In choppy water under blue sky off Bellingham, Wash., a Shell Oil crew on Monday lowered a "capping stack" 200 feet in the water and put it through maneuvers with underwater robots connected by cable to operators on the surface, a test that fulfilled one of the final steps required for permission to drill exploratory wells in Arctic waters.
The capping stack looks like a giant spark plug and is designed to kill an undersea oil well blowout by providing a metal-to-metal seal on a malfunctioning blowout preventer.
Shell is sending the capping stack, skimmers, boom and a containment dome on board a flotilla accompanying drill ships to Alaska's northern shores as part of a spill response plan that has the blessing of Interior Secretary Ken Salazar. Shell expects final approvals within weeks and drilling by late this month.
But environmental groups contend the government has it wrong. Despite reforms put in place after the Deepwater Horizon blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, their basic objections remain. Shell has vastly overstated its ability to respond to a worst-case scenario spill in open water, said attorney Holly Harris of Earthjustice, and no oil company has demonstrated it can clean up a spill that lingers into the Arctic's eight months of sea ice.
A spill will threaten whales, polar bears, ice seals and walrus plus the Alaska Native subsistence communities that depend on the ocean's bounty, according to environmental groups.
The federal government requires a spill response plan to show how the drilling company will clean up a worst-case discharge in adverse weather. Shell's worst case for drilling in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas is a spill of 25,000 barrels per day. Environmental groups have seized on the phrase that for planning the onshore response, "the worst case discharge scenario assumes that 10 percent of the 25,000 barrels per day discharge escapes the primary offshore recovery effort at the blowout."
Said Harris, "If you base a spill plan on the assumption that 90 percent of it is going to be recovered in the open water, and only, quote, 10 percent of the daily discharge is going to escape those cleanup efforts, then you don't have to have as many spill response assets near shore protecting things like coastlines, lagoons and the near-shore environment."
She said "there is no evidence before this agency or anywhere else" that the oil company has come close to having enough boats, enough oil-containing boom or enough people to control 90 per cent of the damage.
Shell Alaska spokesman Curtis Smith said opposition groups are purposely mischaracterizing Shell's oil spill response plan. The plan does not claim Shell can clean up 90 percent of an oil spill, he said.
"We say in our plan we expect to 'encounter' 90 percent of any discharge on site â€" very close to the drilling rig," he said. "We expect to encounter 5 percent near-shore between the drilling rig and the coast. And we expect to encounter another 5 percent on shore. We never make claims about the percent we could actually recover, because conditions vary, of course."
The Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement signed off on Shell's response plan in February. At a news teleconference Tuesday, when asked about the 90 percent claim included in Shell's response plan, Salazar did not answer directly but put his faith in federal on-site inspectors.
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