Oil, Power & Empire II

[Big Bunny]

A world without oil - it's closer than you think

Steve Hallett and John Wright
April 27, 2011

So far, we've done very little to plan for the perilous moment.

DISMANTLE the oil rigs and stack them in a pile. Radio the tankers and order them back to port. Pull out the drills and seal the wells with cement. (A year after the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico, let's hope we've learnt how to do that, at least.) Tow the platforms back to shore. Plug up the pipelines.

What would happen next? How would we live in a world without oil?

First, there's transportation. With the overwhelming majority of the oil we produce devoted to powering our cars, motorcycles, trucks, trains and planes, the impact on getting around would be most dramatic. Price-gouging would begin right away, and long lines would form at petrol stations. The lines wouldn't last, though, because the supply would soon be gone. Within a month, every fuel tank would be dry, all our gauge needles would point to ''E'' and the roads, rails and skies would be virtually empty.
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How far is it to the nearest supermarket? How long does it take to walk - or cycle, or skate - to work? Finally confronting our dependence on motor vehicles, we'd reach for whatever solutions we could find. Soon, we'd all be looking for an electric car (but there are precious few of those for sale) or converting our vehicles to run on natural gas. But we'd be waiting for some time to secure adequate natural gas supplies.

Our enslavement to black gold goes much further than the problem of getting from point A to point B. We also need to keep the lights on. And this would be possible for a while, but brownouts and blackouts would soon begin - sure, our electricity is generated mostly from coal, but how would the coal be extracted without those diesel-guzzling yellow trucks? How would it be hauled to the power plants? (Remember, freight trains all run on diesel, too.) Heating and cooling our homes would suddenly get a lot more complicated, and our televisions and laptops would be just a few weeks away from shutting off forever.

Forget even trying to get to work any more; we now have another set of problems to solve, especially if it's winter and our houses are getting cold. Can we quickly put together some solar panels and batteries? A wind turbine? What do we have growing in the backyard that can burn? Environmentalists have been nudging us to insulate our homes and generate electricity from renewable resources for a while now; this might be the time to start paying attention.

It gets much worse, of course, because a world without oil would quickly become a world without all the products made from petroleum that we have come to know, love and depend upon.

The list of essentials that we'd soon be doing without is prodigious: nearly all plastics, paints, medicines, hospital machines that go ''beep'', Barbie dolls, ballpoint pens, breast implants, golf balls.

Eating would get tougher, too. If no one can truck in fresh vegies from across the country, we might be inclined to go back to basics and grow our own food. Local farmers would become a necessity, not just people who sell us honey at the school fete. That said, make sure to keep the food coming, fresh and fast, because it's going to be awfully difficult to refrigerate. Fishing might work, so you'd need to get a new rod while supplies last. Alas, most of them are made of plastic. Then again, so is fishing line.

It's an interesting thought experiment to picture a world suddenly without oil. Taken to its logical conclusion, it encompasses so much more: a complete and rapid breakdown of society, leading to desperation, lawlessness, wars and untold suffering. The scenario is unreal, of course, because we could never shut off our oil supply in a day, and, in any case, there are trillions of barrels of the stuff still in the ground, right?

Yet, in a simpler sense, it's not so unrealistic, because even if it will happen more gradually than laid out here, we will indeed run out of oil. Output has already peaked in the majority of countries. A handful of countries are still increasing production, but not enough to offset even bigger declines elsewhere.

There is lots of oil still in the ground (we've used about half of the planet's generous endowment), but while the end of oil may be many decades away, the beginning of the end is now.

It's not just at the drip of the final drop that the oil crisis begins. It is when production stagnates and begins its inexorable fall. That perilous moment, alas, is now. Our oil supplies are about to begin to fail us. As oil becomes more scarce, we have to get serious about finding new solutions to power our world.

We have time to plan - but not that much time. And so far, we've done very little to prepare for a world without oil.

WASHINGTON POST

Steve Hallett is an associate professor of botany at Purdue University. John Wright is the Latin America news editor for Energy News Today. They are the co-authors of Life Without Oil: Why We Must Shift to a New Energy Future.

www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/a-world-without-oil--its-closer-than-you-think-20110426-1dv1d.html#ixzz1KfbBTs00

[Big Bunny]

Fossil fuel firms use 'biased' study in massive gas lobbying push

Industry urging governments and business to reject renewables in favour of 'green' shale gas

* Fiona Harvey, environment correspondent
* guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 20 April 2011 17.24 BST

Senior executives in the fossil fuel industry have launched an all-out assault on renewable energy, lobbying governments and business groups to reject wind and solar power in favour of gas, in a move that could choke the fledgling green energy industry.

Multinational companies including Shell, GDF Suez and Statoil are promoting gas as an alternative "green" fuel. These companies are among dozens around the world investing in new technologies to exploit shale gas, a controversial form of the fuel that has rejuvenated the gas industry because it is plentiful in supply and newly accessible due to technical advances in gas extraction known as "fracking".

The expansion of shale gas holds out the promise of a glut in gas that is driving down prices and creating a bonanza for the fossil fuel industry. Burning gas in power stations releases about half the carbon emissions of coal, allowing gas companies to claim it is a "green" source of fuel.

Central to the lobbying effort is a report claiming that the EU could meet its 2050 carbon targets €900bn more cheaply by using gas than by investing in renewables. But the Guardian has established that the analysis is based on a previous report that came to the opposite conclusion – that renewables should play a much larger role. The report being pushed by the fossil fuel industry has been disowned by its original authors who referred to it as "biased" in favour of gas.

For the last two months, company lobbyists have been besieging government officials in Europe, the US and elsewhere to push the report. Their efforts are being boosted through alliances with energy-intensive industries, which are joining in the pressure on government in the hope of securing cheap energy.

As the problems with the Fukushima plant in Japan have cast a pall over nuclear power, gas companies sense the chance to brand themselves as the main "green" source of energy. James Smith, outgoing UK chairman of Royal Dutch Shell, one of the leaders in the lobbying effort, said switching to gas would offer the world "a breathing space" in the battle against climate change.

This view was challenged by Prof David Mackay, chief scientific adviser to the UK's Department of Energy and Climate Change. He told the Guardian: "You can't reach the [climate] targets like this - there is no way that switching to gas would solve the problem. I don't think it's really credible that gas is the only future."

The lobbying effort by fossil fuel companies has been intense. At a high level meeting on Wednesday, the president of the European parliament hosted a lunch for the gas industry with VIP guests including the EU's energy chief, Günther Oettinger.

It is the latest in a long round of meetings in recent months between gas lobbyists and senior officials in Brussels, including other EU commissioners and prominent MEPs, as part of the industry's charm offensive. Oettinger alone has held at least two other major meetings with gas representatives this year.

At most of these meetings, and at many other formal and informal meetings to discuss EU energy and climate change, officials have been presented with a report commissioned by the European Gas Advocacy Forum (EGAF), an industry lobbying group, based in part on an analysis by consultancy firm McKinsey and called Making the Green Journey Work. This report appears to show the EU could meet its 2050 climate targets €900bn more cheaply using gas than by investing in renewables. A copy of the report has also been presented to the office of José Manuel Barroso, the EU president, who has taken a close interest in EU gas supply with visits to the Ukraine, Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan this year.

Apart from coming to different conclusions about renewable energy, the report also relies on questionable assumptions about the future price of technology to capture and store carbon.

The team at the European Climate Foundation that produced the original report described the EGAF version as "biased to one preferential outcome in support of gas advocacy". They warn that adopting its conclusions would reduce energy security and expose the European economy to the volatile gas price.

A spokesperson for McKinsey said: "It is our long-standing policy not to discuss our clients or the work we do for them."

David Rimmer, Shell's general managed for global gas said, "Shell sees renewables as a major part of the future energy mix but this analysis has shown that increased reliance on gas in the near term saves money and jobs, delivers on climate targets and allows new technologies to be improved before large scale deployment."

Further doubt has been thrown on the industry's claims by a newly released academic study from Cornell University which found that generating electricity from shale gas – because of the difficulty in extracting it from rocks – produces at least as much carbon dioxide as coal-fired power, and perhaps more.

Jenny Banks, climate and energy policy officer at WWF-UK, called on the British government to halt shale gas exploration. "It would be ridiculous to encourage shale gas when in reality its greenhouse gas footprint could be as bad as or worse than coal. We need to reject this source of gas, and have a clear plan to move away from our dependency on fossil fuels and harness the full potential of renewable technologies."

Some in the gas industry are careful to argue that its fuel is complementary to renewables, as it can be relatively easily turned on and off to provide flexible back-up power when the wind is not blowing.

This argument is accepted by Oettinger, who insists that both gas and renewable energy will be needed for flexible low-carbon power generation, and some other senior figures. Nobuo Tanaka, the executive director of the International Energy Agency, said: "Gas is potentially a game changer. But it is complementary to renewables, as it can be turned on and off quickly. It could be baseload power and we could turn off coal."

But renewable energy generators are wary, as they fear that cash-strapped governments will ease off on subsidies for clean power, in favour of licensing gas-fired power stations.

A new gas-fired power station would be expected to have a useful life of about 25 to 40 years. So although switching from coal to gas would help countries meet their short term emissions targets, in the longer term they would be left with fleets of redundant, high-emitting fossil fuel power stations – unless they were fitted with expensive technology to capture and store the carbon dioxide underground. However, this technology is still unproven and it is likely to be decades before it can be widely used. The economics of the technology are highly uncertain, and renewable companies argue that the assumptions used by EGAF to show that the fossil fuel is cheaper than renewables do not stand up to scrutiny.

Shale gas is controversial because it requires large amounts of water to release it from rocks, and the use of potentially dangerous chemicals that could leach into the water supply. Numerous cases in the US, which has led the way in releasing gas from shale rocks using fracking technology, have shown evidence of contamination and dangerous leaks of methane.

Prof Robert Howarth, lead author of the Cornell study, said: "My strong belief is that shale gas has been promoted far beyond the objective evidence of what it can and cannot do. It is time to step back, and objectively analyse whether this is a reasonable energy technology for our future. It is also time to analyse how environmental issues associated with the technology might be reduced, and at what cost."

www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/apr/20/fossil-fuel-lobbying-shale-gas

And:

Shale gas: is it as green as the oil companies say?

At the heart of the shale gas 'sell' is the industry's analysis of a European Climate Foundation report – an analysis ECF rejects

o Fiona Harvey, environment correspondent
o guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 20 April 2011 20.49 BST


A natural gas wellhead near Montrose, Pennsylvania. Photograph: Daniel Acker/Getty

"You just wouldn't believe you could get gas out of that, would you?" said Mark Miller, chief executive of UK gas company Cuadrilla Resources, turning over a lump of hard black rock. It is dark, extremely dense and very heavy, with a smooth and almost chalky feel, and is found buried thousands of feet beneath the surface of the earth in deposits made 300m years ago.

There are no holes, nothing to betray the fact that this shale rock can be made to yield natural gas in such quantities that it could power the globe for centuries.

Shale is being hailed as the green energy of the future because new technologies can be used to fracture the dense rock and flood it with water to release bubbles of natural gas that can be burned for electricity with – according to the gas industry – only about half of the carbon dioxide emissions of coal.

"This source of gas is revolutionary," said Malcolm Brinded, foremost expert on the technology at Royal Dutch Shell. "It will reduce dependence on imported oil, and in practice price volatility. There is a huge pace of growth."

Oil companies are rapidly seizing the opportunity. Within two years, predicts James Smith, outgoing UK chairman of Shell, the company will go from being an oil business to a gas producer. "Estimates show that we could have enough gas to power the world for 200 years," he said.

But proponents of renewable energy argue that the millions spent on lobbying efforts to rebrand gas as "green" are based on questionable assumptions. They say that the oil industry's attempt to replace renewable power as the main means to combat climate change could destroy the fledgling green energy industry and thwart attempts to stop global warming.

"Any money and investment that is going to gas is money that is not going to renewables," said Brook Riley, campaigner at Friends of the Earth. "This is a threat to renewables."

Gordon Edge, director of policy at Renewable UK, a trade body for wind companies, said: "We must be careful not to lock ourselves into dependence on a finite imported fuel which, while it is less carbon intensive than coal, is nevertheless much more carbon intensive than any renewable."

Oil companies see gas as a means of recasting themselves as environmentally friendly, with government backing. Newly available forms of gas appear to offer a 50% reduction in carbon emissions compared with electricity generation from coal, meaning most countries could easily meet their 2020 emissions targets – agreed at the 2009 Copenhagen climate conference – at a fraction of the expense of investing in wind, solar and renewables.

These assumptions are backed up by [glow=red,2]an economic analysis commissioned by the European Gas Advocacy Forum (EGAF)[/glow] based in part on work by McKinsey, a consultancy which found that Europe could save about €900bn by 2050 if it met its emissions targets through investment in gas rather than renewables.

"This report seems to get pulled out at every meeting," said one European commission insider. "But what they [the lobbyists] do not say is where it came from."

This EGAF study is now under question by the very people who helped to write it. In its original form, the study found that renewable energy was the best means of meeting Europe's energy needs while cutting greenhouse gas emissions. The sources, methodology and conclusions of this original report were made "open source" by the European Climate Foundation (ECF), the green thinktank that commissioned the research and provided much of the material.

