Phil Taylor, E&E reporter
Published: Friday, December 2, 2011
The Pew Charitable Trusts this weekend will launch a national advertising campaign highlighting the risks of oil and gas drilling in the Arctic Ocean.
The campaign, which will include 30-second television commercials and online ads, comes weeks before the Interior Department must complete its review of Royal Dutch Shell PLC’s plan to drill six wells off Alaska’s northwest coast.
Federal agencies are also reviewing Shell’s oil spill response plan, air permits and impacts on endangered and marine mammals.
The TV ads, which will run Sunday in the District of Columbia market during “Meet the Press,” “This Week,” “Face the Nation” and “State of the Union,” and later in the week during cable shows including “Morning Joe” and “The Daily Show,” are Pew’s first major network buy on the Arctic.
Online ads will run beginning next week on sites including Politico.com and on targeted Google search ads, the group said.
The video opens with a pan of ice-choked waters, then cuts to a still of the flaming Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico. It asks whether the United States could respond to an Arctic spill given that it took three months to quell the BP PLC spill in the Gulf.
“How long would it take in sub-zero weather, amid shifting ice in the dark of winter with no Coast Guard present, no roads and no ports for a thousand miles?” a narrator asks. “President Obama, don’t risk a spill in U.S. Arctic waters.”
Eleanor Huffines, manager of Pew’s U.S. Arctic program, said the group is not categorically opposed to drilling, but that such activity must include a capable oil spill response plan, new scientific insights and protection of ecological areas.
The ads mark an escalation in the battle over whether to allow new drilling in the Arctic. The area is believed to contain 26 billion barrels of oil, making it one of most promising new frontiers for domestic energy production.
Shell roughly a year ago launched a lobbying campaign of its own urging the public and the Obama administration to support its proposal to drill in Alaska’s Beaufort and Chukchi seas, an area in which it has invested billions of dollars over the past several years (Greenwire, Nov. 8, 2010).
The company scrapped its plans early this year after a U.S. EPA appeals board ruled its air permits were insufficient (Greenwire, Feb. 3).
The company earlier this year announced an expanded drilling plan, which groups also appealed to the EPA board and challenged in a federal appeals court (E&ENews PM, Sept. 29).
Adrian Herrera, who directs Arctic Power, which lobbies for drilling, said Alaskans are “highly supportive” of drilling off the state’s coast.
“One always has to remember that an oil spill does absolutely no one any good,” he said this morning after viewing the ads. “No, you can never be 100 percent sure [that a spill will be prevented], but you can do your darnedest job to try to prevent it.”
Shell has promised it will use world-class technology to ensure a safe, environmentally responsible Arctic exploration program. “One that has the smallest possible footprint on the environment and no negative impact on North Slope or Northwest Arctic traditional subsistence hunting activities,” spokesman Curtis Smith said last month.
The Coast Guard has warned that if an oil spill were to occur, it could do very little to help.
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http://www.eenews.net/climatewire/2011/12/02/8
ARCTIC: Congress may have a cheap fix to U.S. icebreaker dilemma
Lauren Morello, E&E reporter
Published: Friday, December 2, 2011
Tripling the number of working U.S. polar icebreakers could cost as little $11 million, according to the Government Accountability Office.
The news could help resolve a ongoing impasse between the House, which passed a bill last month that would force the Coast Guard to decommission both of its aging heavy icebreakers in the next three years, and the Obama administration, which hasn’t laid out a plan to buy or lease new ships.
And it could help the Coast Guard handle the economic and geopolitical shifts in the Arctic, where climate change is melting ice and positioning the region as a new hotbed of oil and gas exploration, shipping traffic and military posturing.
Right now, both of the nation’s heavy-duty icebreakers are laid up at their home port in Seattle. ThePolar Sea is set to be decommissioned; the Polar Star is undergoing repairs to extend its life another seven to 10 years. A third icebreaker, the Healy, is seaworthy, but it was designed to conduct scientific research and cannot break through the thickest ice (ClimateWire, Nov. 7).
Building a new heavy icebreaker would cost $859 million, according to a Coast Guard analysis completed last month. But repairing the Polar Sea’s engine to extract another seven to 10 years of use would cost just $11 million, a GAO official told the House Subcommittee on Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation yesterday.
That could put the Polar Sea back on the water in 10 to 18 months, joining the Healy and the Polar Star, whose $60 million rehabilitation is scheduled to finish in December 2012.
“I’m happy to hear about that,” said Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska). “If all that takes is $11 million, that’s not even a spit drop. … This is new to me. That’s something that could be done.”
Lease or buy?
Young is among a group of House Republicans who have pushed the Coast Guard to lease, not buy, a new heavy icebreaker, arguing that’s a faster, cheaper route to beef up the U.S. fleet.
Coast Guard Commandant Robert Papp said yesterday that he is “ambivalent” about whether leasing or buying a heavy icebreaker makes more sense.
“I’ve leased one of my two cars,” he said. “When the lease was over, I’d paid a lot of money, but I didn’t have a car. I don’t know how that’s applicable to ships, but right now one-half of my garage is empty.”
A former Coast Guard official told lawmakers that his experience suggests it’s more expensive to lease than to own.
“When I was a member of the commandant’s staff in the late ’80s in Washington, we were directed to pursue the same sort of lease-versus-buy analysis,” said retired Rear Adm. Jeffrey Garrett, whose 31-year career included stints as the commanding officer of both the Healy and the Polar Sea.
“After over a year of analysis, study and discussion with other agencies, what became clear was that there was no off-the-shelf asset readily available. And in the long run, when you crossed it all out, considering the value of the payments, leasing actually cost about 12 percent more.”
But coming up with even the $11 million Band-Aid described by GAO may be a struggle for the Coast Guard.
“We have a lot of acquisition projects going, and we’re having problems fitting within the limits of current appropriations right now,” Papp said — projects that don’t include additional spending on icebreakers.
Special thanks to Richard Charter.