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Shell’s Safety System Problems Plague Arctic Plans

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Photo credit: Daquella manera

Safety equipment that Shell Oil volunteered to put into place for drilling off the coast of Alaska is complicating the company’s quest to reach oil-bearing rock during the short open-water drilling season this year.

Royal Dutch Shell PLC announced Monday that a containment dome being tested off the coast of Bellingham, Wash., was damaged Saturday night in its final test. Time needed to repair the damage, on top of delays from ice and waiting for the Alaska Natives’ whaling season to end, figured into a decision to cancel plans to complete exploratory wells this year in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas.

“We can see that we’re better off optimizing this year around top holes and next year drilling into hydrocarbons,” Shell Oil President Marvin Odum told The Associated Press. “That’s the way we get the best out of a multiyear approach.”

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar last month cited Shell’s failure to obtain certification for the Arctic Challenger, the oil spill response barge that will carry the containment dome, as the prime reason the company has not been able to drill into hydrocarbon zones this year.

Shell Alaska spokesman Curtis Smith said Monday the dome is one of several precautions against a major spill.

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Sea Ice Halts Shell Alaska’s Drilling of its Landmark Oil Well in Chukchi Sea

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Photo credit: NASA Goddard

Only a day after Shell Alaska began drilling a landmark offshore oil well in the Arctic, the company was forced on Monday to pull off the well in the face of an approaching ice pack.

With the ice floe about 10 miles away, the Noble Discoverer drilling rig was disconnecting from its seafloor anchor Monday afternoon in the Chukchi Sea, about 70 miles from the northwest coast of Alaska.

Company ice trackers had been carefully monitoring ocean ice and, when the wind direction changed and the ice floe began moving closer, they advised that the rig shut down and disconnect from the well, Shell spokeswoman Kelly op de Weegh told the Los Angeles Times.

Op de Weegh said that the ice floe, 30 miles long and about 10 miles wide, wasn’t an immediate threat but that engineers elected to halt operations as a precaution.

“The Arctic if anything is dynamic,” she said. “That’s why we have the capabilities we have to monitor sea ice, as well as the ability to safely alter our operations.”

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Prepping to fight Shell Oil production: Biologists commence study of Chukchi Sea life

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Photo credit: thomas toohey brown

A group of researchers has embarked on the first comprehensive study of marine life in the eastern Chukchi Sea near Alaska. Their findings will be used by the Department of the Interior to help decide whether to grant future leases for offshore oil exploration and drilling in the region, and to regulate transportation and future fishing.

“We are going up there to look at the oceanography, plankton, fish and crab in the region,” said Michael Sigler, a marine biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s fisheries service in Alaska.

Little baseline data has been collected in the region, which is currently little-trafficked and fished due to its remoteness and its ice-choked waters. As ice cover throughout the Arctic decreases, however, these pursuits are likely to increase.

Although surveys have been conducted in both the Beaufort and Chukchi seas since 1959, U.S. fishery research in the Arctic has been infrequent and limited in scope, according to a statement from NOAA. A similarly comprehensive survey of the northern Bering Sea was not conducted until 2010. [Images: Creatures of the Bering Sea]

The new study is primarily meant to gather data for scientists and to avoid negative impacts of oil exploration in the region, Sigler told OurAmazingPlanet. (Royal Dutch Shell has been granted a lease to drill exploratory wells in the area, and the company hopes to begin in the next few weeks, according to the Reuters news service.)

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