But these open source calculations were seized on by the gas industry, which commissioned a new report altering the original conclusions to appear to show that gas would be a cheaper and more viable form of energy than renewables.

The ECF says: "We in no way endorse this [EGAF] report. Heavy dependency on gas, as this report seems to suggest, is not a viable alternative to a low-carbon generation network with low dependence on fossil fuels in terms of cost, energy security, or climate resilience

"[This is because] it will make Europe dependent on one potentially cost-volatile solution, and the successful commercialisation of carbon capture and storage at an unrealistically large scale. It also reduces Europe's energy security [because Europe has few shale gas reserves to exploit, unlike the US and Asia]. These are high-risk strategies indeed."

Privately, green campaigners and officials in Brussels are furious at EGAF's actions. "It is outrageous," said one insider, who cannot be named. "The way in which this has been distorted by the gas industry is unbelievable."

What is more, the industry's core assumption that shale gas offers a 50% reduction on burning coal has also been sharply challenged by a new academic study.

Gas, in its pure form, burns in power stations with about half the carbon dioxide produced by burning coal. But if all of the associated emissions of shale gas are taken into account, this benefit disappears, according to a newly published study from Cornell University.

The study, published in the Climatic Change Letters journal, showed that about 4-8% of the methane from shale gas production escaped to the atmosphere via leaks and venting over the lifetime of a well – much more than from conventional gas drilling. As methane is more than 20 times as powerful a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide, shale gas is likely to prove more harmful in climate change terms than even coal, which is usually regarded as the dirtiest fossil fuel. The Cornell study concluded that shale gas used to generate electricity had about the same carbon footprint as coal, or even a slightly higher one, and when used as heating or transport fuel would be no cleaner than diesel.

The authors concluded: "The large GHG footprint of shale gas undercuts the logic of its use as a bridging fuel over coming decades, if the goal is to reduce global warming. We do not intend that our study be used to justify the continued use of either oil or coal, but rather to demonstrate that substituting shale gas for these other fossil fuels may not have the desired effect of mitigating climate warming."

Nor does the fuel appear green when the side effects are taken into account, some of which are potentially lethal. From the US, where the fracturing – fracking – of shale rock has been pioneered, come myriad reports of disastrous gas leaks, land contaminated by the chemicals used in extraction, and drinking water rendered unsafe by pollution from the drilling. The film Gasland featured families whose homes were uninhabitable and who were suffering health problems.

Gas advocates, such as Miller of Cuadrilla, argue that the film, and many other similar reports from the US, seized upon examples from a small minority of companies that have cut corners and pursued poor practices. "There are always a few bad apples in any industry," he said. "But it is possible to do this in a clean, responsible way that does not lead to these kind of problems." His company, he said, was spending more than the average in order to ensure its sites did not lead to contamination or gas leaks.

Gas companies also seek to reassure governments and green campaigners that their fuel does not compete with renewables, and can even help countries to include more renewables in the energy mix because it provides flexible generation that can be turned off or on quickly to cope with the intermittency of renewable energy. Green campaigners are less optimistic. They believe that pursuing gas – which is artificially cheap outside Europe because its associated emissions are not properly taken into account – will crowd out investment in renewables, until it is too late and the world is committed to a gas-powered future.

The consequences for genuinely green forms of power, such as wind and solar, could be dire. Investment in gas is posited as an alternative to green fuels. In the US, climate change has been chiefly framed as a matter of energy security. Emissions cuts have been promoted as a way of reducing foreign oil dependence so a new domestic fuel source is very attractive.

With shale gas in plentiful supply in the US, the needs of energy security can now be met without the sharp reductions in emissions needed to avoid dangerous levels of global warming. Investment in wind and solar in the US have already been hit hard by a combination of competition from shale gas, recession and weaker government assistance. The number of wind turbines being erected has "fallen off a cliff", according to General Electric, one of the biggest turbine manufacturers.

"In the US, it's as if they do not have to do anything about climate change because they say 'we have shale gas'," said Connie Hedegaard, the EU climate chief, of her recent visit to the US. "But you have to have climate change as part of the equation … and avoid the lock-in to fossil fuels."

That is another key point: The development of a new generation of gas-fired power stations threatens to perpetuate a long-term future of fossil fuel energy generation. Switching from coal-fired power stations to gas produces sizeable short-term reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, as the UK proved through its "dash for gas" in the 1980s and 1990s. But after the initial gains – and unlike renewable energy sources – gas-fired power stations carry on producing carbon emissions for decades. The life of a plant can stretchfrom 25 to 40 years, with the right maintenance

If a new fleet of gas-fired power stations built in the next 10 years are still producing emissions in 2050, it will be impossible for the world to halve emissions by 2050, as scientists say we must.

For this reason, EGAF's analysis assumes all gas-fired power stations will use carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology from 2030, reducing their emissions to nearly zero.

But the technology has never been used at a commercial scale. Pilot projects cost about £2bn each, running costs are unknown, and there are likely to be severe limitations to where carbon dioxide can safely be stored underground. Using the technology also reduces the amount of energy a power plant can produce.

EGAF assumes that CCS will become "economically viable" in the mid-2020s, but if these complex estimates are even slightly inaccurate, and the technology is more expensive than forecast, by then it would be too late for the renewable industry.

Prof Howarth, lead author of the Cornell study, added: "Carbon storage remains an idea that has little real-world testing. To the extent it has been tested, problems have clearly surfaced, such as leakage of carbon dioxide back to the atmosphere, and water pollution from the materials extracted from the storage due to the highly corrosive, high acidity of the storage material. It remains to be seen whether the technology can be developed in a safe, environmentally responsible way. It also remains to be seen how much this will cost."

If CCS does not come through as EGAF predicts, then the value of shale gas in the fight against climate change becomes highly questionable.

www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/apr/20/shale-gas-green-oil-companies

[Big Bunny]

China takes step towards tapping shale gas potential with first well

Drilling in Sichuan deemed a success as China seeks to emulate US's adoption of costly and controversial technique

* Jonathan Watts, Asia environment correspondent
* guardian.co.uk, Thursday 21 April 2011 11.38 BST

China has begun trials of a controversial drilling technique to exploit the world's largest reserves of shale gas, as it attempts to cope with the increasing energy demands of a fast-growing economy while reducing its dependence on coal.

In the past two weeks, engineers have completed the country's first horizontal shale gas well in Sichuan and government officials have begun drafting a national strategy to identify a trillion cubic metres of exploitable resources by 2020.

Supporters say China has the potential to emulate the United States, where extraction of shale gas has tripled the lifespan of US gas reserves and offered a lower-carbon alternative to coal.

"Shale gas is a game-changer for the US and should do the same for China," said Ming Sung, Asia representative of the Boston-based Clean Air Task Force and an advocate of closer energy links between the two nations. "This should be one of the centre-pieces for China's energy strategy. As with any new technology development, we must balance benefits versus potential environmental impacts. The experiences of the US are valuable here."

The extraction method itself is costly, controversial and challenging. Hydraulic fracturing or "fracking" involves the injection of chemically treated water at high pressure through seams of rock, forcing the gas inside to seep out to where it can be captured. Environmentalists warn that this wastes and contaminates millions of tons of water.

For fuel-hungry, drought-plagued China, this poses a conundrum. The energy potential is enormous. The ministry of land and resources calculates the size of shale gas reserves at 26tn cubic metres – more than 10 times the country's known holdings of conventional natural gas.

This is a tempting alternative for a country that is eager to improve its energy security in the face of rising oil and coal imports. A global shale gas study released this month by the US Energy Information Administration said China's technically recoverable shale gas reserves were almost 50% higher than those of the number two nation, the US.

But tapping them will be expensive and difficult for a country that is desperately short of water and – until recently – lacking experience in the key technologies.

Engineers from China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) took a major step towards rectifying the latter problem on 23 March, when it opened the shale gas well 3km below the surface at Weiyuan in Sichuan province.

The scale of production is a mere 10,000 cubic metres a day, the equivalent to about 10 tonnes of oil, and the financial returns are unattractive given the low price of gas and the high costs of exploitation – 7% of which are for environmental measures. But the pilot project was deemed a success because it proved the effectiveness of drilling equipment – the final thousand metres of the well being bored in just 34 days.

"The success of this well is valuable for the future of horizontal shale gas technology," said an industry source. "We expect to reach our targets for exploration and development ahead of schedule."

Executives at CNPC – China's biggest energy company – have said they aim to produce 500m cubic metres of shale gas by 2015. With other firms such as Sinopec, Royal Dutch Shell and Chevron lining up to enter the business, the government has begun drawing up a national strategy that is likely to be incorporated into the latest five-year plan. Industry insiders are hopeful that it will include tax incentives and subsidies to develop shale gas reserves.

In an effort to wean the economy off coal, China plans to triple the use of natural gas so that it supplies 10% of the country's energy needs by 2020. Most of this will come from conventional wells and coal-bed methane, but the share from shale is in fact likely to hit 12% by 2020 and continue rising.

The US appears to be a willing partner. President Barack Obama and his Chinese counterpart Hu Jintao signed a joint shale gas initiative in 2009, covering technology co-operation and assessments of reserves.

Liang Digang of the China Research Institute of Petroleum Exploration and Development said many of the technological barriers identified early on have been overcome.

"When China started looking at shale gas two years ago, we did not know how to do it so we spent money and invited foreign companies to join us. Now can do it by ourselves."

But experts and industry executives downplayed the prospect of China exploiting shale gas reserves as quickly as the United States because the geology of the two nations is different. They said China's shale is older and, tonne for tonne, produces less than half the gas of shale in the US. Water shortages will add to the costs. One of China's two biggest deposits in the country – the Turpan Basin in Xinjiang – is a desert.

In the short term, Liang said the costs were likely to curtail China's shale gas ambitions.

"We should not put too much stress on this right now, but in the long run, it is necessary to develop shale gas as a supplement to our conventional gas supply. The development of this industry is not for the present, but for the future."

www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/apr/21/china-shale-gas-well

[Big Bunny]

BP plans to drill in Gulf of Mexico within months

Oil company has set aside over $40bn to cover claims and damages over the Deepwater Horizon disaster

* Terry Macalister and Suzanne Goldenberg
* guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 27 April 2011 21.29 BST

Environmentalists reacted angrily after BP predicted it would be back drilling in the Gulf of Mexico within months despite facing billions in financial penalties over the Deepwater Horizon disaster – and despite balls of tar still washing up on beaches.

The oil giant's finance director, Byron Grote, told City analysts: "We expect to be back and actively drilling during the second half of the year." Such a return would be a major victory for BP – which last summer was threatened by a proposed law to ban the company from the Gulf for up to seven years.

"BP's reckless approach led to the worst oil disaster in American history, but one year later they're off the hook and ready to take more risks," said Phil Radford, director of Greenpeace USA. "It's a testament to the political influence of these big oil companies that right now Tony Hayward is sailing his luxury yacht rather than facing criminal charges," he added.

BP wants to resume drilling at its Thunderhorse and Atlantis fields, but the American regulator told the Guardian that nothing had been decided yet. "They have not received any shallow or deep water permits," said Melissa Schwartz, spokeswoman for the government's Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement.

Another regulatory official said privately that BP expressions of confidence were "pissing people off" in the Obama administration and would not influence any decision on new drilling permits.

BP has already set aside over $40bn to cover claims and damages over the blowout whose first year anniversary was marked last week by a raft of lawsuits. These were both from and against BP as blame for the disaster in which 11 workers lost their lives continues to be pinned on a variety of parties including rig operator, Transocean, and services company, Halliburton.

Meanwhile some environmentalists remain concerned that the damage to the gulf still runs deep, with large amounts of oil continuing to cause damage.

www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/apr/27/bp-plans-drill-gulf-mexico

[Big Bunny]

Chevron chiefs face shareholders after huge $18bn Ecuador fine

California-based oil company criticised by investors for 'take no prisoner' attitude to Ecuador judgment

* Felicity Carus
* guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 25 May 2011 11.46 BST

Chevron bosses are facing shareholders for the first time since the company was fined a total of $18bn (£11.1bn) by a court in Ecuador over contamination from oil extraction in the Amazon. California's largest oil company is coming under increasing pressure from institutional investors and long-term shareholders who are gathering at the annual general meeting at Chevron's HQ in San Ramon, near San Francisco.

A judge ruled in February this year that the company was liable to pay $8.6bn in damages, mostly to decontaminate polluted soil. The judge also awarded $860,000 to plaintiffs and a further $8.6bn in punitive damages. Chevron has appealed the decision, which amounts to the largest award in corporate history, exceeded only by BP's $20bn compensation fund after the Gulf oil spill. Chevron's earnings were $6.2bn in the first quarter of 2011, up from $4.6bn last year.

The New York State Common Retirement Fund – which manages $150bn of state government pensions – has filed a resolution calling on Chevron to appoint an independent board member with environmental expertise.

Pat Doherty, director of corporate governance at the New York State office of the state comptroller, said: "The fact that Chevron didn't have someone with this expertise on the board probably helped contribute to the problem. We're suggesting that Chevron's take no prisoner approach has arguably also made things worse."

