this is such a good idea.

What would happen if Shell caused a spill, like last month's event in Nigeria, in the waters of Alaska hundreds of miles away from any Coast Guard station or port? We superimposed the resulting 350-square-mile Nigeria oil slick on the Chukchi Sea in the area where Shell will be drilling:

Hypothetical 350 square-mile slick originating from a Shell lease block in the Chukchi Sea

How soon would a spill of this size reach the nearby coastline only 30 miles away? What about the effect on local fisheries and native infrastructure? How effectively could a spill like this be contained and cleaned up in icy, treacherous conditions? Shell touts emergency preparedness as key to mitigating any possible spillage, but the notoriously harsh Arctic environment raises many concerns about our ability to safely produce and transport oil in this region.

Bohai Bay Oil Spill - Lessons for Arctic Drilling?

Proponents of drilling in the Arctic Ocean claim the risk of significant spills is much lower than in places like the deepwater Gulf of Mexico, because the water is much shallower and the wells won't be drilled nearly as deep as BP's failed Macondo well.  But recent spills in the Bohai Bay off China, including a possible blowout in the Peng Lai 19-3 oil field, might lead to a reevaluation of those comforting assumptions. 

Peng Lai 19-3 is a new offshore field operated by US energy giant ConocoPhillips (Halliburton is the drilling contractor).  This is China's largest offshore oil field and it lies in very shallow water (76' deep).  The wells are also very shallow, only reaching about 3000' below the seafloor.  The development includes the largest FPSO in China.  This field represents an investment of at least $1.8 billion by ConocoPhillips.

Panama Canal Getting Bigger. Much Bigger.

A man, a plan, a canal. Panama!

It's not just a quaint anagram. In this age of relentlessly expanding global commerce, Panama has been planning ahead, and is investing billions of dollars in supersizing the canal (photo gallery here) to allow the passage of the new breed of supersized cargo ships.  Even more coal mined from Appalachian mountains and Montana/Wyoming prairies -- and possibly natural gas extracted from shale by hydraulic fracturing -- will likely be shipped to Asia and other markets once this expansion work is completed. 

The global warming-driven decline in Arctic sea ice might divert some of the cargo traffic Panama is counting on to pay for this expansion, if the Northwest Passage becomes a viable trade route. So in a bit of irony, by feeding the world's addiction to fossil fuels, Panama may be undercutting its business plan.  Just sayin.

Here are a couple of images from Google Earth showing the area around the Caribbean end of the Panama Canal near the Gatun Locks, as it appeared in 2005 and with the expansion project well underway in 2012.

Panama Canal near Gatun, in 2005.

Panama Canal near Gatun, in 2012. Expansion of canal in progress to accommodate much larger 'New Panamax' cargo vessels.

BP On Trial - Finally

At long last BP is finally standing trial (before a single judge, not a jury) for civil damages caused by their catastrophic blowout in the Gulf of Mexico nearly three years ago. That blowout caused an explosion and fire on the massive Deepwater Horizon drill rig that killed 11 workers, injured many others, and sent the rig to the ocean floor nearly a mile below.  And the resulting oil spill was the nation's worst to date, spewing some 172 million gallons of crude oil into the Gulf. 

In-situ burning of oil slicks during spill response operations in the Gulf of Mexico, June 22, 2010. Photo courtesy Dr. Oscar Garcia, Florida State University.

Assuming BP and their partners don't come to a settlement with the Justice Department, the trial is expected to last throughout most of 2013. But don't hit the snooze button just yet: this could get very interesting.  The trial will be conducted in two phases.  The first phase, underway now, will assign the share of blame for this tragedy among the defendants (BP, Transocean and Halliburton; right now they're all doing their level best to deflect as much of the blame as possible onto each other).  It will also decide if, as government lawyers are arguing, BP acted with "gross negligence."  That's a key ruling because it ramps up the fine BP will pay from the standard $1,100 per barrel spilled, to $4,300 per barrel.  Under the RESTORE Act that Congress passed last year, 80% of that fine will go toward funding restoration projects in the Gulf region. As we wrote back in February 2012,

...federal prosecutors will attempt to paint BP as a "rogue" operator that took unusual risks, to convince the judge that the spill resulted from gross negligence.  BP, to defend itself, will likely claim that their operations, well design, and decisionmaking were not so unusual, and were consistent with industry-wide practices.  To make that case BP will have to present lots of information about the offshore drilling industry as a whole, including the safety record, accidents and near-misses experienced by other companies that we never hear about.  None of the official investigations of the BP / Deepwater Horizon spill looked at the industrywide record, leaving many of us wondering:

Just how risky is modern offshore drilling? 

Given Shell's serial blundering during their Arctic drilling program last year -- problems so severe they just announced today that they've scrapped the entire program for 2013 -- we have to wonder if BP is truly a "rogue" or if their level of risk-taking is more or less the norm throughout the offshore oil industry.

By the way, I'm somewhat dismayed at this statement yesterday by the Chairman and President of BP America, Lamar McKay, that suggests BP has a long way to go when it comes to establishing an effective safety culture:

I think that's a shared responsibility, to manage the safety and the risk. Sometimes contractors manage that risk. Sometimes we do. Most of the time it's a team effort.

I'm not a risk-management expert but it's my understanding that this diffusion of responsibility, and unclear definition of authority, is exactly the kind of management muddle that leads to major system failures.  In other words, somebody has to clearly be in charge at all times.

