Shell Clarifies: It Can "Encounter" 95 Percent Of An Arctic Oil Spill, Not Collect It

As Shell’s rigs head toward the Arctic to exploit melting sea ice to drill for more oil, the company took a small step this weekend in clarifying what would happen in an oil spill during the company’s planned Arctic drilling operations this summer.

Despite the oil industry’s spin, experts know it is impossible to recover more than a small fraction of a major marine oil spill, as retired Coast Guard Admiral Roger Rufe told NPR: “But once oil is in the water, it’s a mess. And we’ve never proven anywhere in the world — let alone in the ice — that we’re very good at picking up more than 3 or 5 or 10 percent of the oil once it’s in the water.”

So how is it possible, according to the New York Times, that Interior Secretary Ken Salazar “said he believed the company’s claims that it could collect at least 90 percent of any oil spilled in the event of a well blowout.” These sorts of claims have raised eyebrows among advocates and scientists who study offshore oil drilling — they aren’t just unbelievable, they’re laughably, outrageously impossible. NPR’s Richard Harris cuts through Shell’s spin, and explains what these numbers really mean:

“They have a miniscule number of boats compared to what was available in the Gulf of Mexico,” [Peter Van Tuyn, and environmental lawyer in Anchorage] says, and in the Gulf, “they didn’t have to deal with the extreme weather conditions that we’ve got in the Arctic.” High winds are the norm, and sea ice is always a possible hazard, “and yet they [Shell] claim they can collect as much as 95 percent.”

Merrell says the company has made no such claim. Instead, he says, the oil company’s plan is to confront 95 percent of the oil out in the open water, before it comes ashore. That doesn’t mean responders can collect what they encounter.

“Because the on-scene conditions can be so variable, it would be rather ridiculous of us to make any kind of performance guarantee,” Merrell says.

While discussing the same issue with the Associated Press, Shell PR folks take another word out for a spin, and even try to blame “opposition groups” for this confusion:

Shell Alaska spokesman Curtis Smith said opposition groups are purposely mischaracterizing Shell’s oil spill response plan. The plan does not claim Shell can clean up 90 percent of an oil spill, he said.

“We say in our plan we expect to ‘encounter’ 90 percent of any discharge on site — very close to the drilling rig,” he said. “We expect to encounter 5 percent near-shore between the drilling rig and the coast. And we expect to encounter another 5 percent on shore. We never make claims about the percent we could actually recover, because conditions vary, of course.”

Where Shell plans to drill in the Arctic, those conditions include 20 foot swells, hurricane force winds, sea ice, and months of total darkness, and all without deep water ports or other infrastructure needed to mount a major oil spill response. But let’s put that aside for a moment, to make sure we’re not mischaracterizing here: Shell expects to “encounter” or “confront” 90% of the spilled oil and another 5% the company plans to — rendezvous? — with elsewhere in the ocean, while the remaining 5% Shell might — happen upon? — on shore. How much of that oil might be recovered, collected, or, you know, removed from the environment? Well, Shell says conditions vary, so making a performance guarantee would be rather ridiculous.

In the relatively calm conditions of the Gulf of Mexico, with thousands of response vessels, only a small fraction was recovered from the BP oil disaster. Despite shameful efforts to spin its announcement, a government report found that 4% of the oil was skimmed, and another 6% was burned. And as oil spill expert Rick Steiner observes, even those estimates might be too high, and burning oil isn’t really removing it from the environment: “It either went into the air as atmospheric emissions, and some of that is pretty toxic stuff, or there’s a residue from burning crude that sinks to the ocean floor, sometimes in big thick mats.”

              Exxon Valdez oil in 2012. Photo courtesy of David Janka, taken on May 24, 2012 on Eleanor Island, Prince William Sound, Alaska.

And the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska’s Prince William Sound? Steiner explains in “Exxon Valdez Oil Spill a Cautionary Tale for Arctic Ocean Drilling:

And today, 23 years later, most of the fish and wildlife populations and habitats injured by the spill have yet to fully recover, and there is still residual, toxic oil in beach sediments. It is becoming evident that the injured Alaska coastal ecosystem may never fully recover from the Exxon Valdez spill.”

