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.

________

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.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kevin-grandia/oil-companies-powned-in-e_b_1123211.html

Kevin Grandia, Online Director, Greenpeace USA
Posted: 12/ 1/11 01:42 PM ET

In true “Yes Men” style, environment campaigners duped representatives of major oil companies into attending a meeting about the harsh realities of offshore oil drilling, instead of their intended meeting with Greenland officials to talk about opening up Northern seas to drilling.

Jon Brugwald, a Nordic Greenpeace campaigner, explains how the Copenhagen meeting was jammed:
When the oil industry people arrived to the site of the meeting, Greenpeace activists greeted them with a red carpet drenched in oil, hand-banners, and a huge floating banner that read”Protect the Arctic: No License to Drill.

We decided that we needed to be dead certain that we this time had the full attention of the oil companies. To ensure this, we arranged our own get-together just downstairs from the official meeting. We booked a meeting room and set it up in nicely with coffee and cake for the nice oil people. When they arrived at the venue, our friendly activists (not the ones with hand-banners and the floating banner), welcomed oil industry people and told them that the meeting was unfortunately moved to another floor due to the annoying Greenpeace activists.

All the oil company representatives — from Shell, BP, ConocoPhillips, Statoil and NunaOil — politely came along to our meeting instead of a meeting with the Greenland representatives.

What came next was a half-hour presentation by the well-dressed campaigners on the many dangers posed by drilling in the pristine waters off the shores of Greenland — like the catastrophe that would result from an accidental oil spill making the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil disaster look like child’s play in comparison.

“After half an hour, they didn’t have a clue about what was going on, and even when the last slide came up, they were oblivious to what had happened,” said Burgwald.

Watch it:

All I can say is “POWNED!”

Follow Kevin Grandia on Twitter: www.twitter.com/kgrandia

Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://www.stuarthsmith.com/breakthrough-in-the-macondo-mystery-bp-admits-to-new-activity-at-deepwater-horizon-site#comments

This makes a lot of sense but is another new awful thing to contend with. The perils of offshore oil continue…. DV

Finally, some answers. After months of trying to make the fresh oil surfacing at the Deepwater Horizon site a “nonissue,” BP has finally copped to what’s really happening at ground zero of last year’s massive oil spill – where just last week, flyover surveillance footage captured a small fleet of large “oil-related” vessels working the waters. It’s hard to hide those ships the size of football fields, even in the Gulf of Mexico.

In a bombshell revelation that’s going viral, BP has admitted to conducting a study to “track oil from seabed to surface” in the Macondo Prospect. Sounds to me like they’ve found a leak.

Not so fast. A leak would suggest BP is to blame (perish the thought), but a “natural seep” would imply an act of God, conveniently out of the hands of mere mortals. Here’s how Sabrina Canfield covered the BP disclosure for Courthouse News Service on Nov. 21:

In an emailed statement late Friday, a representative from BP verified that several vessels are in the vicinity of the Macondo well: “There are several vessels there participating in a study of natural oil seeps. This study has been ongoing for the past month or so. Data continues being collected and we provided an update on the natural oil seeps at the SETAC [Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry] conference in Boston this week. … The study is documenting the specific locations of these seeps and is seeking to track oil flow from seabed to surface,” BP wrote.

If there are seeps in the area, they are not natural. I can assure you of that. BP was required to conduct a seafloor survey prior to applying for a permit to drill. If these seeps were not discovered during the survey – which they apparently weren’t – they must be related to the disaster and the heavy-handed methods used to attempt to seal the well. Consider this from my Oct. 13, 2011, post:

As you may recall, back in late August, BP lowered an ROV down to inspect the Macondo wellhead. The video feed, viewed by federal officials in New Orleans, confirmed that the well itself isn’t leaking. Although I’d like to see that video released to the public (to assuage the cynics), for now I’ll take the feds at their word.

If the riser, the rig and the wellhead aren’t leaking oil, where is it all coming from? As I and others have suggested before, the oil may be seeping through cracks and fissures on the seafloor. Remember, BP was banging around down there with heavy machinery and massive pieces of equipment during its many unsuccessful attempts to stem the flow of oil. One of the containment domes BP lowered over top the gushing well last year was four stories high and weighed more than 70 tons. That’s a lot of weight and stress being applied.

Back in August, I called for a full survey of the seafloor surrounding the Macondo wellhead. And today I am renewing that call. It’s not enough to say the wellhead itself isn’t leaking. As noted above, my guess is the heavy stress BP applied to the seafloor created cracks and fissures around the wellhead, and they are the source of all this fresh oil we’re seeing at the site and coming ashore more than 100 miles away.

