Lack of Infrastructure a ‘Significant Liability’ If Oil Spills – NAS
by Phil Taylor
Wednesday, April 23, 2014 – The United States would struggle to respond to a large oil spill in the Arctic Ocean unless it makes significant investments in new ports and air access, in supplies like oil spill booms and dispersants, and in response personnel, according to a newly released report from the National Academy of Sciences.
But there’s also no current mechanism to pay for those improvements, it said.
That was one of several findings of the 199-page report by NAS’s National Research Council, which explored the myriad challenges to responding to oil spills in the Arctic’s remote and harsh environment, marked by long periods of darkness, ice and storms.
The report recommended that oil spill response technologies such as dispersants, booms and in situ burning be tested directly in Arctic waters. It also urged the United States to pursue joint oil spill response exercises with Russia, to provide oil-spill training programs for local Alaskan villages, and to evaluate which response strategies would cause the least overall harm to the Arctic’s fragile ecosystem, including subsistence species like whales.
The report was requested and funded by the American Petroleum Institute, the U.S. Arctic Research Commission, the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, the Coast Guard and other federal agencies.
API said it was “encouraged” by the report’s recommendation that a full suite of response technologies be made available and that it looks forward to continued work with stakeholders to ensure that industry is equipped to drill in the Arctic. But one conservation group called the report “a sobering look” at the difficulty of containing a spill.
BSEE Director Brian Salerno this morning lauded the report, saying it would supplement the $15 million BSEE has invested in oil spill response research. He said he looked forward to reviewing its recommendations.
The report comes more than a year after Royal Dutch Shell PLC tried – but failed – to become the first in decades to explore for oil in Alaska’s Beaufort and Chukchi seas in a 2012 season marked by unpredictable ice floes and an inability to certify key oil-spill response equipment. One of the company’s drillships ran aground after breaking loose from its tug during a fierce storm in the Gulf of Alaska, drawing condemnation from the Coast Guard.
While Shell insists it has taken redundant steps to ensure an oil spill never happens, the United States would be unprepared to respond if the company is wrong, the NAS report said.
“The lack of infrastructure in the Arctic would be a significant liability in the event of a large oil spill,” the report found. “Building U.S. capabilities to support oil spill response will require significant investment in physical infrastructure and human capabilities, from communications and personnel to transportation systems and traffic monitoring.”
Native Alaskan communities currently rely on air and seasonal marine transport to move people, goods and services and have scant storage facilities for oil spill booms, dispersants and in situ burn materials, the report said.
The Coast Guard will need an “enhanced presence and performance capacity” in the region that includes training, ice-breaking capabilities, and vessels and aircraft for responding to oil spills during the open water season and eventually year-round, it said.
Coast Guard “personnel, equipment, transportation, communication, navigation and safety resources needed for oil spill response are not adequate for overseeing oil spill response in the Arctic,” the report said. “And the Coast Guard’s efforts to support Arctic oil spill planning and response in the absence of a dedicated and adequate budget are admirable but inadequate.”
For example, response times could be improved by positioning aerial in situ burn and dispersant capabilities in the region before spills occur, it said.
But there’s no current funding mechanism to bolster that infrastructure, it noted.
One possible solution would be to allow a public-private-municipal partnership to access a percentage of lease sale revenues, rents, bonuses or royalty payments that currently go to the U.S. Treasury. Such a move would require an act of Congress.
The report also recommended that regulators conduct real-world experiments into the effectiveness of oil spill response technologies including biodegradation, chemical dispersants and herders, in situ burning, and mechanical containment and recovery. It called for “carefully planned and controlled field releases of oil” in federal waters to see how it behaves in the Bering Strait and Beaufort and Chukchi seas.
But further research is needed into the biodegradation rates of hydrocarbons in offshore environments and ways to accelerate that process, the toxicity and long-term effects of dispersants and dispersed oil on key Arctic marine species, and the limits of mechanical recovery in both open water and ice, it said.
While Alaska has issued preapproval of in situ burning, regulators should also explore preapproval to use dispersants, which new research suggests may be more effective in diluting crude in cold waters than previously thought, the report noted.
Oil could be dispersed more effectively if dispersants are injected underwater near the well head as opposed to from the air, the report said.
But the report also noted that the Arctic’s cold waters do not inhibit bacteria from naturally breaking down crude as much as previously thought. In some cases, the best response to an oil spill may be none at all, it said.
The report also recommended that the Coast Guard work with the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation to develop oil spill training programs for local communities that tap into traditional knowledge about ice and ocean conditions and subsistence species important to Native Alaskans.
“Local communities possess in-depth knowledge of ice conditions, ocean currents, and marine life in areas that could be affected by oil spills,” it said. “Failure to include local knowledge during planning and response may increase the risk of missing significant environmental information, yet there appears to have been only modest efforts to integrate local knowledge into formal incident command based responses.”
Federal regulators should also pursue periodic oil spill exercises that can validate “flexible and scalable organizational structures” needed to respond to a spill, it said.
The report made no recommendations over whether the United States should continue exploring for oil in the Arctic, a region believed to contain the nation’s largest deposit of untapped crude.
Shell has spent roughly $6 billion over the past eight years on its Arctic drilling push but placed its program on indefinite pause this year following a federal appeals court’s ruling that the Interior Department illegally sold leases in the Chukchi in 2008.
Interior recently asked the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to let it rewrite its flawed environmental impact statement for the lease sale.
Just weeks ago, Shell in its annual sustainability report insisted it is “better prepared for any spill than any other company in the world -- no other company has ever deployed immediate, onsite response resources similar to ours.”
API said the oil and gas industry takes its responsibility to protect the Arctic environment seriously.
“We’re encouraged by the report’s emphasis on the need for the full toolbox of spill response technologies to be available in the event of an incident,” it said in a statement this morning. “As the report says -- no single technique can be guaranteed to work in all situations.”
API said it supported the report’s call for collaborative research, data sharing and spill prevention as well as its recommendation that the Coast Guard have a beefed-up presence in the Arctic.
“We look forward to working with the NRC, federal and state government representatives, and other stakeholders to ensure that we have an appropriate, effective and efficient system in place to prevent, mitigate and respond to spills in the Arctic.”
But Chris Krenz, a senior scientist and Arctic campaign manager for the conservation group Oceana who provided testimony to the report committee last year, said it shows the United States is “woefully unprepared” for a disaster like the Exxon Valdez or Deepwater Horizon in the Arctic.
“The National Research Council has provided the U.S. government a sobering look at our lack of preparedness,” he said in a statement. “Having yet more evidence that we are not ready to move forward safely, will the government and companies continue their blind leap into the offshore Arctic oil and gas race?”
Other conservationists said they have not yet read the report but planned to review it closely.
Reprinted from Greenwire with permission from Environment & Energy Publishing, LLC. www.eenews.net, 202/628-6500.