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Post by kaima on Dec 5, 2011 10:01:08 GMT -7
We talked about drilling in the Arctic after the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. We are getting closer to drilling in the Arctic, and the Alaskan newspapers are starting to look at Shell Oil's performance in protecting the environment:
Spills, violence follow Shell Oil in Nigeria
By LISA DEMER Anchorage Daily News
Published: December 4th, 2011 10:52 PM Last Modified: December 4th, 2011 10:53 PM
Second of three parts
Ask almost any environmental activist about Shell and he'll point to Nigeria, in West Africa.
Environmentalists say decades of oil production have left the Niger Delta one of the most polluted regions in the world. Shell is Nigeria's biggest operator, with more than 50 years of oil production there, and it's a main target of activists' wrath.
The political and social situation there is far more complex than anything Shell will encounter in Alaska.
Shell maintains that sabotage by rebels and spills from oil thieves drilling into pipelines or opening wells are mainly to blame for the pollution. Some areas of the country are so violent it's difficult to safely reach the infrastructure for repairs, Shell says.
Other assessments say aging and neglected equipment, substandard practices and insufficient cleanup efforts are also factors.
Rick Steiner is a former University of Alaska Fairbanks professor and marine conservation biologist who has been to Nigeria five or six times to study oil pollution there. He is a long-time oil industry watchdog who has criticized Shell's operations and practices in Russia, Nigeria and Alaska. He resigned his UAF post in 2009 after he publicly criticized Shell sponsorship of a university forum on oil drilling and fishing in Bristol Bay, and the university cut off his federal funding.
Nigerians have seen their land, drinking water and fishing grounds ruined, but haven't shared in the huge oil profits taken in by both the oil producers and the Nigerian government, Steiner said.
Shell's Nigerian operations in shallow water and onshore are through Shell Petroleum Development Company. The Nigerian government owns a 55 percent stake in the joint venture, while Shell owns 30 percent and two smaller companies own the rest.
A group of conservationists, including Steiner, and the Nigerian Ministry of Environment concluded in 2006 that the equivalent of an Exxon Valdez volume of oil spilled every year in the Niger Delta. Much of it was from old, corroded and poorly maintained pipelines, according to the report for the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.
"The environmental degradation and economic mismanagement feeds the social and economic despair in the region, and thus continues to manifest in epidemic violence and social unrest," Steiner wrote in December 2006 in a request that the United Nations lead a restoration effort.
The United Nations undertook a study of oil pollution in one troubled area, Nigeria's Ogoniland region, that wrapped up in August.
The cost of cleanup will be at least $1 billion and will take 30 years from the time ongoing pollution is stopped, the United Nation's new report on the effect of oil pollution in Ogoniland concludes.
EXECUTIONS IN AFRICA
Local activists drew world attention on the region in the early '90s. One Ogoni leader, Ken Saro-Wiwa, criticized Shell for its environmental practices and the Nigerian government for failing to enforce its own laws, and organized others. He led a protest march in early 1993 that drew a crowd estimated at 300,000, according to various published reports.
That year, Shell abruptly pulled out of Ogoniland, essentially abandoning its facilities, the U.N. report says.
Two years later, Saro-Wiwa and eight others were executed in what activists called "judicial murder." Their families sued Shell in the United States, and in 2009 Shell settled for $15.5 million. The company said the money was a compassionate payment, and it was time to move on.
"Shell leaders were as shocked as any others of the brutality around these executions. The Shell global CEO at the time even asked for clemency for the accused when we were informed that they had received death penalties," Shell said in a written response to Daily News questions.
Some critics say Shell was not just a corporate bystander to the violence.
A new report by Platform, a London-based social and ecological justice group, contends that in the early 1990s Shell funded government attacks against peaceful protestors in the Ogoni region and that its security forces have continued to brutalize innocent citizens.
"While primary responsibility for human rights violations falls on the Nigerian government and other perpetrators, Shell has played an active role in fueling conflict and violence in a variety of forms," the Platform report said.
Shell said the Nigerian federal government -- as majority owner of the oil production facilities -- oversees the military units that provide much of the security.
"Suggestions in the report that SPDC (Shell Petroleum Development Co.) directs or controls military activities are therefore completely untrue," Shell said in response to Daily News questions.
Platform said that since the crisis in the Ogoni region, Shell has distanced itself from major military operations. But the company still funds its own private security force, its report said.
