Big Oil Spills - Northern Exposure

Posted by John Streicker on 7 May 2010 | 0 Comments

On April 20, 2009 the Deepwater Horizon, an offshore drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico operated by BP, caught fire and exploded.

Within two days it had sunk in 1500 meters of water. At that point a subsea well it had been drilling began to pump oil directly into the waters of the Gulf

The resulting spill is already about as large as the Exxon Valdez disaster from 20 years ago. It is expected to hit the coast of Louisiana any day now.

So far, BP has not been able to stem the spill. And worse, it appears they do not know how to contain it quickly.

As an engineer who has worked offshore, including in the Gulf of Mexico, I have been dismayed by this unfolding tragedy. It will take some time to determine the cause of the disaster.

Regardless of whether it turns out to be human error, or design failure or both, one thing is clear. It should never have happened.

What lessons can we learn from this for the North? The first one should be that we are vulnerable.

Offshore oil and gas have been in production in the Beaufort and other parts of Arctic for a couple of decades now. And interest in these resources has been growing lately.

There are two reasons for this. The first is that nearly one quarter of the world's oil and gas is estimated to be in the Arctic.

The second reason is that summer sea ice is melting rapidly - ironically due to greenhouse gas emissions largely from the burning of fossil fuels. Melting ice makes subsea resources more accessible.

Scientists project that the North Pole will be summer sea ice free sometime in the next decade. The opening of the Arctic is what is driving the sovereignty debate and the renewed interest in the North.

Our vulnerability is that Arctic offshore drilling is more challenging than elsewhere. The simple reason is that the cold and the seasonal darkness make it tougher to explore and to go into production.

In particular, if we ever have a significant oil spill in the Arctic, then sea ice (even when it is only seasonal) would make cleanup challenging if not impossible.

And even if Canada has best practices for offshore oil and gas in place, we are still not safe. In the Arctic, large oil spills will end up in Canada.

Trade winds and the Arctic ocean gyre (the large circular current) both work to eventually push sea ice against the Canadian Arctic islands.

This means that any accident off the Alaska North Slope, or in the Russian Arctic will likely result in an oil spill in Canada's waters and on Canada's coastlines.

We need to make sure that our best practices are everybody's best practices. The solution is for an Arctic Council maritime treaty which addresses offshore development, shipping, security, sovereignty, etc.

There are many reasons why Canada and the whole of the Arctic would benefit from collaboration, but I will leave this for another discussion.

For now, we need to make sure that if we have offshore development in the North that we are not cutting any corners. And when we ask industry to take responsibility to protect the environment, we consumers have to value, conserve and pay the fair price for those resources.

Yet even if best practices are in place for any and all resource extraction across the Arctic, it turns out that we in the North are still vulnerable.

Our exposure is to the price of oil itself. Living and working in the North means that we are more dependent on energy.

The fallout from the Gulf accident will be environmental degradation and massive clean-up costs, but it will also likely slow down offshore production. As a result, the price of oil goes up.

The real wake-up call here, is to shift the energy economy. In Canada we talk about clean energy and leading on climate change, but we don't do much of anything.

Last I heard we were waiting on the Americans.

Let's make this the tipping point to a renewable and sustainable future.

After all, when wind turbines fail, the resulting wind spill is not terribly dangerous. Excessive sunshine has never caused any major industrial accidents.