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From: John Young <jya@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
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Date: Fri, 23 Jun 1995 11:33:40 -0400
Responding to msg by stu249@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Martin Burns)
on
Martin: is the second story below accurate about the UK?
Please note that the US is about to massively increase drilling
in its off-shore fields, thanks to vastly improved
computer-guided explorations which promise more reserves than
the great Alaskan deposits. And, thereby, expect dumping more
rigs artfully designed with the complicity of
"environmentalists."
So, along with renewal of nuclear testing (after a brief delay
by the administration for the French to take the hit), the US
will maintain its leadership in environmental degradation by
Big Power economic terrorism (oops, nuclear-tipped free
marketism).
(The New York Times notes today a hustler who wants to make the
Brent Spar into an international casino. Call him up Rick,
maybe it's The Donald or an MBAmerindian po'boy.)
The Wall Street Journal, June 22, 1995, p. A12.
Offshore Oil-Rig Quandary: Sink or Spend: Shell's New Plan
for Platform Disposal Has Its Own Hazards
[Drawing]
The Brent Spar
[comparable to 45-story cylindrical building, say,
Bernard
Goldberg's Chicago apartments]
91 feet above water containing helipad, equipment and
crew quarters.
360 feet below water (vertical cylinder) containing
buoyancy tanks, oil storage tanks and ballast.
100 feet above seabed floor with anchors for tether
cables.
By Kyle Pope and Allanna Sullivan
London -- In abandoning its plans to dump a massive oil
platform into the North Sea, the Royal Dutch/Shell Group
ended a public-relations nightmare. But did it make the
right choice environmentally?
Greenpeace, which led the fight against the scuttling,
unequivocally says yes. But some oil-industry experts say
the issue isn't clear-cut.
Those experts say the option that now remains for Shell,
dismantling its 14,500-ton Brent Spar platform and taking
it apart on land, is just as risky as the earlier plan to
sink it, and four times as costly.
And the change of heart puts Shell in a delicate quandary.
How does it convince the world its new proposal is the
right one after spending the past three years arguing that
the best environmental choice was dumping the rig?
British Energy Minister Tim Eggar said it was
"extraordinary" that Shell would change its mind after
three years of research. "I am certainly going to insist
that their case is a persuasive one," Mr. Eggar said.
Longstanding Practice
Lost amid the fury of the past week is the fact that
dumping drilling rigs into the drink is hardly a new thing.
For decades, the U.S. oil industry has routinely dumped
thousands of rigs into the Gulf of Mexico, nearly always to
the applause of American environmentalists. As it turns
out, the rigs' latticework structures make perfect
artificial reefs, drawing in fish that otherwise wouldn't
live in the region. "Around here, we just topple them
over," says David Kent, an offshore expert at Oceandril, a
Houston-based consultancy.
Granted, the Brent Spar is much different, and its unusual
size and design are at the center of the debate over how it
should be scrapped.
Unlike most drilling rigs, which are little more than
oversized pulleys, the Brent Spar is actually an oil tank
that floats. For 20 years, as much as 30,000 barrels of oil
produced from nearby fields was loaded onto the vessel and
held there until it could be transferred to supertankers
for shipment to coastal refineries. In the early 1990s,
pipeline improvements meant the oil could be sent directly
to shore, making the Brent Spar obsolete.
Greenpeace has argued that the decades of use as an
oil-holding pen has made the Brent Spar too contaminated to
sink into the ocean. Though the structure is technically
empty, it still contains an estimated 100 tons of
oil-related sludge left over from its working days. While
most of that is simply sand, about 10% of it is made up of
toxic heavy metals, including cadmium, arsenic, and
mercury.
Many experts, including some working for the British
government, have worried that dumping the Brent Spar at sea
would raise the prospect of toxic contamination.
While experts guess that as many as 50 more North Sea rigs
and platforms are destined for destruction over the next
decade, none are on the same scale as the Brent Spar.
Still, the Brent Spar Controversy already is hanng an
effect on the industry itself. Experts say the uproar over
the Shell platform probably will result in prolonging
production in some North Sea fields that might otherwise
might have been closed down. Typically, producers stop
pumping when they can no longer cover their operating
costs. But with the sharply higher cost of hauling
platforms to shore rather than just toppling and dumping
them into the sea, "there is now a new incentive to keep on
pumping," said Julian Kennedy, analyst for Wood McKenzie
Consultants, North Sea oil specialists based in Scotland.