Some of the case studies in the Platform report are inaccurate or unsubstantiated, and the report obscures the company's good work, Shell said.
"However, we will carefully examine its recommendations and look forward to continuing a constructive dialogue with the Nigerian government and other stakeholders to find solutions to these issues," Shell said.
MASSIVE THEFTS OF CRUDE
By Shell's calculation, interference by rebels and pirates accounts for 70 percent of all oil spilled in the last five years. Sometimes thieves haul crude to makeshift refineries in open boats that look like overloaded, oversized canoes trailing a rainbow sheen.
Shell says its oil production elsewhere in Nigeria has generated $35 billion over the last five years in taxes, royalties and direct revenue to the government, an onshore oil field partner. It has put millions more into health care, agriculture, education and micro-business programs.
But people remain poor and are upset with the government over their situation, Shell says.
"The unrest has turned into a worrying criminal movement, which feeds on massive thefts of crude oil," Shell said.
Pipelines carrying oil produced elsewhere in Nigeria still run through Ogoniland and aren't adequately maintained by Shell, the 262-page U.N. Environment Programme report said. The company didn't properly decommission all its oil infrastructure when it bailed out, the report said.
Some wellheads can be easily accessed by thieves. Formation pressure, corrosion and illegal tapping can cause wells to blow out. The U.N. team witnessed a raging fire at a blown-out well that burned for a month.
Oil pollution in Ogoniland is widespread and creating numerous hazards to human health, the report concluded. Spills were happening regularly, they weren't immediately addressed, and cleanup equipment too often was in poor condition and ineffective, the report said.
The U.N. says the $10 million study was paid for by a venture that includes Shell and the government of Nigeria, among others.
The study did not attempt to quantify how much oil spilled, and seemed to put more blame on theft and sabotage than on poor oil company practices, Steiner said.
The U.N. team didn't favor Shell, said Nairobi-based U.N. spokesman Nick Nuttall.
Whether anyone could come up with an accurate figure of spills over 50 years is questionable, he said. Researchers tried to identify hot spots where urgent attention is needed and create a "balanced, scientific baseline upon which the communities, authorities and government can build a response for the sake of the people of Ogoniland."
Shell said it's working to address the issues identified by the U.N.
LAWSUITS
Shell acknowledges it was responsible for two 2008 spills from a major pipeline, one from corrosion and the other from a defective weld. Steiner, who is working as an expert witness for the local community suing Shell in London over those spills, traveled to the region this past summer and said much of the oil has yet to be cleaned up. He said oil seeped for five months.
Shell says security concerns delayed its response but that it didn't take five months. In the case of the second spill, discovered in December 2008, a joint investigative team that included Shell, security forces and representatives of various government agencies reached the site in February 2009, Shell said.
The primary cleanup was done by December 2009, Shell said, but before that could be verified, there were additional spills, not related to pipeline operational issues.
In October, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear a case against Royal Dutch Shell brought by another group from Ogoniland who allege Shell was complicit in human rights abuses from 1992 to 1995. The issue before the court is whether corporations can be held liable under a 1789 U.S. law for human rights abuses overseas.
Shell's pipeline maintenance practices fall far short of international best practices and Nigerian law, Steiner said.
Shell disputes Steiner's characterization. The company says it suspends production when leaks are discovered and works to contain spills. Tides in mangrove swamps can quickly spread even small amounts of oil, Shell said.
If oil production cannot be done safely, it shouldn't be done at all, Steiner responded. Shell should be doing better surveillance in areas where thieves are known to regularly siphon oil and should be using the latest leak detection technology, he said.
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Post by kaima on Dec 5, 2011 10:06:21 GMT -7
and what is being done today, and what is risked ....
Shell gambles billions in Arctic Alaska push
By LISA DEMER Anchorage Daily News
Published: December 4th, 2011 09:32 PM Last Modified: December 4th, 2011 09:33 PM
NEW ORLEANS -- Standing in front of a brightly colored, 3-D image of the geology far below the floor of the Chukchi Sea, Steve Phelps pointed to the "giant opportunity" that has prompted Shell Oil to pour billions of dollars into the Alaska Arctic.
"Burger -- that's the name you are going to get to know," Phelps recently told reporters gathered here to learn about the huge oil company's plans and promises for Alaska.
