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U.S. Coast Guard via AP
A Royal Dutch Shell drilling rig is stranded off a small island near Kodiak Island on Jan. 1. No leak has been seen from the drilling ship that grounded off the island during a storm, officials said, as opponents criticized the growing race to explore the Arctic for energy resources.
ANCHORAGE, Alaska - Calls for federal scrutiny of Royal Dutch Shell PLC drilling operations in Arctic waters swelled Thursday with a request for a formal investigation by members of Congress.
The House Sustainable Energy and Environment Coalition called on the Interior Department and the Coast Guard to jointly investigate it the New Year's Eve grounding of the Shell drill vessel Kulluk on a Gulf of Alaska island during a storm, and a previous incident connected to Arctic offshore drilling operations in 2012.
The coalition is made up of 45 House Democrats.
"The recent grounding of Shell's Kulluk oil rig amplifies the risks of drilling in the Arctic," they said in a joint statement. "This is the latest in a series of alarming blunders, including the near-grounding of another of Shell's Arctic drilling rigs, the 47-year-old Noble Discoverer, in Dutch Harbor and the failure of its blowout containment dome, the Arctic Challenger, in lake-like conditions."
The coalition believes these "serious incidents" warrant thorough investigation, the statement said.
Shell Alaska spokesman Curtis Smith said in an email that the company is in full support of, and is providing resources for, the investigation of the grounding by the Unified Incident Command, made up of federal, state and company representatives. Smith said the findings will be available to the public.
The Kulluk remains upright and intact along the shore of Sitkalidak Island, which is near the larger Kodiak Island. Coast Guard Capt. Paul Mehler flew over the vessel Wednesday and saw no indication of a fuel leak.
Previous report: Salvage crew boards grounded drilling rig in Alaska
"There are still no signs of any sheen or environmental impact, and the Kulluk appears to be stable," Mehler said.
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A salvage team aboard the conical drilling unit Kulluk moves lines from an emergency towing system in this U.S. Coast Guard handout photo taken Jan. 2, 2013.
The Kulluk is a non-propelled, 266-foot diameter barge with a reinforced funnel-shaped hull designed to operate in ice. It is carrying more than 140,000 gallons of diesel and about 12,000 gallons of lube oil and hydraulic fluid. Centered on the vessel is a 160-foot derrick. It drilled during the short open-water season in the Beaufort Sea.
A 360-foot anchor handler, the Aiviq, was towing the Kulluk from Dutch Harbor to Seattle last week for maintenance and upgrades when the tow line snapped south of Kodiak. Lines were reattached at least four times but could not be maintained. A lone tugboat still attached Monday night in a vicious storm couldn't control the vessel and cut it loose as it neared land.
Mehler said he saw four lifeboats on the shoreline Wednesday but there was no indication that other debris had been ripped from the ship.
The flyover in rain and 35 mph winds showed a few birds but no marine mammals near the rig, said Steve Russell of the Environmental Conservation Department.
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Also Wednesday, calmer weather allowed five salvage experts to be lowered by helicopter to the barge. They conducted a three-hour structural assessment. Mehler said the assessment team was working with salvage planners but it was too early to speculate on a timeline for moving the vessel.
After the grounding, critics quickly asserted it has foreshadowed what will happen north of the Bering Strait if drilling is allowed.
Environmentalists for years have said conditions are too harsh and the stakes too high to allow industrial development in the Arctic, where drilling sites are 1,000 miles or more from the closest Coast Guard base.
Two national organizations kept up the drumbeat Thursday by calling for a halt to all permitting for Arctic offshore drilling in the wake of the grounding.
"This string of mishaps by Shell makes it crystal clear that we are not ready to drill in the Arctic," said Chuck Clusen of the Natural Resources Defense Council. "Shell is not Arctic-ready. We have lost all faith in Shell, and they certainly don't have any credibility left."
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Lois Epstein, a civil engineer who works for The Wilderness Society in Anchorage, said Shell has made troubling, non-precautionary decisions that put workers and the Coast Guard at risk.
"These ongoing technical and decision-making problems and their enormous associated costs and risks taken by our military personnel once there were problems should lead the federal government to reassess its previous permitting decisions regarding Shell," Epstein said.
In the short term, she said, damage to the Kulluk may prevent it from being ready for the 2013 open water season. Besides drilling in the Beaufort, the barge was supposed to be on hand for drilling a relief well if Shell's drill vessel in the Chukchi Sea, the Noble Discoverer, experienced a wellhead blowout and was damaged, Epstein said.
