Toronto Star - June 3, 2010
By Colin Kenny
The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has raised the bar on what will be needed for safeguards if Canada allows companies to drill for oil in its part of the Beaufort Sea. Canadians will not stand for the slightest possibility that an oil spill will mess up the Arctic.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates that international energy consumption will have increased by 49 percent in 2035 from its 2007 base year. The use of hydro-electric, nuclear and wind power will increase, but oil will still rule. Costly energy sources such as solar, geothermal, biomass, waste and tidal power will not grow markedly in importance.
So anyone who thinks that the Gulf of Mexico disaster will put an end to exploration and drilling in problematic places like the Beaufort is dreaming. The truth is that we humans are stuck with our oil dependence for a long time to come, and the stuff is increasingly difficult to get at. But you can be sure that we will go after it – everywhere. So both politicians and oil companies must come to grips with the fact that spills cannot be an option any more than nuclear meltdowns are an option.
It is time for the oil companies to stop whining about excessive government safeguards and start acknowledging that more rigorous safeguards – safeguards that will cost them a whack of money – are needed in difficult offshore locations. The problem is not that the oil companies don’t do a great deal to avoid mistakes – mistakes cost them billions. The problem is that they don’t do everything possible to avoid mistakes. Following up on mistakes is next to futile: even in the best of situations, only about 15 percent of oil gets recovered after cleanups.
So prevention has to be the watchword. There are no perfect plans for prevention, but there can be plans that exponentially decrease the likelihood of disasters in places like the Beaufort. There are dozens of safety mechanisms at play with every well, but here are three in particular that deserve the public’s attention.
The first is a blowout preventer (BOP) – the device that failed in the Gulf of Mexico. It is a large valve that blocks the line through the application of hydraulic pressure on massive pistons when things go wrong, shutting down the hole. This is advanced technology that rarely fails – but rarely obviously isn’t enough. This technology should be applied so it never fails. If two or more of these blowout preventers were stacked, the probability of failure would be infinitesimally small. So stack them.
The second safeguard involves the drilling of a backup relief well. If the process of retrieving oil from the main hole is somehow compromised, an adjacent well can be activated that will pierce the leaking well and divert its flow. Oil companies have quite stupidly been asking the National Energy Board to relax Canadian regulations regarding relief wells. In fact, the regulations need to be tightened.
Current regulations require drilling a relief well in the same season the working well is drilled. Oil companies argue that makes drilling in the Arctic difficult, because seasons are so short (usually July to October) that it typically takes more than one season to install a producing well – with no time left to drill a relief well. They are thinking backwards. The relief wells should be substantially drilled before the working wells so they only need to be poked down a little further if something goes wrong. That way there will be minimal lag time when a relief well is needed.
The third safeguard is something called a glory hole – an excavation that is dredged on the seabed around blowout preventers and other wellhead equipment to assure that drifting icebergs – which often scour shallow sea beds ¬– do not damage them.
Islands surrounded by concrete berms can be constructed in shallow seas such as the Beaufort to assure durable platforms. Directional drilling allows companies to drain contiguous pockets of oil from the same platform. The government should require that glory holes are extraordinarily deep to protect every blowout preventer from ice scouring the sea bottom and then some.
By stacking blowout preventers, drilling relief wells in advance, and excavating deep glory holes, companies can reduce blowout potential to the point that futile cleanup attempts are a thing of the past.
Have no doubt – nations will remain desperate for oil for many decades and will go anywhere to recover it. Eventually we humans will be forced to shake our dependence on oil, but it won’t happen in my lifetime or the lifetime of my children or grandchildren.
But if we humans don’t learn a profound lesson from this Gulf of Mexico oil spill and take measures to prevent a repeat in places like the Beaufort, we should all stop having children and grandchildren anyway.
[Colin Kenny was a member of the Senate Energy and Environment committee for over 20 years and served as its deputy chair. Prior to that he was an executive with Dome Petroleum]