In the U.K. portion of the North Sea, which contains the
bulk of that region's oil production, there are about 210
oil platforms. About 160 of those can be disposed of with
relative ease because they are located in the shallow areas
of that body of water. But the approximately 50 remaining
rigs will pose a problem. Wood MacKenzie Consultants Ltd.,
an industry consultant, estimates it could cost as much as
$12 billion to decommission the oil fields, not including
complicated problems such as the one currently bedeviling
Shell.
So what of Shell's now-favored option, of hauling the
vessel to land and dismantling it there?
An internal feasibility study by the company says the
operation would carry "significant hazards" and would cost
as much as 46 million pounds ($73.9 million). The deep-sea
dumping proposal, by comparison, would have cost about 10
million pounds.
What's more, Britain may refuse to grant Shell favorable
tax treatment of the disposal costs if it takes the
more-expensive route.
The operation now proposed is vastly more complex. Because
the Brent Spar is so huge -- it's as high as one and a half
football fields are long -- simply finding a place to do
the work is a task. Shell said yesterday it didn't believe
there was a coastal area in Britain deep enough to do the
work. Norway has offered a deep fjord, though no agreement
has been reached.
Once it gets to its destination, the structure would have
to be cut down and turned on its side for towing.
Danger of Tipping
And that could get tricky. When Norwegian crews first
installed the Brent Spar in 1970, it took 10 days in
perfect weather to get it upright. Even then, underwater
sections were damaged in the process, raising fears that it
could tear apart as it's being towed in. "A real buoyancy
problem could result, causing the rig to tip and fall into
the sea," said one individual familiar with the situation.
And if the structure makes it back to shore, it will have
to be cut up. Its toxic contents will be removed and either
stored in a deep mine onshore or put back in barrels and
dropped back into the sea. Industry officials claim
Greenpeace's fuss has only postponed the disposal issue.
[End]
-----------
[Adjoining article]
Rig Incident Shows Britain Is Paler Shade of Green Than
Rest of Europe
By Kyle Pope
London -- To Europe's environmentalists, it was hardly a
surprise that the ill-fated proposal to sink an oil rig in
the North Sea originated in Britain. Now more than ever,
the U.K. is Europe's environmental bogeyman.
Whether it comes to big issues like nuclear dumping and
global warming, or the simpler question of whether to sort
aluminum cans from household garbage, Britain increasingly
is finding itself out of sync with a European continent
that is turning increasingly green.
"The U.K. is completely lagging behind everybody else when
it comes to environmental issues," says Martin Hiller, an
official at the World-Wide Fund for Nature in Brussels.
"It's kind of a cultural thing. The British are living on
their island and they want to do it their way." ...
Although environmental leaders and government ministers on
the continent applauded Shell's turnaround, the decision
provoked a furious backlash from the British government,
which had supported the company's original plan. "I think
they should have kept their nerve and done what they
believed was right," said Michael Heseltine, a prominent
member of the Conservative government.
To Britain's neighbors, the rig-dumping issue became a
target too rich to ignore. Ultimately, the proposal came to
symbolize not only the U.K.'s controversial environmental
stance, but its stubborn view on European integration in
general.
"Britain has always been a holdout country," said Blair
Palese, a spokeswoman for the London office of Greenpeace,
which spearheaded the fight against the sinking of the
Brent Spar rig. "The other countries felt like they had to
respond. There was a bit of nationalism involved with the
rest of Europe." ...
Ian Rowlands, a lecturer at the London School of Economics,
traces the antagonism to Britain's refusal to embrace other
nations' global-warming proposals in the 1992 Earth Summit.
Similarly, the U.K. was left isolated after it protested an
acid-rain treaty in 1993. Europe wanted Britain to offer
deeper cuts in pollution, but the U.K. worried how the
proposals would affect its proposed privatization of
British Coal. The debate got so nasty that Norwegian
ministers accused Britain of waging "chemical warfare"
against them.
[End]