What of the promised “state-of-the-art spill response”? Despite a three-year, $2 billion effort by Exxon, the response was a spectacular failure, recovering less than 7 percent of the spilled oil.

Oil that Exxon might have “encountered” decades ago, still remains today, as do the impacts to the ecosystem and the wildlife and communities that depend upon it.

By Joe Smyth Media Officer with Greenpeace@Think Progress: Climate Progress

Cold Comfort

A flouting mountain of grey and white ice, castellated and crevassed like an Alpine ridge, the iceberg is vast: the size of two aircraft carriers, maybe more. Scale is hard to judge in the Arctic because of its ubiquitous icy-white backdrops.

Yet much the biggest part of the iceberg—perhaps nine times the size of the visible part—is submerged and invisible. As it drags along the bottom of the Jakobshavn Fjord, this mass of ice could cause earth tremors. Were it to flip over, pressed by sea ice from behind, it might cause a tsunami.

The Arctic will retain its power to amaze for a long time. Yet it is now changing beyond the usual regional and annual variations in sea-ice formation, glacier melt and so forth. The Arctic is clearly melting. Its floating ice cap is shrinking and thinning and its glaciers are retreating. By the end of this century, maybe much sooner, there will be frequent Arctic summers with almost no sea ice at all.

In the balance

Why does this matter? For millennia man has been changing the landscape, hacking and burning forests and ploughing up grasslands. This is how societies have evolved and prospered. Why should the melting Arctic, a product of man-made global warming, be any different?

For most people living there, it is not. Many welcome the changes. They certainly know what is happening. “No one in Greenland would think of climate change as a theory: it’s observation,” says Minik Rosing, a Greenlandic scientist. Yet many would prefer their winters a bit less chilly. They are also looking forward to the rich opportunities a warmer Arctic will open up in resource development, shipping and the service industries that will flourish around them.

These new Arctic industries will not come about overnight and may well deliver less than their cheerleaders promise. Even as the ice recedes, the Arctic will remain extraordinarily cold, dark, remote, expensive and difficult to operate in. But Arctic oil could make a significant contribution to global supplies—maybe as much as 10% of the total. That will be of huge benefit to Arctic economies. So those greens who have set their hopes on the eco-attuned Inuit or Scandinavians taking a stand against Arctic warming are likely to be disappointed. The best hope is that Arctic governments will continue to develop the region as carefully and harmoniously as they have been doing in recent years.

That is no small thing. The Arctic is probably the arena where Russia interacts most usefully with the Western world. And all Arctic countries are opening their offshore areas to exploration with caution: for oil companies, the Arctic is one of the world’s most tightly regulated regions. All this is good, but it is not the main point.

The impending enrichment of Arctic countries would not compensate for the costs of runaway Arctic warming. Arctic species, habitats and quite possibly whole ecosystems would be lost. No Arctic country—not even Russia, which has a poor history of conservation—could contemplate wreaking such environmental havoc unilaterally. Yet all are happy to profit from it. That makes the Arctic a textbook illustration of the commons-despoiling tragedy that climate change is.

The costs to the world are likely to be greater than those to the Arctic, however. Arctic glaciers—including the Greenland ice sheet—are melting and disintegrating faster than expected. If this were to continue over a couple of centuries, there would be a strong chance of catastrophic rises in sea levels; this alone might cost the world more than it stands to benefit from Arctic resources. As a symptom of global warming, moreover, the warming Arctic is indivisible from the manifold costs it will entail. The World Bank estimates the cost of adapting to climate change between 2010 and 2050 at $75 billion-100 billion a year; other estimates are higher.

Sooner or later such arithmetic is going to force governments to get serious about dealing with climate change. It is already clear what is required: policies to put an appropriate price on carbon emissions, through a tax or market-based system, that is sufficient to persuade polluters to develop and adopt cleaner technologies. These are already available, and so is the ingenuity needed to force down their costs and bring them to market. Indeed, it is evident in the Arctic: the technological feats that oil companies display there are inspiring.

With prompt action, the worst outcomes of a warmer Arctic can still be avoided. The shrinking ice cap may find a new equilibrium. Most of the permafrost may remain frozen. But the Arctic will nonetheless be radically changed, to the detriment of a unique polar biome. This much is already inevitable.

The Economist