Shell Oil Move Dims Oil Prospects, Delights Environmentalists
Category Archives: offshore oil
Hakaimagazine.com: Reefs de Rigueur; Fish earstones may offer a verdict on the environmental value of oil rig reefs.
Hakai Magazine
by Nsikan Akpan
Published May 26, 2015
Published May 26, 2015
Life swarms to an oil rig the moment its massive steel legs plunge into the ocean. Algae, barnacles, anemones, sponges, and other less-mobile creatures latch onto the hard metal structures. Darting fish soon join the fray. But petroleum wells dry up after a couple of decades, and traditionally this has spelled the end of a rig: the steel legs, and the habitat they create, are decommissioned, dismantled, and hauled away.
In 1979, the United States introduced the concept of the “rig-to-reef,” wherein an oil platform’s legs are left in the water post-decommissioning to retain the constructed ecosystem. Soon after the first rig reefs were built along Florida’s coast, these artificial ecosystems began popping up everywhere. And soon after that, the protests started-the most famous being in 1995 when Greenpeace occupied Shell’s Brent Spar platform in the North Sea for nearly a month.
There are a number of points of tension over oil rig reefs. Some are ideological or political-“All offshore oil leases were granted on the reassurance that the seafloor would be returned to as near natural conditions as possible,” says The Ocean Foundation’s Richard Charter-while some challenge the ecological value of the reefs themselves.
The central scientific dispute over rigs-to-reefs is one that has dominated the debate for 40 years: do the structures actually encourage growth of reef-dwelling species or do they merely attract marine life that’s passing by?
Without a clear understanding of rig reefs’ effects, the international response has been mixed. Following Greenpeace’s 1995 protest, plans for rig reefs in the North Sea stalled. Elsewhere, oil rig reefs blossomed. In Texas, more than 140 rigs have added to the state’s artificial reefs since 1990. Over the next 10 years more than 6,500 oil rigs are due for decommissioning. How many will be turned into reefs is still up for debate.
For their part, oil companies like rig reefs because it saves them money-to the tune of tens of millions of dollars in saved decommissioning costs-as do US state governments, which often get a kickback for some of the money saved. Environmentalists are torn.
A novel scientific technique, however, may offer a way to resolve this long-running controversy by finally giving scientists a way to determine whether reef fish treat these rigs like a home or like a hotel.
In 2008, fish ecologist Ash Fowler and his team ventured onto the water off northwestern Australia. There, four separate oil rigs were being decommissioned. When the steel structures were hoisted onto the ship’s deck, dozens of red-belted anthias spilled forth. (This seafloor-dwelling species is often found hiding in the drilling wellhead.) The team collected the fish and returned to shore, where they chemically examined each fish’s earstones, or otoliths.
Much like a tree’s trunk, otoliths grow annual rings. As these rings grow, they absorb chemicals from the surrounding environment. By firing a laser at the otoliths, Fowler and his colleagues learned that each oil rig gave the fishes’ earstones a distinctive chemical composition. The overall shape of the earstone honed the geographical marker, allowing the otolith to serve as a home address.
“Otoliths are used to identify fish stocks over regional scales, but with our technique, we could identify home [oil rig] structures over distances as short as 10 kilometers,” says Fowler.
This geolocating technique can be used for almost any artificial structure, says Fowler, because the chemical distinctions between sites are based on common elements found in seawater (rather than, for instance, the pollution that might seep from a drilling site). As such, the technique can also distinguish oil rig reef fish from those living on natural reefs nearby. If combined with a genetic screen for lineage, Fowler’s otolith technique may reveal whether fish live around the same rigs for generations, or are just passing through.
Separating oil rig fish from natural reef fish has been a major challenge for the handful of scientists who have tried to compare the ecology of rigs-to-reefs with natural environments.