Chevron acquired Texaco in 2001, inheriting its liabilities for alleged substandard oil extraction in Ecuador's rainforest between 1964 and 1992. The company no longer extracts oil in Ecuador, but has operations in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Venezuela. It has admitted in court documents that enforcement of the penalties by the seizure of assets in these countries would bring "irreparable harm" and disrupt its supply chain.

Chevron also now faces scrutiny by the Securities and Exchange Commission after Trillium Asset Management, a Boston-based sustainable and responsible investment fund, filed a request this week to review the company's shareholder disclosures on the magnitude of its financial and operational risk.

Shelley Alpern, vice president and director of ESG research and shareholder advocacy at Trillium, said: "The Ecuadorian courts are but one step away from seizing Chevron's assets to pay for the record $18bn judgment. It doesn't seem unreasonable to hope that a settlement agreement might be brokered that comes in below this extraordinary amount, puts funds to work immediately restoring the polluted areas, and helps Chevron put this reputational disaster behind it."

A delegation from the affected region in Ecuador is due to attend the AGM, alongside 22 proxy voters. Humberto Piaguaje, a leader of the Secoya tribe in the Ecuadorian Amazon, said: "We have fought for nearly 20 years to bring Chevron to justice, and finally we have a court judgment that affirms what we have been saying all this time.

"The court, which Chevron chose, found them guilty of poisoning our rainforest, and our families. With this verdict, we have come north to demand that Chevron cease its lies and pay to clean up the contamination that is choking our communities."

Chevron continues to aggressively deny liability. The company said: "Chevron has appealed because the judgment was procured by fraud and because the Ecuadorian judicial system failed to afford an impartial tribunal and due process.

"The plaintiffs' representatives have colluded with the court and its experts, fabricated evidence, falsified reports, and forged signatures. Chevron acknowledges that the people of Ecuador's Amazon face legitimate challenges. But a fraudulent lawsuit is not a solution."

www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/may/25/chevron-heads-shareholders-huge-fine

[Big Bunny]

Greenpeace Arctic oil protest ended by Danish navy

Commandos end occupation of drilling rig on exploration vessel by breaking into activists' survival pod

* Severin Carrell, Scotland correspondent
* guardian.co.uk, Thursday 2 June 2011 08.49 BST


Danish navy commandos remove Greenpeace activists from the Arctic drilling rig Leiv Eiriksson. Photograph: Greenpeace/Reuters

[glow=red,2]Link to this video:[/glow] www.guardian.co.uk/environment/video/2011/jun/02/arctic-oil-occupation-greenpeace-video

Danish navy commandos have ended the occupation of an Arctic drilling rig by Greenpeace by breaking into the protesters' survival pod hanging off the drilling platform.

The navy unit broke into the pod just before midnight, four days after the two activists began their occupation of the drilling platform of Leiv Eiriksson, an oil exploration vessel operated by the British firm Cairn Energy.

The arrests of Luke Jones, from Leeds, and Hannah McHardy, from the US, end a 10-day long action by Greenpeace and its protest ship Esperanza against Cairn's drilling operations off Greenland. The activists are now being held and are likely to be deported.

Last year, four Greenpeace protesters occupied another Cairn rig in the same area for about 30 hours after attaching a climbing platform under the structure. That protest was brought to an end by severe weather.

Ben Ayliffe, a Greenpeace International campaigner on board the Esperanza, said: "Our team stopped this rig from drilling for four days, which was four days in which a Deepwater Horizon-style blowout couldn't happen and this beautiful fragile environment was safe.

"Our climbers are in jail now, but this won't stop us opposing the madness of drilling for oil in a region where a spill would be almost impossible to clean up. This isn't over. We'll keep on pushing till the oil companies get out of the Arctic."

Cairn denies that its drilling operation was affected by the occupation. It and Greenland's government insist that its oil spill emergency plan is detailed and comprehensive, and argue that oil wells have been sited in the Arctic for several decades.

www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/jun/02/greenpeace-arctic-oil-protest-ended

Further:

Cairn Energy threatens to fine Greenpeace for Arctic drilling protest

British oil company wants to fine Greenpeace €2m a day if the campaign group disrupts its oil drilling operations in the Arctic

* John Vidal, environment editor
* guardian.co.uk, Thursday 2 June 2011 18.15 BST


Greenpeace protesters spent four days in a survival pod attached to the the Leiv Eiriksson rig. Photograph: Steve Morgan/Greenpeace/HANDOUT/EPA

British oil company Cairn Energy has filed legal papers with a Dutch court to fine Greenpeace €2m (£1.76m) a day if the campaign group disrupts its oil drilling operations in the Arctic.

The draconian legal move, that would bankrupt the environment group, comes after Danish marines boarded Cairn's giant Leiv Eiriksson drilling platform early on Thursday. They evicted two Greenpeace climbers who had spent four days in a survival pod attached to the drilling platform.

The company has previously claimed in interviews that the four-day Greenpeace occupation had "no impact on its schedule". However, Cairn says in the court documents: "The defendants are preventing the exploitation of the platform. All delay of the platforms during its journey to the respective drilling locations and each hindrance during the drilling activities will lead to delay of the operations. Plaintiffs estimate the damage resulting from delay to those drilling activities at least $4m (£2.5m) per day. The urgent character of the plaintiffs demand thus speaks for itself."

Greenpeace reacted with defiance, saying it would fight the case. "This oil company has been hiding behind the Greenland government and the Danish navy, and now it's trying to use the Dutch courts. It can hire all the lawyers it likes, but it can't hide the huge risks it's taking with this beautiful and fragile environment. Cairn is threatening us with a huge legal hammer now, it wants to shut down our campaign to kick the oil companies out of the Arctic, but we'll challenge them and their lawyers every step of way. The stakes are high here, the Arctic is in the front line of climate change. We won't stop shining a light on this dangerous deep water drilling operation in the Arctic."

The legal summons, which will be heard on Monday in Amsterdam where the Greenpeace ship Esperanza is registered, asks the judge to "… order defendants to cease all unlawful activities within one hour of handing down the judgment in this matter against the platforms and to order their employees, their aids or their sympathisers to cease all unlawful activities against the platforms, to allow the safe and unhindered exploitation of the platforms, at a penalty of €2m for each day or part thereof during which defendants are not complying with this order."

Cairn is spending around $1bn over the next two years seeking oil in Arctic waters, but can only work during a short three-month window when weather conditions allow exploration. It is thought to be paying $500,000 a day to hire the Leiv Eiriksson, one of the largest oil platforms in the world.

Cairn last night denied it was trying to bankrupt Greenpeace, saying that it was seeking to prevent further interference with its work in the Arctic. "Cairn respects the rights of individuals and organisations to express their views in a safe and peaceful manner but would be concerned with anything that presents a safety risk for those involved and the operations," the company said in a statement.

Oil companies have a long history of challenging protest groups in the courts but have mostly backed off after facing bad publicity. BP sued Greenpeace and four of its senior staff for $2.3m in 1997 after activists occupied an oil platform, but later dropped the case.

www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/jun/02/cairn-greenpeace-arctic-drilling-protest

[Big Bunny]

Company plans to tap world's biggest coal field

By Lucy McNally

Updated 2 hours 56 minutes ago

An Australian company says a coal field discovered in the Simpson Desert could be the biggest in the world.

Central Petroleum Limited says it recently discovered the field in the south-east of the Northern Territory, about 300 kilometres from Alice Springs. It says the coal seam stretches across 400 kilometres.

The company has signed an agreement with Allied Resource Partners (ARP) to work towards setting up a coal production plant in the Great Artesian Basin area.

ARP says the plan is to make liquid fuel without mining, by heating the coal underground, turning it into a gas, and then turning that gas into a liquid.

ARP spokesman David Shearwood says operations could last for 100 years because the field is so big.

"It is an enormous quantity of coal," he said.

"In our analysis, we can't find a bigger coal field on the planet."

He says the project would involve building a pipeline to Darwin and possibly one to South Australia.

The joint venture partners say they are seeking $300 million from investors to pay for a feasibility study that would include extensive exploration.

ARP says the project could be bigger than the Inpex gas plant planned for Darwin - which today received environmental approval from the Federal Government.

A peak environment group in Central Australia has expressed concern about the proposed project.

Jimmy Cocking from the Arid Land Environment Centre says he is not buying assurances that the process will be environmentally friendly.

"They are very keen to distance themselves from the coal seam gas industry in saying it is very different," he said.

"There are still inherent risks associated with it.

"This project is about making coal not coal, but pumping chemicals into the ground and pumping them up, so we have got big concerns about it."

Mr Cocking also says he is not convinced the companies can meet their promise to capture carbon and store it underground.

He says the science of carbon capture has not been proven on a large-scale project like this one.

"What happens if we pump all that CO2 down into the aquifer?" he asked.

First posted 3 hours 33 minutes ago

www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/06/28/3255535.htm

[Big Bunny]

Arctic scientist who exposed climate threat to polar bear is suspended

US government conducts 'integrity inquiry' on federal biologist amid lobbying by oil firms for Arctic permits

* Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent
* guardian.co.uk, Thursday 28 July 2011 20.43 BST

It was seen as one of the most distressing effects of climate change ever recorded: polar bears dying of exhaustion after being stranded between melting patches of Arctic sea ice.

But now the government scientist who first warned of the threat to polar bears in a warming Arctic has been suspended and his work put under official investigation for possible scientific misconduct.

Charles Monnett, a wildlife biologist, oversaw much of the scientific work for the government agency that has been examining drilling in the Arctic. He managed about $50m (£30.5m) in research projects.

Some question why Monnett, employed by the US Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, has been suspended at this moment. The Obama administration has been accused of hounding the scientist so it can open up the fragile region to drilling by Shell and other big oil companies.

"You have to wonder: this is the guy in charge of all the science in the Arctic and he is being suspended just now as an arm of the interior department is getting ready to make its decision on offshore drilling in the Arctic seas," said Jeff Ruch, president of the group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. "This is a cautionary tale with a deeply chilling message for any federal scientist who dares to publish groundbreaking research on conditions in the Arctic."

The group filed an official complaint on Monnett's behalf on Thursday, accusing the government of persecuting the (see following) scientist and interfering with his work. It seeks his reinstatement and a public apology.

Monnett was on a research flight tracking bowhead whales, in 2004, when he and his colleagues spotted four dead polar bears floating in the water after a storm. The scientists concluded the bears, though typically strong swimmers, had grown exhausted and drowned due to the long distances between patches of solid sea ice. It was the first time scientists had drawn a link between melting Arctic sea ice and a threat to the bears' survival.

Two years later, Monnett and a colleague published an article in the science journal Polar Biology, writing: "Drowning-related deaths of polar bears may increase in the future if the observed trend of regression of pack ice and/or longer open water periods continues."

The paper quickly heightened public concern for the polar bear. Al Gore, citing the paper, used polar bear footage in his film Inconvenient Truth. Campaigners focused on the bears to push George Bush to act on climate change, and in 2008, the government designated the animal a threatened species.

It was the first animal to be classed as a victim of climate change.

In 2010 the Obama administration began an investigation into his work. The scientist was suspended with pay on 18 July. He is said to be under a gagging order and forbidden from communicating with his colleagues. The employee group's complaint alleges that the investigation is a thinly veiled attempt to disrupt scientific work on the Arctic.

Oil firms, which want to drill in the pristine environment of the Chukchi and Beaufort seas, have been complaining of delays caused by environmental reviews. This month Obama issued an order to speed up Arctic drilling permits.

A spokeswoman for the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management Regulation and Enforcement (Boemre) said the government would continue to carry out research on the potential impacts of Arctic drilling, despite Monnett's suspension.

"All of the scientific contracts previously managed by Mr Monnett are being managed by the highly qualified scientists at Boemre," Melissa Schwartz said in an email. She noted that the investigation was being overseen by the inspector general, which is independent, and that it was being conducted according to the Obama administration's new guidelines on scientific integrity.

However, Peer argues the exercise is intended to discredit Monnett's brief paper on the polar bear.

Other organisations also accused the government agency of a long record of meddling in science. A 2009 report by the Government Accountability Office found huge gaps in Boemre's research on the impacts of drilling in the Arctic. And the Alaska Wilderness League stated: "Alaska Boemre has continued to ignore science and traditional knowledge in its decision-making about oil and gas development."

Documents posted on the League's website include a transcript of a conversation between investigators and Jeffrey Gleason, another government scientist on the 2004 trip. Gleason, who works for the government, in the Gulf of Mexico, said he did not necessarily share Monnett's conclusions that the polar bears were killed as a consequence of climate change. "It's something along the lines of the changing environment in the Arctic," he was quoted as saying.

www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jul/28/arctic-scientist-polar-bear-oil

FURTHER:

July 28, 2011

Office of the Executive Secretariat and Regulatory Affairs
U.S. Department of Interior
1849 C Street, NW
Washington, DC 20240

Complaint of Scientific and Scholarly Misconduct

Complainant:

Filed on behalf of Dr. Charles Monnett, PhD, a wildlife biologist with the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement (BOEM) by undersigned of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). Dr. Monnett coordinates a significant portion of all BOEM extramural research and a majority of BOEM research on Arctic wildlife and ecology. He had Contracting Officer’s Representative duties managing approximately $50 million worth of studies.