The truly devastating part of the “seafloor crack” scenario is that kind of leakage can’t be stopped. You can’t plug a crack or a fissure, all you can do is try to contain and recover the oil.

So although BP has confessed to conducting a study at the epicenter of last year’s 200-million-gallon spill, its disclosed focus is just another example of the oil giant’s inability to tell the whole truth.

Stay tuned, we’ll be bringing you updates as details emerge.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=142726848

by THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

SAO PAULO November 23, 2011, 04:54 pm ET

SAO PAULO (AP) – Chevron was banned from drilling for oil in Brazil until an investigation into an offshore oil leak at one of the U.S.-based oil company’s well sites is completed, regulators said Wednesday.

The board of Brazil’s National Petroleum Agency met and “ordered the suspension of drilling activities” until it can identify the causes and who is responsible for the leak of more than 110,000 gallons of oil into the Atlantic ocean off the nation’s southeastern coast.

“This resolution suspends all drilling activity for Chevron Brasil Ltda. in national territory,” the statement read.

It was not clear how long the suspension would last.

Chevron said in an emailed statement that it would “follow all the rules and regulations of the Government of Brazil and its agencies.”

Oil started leaking at the site of a Chevron appraisal well on Nov. 7, about 230 miles (370 kilometers) off the northeastern coast of Rio de Janeiro state.

The agency said on Tuesday that the leak was now “under control.”

The work at the Frade field where the leak took place is one of Chevron’s “biggest capital investments,” according to the company’s website, though details are not provided.
George Buck, chief operating officer for Chevron’s Brazilian division, has said the spill occurred because Chevron underestimated the pressure in an underwater reservoir.

He said earlier this week that this caused crude oil to rush up a bore hole and eventually escaped into the surrounding seabed. The oil has leaked through at least seven narrow fissures on the ocean floor, all within 160 feet (50 meters) of the wellhead.

The leak is a test for Brazil as huge offshore oil finds have been announced recently, with estimates that they could hold at least 50 billion barrels of oil.

Brazil’s Environment Ministry has fined Chevron nearly $28 million, but has said the company could face five or six times that in future penalties. Chevron has not indicated if it will contest the fine in court, which it can do under Brazilian law.

The company came under withering criticism from officials at the ministry and also the regulatory agency for not fully sharing information about the spill in its early days, and of not having the proper emergency equipment on hand to deal with the spill.

Chevron Corp. officials have accepted responsibility for the spill but adamantly reject those accusations.

The oil slick on the ocean surface that resulted from the leak has significantly declined, officials said, dropping to less than 0.78 square miles (2 square kilometers).

George Buck, chief operating officer for Chevron’s Brazilian division, appeared before the lower house of Brazil’s Congress on Wednesday. He repeated that the company takes full responsibility and he apologized to the Brazilian government and nation.

Carlos Minc, the environment minister for Rio de Janeiro state, has harshly criticized Chevron, telling foreign reporters in Rio that Brazil’s laws “allow foreign companies to explore in our waters, we welcome anyone as long as they respect our laws.”

“But we are also not a banana republic. If a company violates Brazilian law and the concession terms … they should go to jail and lose all their exploration rights. We want to be treated with the dignity we deserve as the world’s seventh-largest economy.”
___
Associated Press Television News producer Flora Charner contributed to this report from Rio de Janeiro.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/news/2011/11/19/major-oil-leak-at-o

Published November 19, 2011
Fox News Latino

A leak at an offshore Chevron drilling site off the coast of Brazil may have dumped around 110,000 gallons of oil into the Atlantic Ocean, Brazilian officials said Friday.

Officials think between 8,400 to 13,800 gallons of oil leaked each day from Nov. 8 through Tuesday, Ibama said in a statement on its website. Chevron had said that only 16,800 to 27,300 gallons in total leaked into the ocean.

Officials are still investigating the cause of the leak, which has been almost entirely contained, but the Ibama statement said it was a result of drilling.

An official at Brazil’s Federal Police, which has opened an investigation into the spill, said Chevron “drilled about 500 meters (1,640 feet) farther than they were licensed to do.” The official, who agreed to discuss the matter only if not quoted by name, said that information came from a person with knowledge of the drilling.

The leak occurred at a drilling site about 230 miles (370 kilometers) northeast of Rio de Janeiro.

Rio state Environment Minister Carlos Minc said earlier he was sure the leak was larger than Chevron estimated and he called for more transparency from the company.