Phelps is Shell's Alaska exploration manager, a geologist whose job it is to find big oil. The Burger field, part of a Shell naming theme that revolved around junk food, has been eyed by various oil companies for years. But it's more than 70 miles offshore in the Chukchi Sea -- between Siberia and the northwest coast of Alaska -- and until recently was thought to be too expensive to develop. Now Shell -- for the second time -- holds the leases.
Armed with promising new seismic science, a sort of undersea sonogram of the earth's belly, the Dutch company says Burger is a signature find. It's the spark for ramping up controversial efforts to drill off the northernmost coast of the U.S. in some of the most extreme conditions on Earth.
"This is the stuff that most of the world was finding in the 1930s, the 1950s, the 1960s, in places like Saudi Arabia and the Middle East, Nigeria," Phelps said. "This one potential resource far outweighs any single field we've got in the Americas' portfolio."
More than in the Gulf of Mexico, where drilling rigs checker the ocean and Shell led the way into deep-water zones that produce more oil than anyone predicted.
More than in Brazil, where Shell is the second biggest oil producer after the state energy company.
More than in Canada, where Shell is investing billions to extract thick, sticky crude from tar sands.
As a result, Shell is at the center of a classic Alaska development battle, gearing up to explore for oil as it confronts ever-higher regulatory hurdles and court challenges by environmentalists who say a big Arctic oil spill would be a disaster.
So far, Shell has spent nearly $4 billion on leases, groundwork and specialized equipment, including a new icebreaker being built in Louisiana.
At stake are billions in oil income and the reputation of a corporation that promotes a culture of safety but has been tarnished by troubles overseas.
A MIXED RECORD
In a sense, Shell is an old Alaska hand. Back in the 1960s, the company was the first to produce oil in Cook Inlet waters, where it had to engineer platforms able to withstand harsh winters and severe tides. Some of those platforms still produce today. But Shell sold those interests in the late 1990s, after their heyday.
Shell was an early explorer off Alaska's northern coast in the Arctic, but walked away from those leases in the 1990s. The company missed out on Prudhoe Bay, the most productive oil field in the U.S.
So to many Alaskans today, Shell is an unknown quantity.
What can Alaskans expect from Royal Dutch Shell? After more than 100 years of oil exploration around the world, what is its reputation and record?
Shell executives and scientists talk about its technological know-how and commitment to prudent operations above all. The company's installations withstand 100-foot waves in the North Sea. Shell facilities produce in freezing temperatures offshore from Russia's Sakhalin Island. One of its Gulf of Mexico platforms sits in water eight times deeper than the Eiffel Tower is tall -- a deep-water record.
Shell says it has never had a significant spill or incident in 30 years of leading-edge work in deep water, which is inherently more risky because of the high pressures.
"Planning the right well and then drilling the well right," is how Shell managers put it time and again.
Shell's Alaska leases are all in relatively shallow water, no deeper than 150 feet. If its prospects hold the vast amounts of oil that Shell hopes, it plans to build miles of subsea pipelines to transport the crude to shore, then more pipeline on land to get it into the trans-Alaska pipeline.
"Our goal is zero harm to the environment. Zero harm to people. Safety is ingrained in every ounce of the business that we do," said David Lawrence, Shell's executive vice president of exploration and commercial development.
Shell expects employees to intervene if they even suspect something is going wrong, executives said. No gain is worth rushing a project at the expense of safety, they say.
"I'm not paid enough to take those risks. I won't take those risks. I won't let people who work for me take those risks," said Pete Slaiby, Shell's vice president for Alaska. Like many of the company's executives, Slaiby has spent his whole career with Shell in spots all around the world.
The company has a long history of competent work in the Gulf of Mexico, and will tap into the same expertise for Alaska, executives said.
But Shell's record is not unblemished. There have been spills and environmental violations, according to critics, government records and news accounts.
In the Third World oil regime of Nigeria, the company has been accused of serious spills, human rights abuses and missteps that contributed to violence and the deaths of agitators there.
Shell is no different from other major oil producers in its relentless pursuit of profits and commitment to stockholders, critics say.
To industry watchers, Shell's performance in challenging offshore operations is good, but not perfect.
"They are one of the industry's most credible offshore operators, bar none, with a very long track record," said Mark Gilman, a New York oil analyst with The Benchmark Co.
"It's not an unblemished track record. But then again, in the industry, virtually no one's track record is unblemished, either financially or environmentally."
One former top engineer for Shell who went on to become a famous academic and expert on risk says it's up to government regulators to keep a close eye on oil company operations.