Complaint Summary:

Several recent actions taken against Dr. Monnett violate the Department of Interior (DOI) policy on Integrity of Scientific and Scholarly Activities (Part 305; Chapter 3 DOI Manual), specifically:

a) Dr. Monnett’s significant scientific activities have been completely disrupted, in violation of the policy against “outside interference” with scientific work (§ 3.5 L). He has been forbidden from conducting any scientific work, contacting colleagues or entering BOEM premises under threat of disciplinary action. (See Attachment I) This open-ended professional banishment not only prevents Dr. Monnett from doing work but substantially interferes with a number of on-going research projects.

b) Dr. Monnett has been subjected to “a significant departure from accepted practices of the relevant scientific and scholarly community” (§ 3.5 M), in that –

i. He has been placed on administrative leave and suspended from his Contracting Officer’s Representative duties due to “an on-going inquiry” from the Interior Department of Inspector General (IG) yet Dr. Monnett has not been informed of any specific charge or question relating to the scientific integrity of his work (see Attachment II);

ii. The IG is apparently reviewing a 2006 note authored by Dr. Monnett and a colleague and published in 2006 in the peer-reviewed journal Polar Biology (Attachment III). This note had undergone informal internal peer review, formal management review by the then Minerals Management Service (MMS) chain-of-command and outside peer review coordinated by the editors of Polar Biology. The aforementioned IG investigation, however, is being conducted by criminal investigators who have no scientific training, background or understanding of the scientific issues they are investigating; and

iii. In the course of this investigation, IG agents seized Dr. Monnett’s computer hard-drive, notes, papers and equipment. Although his hard drive was returned within a few weeks, despite repeated requests, IG agents did not return his other materials, further hindering his work.

In short, despite newly minted policies to protect scientific integrity and DOI scientists from political interference, DOI officials have actively persecuted Dr. Monnett, acted on hearsay and rumors, gratuitously tarnished his reputation and substantially disrupted important scientific research.

These actions violate core DOI Scientific integrity principles, including:
 Intentionally hindering the scientific and scholarly activities of others, in violation of § 3.7A (6);

 Failing to “examine, track, and resolve all reasonable allegations of scientific and scholarly misconduct while ensuring the rights and privacy of those covered by this policy and ensuring that unwarranted allegations do not result in slander, libel, or other damage to them,” in violation of § 3.4 L; and

 DOI decision-makers engaging in “coercive manipulation” and other activities which have negatively affected “ the planning, conduct, reporting, or application” of Dr. Monnett’s extensive scientific activities, in violation of § 3.7 C(1).

As detailed below, this misconduct was “committed intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly” and is supported by “a preponderance of evidence”, as stipulated in § 3.5 M(3).

Subjects of this Complaint:

It is our contention, based upon our examination of the record, that the following DOI officials are guilty of Scientific and Scholarly Misconduct:

1. BOEM Director Michael Bromwich, BOEM Alaska Regional Director (Acting) James Kendall, Deputy Regional Director Jeffery Loman and other agency officials involved in the decision to terminate Contract Officer’s Representative status for Dr. Monnett on on-going studies, issuing stop-work orders on others and placing Dr. Monnett on indefinite administrative leave on the basis of information not shared with Dr. Monnett and absent any due diligence inquiry into the validity of this information; and

2. IG Special Agent Eric May and his chain-of-command responsible for a) continuing a multi-month investigation into a more than 5-year old peer reviewed publication well after it became apparent that no falsification or other scientific misconduct by Dr. Monnett could be identified, let alone verified; b) communicating unverified concerns or findings to Dr. Monnett’s chain-of-command; and c) refusing to promptly return papers and equipment seized from Dr. Monnett, the absence of which impeded Dr. Monnett in his scientific activities.
Requested Relief: We request that BOEM immediately reinstate Dr. Monnett to his previous duties and status. We request that the IG either drop its investigation of Dr. Monnett or expeditiously pursue it by specifying charges of scientific misconduct through the process laid out in the DOI Manual (see § 3.8). We also demand that BOEM and the IG each issue a public statement of apology to Dr. Monnett for their misconduct. We further ask that the responsible officials in these agencies be appropriately disciplined.

The Record:

For years, MMS biologists have annually counted bowhead whales sighted in North America’s Arctic waters. Bowheads are targeted in the aerial survey, which involves numerous flight-days, but the team’s researchers routinely note the presence of other marine mammals, including seals, walrus and polar bears, along with fluctuations detected in the region’s sea ice. In 2004, Dr. Monnett was the team leader for this “Bowhead Whale Aerial Survey Project.” During those flights that year, Dr. Monnett also acted as an observer, as did an MMS colleague, Dr. Jeffrey Gleason. That year, they observed an unusual number of polar bears swimming in ocean, then, following a major storm which grounded flights, they sighted four floating polar bear carcasses.

These occurrences were recorded in contemporaneous notebooks and photos of one floating bear were taken.

When the survey project was complete, at first Drs. Monnett and Gleason did not realize the significance of what they had seen, but in speaking with current and retired colleagues, they came to realize that what they had seen was quite unusual, if not unprecedented.
In 2005, they decided to author a “note”, an anecdotal account of their observations with a short scientific discussion of possible implications of these sightings. After composing a short article they circulated it among colleagues both inside and outside MMS, including some of the world’s most eminent polar bear researchers. After incorporating this input, they submitted it for official MMS management review. The article received MMS management approval, up through the then Alaska regional Director, John Goll.

It should be noted that MMS management review was not pro forma as there was extreme sensitivity at this time to any publication that might point to the existence of climate change, especially as it might affect the Arctic region.

With official approvals secured, Drs. Monnett and Gleason submitted the article, entitled “Observations of mortality associated with extended open-water swimming by polar bears in the Alaskan Beaufort Sea,” to the well regarded peer review journal Polar Biology in April 2005. The Polar Biology editors subjected their article to an external anonymous peer review. In December 2005, the journal accepted it for publication and it appeared in the 2006 edition.

The published article, including footnotes, is less than seven pages long. This short note, and two related poster presentations at scientific societies, soon attracted national and even international attention, which connected the findings in the article with climate change.

Both authors began receiving negative feedback and harassment from their MMS chain-of-command, including instructions that they could not answer questions about the article. Soon thereafter, Dr. Gleason left MMS, accepting a lower-grade position with another agency.

To lower his profile, Dr. Monnett decided to take his name off of all future publications and to concentrate on managing a growing portfolio of very important research projects.

On February 4, 2011, Dr. Monnett received an email from IG Special Agent Eric May requesting an interview. Dr. Monnett twice asked Agent May to specify in writing the subject of the investigation but Agent May demurred.

On February 14, 2011, Dr. Monnett received a “Compelled Interview Notice” from his immediate BOEM supervisor (Attachment IV) which stated; “It has come to my attention that the Office of Inspector General is conducting an investigation into allegations of administrative misconduct by you and others in the Bowhead Whale Aerial Survey Project.” The notice directed Dr. Monnett to make himself available for an interview with IG agents on February 23, 2011 in the Anchorage BOEM offices.

At that interview, it became clear that the focus of the investigation was the 2006 Polar Biology journal note, though it remained unstated what had sparked an IG investigation of a peer-reviewed article more than five years after its publication (See IG Interview Transcript, Attachment V).

Early in the interview, it was established that the two IG special agents conducting the investigation had no scientific background or training:

CHARLES MONNETT: Okay, and, and just so I know how to put my answers, do you have scientific credentials of any sort? Uh, what, what, what level of scientist am I speaking with here that’s going to be evaluating my science?
ERIC MAY: No, we’re criminal investigators.
CHARLES MONNETT: Criminal investigators.
ERIC MAY: With the Inspector General’s Office.
LYNN GIBSON: Right.
CHARLES MONNETT: So I assume with no formal training in, in science or biology or –
LYNN GIBSON: That’s correct.
ERIC MAY: That’s right.
CHARLES MONNETT: – marine, marine biology (inaudible/mixed voices).
LYNN GIBSON: That’s correct.
ERIC MAY: That’s correct, right.
CHARLES MONNETT: All right, thanks. [IG Interview Transcript at page 4]

It became apparent that the two criminal investigators had a questionable grasp of the nature of the allegations against Dr. Monnett or how to investigate them. Due to a total lack of scientific background, the agents did not realize that the Polar Biology Journal was an observational note, not a study. Nor did they realize that the discussion section of a note invites speculation of possible meanings.

Repeatedly, the agents were hindered by misunderstanding basic math concepts. For example, Agent May asked about whether the note’s “stats” were peer-reviewed and this exchange ensued:

ERIC MAY: Did they comment at all about any of the stats or –
CHARLES MONNETT: Uh, there’s no stats in there.
ERIC MAY: Well, calculations, for, for example, the 25 percent survival rate.
CHARLES MONNETT: Oh, well, that’s just a mindless thing. That’s in the discussion. Um, that is not a statistic. Um, that’s a ratio estimator. It’s a, it’s a fifth grade procedure. Do you have kids?
ERIC MAY: No.
CHARLES MONNETT: Okay, well, if you had kids, you would know that in about fifth grade, they start doing a thing called cross multiplication. “X” is to “Y” as, you know, “N” is to “M.” And you can – there’s, there’s a little procedure you use to compare the proportions. And so that’s a, um, simply a calculation. It’s not a statistic.
ERIC MAY: Okay.
CHARLES MONNETT: And, uh, we were very careful, um, in how we presented that, to first make it clear that we had – we didn’t have sufficient sample size, although a, a, a peer statistician type would probably argue we did. But we felt we didn’t have a sufficient sample size to do statistics and, you know, and to estimate, to do any estimators or confidence intervals or anything like that on. And we put caveats throughout that section, saying that, uh, “it’s possible.” And we felt that, um, we didn’t want to leave the reader thinking that, “Okay, they went out, and they surveyed it, and there were four dead bears.” Because this is a survey, and it only looks – it only covers a small part of the habitat.

When you’re out there flying in an airplane, uh, over this vast area, our transects were 100 kilometers or longer, many cases, and we were surveying an area 500, you know, kilometers wide. We appreciated that we had a very limited, you know, scope in this thing. We were only looking at a small percentage of it, and so we thought that it would be worthwhile, uh, letting them know essentially that we only looked at about 10 percent of the area. And so if you just kind of draw a circle around the area where the dead bears were, then if we looked at 10 percent of the area, um, it’s reasonable to think that if they’re distributed randomly, which we don’t have any reason not to think they are, that we would see 10 percent of what’s there. And that’s a standard thing that’s, um, used all the time and sometimes very rigorously.
ERIC MAY: Okay.
CHARLES MONNETT: But you, but you have to state your assumptions, which, you know, I think we did, so –. And that’s – that hasn’t been controversial. Nobody, nobody’s really complained about that that I’m – that I recall anyway. [IG Interview Transcript at pages 37-8]

Later, it became clear that the IG agents were focused on what in their mind was a disparity but was, in fact, their inability to understand the note. The issue was how many dead bears had been observed floating in open waters:

ERIC MAY: Well, actually, since you’re bringing that up, and, and I’m a little confused of how many dead or drowned polar bears you did observe, because in the manuscript, you indicate three, and in the poster presentation –
CHARLES MONNETT: No.
ERIC MAY: – you mentioned four.
CHARLES MONNETT: No, now you’re confusing the, um, the estimator with the, uh, the sightings. There were four drowned bears seen.
ERIC MAY: Okay.
CHARLES MONNETT: Three of which were on transects.
ERIC MAY: Okay.
CHARLES MONNETT: And so for the purpose of that little ratio estimator, we only looked at what we were seeing on transects, because that’s a – you know, we couldn’t be very rigorous, but the least we could do is look at the random transects. And so we based, uh, our extrapolation to only bears on transects, because we’re saying that the transects, the, the swaths we flew, represented I think it was 11 percent of the entire habitat that, you know, that could have had dead polar bears in it.
ERIC MAY: Um-hm [yes].
CHARLES MONNETT: And, um, so by limiting it to the transect bears, then, you know, we could do that ratio estimator and say three is to, um, uh, “x” as, uh, 11 is to 100. I mean, it’s that kind of thing. You, you’ve, you’re nodding like you understand.
LYNN GIBSON: Yeah.
CHARLES MONNETT: Yeah, that’s pretty simple, isn’t confusing. I mean, it’s –
ERIC MAY: So, so, so you observed four dead polar bears during MMS –
CHARLES MONNETT: One of which was not on transect.
ERIC MAY: Okay, so that’s what –
CHARLES MONNETT: Yeah.
ERIC MAY: So is that considered an MMS survey, the one that was not?
CHARLES MONNETT: Yeah, because when we go out there, we don’t – we aren’t just limited to flying transects. We have to get there.
ERIC MAY: Okay.
CHARLES MONNETT: And we connect. We go between transects.
ERIC MAY: Right. [IG Interview Transcript at pages 43-4]