SUMMARY

Chevron had said that only 16,800 to 27,300 gallons in total leaked into the ocean.

“We can’t trivialize this,” he told the Globo TV network. “It’s really serious and we don’t yet know all the consequences.”

Marine life in the area of the spill will be affected by the leak, Minc said, adding that whales are migrating from north to south through the spill area.

The oil slick, which was moving away from the coast, grew to 11 miles (18 kilometers), Ibama said. Most of the oil was concentrated around the drilling rig in a layer about 3 feet (1 meter) thick.

Chevron said “current estimates place the volume of the oil sheen on the ocean surface to be less than 65 barrels.”

The company said it has 18 ships working on a rotating basis to collect oil off the surface and monitor the slick.

The drilling contractor for the well is Transocean Ltd., the owner of the Deepwater Horizon rig that oil company BP PLC was leasing at the time of last year’s Gulf of Mexico oil spill, the largest in U.S. history and one that dwarfs the Brazilian leak. At its peak, BP’s Macondo well was spewing more 2 million gallons a day.

Chevron said cementing operations were taking place so the well off Brazil is plugged. ANP, Brazil’s national petroleum agency, said in a note on its website that “the first stage of cementing, to permanently abandon the well, was successfully completed.” The regulator said the success of permanently plugging the well would be known “in the coming days.”

ANP also said underwater footage showed that a “residual leakage flow” was continuing, but that “the oil slick continues moving away from the coast and is being dispersed, as desired.”

Fabio Scliar, head of the Federal Police’s environmental affairs division, which is investigating the case, said those responsible would be held accountable.

“There is no doubt that a crime occurred. The spill comes from the drilling activity. What interests me now is to find who is responsible,” Scliar was quoted as saying by the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo.
It’s really serious and we don’t yet know all the consequences.
– Rio state Environment Minister Carlos Minc

The oil is believed to be coming from seep lines in the seafloor near the well and not from the well itself. Natural seeps are common around the world – perhaps the most well known in the U.S. is the La Brea Tar Pits in the heart of Los Angeles – and are often used by oil companies during undersea exploration to determine where a good prospect for oil drilling may be.

Natural seeps are usually so small in volume they don’t cause a nuisance beyond producing the periodic tar ball that washes up on a beach.

But problems with drilling a well nearby can exacerbate the seeps and cause greater flow of oil, which can be hard to control, said George Hirasaki, a Rice University engineering professor who was involved in the Bay Marchand oil containment effort for Shell off Louisiana in the 1970s.

“Anytime there is movement of fluids, even if it didn’t go to the surface of the well, the internal flow could result in the fluid going somewhere else,” Hirasaki said. “It could move laterally at the same depth or increase the flow rate of natural seeps that are connecting to the surface.”

Investigators will want to look at whether the weight of the mud being used during the drilling and abandonment operations was sufficient to contain the pressure inside the well, and they will also want to see whether drilling too deep caused problems in a geopressure zone beneath the seafloor, experts said.

Ed Overton, a Louisiana State University environmental sciences professor, said that to truly control the leak could be difficult.

“If you have this stuff oozing up through the ground you don’t have a mechanism for control,” Overton said. “If something started that to leak, that would worry me a lot more than a leak around the well. You’d have to drill a relief well and intercept that ooze.”

People familiar with last year’s BP oil spill off Louisiana know about relief wells.

BP spent four months drilling a relief well that it used to pump cement under the area that was spewing oil into the Gulf of Mexico, and sealed the leak permanently.

Experts said that while there are many physical differences between the BP spill and the Chevron spill, the main common thread is the slow flow of information and different explanations for what happened and the severity of what happened.

“There’s a pretty long track record of all the people involved in spills underestimating at least initially the size of the spills,” Overton said. “I would suspect they literally don’t know, so they are trying to figure out.”

The Chevron leak is smaller than those Brazil has seen in the past.

In 2000, crude spewed from a broken pipeline at the Reduc refinery in Rio de Janeiro’s scenic Guanabara Bay, spewing at least 344,400 gallons into the water. Just a few months later, more than 1 million gallons of crude burst from a pipeline state-controlled oil company Petrobras into a river in southern Brazil.

Brazil’s worst oil disaster was in 1975, when an oil tanker from Iraq dumped more than 8 million gallons of crude into the bay and caused Rio’s famous beaches to be closed for nearly three weeks.

Based on reporting by The Associated Press.

Read more: http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/news/2011/11/19/major-oil-leak-at-offshore-chevron-site-in-brazil/#ixzz1eCxbBYbg

Special thanks to Richard Charter