Even after BP's Deepwater Horizon blowout last year in the Gulf of Mexico, U.S. regulation still trails countries like Norway and the United Kingdom, said Robert Bea, the former Shell engineer and retired University of California Berkeley engineering professor.
Everyone with oil and gas interests in the high Arctic will be watching.
"If we do this one right . . . resource development can continue," and Shell will be justly proud, Bea said. "But if we do it wrong, we're going to be -- I'll call it sorry -- for a long time."
BIG PLAYER DOWN SOUTH
In Louisiana, Shell has made a name for itself as both an industry pioneer and savvy corporate citizen.
After Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005, organizers of the treasured Jazz Fest didn't think they could pull it off that next year. In stepped Shell.
The event is now known as the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Fest Presented by Shell, sponsorship that has met with mixed reaction.
"Some people are just absolutely offended by it. I know people haven't been to Jazz Fest since that happened. Some people are very thankful. They go, 'Oh, they saved Jazz Fest,' " said Aaron Viles, deputy director of the Gulf Restoration Network, a 17-year-old environmental advocacy organization.
Shell is No. 1 in employee contributions to the United Way in Southeast Louisiana; company executive John Hollowell is chairing this year's fundraising campaign there.
One Shell Square, its 51-story skyscraper in the heart of downtown New Orleans, is Louisiana's tallest building, a cousin to its U.S. headquarters in Houston.
If Shell gets to move ahead with its plans for the Arctic, the company expects to build an Alaska headquarters in Anchorage.
"In one very significant way, that is what success looks like," said Curtis Smith, a spokesman for Shell in Alaska.
The 65 or so Shell employees already here work out of two floors in the Frontier Building in Midtown. Just recently, one of its New Orleans-based contractors, Superior Energy Services, signed a five-year lease on part of the Daily News building in East Anchorage.
When other oil companies moved their Gulf operational headquarters out of downtown New Orleans, Shell stayed.
"Here in New Orleans, they're a much admired company," said Eric Smith, a Tulane University professor and associate director of the business school's Energy Institute. "They've been here as long as there's been oil around here."
And they're the oil company others learn from. Literally.
"They have pioneered all the development of deep-water (wells) in the area," Eric Smith said.
When Shell and BP joined up years ago on a deep-water Gulf of Mexico platform, Shell was the operator.
"BP went to school on Shell," Smith said.
Shell's training center near here -- with classes in drilling, production, safety, electronics and more -- is open to its competitors. The facility served as an initial base of operations during the Deepwater Horizon crisis.
The blowout on BP's Macondo prospect, involving the Deepwater Horizon rig, killed 11 workers and spewed millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.
Shell's chief well scientist, Charlie Williams, was a top adviser to the Deepwater Horizon incident commander. Williams is now board chairman of the new Center for Offshore Safety, an industry-led group that will help oil companies comply with tougher requirements, some of them mirroring what Shell already does.
Shell had a disastrous Gulf of Mexico well blowout and fire, too, back in 1970 in the Bay Marchand field, which was offshore though not in deep water.
Four men were killed; 2.2 million gallons of oil leaked into the Gulf over a number of months; 10 relief wells were drilled.
The spill was Shell's worst ever. As with the Deepwater Horizon, things went wrong in ways no one expected and people made mistakes.
Bea, who worked as a Shell engineer in the 1960s and '70s, helped design the multiwell platform in the Bay Marchand field.
"Something overcame Shell. I'll call it the drive to make money," Bea said.
Still, Shell learned and became more cautious after system failures, including that one, he said.
"Overall in terms of industry and being able to handle these kinds of complex systems -- and I include the arctic environment in those systems -- Shell is among the best in the world," Bea said.
TALE OF TWO ENCOUNTERS
In the mid-2000s, Shell planned to build a liquefied natural gas terminal offshore in the Gulf of Mexico. The terminal was designed to suck up hundreds of millions of gallons of sea water a day in the process of warming and vaporizing the super-chilled liquid gas. Eggs and larva in the water would have been killed.
Environmentalists mobilized against the "open loop" design. A group went to The Hague in the Netherlands to protest at a Shell shareholder meeting. Others railed about different issues, including Shell's troubles in Nigeria. People waved signs. Protesters took to the mic. As Viles, the activist with the Gulf Restoration Network, remembers it, Shell let them all vent.
About the same time, Greenpeace activists were going after Exxon at its annual meeting in Dallas.