In a 2003 report, researchers from the US Minerals Management Service found that a single natural reef supported more than two million fish, which would be comparable to the number found in 1,000 oil rig reefs. More recently, a 2014 study argued that California’s oil rigs have become a fertile ground for juvenile fish, making the rigs one of the most productive fish habitats in the world. But without the ability to separate permanent resident fish from visitors, properly interpreting these studies becomes difficult.
Milton Love, an ecologist who worked on the 2014 study, doubts that answering the scientific question will actually end the debate over rigs-to-reefs. Even if the rigs are responsible for creating a bountiful ecosystem, he says, it’s an artificial creation that carries the risk of introducing invasive species, such as orange cup coral or Australian spotted jellyfish into new environments. In the Gulf of Mexico, commercial fishermen love the artificial reefs because they attract red snapper and other profitable catch, but the steel legs sticking up from the seafloor strip shrimpers of their ability to trawl the seafloor. Some conservationists want the rigs removed, but that would mean the animals that live stuck to the metal frame would die and wind up as waste dumped into the sea or on shore.
“In the end,” says Love, “the decision has nothing to do with anything except your moral compass.”
Geographic Region: Oceania, North America
Oceanographic Region: Atlantic Ocean, Indian Ocean
Species: Fish
Scientific Fields: Chemistry, Ecology, Engineering
Cite this Article: Nsikan Akpan, “Reefs De Rigueur,” Hakai Magazine, May 26, 2015, accessed May 26, 2015, http://bit.ly/1J077iB.
The Hill: Opinion | Op-Ed Offshore drilling — the Keystone pipeline of the sea by David Helvarg
While half a million people marched in New York and across the nation for climate action this fall and the U.S. launched a new air war in the oil-rich Middle East, President Obama moved forward on one of his least noted but potentially highest impact energy decisions.
Beginning this past summer the Department of Interior has been quietly accepting applications from oil companies to start seismic testing for oil and gas deposits off the eastern seaboard between Delaware and Florida as well as in new areas of the Gulf of Mexico and Arctic Ocean. This decision will open the way for five-year lease sales scheduled to begin in 2017. Like the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada, new offshore oil drilling could threaten increased pollution, continued fossil fuel dependence and climate disaster. Environmentalists are also concerned about death and impairment to whales, dolphins and other marine wildlife from the high-volume sonic cannons used in the surveys. The government itself estimates the testing could impact 138,000 marine mammals.
I recently asked Secretary of Interior Sally Jewell why, given all these factors, they were proceeding with this. Her reply, “It’s important to know what we have … and I think anyone would suggest that reducing dependence on foreign oil is good.”But is there an alternative to the Obama administration’s “all of the above” energy strategy that, along with solar subsidies and fracking, could picket the East Coast with offshore oil platforms and risk a BP type disaster in the frontier waters of the Arctic Ocean? There is. It’s called California.
“Get Oil Out” was the battle cry against offshore drilling following the 1969 Santa Barbara Oil Spill, a disaster that helped launch the modern environmental movement. Forty years later, when President Obama sent his first Secretary of Interior Ken Salazar to San Francisco to hold hearings on new leasing in 2009, the opposition remained unified and vociferous.
More than 500 people including Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), the lieutenant governor and four House members testified and rallied for clean energy and against any new offshore oil drilling. Boxer noted that the coast was a treasure and a huge economic asset “just as is,” generating $24 billion a year and 390,000 California jobs. This, along with a recent strongly worded anti-drilling letter sent to Secretary Jewel from the three West Coast governors, explains why the administration is willing to open up the Eastern Seaboard for the first time ever but ignore the Pacific Coast. “If the states don’t want it, it’s more likely you’ll concentrate where they do,” Secretary Jewell explained. In other words the administration’s energy decisions will be based not on science but on politics, with the biggest drilling conflicts now likely to emerge around Virginia, Alaska, Georgia and the Carolinas.
The best available science already indicates that in order to avoid catastrophic impacts from climate change — if global temperatures rise above 2 degrees Celsius as they are now expected to — we have to choose not to tap two-thirds of the world’s known petroleum reserves.
