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Offshore drilling adviser supports ‘balanced’ Arctic development
The head of a federal offshore drilling advisory panel supports a “balanced” approached to continued oil development off Alaska's coast this year, breaking with President Obama’s former energy czar and environmentalists who say it cannot be done safely.
The comments by Tom Hunter, chairman of the Ocean Energy Safety Advisory Committee, follow Royal Dutch Shell’s troubled 2012 launch of preliminary Arctic development in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas.
“I am not uncomfortable if it proceeds in a very balanced way and with a significant amount of oversight by the regulatory organizations with the federal government, and a lot of engagement with the stakeholders in the local area there,” Hunter said when asked about the prospect of Shell returning to the region later in 2013.
Hunter, the former director of Sandia National Laboratories, made the comments in an interview broadcast Sunday on Platts Energy Week TV.
That pressure increased late last week when top officials with the Center for American Progress (CAP) – a liberal think tank with deep White House ties – came out against Arctic drilling.
CAP senior fellow Carol Browner, who was formerly Obama’s White House “energy czar,” and CAP founder John Podesta wrote in a joint Bloomberg op-ed that “it has become clear that there is no safe and responsible way to drill for oil and gas in the Arctic Ocean.”
But Hunter, asked whether there should be a “pause” in Arctic development to allow technology to improve, said he believes it should be allowed to proceed on a limited basis.
“If you keep the pace very measured, if you keep the actives on a balanced course, which is starting initial operations in the early drilling season, which went on this last year, and then learning from that and improving your operations going forward, I think it can be done in a balanced way and I think it can be done effectively,” Hunter said.
The offshore safety committee – a mix of federal agency officials, industry representatives, academics and others – was created in the wake of the 2010 BP oil spill and this month offered a series of recommendations to the Interior Department.
They include development of Arctic-specific regulatory standards.
Shell, one of several major oil companies holding undeveloped leases in the Arctic, began preliminary operations last year. The company suffered a series of mishaps, and did not win federal permission to drill into oil-bearing zones, but did proceed with some so-called "top-hole drilling."
Shell’s various woes included damage, during testing, to a critical piece of equipment that would be needed to contain a subsea blowout.
Also, the Kulluk drilling rig ran aground en route back from the region.
The problems have created question marks around whether Shell will drill in the Arctic in 2013.
Shell’s Alaskan woes prompted a new, “high-level” Interior Department review that will “help inform future permitting” in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas.