"My friends from Greenpeace were getting arrested and Shell was greeting us with coffee and chocolate and inviting us to stay after the meeting to drink Heineken at the bar with their executives," Viles said.
It wasn't just to smooth things over -- Shell wanted to hear what they had to say, he said.
Ultimately, Shell dropped the project. An executive flew to New Orleans to tell the environmental opposition before announcing the decision publicly.
But in a different case, according to Viles, Shell flubbed it.
A large coalition of environmentalists, fishermen, corporate watchdogs and others -- including some Alaskans -- confronted Shell in 2008 about a growing and expensive problem: the rapid loss of wetlands in coastal Louisiana. Scientists have found that dredging for oil and gas pipelines was one of the chief contributors to the loss, the group, led by the Gulf Restoration Network, said in a November 2008 letter.
"Shell, we are asking you to act to restore the wetlands that have been damaged due to your oil and gas exploration and development in Louisiana," the group said. It wanted Shell to pay up to $362 million for restoration efforts.
Shell replied with a form letter.
"Thank you for your recent inquiry requesting our financial support," the "Dear Applicant" denial said. "Your inquiry, unfortunately, falls outside the scope of our current guidelines for grant-making."
Viles said he followed up with Shell, but didn't get much more of a response.
Meanwhile, Shell has its name as world sponsor on an effort called America's Wetland Foundation. The initiative, which includes a variety of businesses and environmental groups, puts attention on problems arising from the loss of Mississippi River Delta wetlands and advocates for solutions.
The group supports federal funding for restoration of the wetlands.
ENVIRONMENTAL RECORD
Shell executives stress that the company has a history of operating safely in Alaska.
The company drilled four exploration wells in the Chukchi Sea and 15 in the Beaufort; it was the biggest player in the frigid north in the 1980s and early '90s.
While there were some small spills of fuels and crude, almost all of it was cleaned up, according to a federal environmental assessment of Shell's current plans. There was no big spill, no blown out well, no environmental disaster.
In the late 1990s, with the price of oil less than $10 a barrel and the cost of building platforms and pipelines in the remote Arctic high, Shell walked away from its leases.
In federal waters offshore in the Gulf of Mexico, Shell has had 22 spills of at least 2,100 gallons of oil, drilling mud, fuels or chemicals between 2000 and 2010, according to an analysis of statistics kept by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement.
That's two fewer than BP and three more than Chevron, the other big operator there.
Shell's work in Cook Inlet in the 1990s generated sharp complaints from environmentalists over its handling of wastewater generated on its platforms.
The company was able to settle the complaints in part by paying into a fund for the creation of Cook Inletkeeper, an environmental watchdog group. Shell's share of the blame, as measured by the settlement, was a relatively small $48,000.
Marathon and Unocal, two other big operators of oil and gas platforms in Cook Inlet at the time, split the bulk of the $895,000 for Cook Inletkeeper's creation, according to an agreement filed in court. The three companies also paid a combined $194,000 in federal civil penalties under the deal.
Shell had a reputation as a good performer overall, said Mark MacIntyre, a spokesman for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which brought its own claims against the operators and helped negotiate the settlement.
Shell maintains that the allegations were exaggerated. The producers changed some practices and moved on, said Curtis Smith, the Shell spokesman for Alaska. The continued strong salmon runs in Cook Inlet illustrate its health, he said.
But environmentalists said the case reflects on Shell.
"There were definitely discharges of toxic substances," said Pam Miller, a former Greenpeace research biologist who now heads Alaska Community Action on Toxics.
In the U.K., Shell is drawing fresh scrutiny after an August pipeline leak that ranks as the biggest North Sea spill in a decade. A pipeline from a Shell platform 110 miles off the coast of Aberdeen, Scotland, leaked about 55,000 gallons of oil.
The case grabbed headlines around the world. The spill "tarnished Britain's reputation for avoiding such problems," The New York Times reported.
"They cannot come into Alaska and pretend they have an impeccable record," said Rick Steiner, a marine conservation biologist and former University of Alaska professor who has watched Shell for years, especially in Nigeria.
Although it did inform regulators, Shell did not tell the public about the North Sea spill for two days. Environmentalists accused Shell of trying to keep it hush-hush.
Shell says it wanted to understand the problem first, but some executives agree that holding back was a mistake.
"If it were my operation, we would have done it immediately," said Slaiby, Shell's vice president for Alaska.