California as a society has chosen to leave its offshore oil under the seabed, increase its energy efficiency and conservation and, with carbon pricing through cap-and-trade, begin a needed transition to clean energy including wind, solar and hydro. This has also sparked a wave of innovation, from the Tesla electric car, to Google smart cables for bringing offshore wind power onshore, to solar powered wave gliding sea drones for research and national defense.
While the President’s Climate Action Plan for coal-fired utility emissions would reduce greenhouse gases by some 2 billion tons, there could be 30 times those emissions from the burning of all the estimated offshore oil reserves set to be surveyed and leased in the next few years. And the incentive to keep drilling remains huge for companies like BP, Exxon, Shell and Chevron since the U.S. government (along with other oil and gas producing nations such as Iran, Iraq and Russia) has failed to follow California’s lead by putting a price on carbon.
While Barack Obama talks a good game on climate and innovation it looks increasingly likely that seeing the end of offshore drilling won’t happen until California’s old battle cry of ‘Get Oil Out’ is heard from sea to shining sea. People will also need to make it an issue in the 2016 elections since this president, while willing to battle terrorists on the blood soaked sands of the Middle East, lacks the will to stand up to Big Oil.
Helvarg is an author and executive director of Blue Frontier, a marine conservation group. His latest book is The Golden Shore — California’s Love Affair with the Sea.
DECOM WORLD: Deepwater decommissioning up to four times more costly, study finds
http://social.decomworld.com/structures-and-maintenance/deepwater-decommissioning-four-times-more-costly-study-finds#sthash.fijblcu8.dpuf
By Rod Sweet on Apr 30, 2014
A new report on the Gulf of Mexico decommissioning market finds that costs rise sharply in water depths greater than 200ft (61m).
Structure decommissioning ranges from $3-5 million in water depths less than 200ft, to $15-20 million in water depths greater than 200ft, according to DecomWorld’s latest Gulf of Mexico Offshore Decommissioning Report 2014.
In conventional decommissioning, dry tree shallow water plugging and abandonment operations typically cost between $300,000-$500,000 per wellbore, finds the report author, Mark J. Kaiser, research and development director at Louisiana State University’s Center for Energy Studies.
But he warns that estimating true decommissioning costs depends on many site-specific factors.
Meanwhile, the cost of decommissioning storm-destroyed structures often ranges between three to five times the cost of conventional operations, but may be greater by a factor of ten or more in extreme cases, the study found.
In the immediate aftermath of a storm, the resources necessary to initiate inspections, conduct repairs, and procure material and equipment are usually stretched thin.
The report concluded that small companies tend to be cost-minimizers in decommissioning while large companies focus on risk management, with specialized teams and business units dedicated to the task, potentially pushing costs higher.
Produced for DecomWorld the report estimates the GOM decommissioning market to be worth $26bn in and around January 2014.
In its fifth edition, the Gulf of Mexico Offshore Decommissioning Report contains detailed market analyses and forecasts for both shallow and deep water, plus updates on transactions and regulatory developments. Click here for more information.
Decomworld: BOP leak causes 25-day halt for Sevan Drilling in Gulf of Mexico
August 27, 2014
Ultra deepwater drilling specialist Sevan Drilling has announced a 25-day suspension of operations at a well in the Gulf of Mexico following a BOP control system leak.
In order to repair the leak it was necessary to temporarily suspend the well and recover the upper section of the BOP to the surface, the company said in a statement.
The incident occurred at the beginning of August and will result in downtime of more than 25 days in the third quarter, it added.
The firm’s rig, the Sevan Louisiana, began a three-year, $585.5m drilling contract in May this year for LLOG Bluewater Holdings LLC.
Headquartered in Norway, Sevan Drilling owns three ultra deepwater drilling units, Sevan Driller, Sevan Brasil, and Sevan Louisiana. Sevan Driller and Sevan Brasil each have a six-year charter contract with Petrobras in Brazil.
A fourth rig, the Sevan Developer, is under construction.