DRILLING for oil kicked off in Greenland’s Arctic waters last week – just weeks after the Deepwater Horizon leak was finally plugged – angering environmental groups. Cairn Energy, based in Edinburgh, UK, is the first company to explore Greenland’s waters for oil. It won’t be the last.
Interest in the Arctic – which holds 13 per cent of the world’s remaining oil and 30 per cent of its gas – is booming, driven by the rising price of oil and a shortage of other places for multinational companies to drill.
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The Deepwater Horizon spill has halted activities in American, Canadian and Norwegian waters, as new regulations are drafted. But exploration and exploitation in Russia and Greenland carry on – and even North American and Norwegian delays will only be temporary.
Drilling in the Arctic Ocean presents greater challenges than elsewhere, whether at sea or on land. Explorers face shifting pack ice, icebergs, storms, frigid temperatures and perpetual night in winter. This has led oil companies to set their sights on the accessible bits of the Arctic (see map). First in line are the relatively sheltered waters close to shore, and shallower regions further out where artificial islands can be built and linked to the coast, transforming the expedition into one that is effectively land-based.
In deeper water, giant steel structures that can be grounded on the seabed are the best bet. Russia’s Prirazlomnoye platform, now almost complete, will weigh 100,000 tonnes and sit in 20 metres of water. Its sheer bulk will protect it from being crushed by the shifting ice that covers the area for eight months of the year.
To drill in even deeper water, ice-resistant production ships, linked to oil wells beneath them, will have to be constantly protected by ice breakers. The first of these is planned for Russia’s Shtokman gas field, which is 650 kilometres offshore, lies 300 metres beneath the surface, and is plagued by icebergs. Production is planned to begin in 2016.
All this activity has environmental groups up in arms. Oil companies insist that they can take on the Arctic safely, yet there is no proven way to deal with a spill. The biggest threat is not from the wells – which will be few and tightly controlled – but from oil tankers. Pack ice, storms and icebergs mean that shipping accidents are almost inevitable, and spilt oil takes decades to break down in the cold Arctic waters.
Nothing much can be done to cope with a spill in the winter beyond tracking the ice, waiting for the oil to surface in the summer melt, then setting it alight. Yet calls for an Arctic-wide moratorium on oil exploration until safety measures are in place have gone unheeded. Over the last three years, big oil companies have teamed up with Norway’s independent research organisation SINTEF, based in Trondheim, to test ways of fighting spills, such as mechanical skimmers, dispersants and performing controlled burns on deliberately spilled oil. Results show they are still far from knowing how to cope.