Efforts to stop the North Sea spill were complicated by subsea conditions on an old pipe surrounded by marine growth. After the sheen was spotted from the air, the well was shut in and the line depressurized, Shell said. But a relief valve opened to release the pressure failed to re-close completely and a small amount of oil continued to seep. The oil stopped leaking after divers closed the valve, nine days after the spill began.
At any rate, Shell says the well was never out of control and that oil ultimately was trapped between two points in the pipeline as intended.
"Shell transports over two billion barrels of oil and gas through sub-sea pipelines annually and we expect every ounce of that oil to reach its intended destination," Shell said in a written response to questions from the Daily News. When it doesn't, the company is fully responsible for cleaning it up, Shell said.
The company insists the North Sea incident doesn't foretell what might happen in the Alaska Arctic.
'A SAFETY CULTURE'
Shell set its sights anew on Alaska in 2005, buying up leases in the Beaufort Sea and expanding its holdings there two years later.
Then, in 2008, Shell left no doubt it wanted to be a major player, paying $2.1 billion to the federal government for Chukchi leases the second time around. Now it owns the rights to more than 2 million acres in the seas off Alaska's northern coast, far more than any other explorer.
But it has not yet been able to drill. It still needs additional permits. Environmental organizations, with support from some Alaska Native communities, have sued at every turn.
Shell now aims to begin its exploration in mid-summer 2012, during the open water season.
Technology has advanced over the decades to lessen the risk of drilling, and oil production, in the Arctic, Shell scientists say. And, they say, blowouts are unlikely here.
"The Arctic wells are really straightforward wells with few challenges on executing them," said Williams, the chief well scientist for Shell. "They are in shallow water. They are at low pressure, and they have what we call a margin. It gives you a lot of room to operate."
Before Shell drills a well, a team of engineers and operators plans it out step by step and evaluates what could go wrong and how to prevent it.
"The last one we do, we call 'drill the well on paper,' " Williams said.
If part of the spill prevention system breaks down, work must stop until a backup is in place, he said.
"It all fits into what we call safety culture," Williams said. "It's where people . . . make the right decision at the right time."
Shell says it was the first major oil company to staff an operations center that monitors drilling as it happens -- 24 hours a day, seven days a week -- in high risk and high stakes situations. If the company is able to develop fields off Alaska, Shell said, it plans to build a satellite center in the state.
The company is pushing its safety message hard. It paid to air a 30-minute, documentary-style program entitled "Arctic Ready" in prime time, on Nov. 20 on KTUU-Channel 2.
For years, Shell has worked to build relationships with Alaska villages along the Chukchi and Beaufort seas to give residents confidence in its ability to handle trouble, Slaiby said. The company has held hundreds of meetings in Barrow and the seven surrounding villages, according to Shell's count. Shell Oil President Marvin Odum, the company's top executive in the Americas, came to a number of them.
Shell put a half-million dollars into a fund for villages and didn't dictate how the money had to be used, said Dennis McMillian, who coordinates the effort as chief executive of the Foraker Group, which helps nonprofit organizations. Much of the money was spent on equipment like computers and fax machines.
Bessie Kowunna is a Point Hope villager who works for Shell as a community liaison officer.
"It's the first time we're dealing with an oil company here. And a lot of our hunters and our whalers -- they bring up this oil spill, what if it happens and ruins our hunting. Because we depend on the hunting and the harvest of the bowhead whale every spring, just this circle of life, how we catch our food from the ocean," Kowunna said.
She said some residents are upset she works for the oil company.
"My response is -- I'm not drilling out there. I'm an in-between person to let you know what is going on," she said.
Environmentalists say more research needs to precede any drilling. Too little is known about the science of the ocean there, they say. What about an oil spill under ice? What about studies that show problems with cleanup during periods of broken ice?
Shell's oil spill contingency plan is one of the best, but if a disastrous spill happened in the remote Arctic, maybe 3 percent of the crude could be cleaned up, estimated Steiner, the former university professor who now works as an environmental consultant.
Shell maintains otherwise.
"Our whole philosophy has been, in the Arctic, we are remote -- we've got to contain any oil close to the source literally as quick as we can," Slaiby said.
Tapping the Arctic's resources takes big money, operational expertise and advanced technical know-how, he said. "I think there's probably only a handful of companies that can do what we're doing right now."
