The final frontier. Now that Shell and BP are mere steps away from drilling exploratory wells off the Coast of Alaska and Russia, everyone's playfully referring to the Arctic as the "final frontier" for petroleum development.
The notion of the Arctic being "undeveloped" or "undiscovered" probably couldn't be more insulting to the Inupiat, Saami and other Indigenous Peoples whose cultures and subsistence ways of life evolved over centuries of living in the Arctic Circle.
Few people seem to be considering that fact, or even including Arctic Peoples in any debate over whether or not drilling should be allowed to proceed.
You can be sure that Shell and BP are glad of it, especially since their actions may be setting the stage for the destruction of the Arctic way of life.
In the case of Alaska, Shell is hoping to get started in July 2012, with four exploratory wells in the Beaufort Sea. The company has already spent more than $3.5 billion to acquire leases in both the Beaufort and Chukchi. It's all worth it, says Pete Slaiby, vice president of Shell Alaska. After all, "There is a prize over there."
According to the Washington Post, that so-called "prize" is 26.6 billion barrels of oil and 130 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in the Alaska outer continental shelf.
The risks that come with the prize are even greater, despite Shell's "unprecedented spill response and cleanup plan for the Beaufort and Chukchi operations, including having cleanup crew and gear close enough to the drilling site that it could all be deployed in less than an hour," as the Alaska Dispatch notes.
A new coalition made up of more than a dozen conservation groups say the plan just isn't good enough. As the coalition points out on their website,"A major oil spill in the Arctic Ocean would be impossible to clean up and could have enormous consequences for the region’s communities and ecosystems. During the winter months, the Arctic seas are covered with ice and are not navigable by oil spill response ships. If a spill started as winter ice sets in, the oil could continue to gush into the sea and under the ice for eight long months."
The coalition, which includes the Alaska Wilderness League, NRDC, Greenpeace, Oceana, and Defenders of Wildlife adds, "[a] cleanup in the Arctic would be hampered by sea ice, extreme cold, hurricane-strength storms and pervasive fog. The nearest Coast Guard facilities are nearly 1,000 miles away, and there is no port in the Arctic capable of serving large response vessels."
To demonstrate the first point--how a cleanup would be hampered by sea ice, last month, Oceana released the video results of an oil spill response test from 2000. The results show what could occur if an oil spill happened in the Arctic waters.