But despite saying that he understood, Agent May did not understand. Later in this interview this exchange illustrated that the investigation was premised on illusory points:
ERIC MAY: Three dead polar bears?
CHARLES MONNETT: Yeah, three dead.
ERIC MAY: Right.
CHARLES MONNETT: But the four swimming were a week earlier.
ERIC MAY: Okay.
CHARLES MONNETT: And, um, then we said if they accurately reflect 11 percent of the bears present so, in other words, they’re just distributed randomly, so we looked at 11 percent of the area.
ERIC MAY: In that transect?
CHARLES MONNETT: Yeah.
ERIC MAY: Right.
CHARLES MONNETT: In, in our, in our area there, um –
ERIC MAY: Right.
CHARLES MONNETT: – and, therefore, we should have seen 11 percent of the bears. Then you just invert that, and you come up with, um, nine times as many. So that’s where you get the 27, nine times three.
ERIC MAY: Where does the nine come from?
CHARLES MONNETT: Uh, well 11 percent is one-ninth of 100 percent. Nine times 11 is 99 percent. Is that, is that clear?
ERIC MAY: Well, now, seven of 11 – seven of what number is 11 percent? Shouldn’t that be – that’s 63, correct?
CHARLES MONNETT: What?
ERIC MAY: So you said this is –
CHARLES MONNETT: Seven/11ths this is –
ERIC MAY: No, no, no, no, no. This, this is, this is 11 – seven is what number of 11 percent?
CHARLES MONNETT: Seven?
ERIC MAY: Yeah.
CHARLES MONNETT: Is what number of 11 percent?
ERIC MAY: Eleven percent, right.
CHARLES MONNETT: Well, I don’t know. I don’t even know what you’re talking about. It makes no sense. [IG Interview Transcript at pages 51-2]

Agent May persisted but as the interview wore on it became less and less clear just what credible allegations prompted this investigation, as illustrated by this exchange:
ERIC MAY: “If seven total bears, four swimming, uh, and three drowned represents 11 percent of the population” –
CHARLES MONNETT: It doesn’t.
ERIC MAY: Okay, and we’ll – let me, let – “of bears before the storm, then the total number of bears after the storm is 63,” and that’s where I came up with the sixty –
CHARLES MONNETT: That’s just stupid. I – did you do that?
ERIC MAY: No.
CHARLES MONNETT: That is stupid.
ERIC MAY: I’m a, I’m just – I interview –
CHARLES MONNETT: In the first place, there’s – it’s 200 percent, okay?
ERIC MAY: So explain – tell me why that’s wrong.
CHARLES MONNETT: Well, because they’re acting like they were all seen at the same survey. We flew the whole thing twice to see that, right?
ERIC MAY: Right, and that’s, that’s different.
CHARLES MONNETT: Yeah.
ERIC MAY: That’s where the mistake is here –
CHARLES MONNETT: Yeah.
ERIC MAY: – because they –
CHARLES MONNETT: Yeah.
ERIC MAY: – they – it occurred on different trips.
CHARLES MONNETT: Yeah, it, it, it’s, it’s three out – uh, three is to 11 to 100 percent, and then four is to 11 to 100 percent. It’s another 100 percent. And so I, I don’t even still follow what they did to get the 60 percent. That, that’s –
ERIC MAY: The 63 percent.
CHARLES MONNETT: Yeah, that’s just goofy.
ERIC MAY: Okay.
CHARLES MONNETT: But you should at least be – if you were trying to, uh, uh, document the rate at which we saw something, dead or swimming, it would be seven out of 200 percent. [IG Interview Transcript at page 60]

After a few more minutes of mystifying questions from the IG agents, they indicated they were about to conclude. This exchange then occurred with one of the PEER legal team, Executive Director Jeff Ruch:
JEFF RUCH: Um, but, uh, Agent May indicated to, um, us all that he was going to lay out what the allegations are, and we haven’t heard them yet, or perhaps we don’t understand them from this line of questioning.
ERIC MAY: Well, the scientif- – well, scientific misconduct, basically, uh, wrong numbers, uh, miscalculations, uh –
JEFF RUCH: Wrong numbers and calculations?
ERIC MAY: Well, what we’ve been discussing for the last hour.
JEFF RUCH: So this is it?
CHARLES MONNETT: Well, that’s not scientific misconduct anyway. If anything, it’s sloppy. I mean, that’s not – I mean, I mean, the level of criticism that they seem to have leveled here, scientific misconduct, uh, suggests that we did something deliberately to deceive or to, to change it. Um, I sure don’t see any indication of that in what you’re asking me about.
ERIC MAY: No, no, no further comment on my part. We, we’re – I’m just about complete with my – the interview, so –
CHARLES MONNETT: Really? Oh, good. That’s it?
ERIC MAY: Like I said, we receive allegations; we investigate.
CHARLES MONNETT: Don’t you wonder why somebody that can’t even do math is making these allegations and going through this stuff? [IG Interview Transcript at pages 83-4]

After this interview, the IG Agents made arrangements to seize Dr. Monnett’s computer hard drive, notebooks and other materials. At that time, the agents indicated they would copy them and return them within a month. Months passed and Dr. Monnett sent Agent May emails inquiring when he could have his materials and equipment back, as their loss impeded his work. Dr. Monnett received no substantive response.

Finally, in an email dated June 28, 2011 (Attachment VI), Agent May wrote:
“Sorry for the delay in my response. I wanted to know if you would be available on either July 12th or 13th sometime in the morning for a follow-up interview. At that time, I can also return your materials. If your [sic] not available, no worries, I will be back in Anchorage in mid to late August. Thanks!!”

Dr. Monnett responded that he was on a family vacation on those dates but would be available after he returned. Apparently Agent May and/or other IG representatives decided they could not wait because, according to BOEM officials, the IG was conveying concerns about Dr. Monnett in July 2011. A BOEM notice to Dr. Monnett dated July 13, 2011 informed him that his Contracting Officer’s Representative role for a major study was terminated “effective immediately.” The cited basis for the action was unspecified “Information raised by the Department of Interior Office of Inspector General in an on-going inquiry causes us to have concerns about your ability to act” in the COR role.

The next day, one of his research contractors informed Dr. Monnett that he had received a stop-work order on a scientific study that was completed except for the writing of the final report. (In this study, the Principal Investigator is still monitoring tagged bears with
his own money) Dr. Monnett heard from other researchers with whom he was working expressing concern about the level of disruption being experienced in ongoing scientific work. Then on July 18, 2011, Dr. Monnett received a notice from Deputy BOEM Regional Director Jeffery Loman that he was placed on administrative leave “effective immediately….pending the final results of an Office of Inspector General (OIG) investigation into integrity issues.”

Dr. Monnett was told to collect his personal effects from his office within the next two hours and was then escorted off the premises. During his indefinite administrative leave, Dr. Monnett is forbidden under threat of “disciplinary action” from entering any DOI facilities, attending any DOI functions or engaging in “any communication (including telephone, email, etc.)” with any scientific colleagues with whom he had been working whether inside or outside DOI.

In effect, Dr. Monnett has been placed under professional house arrest. His scientific work and career have been rudely interrupted. With each passing week, his ability to pick up the reins on multiple projects will lessen.

To add insult to injury, DOI officials have announced to his colleagues that “integrity issues” necessitated his immediate removal and suspension without identifying what those issues are or giving him a chance to answer.

Argument:

Dr. Monnett has been subjected to a Star Chamber procedure where he does not know what allegations have been made, yet is being treated as guilty. He has been subjected to a multi-month investigation in which all of his emails have been examined, his notes seized and his colleagues interrogated. He now is suspended, under orders not to speak with or see his colleagues.

The treatment of Dr. Monnett is the antithesis of what the new DOI Scientific Integrity Policy is supposed to produce. And while the events related in this complaint occurred after this DOI Policy went into effect, its provisions were repeatedly violated.

The policy lays out procedures for “reporting and resolving allegations in a timely and fair manner” (§ 3.8) yet both the IG and BOEM ignored this process.

By contrast, the conduct of the IG has been ham-handed and, on the questions of science, utterly clueless. A fair reading of the IG interview transcript can only support the conclusion that there is no credible, or even coherent, allegation of scientific misconduct against Dr. Monnett.

In this instance, not only is the source of the allegations against Dr. Monnett unknown but so are the allegations themselves. The DOI rules provide that the subject will be informed of the allegation and “will be protected” thorough the inquiry (§ 3.8 D). No one could fairly assert that Dr. Monnett is now being protected, unless referring to protective custody.

If there is merit to the allegation, the review is supposed to be conducted by a Scientific Integrity Review Panel – not by criminal investigators lacking any scientific knowledge or understanding.
Perhaps most importantly, no one to our knowledge has accused Dr. Monnett of falsifying observations of polar bears (alive or dead) in open waters. These observations were witnessed by others and contemporaneously entered into notebooks. Unless Dr. Monnett is accused of falsifying these observations, the issues raised by the IG (assuming there is any merit) are not punishable. As §3.5 M(1) provides: “Scientific and scholarly misconduct does not include honest error or differences of opinion.”

The investigation and suspension of Dr. Monnett, however, is not an innocent bureaucratic mix-up. It is our belief that it is a political attempt to interfere with science. Dr. Monnett is overseeing an extensive portfolio of research on a range of Arctic ecology issues (see Attachment VII). Suspending Dr. Monnett disrupts a significant portion of the BOEM extramural research program at precisely the moment when these studies’ results will be most needed to inform agency decision-making. It is precisely the type of political interference that supposedly gave rise to the new DOI Scientific Integrity Policy.

DOI agencies do not suspend employees every time there is an IG investigation (if they did, there would be even more empty cubicles in the agency). Why did BOEM take action against Dr. Monnett before the IG inquiry was finished?

For that matter: Why is there an extensive investigation in 2011 of a peer reviewed journal note from 2006? The IG is not compelled to investigate every allegation and often declines to review meritorious allegations based upon a variety of considerations, including staleness.

The answer is this article’s impact on the climate change debate, especially as it affects the Arctic. The reason the note received so much attention is that it made climate change impacts in the Arctic understandable to the average layman and, in so doing, made the polar bear an icon of the climate change debate. It is also the reason that such elaborate efforts are underway all these years later to undermine it.

In their interviews of other witnesses in this matter, the IG agents have asked questions about the involvement of former Vice President Al Gore because he cited the study in his book and movie, An Inconvenient Truth. They have focused on the amount of media attention the note received – matters which should be beyond the stated scope of their inquiry.

Science is supposed to be provocative. The DOI policies promise to promote scientific inquiries undertaken in good faith. Contrary to that promise, Dr. Monnett is not being encouraged to publish or to pursue scientific inquiries. Instead, he has been harassed from the moment this article appeared until today. As he explained at the end of the IG interview:

CHARLES MONNETT: Yeah, well, we got blasted, you know, really, uh, hard, you know, by this agency when, when this finding came out, and if you’ve been digging in my emails, and I don’t know if you’ve dug in my emails, or it’s just Jeff Loman selecting it, but you’ll see a lot of emails there, uh, from management to me telling me that I can’t function as a biologist. I’m not allowed to talk about this paper or our findings. I’m not allowed to talk to the media. I can’t, you know, I can’t do these things.
And, and they really dumped on us, um, uh, when this things came out, and then that, um – uh, and, and some other, um, manipulation and restrictions that Jeff got hit with caused him to bail out of here, and he, he took a cut from a GS-13 to a GS-11 position to go to the Fish and Wildlife Service. . . .and he was looking for any job and, you know, because I think he felt that, uh, the Alaska Region is kind of special in the way it treats its scientists.
ERIC MAY: Hm. Well, I’m – uh, any more questions on –
LYNN GIBSON: No, no. [IG Interview Transcript at pages 94-5]

The IG’s utter lack of interest in the question of scientists facing reprisal for reporting scientific observations is telling. The gist of this complaint, however, is precisely what the IG chooses to ignore: An immensely talented and extremely valuable government scientist is today suffering harassment, interruption of his work, defamation and blatantly singular treatment because he had the temerity to report scientific observations on a matter that became controversial.
If the DOI Scientific Integrity Policy is worth the paper it is written on, it should be invoked today to protect Dr. Charles Monnett.

Respectfully submitted,
Jeff Ruch
PEER Executive Director

www.peer.org/docs/doi/7_28_11_Scientific_Misconduct_Complaint.pdf

[Big Bunny]

Shell oil spills in the Niger delta: 'Nowhere and no one has escaped'

Two oil spills caused by Shell in 2008 have triggered ongoing social and environmental problems for the 69,000 people who live in the vicinity of Bodo

o John Vidal in Bodo
o guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 3 August 2011 12.23 BST


The oil wellhead near the village of K-dere, Ogoniland, Niger, Delta. Photograph: Amnesty International UK

The air stinks, the water stinks, and even the fish and crabs caught in Bodo creek smell of pure "sweet bonny" light crude oil. The oil has found its way deep into the village wells, it lies thick in the mudflats and there are brown and yellow slicks all along the lengthy network of creeks, swamps, mangrove forests and rivers that surround Bodo in the Niger delta.

The first oil ever exported from Nigeria was found just five miles away from Bodo in 1958. But chief Tella James, chair of Bodo's maritime workers, says life for the 69,000 people who live in the vicinity changed dramatically in August 2008 when a greasy sheen was first seen deep in the Bodo swamps miles from the nearest houses.