The second phase of the trial will determine how much oil spilled into Gulf waters, the key to determining how big a fine BP will pay and how much money will go toward Gulf restoration.  That will pit lawyers against scientists.  Place your bets.

Shell's Grounded Drill Rig Seen From Space - Other Problems Not So Obvious?

Lots of folks lately, us included, have chronicled Shell's confidence-shaking series of missteps, bad decisions and outright failures associated with their years-long, multi-billion-dollar campaign (technical and political) to drill for oil in the Arctic Ocean off the coast of Alaska.  Shell has decided to downplay their latest mishap -- losing control of their multimillion dollar drill rig, the Kulluk,  while it was being towed to Seattle from the drilling site in the Chukchi Sea -- as no big deal since the rig wasn't actually drilling at the time.

Uhhh...so we're supposed to feel better?  Because they can't get the simple stuff right?  Understand that nothing is "simple" in these often wild waters, but in the scheme of things, if you can't even move your equipment around without mishap, then how can you be trusted with the relatively complex and challenging processes of drilling and completing offshore oil wells in these waters? Or mounting a swift and effective oil spill response in ice-choked seas?

High-resolution satellite image showing the drill rig Kulluk aground off the coast of Alaska on January 4, 2013. Image courtesy DigitalGlobe. Subscribe to their WorldView report to see more great images.

It's not just technology failures that lead to disasters.  Bad / risky decisionmaking plays a major part too.  This November 9 news report said the Kulluk had been scheduled to spend the winter downtime in Dutch Harbor.  So why was it being moved? Ostensibly for maintenance work that couldn't be done in Dutch, but Shell admitted they were towing the Kulluk into the teeth of a major winter storm system in part to avoid paying taxes to the sate of Alaska.  Shell said the storm was unexpected. This analysis of the forecasts for the area by meteorologist Cliff Mass suggests otherwise, raising the possibility that Shell risked personnel and very pricey hardware to dodge a $6 million tax bill; about 1/10th of 1 percent of the total project investment. And guess who came to the rescue of the crew and the stranded Kulluk?  The US Coast Guard, courtesy of US taxpayers. What a deal.

Shell was allowed to start shallow "tophole" work on two of their planned wells in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas last summer, but they still need to secure Federal approval to continue drilling these wells to their full target depths.  This disturbing pattern of technical and decisionmaking failures suggests the kind of corporate culture that investigators have implicated as the underlying cause of the catastrophic BP oil spill in the Gulf in 2010.

That approval needs to be withheld until investigators, regulators and the public have enough information to confidently make the correct decision. There's no rush. The oil ain't going anywhere. And after all, down here in the Lower 48, Shell is producing so much oil they want permission to export it to Canada.

Let's slow down and make sure we get this right.

Platform 23051 Site - Still Leaking, Magically!

Back on September 2 somebody submitted a pollution report to the National Response Center indicating an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and it popped up in the SkyTruth Alerts system.  That's depressingly common - there are typically a dozen or so reports of spills every day in the Gulf.  And this one came from a familiar place, the site of a former oil platform (#23051) about 12 miles off the tip of the Mississippi Delta, in Mississippi Canyon Block 20.  We've been systematically documenting a chronic leak there since we first became aware of it last summer during the unrelated BP / Deepwater Horizon spill. 

But the September 2 report is magical:  The caller - presumably an employee of or contractor for the company - claimed a spill totalling 0.0000027 gallons.  That's 1/500th of a teaspoon. 

• Magic Act #1: How did they measure it?  

• Magic Act #2: This vanishingly minuscule spill somehow created an observable oil slick 1,000' long and 200' wide, covering a total area of 4.6 acres with a "silvery sheen." 

Silvery sheen is at least 0.04 to 0.3 microns thick.  By our calculation, that's a slick containing 0.2 to 15 gallons.  Sure, 2/10ths of a gallon isn't much, but it is 74,000 times larger than the caller reported. Maybe this was a simple transcription error at the NRC.  But if not, this one gets the prize for ridiculousness, reinforcing our evolving theory that polluters are consistently underreporting the amounts of pollution. Cumulatively, given thousands of reported spills a year, these unreported amounts add up to a much bigger mess than the public has been lead to believe.  In a place like the western and central Gulf, maybe this is no big deal; but in new places where we're moving ahead with drilling - the Virginia coast, the Arctic Ocean - the routine leaks and spills associated with coastal industrialization and offshore drilling might not be so easily shrugged off by tourists, fishermen, and the environment.

And by the way, we're seeing a lot more than 5 gallons in the ongoing spill - 24/7/365 since September 2004 - from this hurricane-damaged cluster of wells.  The MODIS /Aqua satellite image below, taken on September 10, shows a slick originating at the 23051 site that extends almost 35 miles. And the radar satellite image at bottom, taken on August 30, shows a slick at the site that stretches about 13 miles. We've collected dozens of images showing slicks at this site routinely stretching more than 10miles.

Detail from MODIS satellite image taken September 10, 2011 showing 35-mile-long slick emanating from 23051 site at left.

Radar satellite image taken August 30, 2011, showing 13-mile-long slick at 23051 site at upper left.

We suspect that some of the oil slicks and occurrences of tarballs and other oil on the Louisiana coast are probably coming from this location, not from the BP / Deepwater Horizon site 40 miles offshore.  To help eliminate this possible source of confusion, scientists from National Wildlife Federation are taking a boat out today -- guided by SkyTruth's maps, coordinates, and image analysis -- to collect a sample of the oil slick at the 23051 site.  We hope to get that sample chemically "fingerprinted."  As always, we'll report the results right here.