Shell has maintained it has taken a heads-up approach to anticipating and reacting to problems.
Shell Alaska spokesman Smith said Wednesday the Kulluk had been towed more than 4,000 miles and had previously experienced similar storm conditions. Shell staged additional towing vessels along the route in case there were problems, he said.
"We know how to work in regions like this," Smith said. "Having said that, when flawless execution does not happen, you learn from it, and we will."
Tropical storm force winds and massive winds caused a drilling ship to run ashore near Kodiak, Alaska. KTUU's Adam Pinsker reports.
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Leave a Comment:
A drilling ship being towed is completely different from a drilling ship being properly anchored while staying stationary conducting drilling operations.
Only a "critic" would fail to see the difference.
Just like having your car towed by a tow truck is completely different than having your car parked in your driveway.
You read the article yet you seemed to miss the point. The point being, this a remote region. A very remote region with dangerous weather. If something WERE to happen, just trying to access the area would be far more difficult than any previous disaster we've had.
"We know how to work in regions like this. Having said that, when flawless execution does not happen, you learn from it, and we will."
These executives are vastly overestimating their ability if they think technology can overcome nature, and unfortunately they won't be the only ones to pay for their mistakes should something wrong happen.
I'm an environmental engineer, I mostly work with flooding, but I'll say this - the best we can try to do is mitigate a disaster. Due to budgetary and rational logic we'll only design for certain events (say a 100 year storm), if nature decides to throw a 500 year event at us we're so badly screwed you can't even imagine. Logically speaking, Shell's billions will only protect them to a certain extent. If an accident that would have cost hundreds of billions to prevent were to happen, they're screwed.
yes, safely parked in your driveway; Just like the BP / deepwater horizon oil spill rig was parked in ITS driveway.
only a "denier" would fail to see the similarity.
how many oil spots are in YOUR driveway ecokiller?
[perhaps an enviro engineer could comment on the amount of petrol runoff from driveways and roads; it ain't good.]
You can't wrap yourself in bubble wrap and hide from the world.
And yes, only a critic would take this event and blow it up to epic proportions.
"the best we can try to do is mitigate a disaster." Correct, that is all you can do. That goes for your home, business, family, etc... that pertains to everything. Disasters will happen no matter what precautions are taken. This doesn't mean you should stop trying.
What kind of retard logic is that? You act as if oil is our only option, you do realize it's a FINITE resource that WILL run out? Of course though, let's satiate your hunger and put an entire ecosystem at risk.
This isn't a case of wrapping yourself in bubble wrap and hiding, it's a case of of going to a casino and testing your luck. The difference of course being you aren't the only one that gets to enjoy the failure of greed.
The fact that you just used my flood comparison of where WE LIVE to a purely optional venture to the arctic just shows your ignorance.
Yes, Smith, you and your company can "learn" from it and move on to another area of the world while you leave your learning ground defiled and useless to the wildlife and the indigenous People who depend on it for survival. No big, huh?
How many places around the globe have we "learned" from? Where we tested the atom bomb? The nuclear bomb? Chemical pesticides? Asbestos? Agent Orange? The Gulf of Mexico? The Florida Wetlands?
Environmental resources, as Alex Le stated, are FINITE.
No! This is NOT on-the-job training, and we DO NOT want to give you the opportunity to learn a lesson from your ineptitude at the expense of the wilderness and wildlife!!
DON'T buy Shell products!
This is about our values as a society. Do we want to preserve our ecosystems for posterity or do we want to exploit a highly-developed energy source to power our society today?
Your answer may vary, of course, but I'd rather put our resources into developing power sources we can live with indefinitely instead of raping the wilderness for every last drop of oil.
I agree. Start building more nuclear power plants immediately.
Hydroelectric is the way to go.
Every energy resource has some draw backs.
I think hydroelectric is the best possible answer and the cleanest answer.
Hydro is nice, but I think we've dammed all the viable places. The Colorado already doesn't reach the sea. I'm all for more nuclear.
Until we figure out how to deal with the waste, nuclear is not a viable option. We have been lucky, so far, but disasters can happen with nuclear plants too. How many Fukushimas will it take?