Shell disputes that, saying that a weld broke in September 2008 in the 50-year-old trans-Niger pipeline that takes 120,000 barrels of oil a day at high speed across the Niger delta. Either way the spill was not stopped until 7 November 2008. By that time, as much as 2,000 barrels a day may have been spilled directly into the water.

A month later in December 2008 the same pipeline broke again in the swamps. This time Shell did not send anyone to inspect or repair it until 19 February 2009. According to oil spill assessment experts who have studied evidence of the two spills on the ground and on film, more than 280,000 barrels may have been spilled.

Bodo is at the epicentre of several pipelines that collect oil from nearly 100 wells in the Ogoni district and there have been plenty of minor spills in and around the communities over the years. But this was far more serious, says Nenibarini Zabby, head of conservation at the Centre for Environment, Human Rights and Development in Port Harcourt.

"This was an exceptionally sensitive ecosystem," said Zabby. "The spill lasted a very long time and it spread with the tides. The health of people is at risk. The company needs to compensate the people but they must also recover the environment," said Zabby.

Chief James, assistant secretary to the Bodo council of chiefs and elders, said every family had been affected by the disaster.

"Nowhere and no one has escaped," he said. "This has caused serious poverty to everyone. Nearly 80% of people here are fishermen or they depend on the water. They have lost their livelihoods. People are leaving the community in their hundreds to search for greener pastures. We used to live beautifully. People caught so much fish we could sell it to the cities. Now we have no hope," he said.

A Bodo woman said social problems had followed the environmental ones. "People go hungry, there is more petty stealing," she said.

According to the community leaders, youths from the area started to steal oil and refine it in illegal camps only after the two spills occurred. "It was the negligence of Shell which compelled people to steal. When our livelihoods were destroyed the youth went to places where they learned how do bunkering. They were desperate. They learned from others to steal. It was to survive," says Groobadi Petta, president of the Bodo city youth federation.

Sylvester Vikpee, a barrister and legal adviser to the council of chiefs, said Shell had not responded humanely to the disaster. "They do not know the scale of the devastation. One of the richest companies in the world has done this to us. We have tried to talk to them and asked them what they plan. They have told us nothing."

The Niger delta is one of the most polluted regions in the world, with more oil spilled across the region each year than spilt in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. According to Nigerian government figures, there were more than 7,000 spills between 1970 and 2000, and there are 2,000 official major spillage sites, many going back decades, with thousands of smaller spills still waiting to be cleared up.

More than 1,000 spill cases have been filed against Shell alone, but while the company has been been fined many times by courts in Nigeria for pollution incidents, appeals can take years and communities complain that proper clean-ups and compensation money never reaches them.

"For decades claims have swirled around in the Nigerian courts getting nowhere. Having a venue to bring claims in a proper structured way will revolutionise the process and hopefully ensure that the Nigerians who have suffered loss from the many, many spills, will have a much more ready outlet for their grievances and claims," said Martyn Day of Leigh Day and Co.

Shell, which admitted to spilling 14,000 tonnes of oil in 2009, works in partnership with the Nigerian government in the delta, but argues that that 98% of all its oil spills are caused by vandalism, theft or sabotage by militants and communities and only a minimal amount by deteriorating infrastructure.

No one from the Shell petroleum development company in Nigeria was available to comment on the Bodo spills this week, and a spokesman for Royal Dutch Shell in London said the company could not say anything while the case was ongoing.

"That Shell has now accepted responsibility for the massive spill at Bodo is surprising only in the sense that it is out of place for polluters of this sort to bow to the truth. We only hope that now they will wake up and accept responsibility for other places in the Niger delta," said Nimmo Bassey, chair of Friends of the Earth International from Lagos.


Map: Ogoniland in Nigeria Photograph: Guardian

www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/aug/03/shell-oil-spills-niger-delta-bodo?INTCMP=ILCNETTXT3487

AND:

Shell accepts liability for two oil spills in Nigeria

Oil giant faces a bill of hundreds of millions of dollars following class action suit brought on behalf of communities in Bodo, Ogoniland

* John Vidal in Bodo
* guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 3 August 2011 11.07 BST


The impact of an oil spill near Ikarama in the Niger delta. Photograph: Amnesty International UK

Shell faces a bill of hundreds of millions of dollars after accepting full liability for two massive oil spills that devastated a Nigerian community of 69,000 people and may take at least 20 years to clean up.

Experts who studied video footage of the spills at Bodo in Ogoniland say they could together be as large as the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska, when 10m gallons of oil destroyed the remote coastline.

Until now, Shell has claimed that less than 40,000 gallons were spilt in Nigeria.

Papers seen by the Guardian show that following a class action suit in London over the past four months, the company has accepted responsibility for the 2008 double rupture of the Bodo-Bonny trans-Niger pipeline that pumps 120,000 barrels of oil a day though the community.

Ogoniland is a small region of the Niger delta which threw out Shell in 1994 for its pollution but then saw eight of its leaders, including the writer Ken Saro-Wiwa, executed by the government.

The crude oil that gushed unchecked from the two Bodo spills, which occurred within months of each other, in 2008 has clearly devastated the 20 sq km network of creeks and inlets on which Bodo and as many as 30 other smaller settlements depend for food, water and fuel.

No attempt has been made to clean up the oil, which has collected on the creek sides, washes in and out on the tides and has seeped deep into the water table and farmland.

According to the communities in Bodo, in two years the company has only offered £3,500 together with 50 bags of rice, 50 bags of beans and a few cartons of sugar, tomatoes and groundnut oil. The offers were rejected as "insulting, provocative and beggarly" by the chiefs of Bodo, but later accepted on legal advice.

Shell's acceptance of full liability for the spills follows a class action suit bought on behalf of communities by London law firm Leigh Day and Co, which represented the Ivory Coast community that suffered health damage following the dumping of toxic waste by a ship leased to multinational oil company Trafigura in 2006.

Many other impoverished communities in the delta are now expected to seek damages for oil pollution against Shell in the British courts. On average, there are three oil spills a day by Shell and other companies working in the delta. Shell consistently blames the spills on local youths who, they argue, sabotage their network of pipelines.

"The news that Shell has accepted liability in Britain will be greeted with joy in the delta. The British courts may now be inundated with legitimate complaints," said Patrick Naagbartonm, coordinator for the Centre of Environment and Human Rights in Port Harcourt.

Later this week the company will be heavily implicated by the UN for the environmental disaster in the Niger delta which has seen more than 7,000 oil spills in the low lying swamps and farmland since 1989. Shell first discovered oil in the Niger delta in 1956. According to Amnesty International, more than 13m barrels of oil have been spilt in the delta, twice as much as by BP in last year's Gulf of Mexico spill.

The UN Environment Programme (UNEP) report, funded by Shell, will be presented to president Goodluck Jonathan on Thursday and is expected to be released on Friday in London.

UNEP's report, the first peer-reviewed scientific study of more than 60 spills, is expected to say that oil pollution in Ogoniland is much worse than previously believed, having sunk deep into the water table. Many spills have not been cleared up since 1970 and the effects on the local economy, health and development have been severe. The report will not apportion blame for individual spills.

International oil spill assessment experts who have seen the Bodo spill believe that it could cost the company more than $100m to clean up properly and restore the devastated mangrove forests that used to line the creeks and rivers but which have been killed by the oil.

Proceedings against Royal Dutch Shell and Shell petroleum development company (SPDC) Nigeria began in the high court on 6 April 2011. Last week Shell Nigeria said: "SPDC accepts responsibility under the Oil Pipelines Act for the two oil spills both of which were due to equipment failure. SPDC acknowledges that it is liable to pay compensation - to those who are entitled to receive such compensation."

www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/aug/03/shell-liability-oil-spills-nigeria

THEN:

Oil in Nigeria: a history of spills, fines and fights for rights

On Wednesday Shell admitted liability for two massive oil spills in Nigeria. Ever since oil was discovered in the country in 1956, it has been a source of strife

o Adam Vaughan
o guardian.co.uk, Thursday 4 August 2011 09.22 BST

Oil was first found in Nigeria in 1956, then a British protectorate, by a joint operation between Royal Dutch Shell and British Petroleum. The two begun production in 1958, and were soon joined by a host of other foreign oil companies in the 1960s after the country gained independence and, shortly after, fell into civil war.

The rapidly expanding oil industry was dogged in controversy from early on, with criticism that its financial proceeds were being exported or lost in corruption rather than used to help the millions living on $1 a day in the Niger delta or reduce its impact on the local environment.

A major 1970 oil spill in Ogoniland in the south-east of Nigeria led to thousands of gallons being spilt on farmland and rivers, ultimately leading to a £26m fine for Shell in Nigerian courts 30 years later. According to the Nigerian government, there were more than 7,000 spills between 1970 and 2000.

In 1990, the government announced a new round of oil field licensing, the largest since the 1960s. Non-violent opposition to the oil companies by the Ogoni people in the early 1990s over the contamination of their land and lack of financial benefit from the oil revenues attracted international attention. Then, in 1995, Ogoni author and campaigner Ken Saro-Wiwa was charged with incitement to murder and executed by Nigeria's military government. In 2009, Shell agreed to pay £9.6m out of court, in a settlement of a legal action which accused it of collaborating in the execution of Saro-Wiwa and eight other tribal leaders.

In an escalation of opposition to the environmental degradation and underdevelopment, armed groups began sabotaging pipelines and kidnapping oil company staff from 2006, with a ceasefire called in 2009 by one group, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta. A year later it announced an "all-out oil war" after a crackdown by the Nigerian military.

Hundreds of minor court cases are brought each year in Nigeria over oil spills and pollution. Last year, Shell admitted spilling 14,000 tonnes of crude oil in the creeks of the Niger delta in 2009, double the year before and quadruple that of 2007.

www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/aug/04/oil-nigeria-spills-fines-fights?INTCMP=ILCNETTXT3487

FURTHER:

Niger delta oil spills clean-up will take 30 years, says UN

A succession of oil spills by Shell and other companies over half a century will cost $1bn to clean up, according to a major report

• Read the UN's Ogoniland report here: www.guardian.co.uk/environment/interactive/2011/aug/04/un-environmental-impact-ogoniland

* John Vidal, environment editor
* guardian.co.uk, Thursday 4 August 2011 19.54 BST


An oil spill near Oloibiri Town, Bayelsa, Nigeria. Photograph: Ed Kashi/Corbis

Devastating oil spills in the Niger delta over the past five decades will cost $1bn to rectify and take up to 30 years to clean up, according to a UN report.

The UN Environment Programme (Unep) has announced that Shell and other oil firms systematically contaminated a 1,000 sq km (386 sq mile) area of Ogoniland, in the Niger delta, with disastrous consequences for human health and wildlife.

Nigerians had "paid a high price" for the economic growth brought by the oil industry, said Unep's executive director.

A leaked summary of Unep's Ogoniland study, the first large-scale scientific study of pollution in the area, has been seen by the Guardian. It calls for a clean-up fund of $1bn (£614m) for spills in Ogoniland, and says it will take 25-30 years to restore the environment. Much of the funding for the clean-up is expected to come from the oil companies.

The three-year investigation found:

• Heavy contamination of land and underground water courses, sometimes more than 40 years after oil was spilled.

• Community drinking water with dangerous concentrations of benzene and other pollutants.

• Soil contamination more than five metres deep in many areas studied.

• Most of the spill sites oil firms claimed to have cleaned still highly contaminated.

• Evidence of oil firms dumping contaminated soil in unlined pits.

• Water coated with hydrocarbons more than 1,000 times the level allowed by Nigerian drinking water standards.

• Failure by Shell and others to meet minimum Nigerian or own standards.

The study wants emergency measures taken to warn communities and to clean up drinking-water wells, and says Shell and other companies working in the delta should overhaul the way they operate.

Achim Steiner, a UN under-secretary general and Unep's executive director, said the report provided the scientific basis for a long overdue restoration of Ogoniland. "The oil industry has been a key sector of the Nigerian economy for over 50 years but many Nigerians have paid a high price. It is Unep's hope the findings can break the decades of deadlock in the region. [The study] offers a blueprint for how the oil industry and public authorities might operate more responsibly in Africa and beyond at a time of increasing production and exploration across many parts of the continent."

Nnimmo Bassey, chair of Friends of the Earth International and director of Environment Rights Action in Nigeria, said: "The widespread pollution of Ogoniland as documented does not come as a surprise because the manifestation is physical and people have been living in that putrid situation for decades now. Now we know it will take up to 30 years to remediate the impacts, especially on the mangroves of the region." He said the pollution had decimated the livelihoods of the Ogoni people."Unep's recommendation that an environmental restoration fund for Ogoniland be set up with a take-off sum of $1bn is applauded. But we need a larger fund for the entire Niger delta."

Responding to the Unep report, Mutiu Sunmonu, the managing director of the Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria, said it was a valuable aid to improving understanding of oil spills in Ogoniland. "All oil spills are bad – bad for local communities, bad for the environment, bad for Nigeria and bad for [the company]. Although we haven't produced oil in Ogoniland since 1993 we clean up all spills from our facilities, whatever the cause, and restore the land to its original state.

"The majority of oil spills in Nigeria are caused by sabotage, theft and illegal refining. We urge the Nigerian authorities to do all they can to curb such activity, and we will continue working with our partners in Nigeria, including the government, to solve these problems and on the next steps to help clean up Ogoniland."

