Posted on 16 June 2010
Vorkuta, Russia:
As oil continues to spew into the Gulf of
Mexico from a sunken BP drilling rig, a
key meeting of arctic countries starting
today needs to push for a suspension of
all arctic drilling until the region can
deal with the risks, WWF said.
Greg Bourne, a former
BP executive now with the global environment
organisation, said imagining nations could
deal with a drilling accident in the Arctic
with current technology and resources would
be “a triumph of hope over experience and
reason”.
The Arctic Council recently
updated and revised guidelines for offshore
oil and gas drilling, but those guidelines,
even if implemented, would not go far enough
to prevent or contain catastrophic spills
such as last year’s Timor Sea blowout which
took 73 days to stop or the current Gulf
of Mexico oil confirmed as the worst in
US history and still unresolved.
WWF maintains that the
revised guidelines do not go nearly far
enough and the Arctic Council Emergency
Prevention, Preparedness and Response (EPPR)
Working Group needs to use the Vorkuta meeting
commencing today to strongly urge the Council
to impose a halt to drilling plans for this
year over a wide spread of the Arctic.
This year exploratory
drilling is scheduled to occur off the west
coast of Greenland. In Norway, the government
is considering opening up areas of high
ecological value outside of Lofoten and
Vesterålen for oil exploration. In
Russia, exploratory drilling is scheduled
in the Kara Sea and the Ob river estuary
near the Yamal Peninsula.
Nationally, no new drilling
should occur until there is the capacity
to rapidly and effectively respond to spills
in arctic waters.
“It is time for the
arctic states to recognize that offshore
oil drilling with current technology and
response capability poses unacceptable risks
in the Arctic” says Aleksey Knizhnikov,
Oil & Gas Environmental Policy Officer
for WWF-Russia who is attending the Vorkuta
meeting.
“Norway and the United
States have already taken the first step,
by putting off any further arctic offshore
drilling until an investigation into the
Gulf disaster is over. But we already know
that whatever that investigation reveals,
it will not diminish the risks of arctic
drilling.”
Arctic offshore oil
drilling is facing increasing opposition
from local peoples. A recent poll commissioned
by WWF-Norway indicated that almost one
out of four Norwegians has become more negative
to oil exploration in Lofoten and Vesterålen
following the Gulf spill. In both Canada
and Alaska, local Indigenous peoples are
also opposing offshore oil development until
or unless they can be assured that it can
be done safely.
"The offshore exploration
and production industry are pushing at the
very limits of technology and the ability
to safely handle and control that technology,"
says Greg Bourne, CEO of WWF-Australia,
and formerly a Drilling Manager and Regional
President with BP in Latin America and then
Australasia.
"The Gulf of Mexico
is the world's centre of drilling technology
with thousands of engineers and immense
resources in terms of boats, planes, control
equipment and manufacturing facilities -
and even here it is proving immensely difficult
to handle the tragic event of the Gulf of
Mexico blowout.
“To even conceive of
being able to control a similar event in
the Arctic would be a triumph of hope over
experience and reason. The consequences
of such an event in the cold climate would
lead to a persistence of ecological damage
over many decades," Bourne says.
WWF is currently updating
a study of the oil spill response gap in
the Arctic, showing that current technology
is incapable of effectively cleaning up
oil spills in ice covered waters.
Link to web-quality
material: http://www.youtube.com/user/WWFNorge#p/a/u/0/dCSbY5nsjks
About WWF
WWF is one of the world's largest and most
respected independent conservation organizations,
with more than 5 million supporters and
a global network active in over 100 countries.
WWF's mission is to stop the degradation
of the earth's natural environment and to
build a future in which humans live in harmony
with nature, by conserving the world's biological
diversity, ensuring that the use of renewable
natural resources is sustainable, and promoting
the reduction of pollution and wasteful
consumption.
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