We have figured out how to deal with the waste. There are a variety of Gen IV reactor types that not only produce less waste, but can reuse the same waste for decades. A breeder reactor will even make more fuel than goes in. These technologies aren't ready yet (est. 2030), but they could be if we funded them properly.
Breeder reactors are available, have been since the 70's. A whole lot of NIMBY, plus some serious deficiencies in the actual implementation which caused significant problems in waste management, led to the shutdown of the program.
Gen IV reactors would be nice. Even nicer would be a fully-operational fusion plant. And we're closer to that than you think. Look up "polywell fusion" and read on.
I live by a river and to my knowledge there are at least two hydro plants just sitting there not being used 3,000,000 KWH per dam
Yeah, and Apollo 13 showed us the folly of space travel. It's a good thing we never went back there or anything.
Good point. Still, it is well-known that being a test pilot or an astronaut is a very high risk occupation, and a failure in the Apollo program jeopardized only the lives of astronauts who had already fully accepted the extrordinarily high risks associated with their job. A failure of a coastal energy exploration jeopardizes not only massive stretches of ocean and coast but also the lives of the general population living along the coast who, unlike astronauts, have not come to the conclusion that the high risk of the activity is justified by any potential benefits from it, and have not agreed to put their lives on the line for it.
Space exploration doesn't damn an entire ecosystem for DECADES if it fails. That's a retarded comparison.
the thing i don't understand is what happens if they strike oil? wouldn't that technically be an oil spill? i don't pretend to be an expert... i simply do not understand how they prevent the oil from contaminating the water
....
The oil is prevented from gushing out of the well by high-pressure fluid (they call it "mud", but it's a lot more complicated than just wet dirt) pumped down the hole by the rig. It pushes up, you push down just as hard.
If the oil companies were required to carry insurance for ALL of the the costs of an accident, it would be less of an issue because the costs of a cleanup would be carried by the insurance companies.
The problem with the Exxon Valdez and the BP Horizon spills was that the owners in those disasters were held responsible for only a fraction of the costs. The bulk was paid by the US taxpayers. The law was created this way in order to encourage companies to operate in remote regions. Perhaps this was to create "energy independence".
Perhaps this was to create "political contributions".
there, fixed that for ya mate.
No. You are missing the point, which is that there was a spill at all. It doesn't matter how much insurance they provide if they can't clean up the spill to the point they put the environment back to the way it was... which, of course, they can't. THAT is the problem.
It's not a question of "IF" it will happen it's when. There will be a spill at some point for sure. Real question is do we accept the risk or not? They're all cocky while trying to convince the people they know what they're doing.. Till nature proves them wrong and we force them to admit they're mistake.
I wonder if all these critics who want to stop drilling for oil because of a potential spill are also in favor of shutting off all natural gas supplies because the occasional pipe explodes.
I bet they also never use a laptop. After all, it's not IF a battery will overheat and burn down your home, it's WHEN.
Denver - Sorry, but, I find that to be a ridiculous comparison; similar to comparing concerns over the failure of safety procedures at 3 Mile Island to wanting to shut down power generation plants of any kind. Stopping drilling in the extreme arctic until we are at a point where we can effectively handle problems that could arise is a far cry from wanting to stop all drilling period.
The gulf spill shows how ill-prepared the oil companies are in dealing with unexpected problems when drilling in new frontiers where we are pushing our capabilities. Methods of dealing with the problems were being developed on the fly - instead of contingencies having been planned for in advance. That is not even touching the problem of shortcuts having been taken in the first place. This is unacceptable. One can only imagine how much harder the Gulf spill problem would have been to solve had the area been covered in thick sea ice, sub-zero temps, and any number of other variables that exist in the Arctic. Flying by the seat of your pants - after a problem has occurred - is just not going to cut it.
Experience allows us to define what problems can be expected and which are likely to be remote; but, experience in one type of situation is not necessarily going to transfer to another as we venture into ever more extreme conditions and remote areas. Even if a possible problem is unlikely to occur, that does not excuse the failure to develop contingency plans and basic guidelines to deal with them; nor does it excuse the lack of the basic capabilities necessary to gather and mobilize resources to address unforeseen problems. Calling in Red Adair's group as an afterthought is not acceptable.
There are a variety of reasons why people may not want drilling in sensitive environments and/or places subject to extreme conditions. Not everyone is a total "never drill in the Arctic" extremist. There are many who feel that drilling would be fine once concerns are addressed and the oil companies have shown themselves capable and responsible enough to adequately plan for and deal with the unexpected in these remote and extreme environments. There are a lot of people who feel that the the oil industry just hasn't given sufficient reason to put much hope in that; and until they do, I'll have to side with the extremists.