Environment groups and Ogonis welcomed the report but said $100bn was needed to clean up the entire delta, beyond just Ogoniland. Friends of the Earth International called on Shell to come up with an action plan with the Nigerian government to commence remediation actions immediately.

The Guardian has revealed that Shell accepted responsibility for two massive oil spills in the region that devastated a 69,000-strong community. Combined, the spills could be larger than the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska, and Shell faces a bill of hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation.

The Unep team collected more than 4,000 samples of soil, fish and air, and investigated, in depth, 69 of the many hundreds of oil spills in Ogoniland over the past 50 years. They studied 5,000 medical records and had 260 meetings with communities.

It is expected that the report will act as a baseline study for a massive clean-up operation required by the UN.

Oil drilling in Ogoniland ceased in the 90s after Shell was ejected for widespread pollution and failing to help regional development. More than £30bn of oil has been extracted from the area but the majority of people are worse off than before the companies arrived.

"Even though oil operations have ceased in Ogoniland, oil spills continue to occur in alarming regularity. Since life expectancy in Nigeria is less than 50 years it is a fair assumption most people in Ogoniland have lived with chronic oil pollution throughout their lives," the report says. "Ogoniland has a tragic history of pollution but systematic scientific information has been absent about the ensuing contamination." Oil company records and investigations of spills in the delta are heavily disputed and politically sensitive, and the UN has been careful not to apportion blame for any particular spill.

Because Shell's subsidiary, the Shell Petroleum Development Company, which works in partnership with the Nigerian government, has been the largest operator in the region, the report will be seen as an investigation of their practices. The independent report was paid for in part by Shell, and commissioned by the Nigerian government.

The UN team was clearly shocked at some of their findings. In one place, Ejama Ebubu, the study found heavy contamination from a spill that took place more than 40 years ago "despite repeated clean up attempts". In Nisisoken Ogale, in Eleme, close to a Nigerian national petroleum company pipeline, researchers found 8cm of refined oil floating on groundwater that served community wells.

"Pollution of soil is extensive, widespread and severely impacting," says the report, which will be presented to Nigeria's president, Goodluck Jonathan, in Abuja on Thursday and will be released on Friday in London.

www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/aug/04/niger-delta-oil-spill-clean-up-un

ALSO:

Niger Delta villagers go to the Hague to fight against oil giant Shell

This once self-sufficient community suffered from the excesses of oil firms and corrupt officials. Now, the villagers are blamed for everything and the arms dealers are having a field day

* John Vidal
* guardian.co.uk, Saturday 6 August 2011 12.23 BST


A man walks on slippery spilled crude oil on the shores of the Niger Delta swamps of Bodo, a village in Niger's oil-producing Ogoniland. Photograph: Pius Utomi Ekpei/AFP/Getty Images

Goi is now a dead village. The two fish ponds, bakery and chicken farm that used to be the pride and joy of its chief deacon, Barrisa Tete Dooh, lie abandoned, covered in a thick black layer. The village's fishing creek is contaminated; the school has been looted; the mangrove forests are coated in bitumen and everyone has left, refugees from a place blighted by the exploitation of the region's most valuable asset: crude oil.

Last Thursday, a long-awaited and comprehensive UN study exposed the full horror of the pollution that the production of oil has brought to Ogoniland over the last 50 years.

The UN report showed that oil companies and the Nigerian government had not just failed to meet their own standards, but that the process of investigation, reporting and clean-up was deeply flawed in favour of the firms and against the victims. Spills in the US are responded to in minutes; in the Niger delta, which suffers more pollution each year than the Gulf of Mexico, it can take companies weeks or more.

"Oil companies have been exploiting Nigeria's weak regulatory system for too long," said Audrey Gaughran of Amnesty International. "They do not adequately prevent environmental damage and they frequently fail to properly address the devastating impact that their bad practice has on people's lives."

Goi, 40 miles from Port Harcourt, is a typical case. Just a few miles from where Shell first found oil in Ogoniland in 1958, it is only 20 miles from Bane, the ancestral home of Ogoni writer and leader Ken Saro-Wiwa. People from Goi joined the great Ogoni protest march of 1994, when one in three people from the small kingdom of 900,000 rose peacefully against the company, preventing it from working any of its 30 wells in the area. Two years later, Saro-Wiwa and eight Ogoni leaders were tried on a fabricated murder charge and executed.

A quiet fishing community of fewer than 100 people, Goi was steadily weakened and then broken by a series of oil spills that, over 20 years, made the network of swamps, lagoons, rivers and creeks around it unusable. "People used to drink the water in the creek, fish, cook and swim in it. It was a perfect place," says Dooh. "We wanted for nothing, but the spills came, the tide washed in pollution from elsewhere and in 1987 a massive oil fire burned uncontrolled for weeks. By 2008, most people had left."

Dooh and the last people of Goi then finally gave up. "We kept being polluted. We could not stay any longer," says his eldest son, Eric. "Shell said they would fix things, but a contractor came and scooped some of the oil up and that was it. The spills just got bigger and bigger." In 2009, a third large spill made the last house uninhabitable.

Whether Dooh or anyone ever returns now depends on a court case in the Netherlands. Together with Friends of the Earth Netherlands, Dooh is suing Shell in The Hague for negligence. The Shell pipeline close to the village pumped 120,000 barrels of oil. It burst in 2004 with devastating consequences. The company claims that it was sabotaged by youths stealing oil to process in rudimentary home-made refineries – a process called bunkering. Dooh blames corrosion of the decades-old pipeline.

On Wednesday, Shell formally accepted responsibility in British law for two significant spills in nearby Bodo. Those were rare victories. More than 1,000 court cases have been taken against Shell for pollution in the last 30 years, but almost all are rejected, settled for a few dollars or remain mired in the legal system for years. Even when the courts rule against the company and fine it millions, it is possible for it to appeal, with legal delays draining communities of cash. One case against Shell taken by people in Goi is still in the courts after 14 years.

Ogoni chiefs admit that some spills have certainly been the result of bunkering by youths determined to cash in on the region's one natural asset. "It was the negligence of Shell which compelled people to steal," Groobadi Petta, the president of the Bodo city youth federation, told the Observer. "When livelihoods are destroyed, the youth go to places where they learn how to bunker. They are desperate. They learned from others to steal. It has been to survive." But corporate claims that Shell had been responsible for only 2% of the spills were an insult, he said.

The consensus on the delta is that bunkering and oil theft on a grand scale are condoned, protected and encouraged by a web of organised crime that colludes with government and political elites, the security services and people within the oil companies.

"This is a mafia. They have godfathers. There is no way so much oil could be stolen without protection. Communities get the blame for the spills and the thefts, but the top people are taking far more and are well aware of what is going on. The navy patrols the creeks and main rivers, so there is no way boats could get past checkpoints without their knowledge," says Kentebbe Ebiaridor, a field officer with the Port Harcourt-based Environment Rights Action group.

At the lowest level, villages throughout the delta have set up illegal DIY oil refineries. These rudimentary stills, consisting of a few old pipes and drums welded together, were first used for fuel in the Biafran war. However, they have become part of the survival strategy of many villages too poor to pay for electricity or transport. A few drums of crude are tapped off from old company manifolds, and the oil is boiled up in drums. The fumes are collected, cooled and condensed in a simple distilling process and the result is a low-quality diesel good enough for generators and some cars. But they often catch fire, pollute small areas and every so often are regularly identified and destroyed by the military – only to start up again in days. Government agencies condone them and take a small fee.

"The fact that these operations are proliferating in full view of the enforcement agencies is indicative, at best of a lack of preventative measures and, at worst, of collusion," said the UN Environment Programme report last week.

The brio with which the oil is stolen on a larger scale is breathtaking. Reports allege that top naval officers have private pipelines that serve as conduits through which they siphon crude oil, load on to vessels and ship to refineries in other countries such as South Africa. Last year, a Shell man was reportedly sacked after it was found he had set up a gang to destroy well-heads and then get his contacts to clean up the pollution. In 2003, the Nigerian tanker African Pride was impounded after being found carrying 11,000 barrels of stolen oil and was held in custody by the Nigerian navy. Within months it had mysteriously slipped away.

Organised crime now dominates the theft of Ogoniland oil, says Patrick Naagbanton, co-ordinator of the Amnesty International-backed Centre for Environment, Human Rights and Development. "The pollution has led to the proliferation of small arms, making the delta now one of the most dangerous places on earth. The arms come through porous borders. You can get AK-47s, Chinese, South African, Italian, German and Belgian arms."

Naagbanton conducts a regular survey on the availability of arms on the delta and receives regular death threats. "The arms trade in the delta is dominated by Ukrainian and Russian dealers who swap automatic weapons for illegal bunkered oil. It is driven by political ambition combining with an illegal economy and fed by oil bunkering, creating both direct and indirect drivers of violence in the Niger Delta region," he says.

"Every community now has a silent army. If the problems of proliferation are not addressed, the non-state armed and warlords operating in the region will undermine the region and turn it into a dangerous conflict zone where the gangs will rule at the expense of legitimate authority, development, security and progress of all," he says.

Back in Goi, Chief Dooh's son, Eric, was preparing to go to the Netherlands to represent his father in the case against Shell.

"The human cost of all this pollution is too high. After the spill, Dad's business collapsed, Mother died because there was no money to treat her illness and my brothers and sisters had to come out of school. I am not fighting for myself. This is a test case. Perhaps Shell will now sit up and be corrected after this week. I am fighting for communities across the delta."

www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/aug/06/shell-oil-spills-niger-delta-pollution

FINALLY (for the moment):

Nigeria: Oil-polluted Ogoniland could become environmental model

UN says clean-up operation following two massive oil spills in the Niger Delta could benefit other African countries developing their oil reserves

* John Vidal
* guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 9 August 2011 10.55 BST


Crude oil spilled in the Niger Delta swamps of Bodo, a village in Ogoniland. Photograph: Pius Utomi Ekpei/AFP/Getty Images

Ogoniland is one of the most oil-polluted places on earth but it could become a model for other countries wanting to clean up their environments or avoid making the same mistakes, the UN has said.

"This could be the world's biggest oil contamination clean-up," said Nick Nuttall, spokesman for the UN's environment programme (UNEP) director, Achim Steiner. "It is up to the government of Nigeria what happens now, but [from talks with President Goodluck Jonathan in Abuja this week] there appears to be a willingness to act," he said while in London.

Preliminary cost estimates to decontaminate and restore the devastated ecology of the 1,000 sq km of land and water are nearly $1bn for the first five years, with much more money possibly needed over the full 30 years it will take to clean up the region, said UNEP chief scientist Joseph Alcamo in London.

But he said that if governments and oil companies were prepared to put up the money to act, it could provide work to train tens of thousands of Ogonis, leave the area "pristine" and help many other African countries that were on the point of commercially developing their oil reserves.

São Tomé, Ghana, Uganda, Sierra Leone and Ethiopia all expect to produce oil in the next 10 years. "One in 10 barrels of oil in the world presently comes from Africa. It is very likely that oil production will increase on the continent. Countries can learn from this painful experience," said Alcamo.

As well as immediate measures, such as warning Ogoni people if they are drinking from polluted wells and proposing that the oil companies rethink their clean-up procedures, the UN recommended that a global centre for excellence for environmental restoration be set up in Ogoniland.

This would run courses in environmental monitoring, promote learning about pollution and decontamination of land in Nigeria and abroad, and become a model for restoration, attracting people from around the world, said Alcamo.

It would like to see Nigeria declare its intention to make the extensive wetlands around Ogoniland a "Ramsar site" – the highest classification of wetland. "This would provide the government with a roadmap for restoration and bring the site into the global spotlight, which will make the many agencies and companies focus on their task," said the report.

Shell Nigeria said it was willing to act. "Shell Petroleum Development Company is already reviewing its remediation practices and looking to involve independent international experts in assessing how it can improve. The company is also examining ways to bring third-party verification to the oil spill investigation process, bringing further transparency to the assessment of causes and volumes," said managing director Mutiu Sunmonu. "We pledge to work with the government, UNEP and others on the next steps."

Sunmonu urged the Nigerian government to take concerted action to curb oil theft by communities and others. "Unless these activities are brought to a halt, any action we take will be of limited impact," he said.

But the Movement for the Survival of the Ogonio People (Mosop), which was founded by Ogoni writer Ken Saro-Wiwa and has been a powerful political voice in the region, rejected the UN report, saying it was compromised because it was mostly paid for by Shell.

"Who determined that restoration of Ogoniland would last for 30 years? What is the extent or estimate of overall damage? Everything is dictated to us, the Ogoni people, who have lost our means of livelihood, [and been] subjected to economic burden and poverty," said Mosop president Goodluck Diigbo.