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Post by kaima on Dec 8, 2011 7:16:17 GMT -7
Soviets were intricately familiar with Northwest Passage channels, charts show
Published: December 7th, 2011 12:48 PM Last Modified: December 7th, 2011 12:49 PM
Cold War nautical charts obtained by The Canadian Press document, perhaps for the first time, that Canada's Arctic waterways were routinely patrolled by Soviet submarines. Those charts are still in use by Russian mariners, reports the CP.
"In some cases the Russian charts are more detailed than the Canadian ones and the navigators have them out on the chart table beside the Canadian ones in order to cross-reference any questionable soundings," said Aaron Lawton of One Ocean Expeditions, an adventure tourism company that charters the Russian-owned ship Academik Ioffe for Arctic cruises. ...
The Ioffe is owned by the Moscow-based P.P. Shirsov Institute of Oceanography. Vladimir Tereschenkov, head of marine operations, said the Russian charts were published by the Russian Hydrographic Service.
The sections seen by The Canadian Press are photographs of charts in current use on the Ioffe. Compiled from information gleaned over the years up to 1970, they are clearly marked with Soviet insignia, including the red star and the hammer and sickle.
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Post by Nictoshek on Dec 9, 2011 12:01:15 GMT -7
Stranded Nome man survives 3 days in cold
THREE DAYS: Rescuers found pickup stuck in snow near Nome.
By KYLE HOPKINS
(12/03/11 19:08:42)
Clifton Vial, 52, climbed into the cab of his Toyota Tacoma Monday night in Nome to see how far a road winding to the north would take him.
More than 40 miles out of town, at about 9:30 that night, he found out. As Pink Floyd's "Echoes" played on the stereo and temperature dipped well below zero in the darkness, Vial's pickup plunged into a snowdrift.
"I made an attempt at digging myself out and realized how badly I was stuck," said Vial. He was wearing tennis shoes, jeans and a $30 jacket from Sears. "I would have been frostbit before I ever got the thing out of there."
Vial found himself alone near Salmon Lake, on a road that doubles as a snowmachine trail in the winter and stretches inland from the Bering Sea city. Far beyond the reach of his cellphone, Vial slipped into a fleece sleeping bag liner and wrapped a bath towel around his feet. He occasionally started the truck to run the heater and listen to the radio.
Was anybody talking about him? Did they know he was missing?
By the third day, Vial said, the truck was nearly out of gas.
WIDE-RANGING SEARCH
"I felt really pissed at myself," Vial said. "I shouldn't have been out there by myself unprepared for what I knew was possible."
Normally Vial carries a sleeping bag, extra gasoline and other survival gear in the 2000 Toyota, he said. But on this trip he had few supplies, no food and no water. Even his dogs, a pair of labs that usually accompany him on drives, stayed home.
Vial kept busy trying to think of ways to stay warm. His family was out of town, searchers said. No one would know he was gone until he failed to show up for work at 3:30 p.m. Tuesday.
"He's a very punctual employee," said John Handeland, general manager for Nome Joint Utility System, where Vial works as an operator mechanic. "By 4 o'clock we figured something was wrong,"
No one could reach Vial on the phone. Co-workers patrolling the town that night found no sign of his pickup.
Handeland called police on Wednesday when Vial missed work for a second day.
The Nome Volunteer Fire Department was alerted and Vial's co-workers and volunteer rescuers drove surrounding roads in search of the Toyota.
One searcher drove 41 miles along Kougarok Road -- just a few miles from where Vial sat shivering and stranded in his pickup -- but saw no tracks. The searcher turned back as daylight disappeared and the road conditions worsened, Handeland said.
Troopers joined the search. Rescuers looked for Vial on the ground and from the air, in planes and from a helicopter.
"When we get called on situations like this, it's a needle in a haystack," said Jim West Jr., a Nome fire department captain and search and rescue coordinator.
For Vial, the cold was worse than the hunger, he said. Still he scoured the pickup in vain for food.
His only provisions: Snow, and a few cans of Coors Light that had frozen solid in the cab.
Vial ate the beers like cans of beans. "I cut the lids off and dug it out with a knife," he said.
FIGHTING FOR WARMTH
The overnight low temperature in Nome dropped from about 12 below Monday night -- not counting windchill -- to 17 below on Wednesday morning, said National Weather Service meteorologist Charles Aldrich.