No leak since it hasn't started drilling ..yet !
The concern is leakage from the 150,000 gallons of diesel and 10,000 gallons of hydraulic fluid on board; the same concern when any shipwreck grounds itself on a pristine (and impossible to protect/cleanup) shoreline.
They are not drilling tard.
Of particular concern to me was the repeated inability to maintain the connection of the tow lines.
Ban cars and we can stop drilling.
Buy a horse.
Horses don't poo-lute .. right!
I agreee! Buy a horse.
@ warren... the pollution caused by a horse can be recycled into fertilizer; it is the best on the market for gardens and lawns.
On a lot of these issues, I'm usually very middle of the road - I get both sides and agree with each to an extent. But even I have to say Shell's spokesman (and by extent, the company) seems overconfident, almost brash and cocky. It's possible critics are making more out of this situation than it is, but based on this article (which, admittedly, seems skewed) I'd be worried that the company isn't taking the rigors of drilling in these areas seriously.
What about the Northstar Project up in Prudhoe Bay? 1999 - 2000. The first ever submerged Arctic Pipeline. Built by BP and a handful of great contractors. 6 miles of submerged oil and gas injection pipeline under the Beaufort Sea. From McKenzie Point to man made Seal Island and thirty miles of related onshore pipeline to Pump Station 1. I was there. It was a great project. I haven’t heard of any problems. Has anybody heard anything?
No. I worked the Northstar project too. Hated the chopper rides. Most of these clowns are lower 48 dolts who don't know jack. Ignore them
Either we drill or the soviets and chinese will drill. Im sick of these liberals trying to kill our country.
...I guess that, when you have no good argument or rationale, "everyone else is doing it" is always a good fallback that is hard to argue with. ...Kids figure out how to use that one real early in life, and it seems to work a good deal of the time.
I'm tired of fanatics on both sides trying to kill our country.
More than 90 percent of its general fund revenue comes from oil earnings.
Did the the word "socialism" get removed from the special edition of the "Alaska Only Dictionary"
You don't think any other resource rich state gets royalties from extraction?
Hey Palin...!!! Did you mean to say "spill baby spill". If these companies go on with this I wonder what Alaska will look like in fifty years...the polar bears, the carribou, the whales.. the beautiful bays...I am sixty five...glad I won't be around to see it.
Thank goodness
In time, our need for oil will raise over any concerns.... Wait for it....!!
Drill baby drill, right Sarah.....you corn fed, hog %#@$*&% dolt!
Well, a lot of people here are VERY MISINFORMED.
Let's start with the idea that Shell Does Not Have a plan submitted to the U.S. for cleaning up any spills. This was just stamped through.
Shell Does Not Have the equipment necessary should a spill occur.
And after watching what Shell has done to Ecuador and Nigeria, as soon as they plant the First drill down, It Is GAME OVER. I have been all over this issue for the past 2 1/2 yrs. now. It's been a long fight and we thought we had won, but we got screwed over.
Who are we? Just about every enviromental group under the sun. You name them, we've got them. I've signed onto at least 100 petitions about this. It hasn't been a secret, but it's been a David & Goliath legal hell ultimately overturned and betrayed. This was NOT supposed to happen!
It just a matter of dollars and cents. No one was duly punished for any of the huge oil spills that have occured ANYWHERE. No one has done a day of jail time and the fines doled out are just an operating expense.
I don't give a sh*t what insurance company gets the contract. Exxon had insurance and as late as 2006 when I visited, there is STILL a bathtub ring of greasy oil around the bay up there.
Whose Friggin' government is it anyway?
And your source is? or are we suppose to take your word for it?
That's pretty funny...
Drilling in the Arctic wasn't the issue. Towing this rig across the Gulf of Alaska in the dead of winter is the issue. Very dangerous water. Should have stayed in Dutch Harbor and performed the maint there. All the libbies , get on your bikes and stfu.
Anybody see how bad the ocean is where Russia drills? It's pretty bad, much worse than the Gulf of Mexico spill. It really should be the Russian operations that should make the news, at least our companies try to make it look like they try to be safe.
Mr. Nick - Our companies? You are seriously misinformed. Shell - aka Royal Dutch Shell and BP - aka British Petroleum.