This July 17, 2012 photo released by the U.S. Geological Survey shows adult female walruses on an ice flow with young walruses in the Eastern Chukchi Sea, Alaska. A remote plateau on the Arctic Ocean floor, where thousands of Pacific walrus gather to feed and raise pups, has received new protections from the Obama administration that recognize it as a biological hot spot and mark it off-limits to future oil drilling
Shell Oil has received permission from the Bureau of Ocean Management to drill for oil in the Chukchi. What is odd is that Obama just approved a large section of the Chukchi for protection. Any spill of oil will just slosh around in the currents and contaminate the shoal that he preserved anyways.
Hanna Shoal rises from the shallow Chukchi Sea and teems with plankton, clams and marine worms that attract walrus and bearded seals. The remote area lies 80 miles off the state's northwest coast, beyond even sparsely populated subsistence whale hunting towns such as Barrow, the northernmost community in the U.S.
Federal estimates, however, show that the Chukchi and Beaufort seas could hold 26 billion barrels of recoverable oil, and many Alaska leaders are eager to begin drilling in the area to create jobs and fund state government projects and services.
Time reports:
The oil and gas giant still must receive approval from other agencies, but a stamp of approval from the federal BOEM removes what was perhaps the plan’s most significant potential stumbling block.
“We have taken a thoughtful approach to carefully considering potential exploration in the Chukchi Sea,” said BOEM Director Abigail Ross Hopper in a statement. The drilling would be consistent with “high standards for the protection of this critical ecosystem, our Arctic communities, and the subsistence needs and cultural traditions of Alaska Natives,” she said.
This approval comes just a month after
Shell's drill ship Noble Discoverer failed inspection in Honolulu.
Think Progress notes the BOEM rule that is supposed to keep oil out of the delicate Arctic ecosystem.
The proposed rule, which is preliminary and is expected to take at least a year to reach its final version, would for the first time impose specific requirements on oil companies that want to take the plunge into the Arctic’s icy waters. Among those are requirements for companies to have contingency plans for mishaps — companies must be able to “promptly deploy” emergency containment equipment to deal with a spill, and must build a second rig close to their initial operations so a relief well could be drilled in the event of a blowout, among other things.
Only exploratory drilling is covered by the rule, not large-scale production, which is not expected to be approved for another few years. Thirteen percent of the world’s undiscovered oil reserves and 30 percent of its undiscovered gas — up to 160 billion barrels of oil — are thought to be held in the Arctic.
On the one hand, environmentalists are glad that some kind of safety rule has been proposed, but on the other, they are queasy about the prospect of drilling in one of the most environmentally sensitive and isolated areas of the world. One of the loudest criticisms of Arctic drilling is that oil spills there would be notoriously hard to clean — weather conditions are frigid and often unpredictable. In a 2011 report, Canada’s National Energy Board found that even during the warm season, cleanup conditions are not possible about 20 percent of the time in June, 40 percent of the time in August and 65 percent of the time in October.
Please see
zmom's diary on this subject. This news is just maddening.