Battling for warmth, Vial wrapped a bath towel around his feet and placed another over his knees and thighs. He shook his ankles and knees to keep moving. He stuffed rags in his clothes and unraveled tissue paper, jamming it down around his feet.
"When I was just sitting there in my coat in the sleeping bag liner I would pull my arms inside my T-shirt to try and utilize my body heat as much as I could," Vial said. "That worked fine for some time, as far as keeping my torso warm and my arms. But my legs and feet where getting pretty cold."
The wind rumbled like airplane engines, Vial said. He thought about his daughter, and about what would happen if no one found him in time.
"I tried to sleep when I could," Vial said, "but I knew that I might not wake up."
When he did close his eyes, Vial said, strange and vivid images appeared. "Saw my daughter. Saw my job. Saw some things that didn't look like people."
He would picture himself driving around Nome, saying hello to friends, only to snap awake and find himself back in the truck, freezing.
At one point Vial decided he would only fire up the pickup's engine once a day. "(The gas tank) was on 'E' and the gas light was coming on," he said.
Vial never heard the rescuers arrive. It was early Thursday afternoon, three days after he first became stranded in the snow, when they pulled up behind his pickup. A co-worker and another volunteer opened the door to the truck, he said.
They gave him a Snickers bar -- it seemed too dry to eat, he said -- and an orange soda.
Vial described the more than 60-hour ordeal in a short phone interview Friday from Nome. His daughter was home from Anchorage. He planned to visit a doctor Friday afternoon, then return to work.
Vial's legs felt as if they'd been beaten, he said, but he found no signs of frostbite. "I weighed myself last night," he said. "I lost approximately 16 pounds."
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Post by Nictoshek on Jan 5, 2013 3:36:08 GMT -7
A 2x6 plank driven through a ten-ply tire by the tsunami in Whittier. 7.5-magnitude earthquake strikes off coast of Alaska; Tsunami warning issued
By CNN Staff updated 5:17 AM EST, Sat January 5, 2013 (CNN) -- A 7.5-magnitude earthquake struck off the coast of Alaska early Saturday morning and a tsunami warning is in effect for portions of British Columbia, Canada, and southern Alaska, officials said. There were no initial reports of damage but the West Coast and Alaska Tsunami Warning Center said that a "tsunami with significant widespread inundation of is land is expected." The quake struck at about 3:58 a.m. ET off the coast of Alaska about 63 miles west of Craig, a town on Prince of Wales Island, and about 208 miles south of the capital of Juneau, the U.S. Geological Survey said. The size of the temblor was downgraded by the USGS from 7.7 to 7.5. The tsunami warning was issued for the coastal areas of British Columbia and from the northern tip of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, to Cape Suckling, Alaska, about 75 miles southeast of Cordova, according to a bulletin released by the tsunami warning center. A tsunami watch was in effect for areas of British Columbia to the Washington-British Columbia border, the bulletin said. Based on available data, the tsunami warning center said there is "no destructive threat" to Hawaii, though it warned that some coastal areas could experience larger waves and strong currents. bit.ly/Ur8aShAlaska Plan for Emergency Food Stockpile Hits BumpBy BECKY BOHRER Associated Press January 5, 2013 (AP) Alaska's plan to stash stockpiles of emergency food in case the state is cut off from supplies by a disaster has hit a bump. The state Department of Military and Veterans Affairs this week canceled its solicitation for proposals after receiving just one response, which was rejected. Department procurement officer Jolund Luther said Friday that the company that responded could not come up with a performance bond, which would have ensured the project was seen to its completion if the contractor went bankrupt or out of business. Jeremy Zidek, a spokesman for the state's emergency preparedness division, said officials remain committed to the plan and will look for ways to improve the solicitation before moving forward again. "We want to do this project well, and not necessarily fast," he said. The department issued a request for proposals in August, with a goal of having two storage sites ready and one-third of the food supply in place by the end of 2012. Ultimately, the proposal sought a sufficient amount of rations to feed 40,000 people for seven days. The food was to have a five-year shelf life and meet the nutritional, health and cultural requirements of the state's demographics. Gov. Sean Parnell has promoted such emergency preparations as part of a larger push to improve disaster readiness across the state. Zidek said the state has made strides toward the bigger goal in recent years, including acquiring or purchasing water purification units, communications systems and emergency power generators designed to work in cold climates, including units that could power facilities like hospitals. The food stockpile project had a budget of $3.5 million to $4 million, and Luther said that money will remain available as officials consider how best to proceed.
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