Drilling Shell in Alaska

Shell Offshore, Inc. has green light to drill for oil and natural gas deposits, off the northern coastline of Alaska, in the "environmentally sensitive" Beaufort Sea.

Oct. 22 – Anchorage, ALASKA – U.S. Mineral Management Services (MMS) has given Shell Offshore, Inc. the green light to drill for oil and natural gas deposits about 20 miles off the northern coastline of Alaska, near Point Thomson, in the “environmentally sensitive” Beaufort Sea. The decision made on Monday, Oct. 20, clears the way for Shell to drill for two oil exploration wells, designated Torpedo and Sivulliq respectively, during the July – October 2010 open-water drilling season, when the Arctic Ocean is largely free of sea ice. The drilling operations will be conducted by Frontier Discoverer, a modern drillship retrofitted and ice-reinforced for drilling operations in arctic waters. The Beaufort Sea is estimated to contain 8.22 billion barrels of oil and 27.64 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. Environmentalists condemned U.S. President Barrack Obama’s decision to allow drilling in the Arctic – home of the vulnerable polar bear – saying it would generate industrial levels of noise in the water and pollute both the air and surrounding water. Rebecca Noblin, an Alaskan specialist with the conservation group the Centre for Biological Diversity, said: "We're disappointed to see the Obama administration taking decisions that will threaten the Arctic. It might as well have been the Bush administration." Whit Sheard, the Alaskan expert with the environmental group Pacific Environment, accused the U.S. Department of the Interior of "again trying to implement an overly aggressive Bush-era drilling plan in one of the riskiest areas on the planet to drill". Shell’s permission for drilling exploration in the Beaufort Sea was struck down last year by a U.S. court on grounds that the company had failed to sufficiently consider the impacts their drilling would have on bowhead whales, polar bears, and on the survival activities of the Inuit populations of Alaska. The Inupiat people, or Eskimos, have a native population residing in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Northeast Alaska. Bowhead whales migrate through the Beaufort Sea twice a year and are crucial to the continued existence of the Inuits. To deal with these concerns, Shell has agreed to interrupt its operations halfway through the drilling season to allow for the whaling activity by villagers from Kaktovik and Nuiqsut, according to MMS. Shell’s activities will be completely suspended on Aug. 25, 2010, and the company will remove its vessels from the drilling site during the whale hunts. Once the whaling season is over, Shell will be allowed to return until October, if ice and weather conditions permit. Shell must now satisfy U.S. authorities that it has met air and water quality standards and safeguards for whale protection before it can begin drilling. Chuck Clusen, the director for the National Parks & Alaska Projects at the Natural Resources Defense Council, warned about the risks of an oil spill in Alaska. “The reality of offshore oil drilling is that accidents will happen,” he said. “And when oil spills in Arctic ice, there is no cleaning it up. A blow-out like the one that recently despoiled waters off the coast of Australia would leave oil in the waters off the coast of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for decades, killing whales, seals, fish and birds and turning irreplaceable spawning and feeding grounds into an ecological wasteland.” Dutch Royal Shell is the largest oil company in the world and has been listed as the world’s largest corporation by Fortune Magazine in 2009. In 2008 the conglomerate earned US$458 billion.