Environmental Rights Action/Friends of the Earth Nigeria called for the creation of a $100bn environmental restoration fund for the whole Niger Delta, parts of which they said were just as polluted as Ogoniland. "The $1bn initial restoration fund that the report has proposed is negligible compared with the mammoth ecological disaster caused by Shell," said director Nnimmo Bassey. "Other communities must now also be considered for a comprehensive environmental audit," he said.

www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/2011/aug/09/niger-delta-shell-oil-spills?intcmp=239

[Big Bunny]

ConocoPhillips warned that Chinese partner could hinder oil spill clean-up

Diplomatic cables show US oil firm complained four years ago about a conflict of interest over environmental emergencies

* Jonathan Watts, Asia environment correspondent
* guardian.co.uk, Thursday 25 August 2011 13.41 BST

ConocoPhillips, the US oil firm currently being blamed for a spill the size of London in China's Bohai Sea, complained four years ago that its Chinese partner was hampering preparations for environmental emergencies.

Instead of using a US service, which can deploy clean-up teams anywhere in the world within 24 hours, the state-owned partner – China National Overseas Oil Company (CNOOC) – insisted on contracting one of its own affiliates.

ConocoPhillips executives warned this was an example of a conflict of interest that hampered the effectiveness of the joint venture, according to a diplomatic cable from the embassy in Beijing.

The revelation may cast a new light on the handling of the seepage at the Penglai oil fields in the Bohai Sea in June, which went unreported until 21 June when a blog broke the news. The Chinese authorities and media have criticised the US operator of the platform for a slow response, but the five-year-old cable appears to spread responsibility. It also raises questions about China prioritising domestic business interests even if that means not using the best-available expertise to deal with problems.

The cable relates to a roundtable discussion with representatives from several US energy firms hosted by assistant secretary of state for economics, energy, and business affairs, Daniel Sullivan, on 24 April, 2007. At the outset, the president of ConocoPhillips China noted the CNOOC, "is essentially the company's partner, service and parts provider, and Chinese government interlocutor. These overlapping responsibilities are a conflict of interest for CNOOC and hamper the effectiveness of the joint venture."

Similar concerns were expressed by the Texas American Resource Company, which said CNOOC insisted on using its own rigs for oil and gas exploration in the South China Sea.

While their concern were mainly about business restrictions, the executives said that CNOOC's insistence on using its own equipment and services limited their options particularly with regard to spills.

The diplomatic cable noted that ConocoPhillips "has a contract for emergency environmental clean-up services with a United States-based company that can deploy resources worldwide on a 747 aircraft within 24 hours." However, it was not allowed to use this service in China and instead had to contract clear-ups to a CNOOC-affiliated company.

It is unclear whether this would have made a difference with the latest spills.

www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/aug/25/conocophillips-china-oil-spill

[Big Bunny]

Shell's failure to protect Nigeria pipeline 'led to sabotage'

Attacks on key pipeline force company to declare 'force majeure' and reduce exports by 300,000 barrels a day

* John Vidal, environment editor
* guardian.co.uk, Thursday 25 August 2011 11.06 BST


A man holds a shell coated in oil from a polluted river in the Niger delta. Photograph: Akintunde Akinleye/Reuters

Shell Nigeria's declaration this week that it cannot meet its international commitment to export 300,000 barrels a day of crude oil was caused by the company withdrawing contracts to pay people to monitor and protect the pipeline, Shell and independent reports indicate.

Nine oil spills in three weeks along one pipeline in the Niger Delta have forced Shell Nigeria to declare that it cannot meet its international contracts to export 300,000 barrels a day of crude oil.

Nine oil spills in three weeks along the Adibawa-Okordia pipeline in the Niger Delta are believed to be the result of sabotage by disaffected youths using hacksaws. An unknown quantity of oil has been lost and, since 2 August, fishing grounds and farmland have been polluted . With three more spills reported in the last 24 hours it appears that the company has now lost some control of the pipeline.

On Tuesday the company declared "force majeure" on all Bonny light [crude] exports until the end of October. Force majeure is a legal term releasing a company from contractual obligations due to circumstances beyond their control. "On August 21, another three hacksaw cuts were reported on the nearby Adibawa delivery line," said Shell in a statement. "Some production is shut in while the line is repaired."

With this force majeure, Nigeria's total production capacity, which stood at about 2.6m of crude oil barrels per day (BDP), has declined to about 2.3m BPD.

Unpublished independent reports of the latest incidents, seen by the Guardian, suggest that the nine spills have occurred because Shell recently withdrew contracts to pay people to monitor and protect the pipeline. In interviews conducted by Friends of the Earth (FoE) Nigeria within hours of the latest incidents, community leaders said Shell must take the blame.

"The oil spills in Ikarama are caused by Shell. The youths of Ikarama were pushing for an upward review of the wages paid [by Shell] to surveillance guards and the employment of more persons in the community for the security of the pipelines. [But] we suddenly heard that Shell has stopped the surveillance contract. This is the main reason behind the series of spills experienced in the community recently", said Livingstone J. Berebo, secretary of the Ikarama Youths group.

Ikarama,a collection of villages in the southern Nigerian state of Bayelsa, is one of the most polluted sites in the entire Niger Delta. The major pipeline that passes through the fishing and farming community of 50,000 people has been the subject of many accidents and attacks over 20 years. The company regularly blames all incidents on sabotage, but the communities accuse Shell staff of working with contractors and youths to deliberately damage the pipeline in order to get the lucrative contacts to clean up the spills.

The company is obliged by Nigerian law to clean up all spills of its oil, whatever their cause.

"It does seem that the catalyst for the incidents in this case was the withdrawal of a contract", said a Shell spokesman in London. "Shell does not attribute every single spill to sabotage. There is no evidence that Shell contractors or staff instigated any pipeline sabotage." But he declined to comment on the possibility of contractors paying youths to deliberately damage the pipeline, or on the standard of clean-up work done.

Last week more than 100 women from the community demonstrated against the company. "Each time there is a spill, Shell attributes it to sabotage and prevents our people from witnessing when the spill point is being clamped [repaired] and to know the cause of spill. The company makes use of the military men to threaten and chase us away from the site. The community is never represented in joint investigations. Only Shell really knows what they are doing in our land," Berebo said.

"Shell is not helping our community; the company disregards us and is wicked. Any spill here is attributed to sabotage always by Shell since about twenty years ago, chief Luke Ogbona told FoE Nigeria. "Shell will not listen to us because they know we don't have people to fight for our rights."

A report from the UN Environment Programme earlier this month said decades of oil pollution in the nearby Ogoniland area of the Niger Delta may take 30 years in what would become the world's largest ever clean-up operation. While the UN did not apportion blame for dozens of major spills, it said that there were serious faults in the way that spills were investigated and cleaned up. It called for a $1bn fund to clean up Ogoniland.

Separately, Shell has accepted blame for two major spills in the Bodo community in 2008 and is expected to have to pay many millions of dollars to have them cleaned up to international standards.

"The authorities must properly investigate the spill incidents of the last three weeks in the Ikarama community and concerned groups and environmental organisations must be part of this process. In addition, Shell should identify the contractors and staff who are instigating pipeline ruptures in Ikarama", said Nnimmo Bassey, head of Friends of the Earth International in Lagos.

www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/aug/25/shell-oil-export-nigeria-pipeline-sabotage

[Big Bunny]

Obama administration backs oil pipeline from Alberta to Texas

Campaigners disappointed as White House says 1,700-mile pipeline will not cause significant environmental damage

* Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent
* guardian.co.uk, Friday 26 August 2011 22.16 BST

The Obama administration has given an important approval to a controversial pipeline that will pump oil from the tar sands of Alberta to the Texas coast.

In a blow to campaigners, who have spent the last week at a sit-in at the White House, the State Department said the proposed 1,700-mile pipeline would not cause significant damage to the environment.

The State Department in its report said the project – which would pipe more than 700,000 barrels a day of tar sands crude to Texas refineries – would not increase greenhouse gas emissions. It also downplayed the risks of an accident from piping highly corrosive tar sands crude across prime American farmland.

Campaigners accused the State Department of consistently overlooking the potential risks of the pipeline.

"The State Department… failed to acknowledge the true extent of the project's threats to the climate, to drinking water and to the health of people who would breathe polluted air from refineries processing the dirty tar sands oil," Friends of the Earth said in a statement.

But Kerri-Ann Jones, the assistant secretary of state, rejected the charges. She argued that other government agencies had still to sign off on the project.

"This is not the rubber stamp for this project," Jones told reporters, adding that the pipeline would not lead to an increase in greenhouse gas emissions, claiming Alberta was going to produce the crude anyway.

"The sense we have is that the oil sands would be developed and there is not going to be any change in greenhouse gas emissions with the pipeline or without the pipeline because these oil sands will be developed anyway," she said.

Jones said that the State Department review had addressed some safety concerns, directing TransCanada, the pipeline operator, to bury the pipeline deeper.

The State Department will hold a series of public meetings on the pipeline next month and into October.

But with Friday's decision the pipeline is now expected to come on line in 2013.

Over the last three years, the pipeline has become a central focus of environmentalist concerns, and Friday's decision was rendered at the midpoint of a two-week sit-in at the White House against the project which has seen more than 100 arrested.

But the Canadian government and oil companies with a stake in tar sands production fought back with an intense lobbying effort.

Environmental campaigners argued the pipeline would encourage production of Alberta tar sands, which imposes a far heavier carbon footprint than other oils.

There was also opposition from homeowners along the Keystone's proposed route through South Dakota, Nebraska, and Texas.

They warned the highly corrosive nature of tar sands oil put the pipeline increased the risk of accidents, and damage to important sources of groundwater.

Bill McKibben, who helped organise the protests at the White House, said the approval from the State Department had been expected. The secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, indicated last year that she favoured the pipeline.

"Everyone has known exactly what they would say all along. And everyone knows that they've valiantly ignored the elephant in the room - the fact that this would go a long ways towards opening up the world's second-largest pool of carbon," he wrote in an email.

However, McKibben held out hope that Obama - who still has final authority over the project - might step in to stop the pipeline.

www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/aug/26/obama-approves-pipeline-alberta-texas

[Big Bunny]

ExxonMobil clinches Arctic oil deal with Rosneft

Under the deal, Exxon and Rosneft will invest $3.2bn (£1.9bn) in developing the Arctic Kara Sea

* Tom Parfitt in Moscow and Dominic Rushe in New York
* guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 30 August 2011 20.10 BST

Exxon, the world's largest company, and Rosneft signed a deal to develop oil and gas reserves in the Russian Arctic, opening up one of the last unconquered drilling frontiers.

The deal, signed in the presence of Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin, dashes any hopes that BP had of reviving its own deal with Rosneft that was blocked in May by its billionaire partners in an existing Russian venture.

Exxon boss Rex Tillerson and Russia's top energy official deputy prime minister Igor Sechin were with Putin at the signing ceremony in the Black Sea resort of Sochi.

Calling the deal a "truly strategic partnership" and hailing Exxon's experience in exploiting Arctic reserves in Canada, Putin said: "New horizons are opening up. One of the world's leading companies, ExxonMobil, is starting to work on Russia's strategic shelf and deepwater continental shelf," Putin said.

Under the deal, Exxon and Rosneft will invest $3.2bn (£1.9bn) in developing East Prinovozemelsky Blocks 1, 2, and 3 in the Arctic Kara Sea and the Tuapse licensing block in the Black Sea.

Those regions "are among the most promising and least explored offshore areas globally, with high potential for liquids and gas," Exxon said in a statement. Rosneft, meanwhile, will be offered an equity interest in a number of Exxon exploration projects in North America, including deep-water Gulf of Mexico and tight oil fields in Texas, as well as in other countries.

"The fact that after the BP-Rosneft deal collapsed a new partner was found so quickly is a very positive signal," said Denis Borisov, energy analyst at Bank of Moscow.

The deal would help Rosneft share the risks of developing the Arctic, which could run into the hundreds of billions of dollars, and contrasts with the BP-Rosneft deal in that it does not include a share swap.

"If this is essentially the BP deal it is exposure to a pretty significant resource base. There's a lot of risk that's involved in it," said Jason Gammel, energy analyst at MacQuarie Research.

"Rosneft had been pretty clear that they were still looking to get a deal done up there," Gammel added. "It's a pretty big win for them if they were able to gain access up there, clearly dependent on what type of terms they got."

www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/aug/30/exxon-rosneft-oil-arctic

BUT:

ExxonMobil-Rosneft oil deal unlikely to open the taps of transparency

Where there's oil, there's corruption – and Russia has plenty of both. So can state-owned Rosneft be trusted in this deal?

o Phillip Inman
o guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 30 August 2011 20.28 BST

Looked at one way, ExxonMobil joining hands with the state-owned Rosneft is a vote for world peace. What better than to have a symbol of American capitalism clasped to Russia's bosom? By such joint efforts countries become tied together and unlikely to fight wars. Only last week President Medvedev shook hands with Kim Jong-il. Maybe the US can find a backdoor through Moscow to meet the totalitarian leader and quell his nuclear ambitions.

Yet such a view is beyond naive. If anything, countries with considerable oil and gas resources find themselves riddled with corruption. That is the inevitable consequence of the riches that flow from oil and gas sales, especially when the country has yet to develop sound business and legal processes before the gushers flowed.

Russia was already a victim of corruption dating back to the communist regime and beyond. It is the same in Nigeria, Venezuela and the Middle East where oil came before stable government and oversight by the courts.

Ask any Nigerian business person what is the key to the country's advancement and they will tell you a fair judiciary – not one that continues to protect wealthy people and companies that can afford to pay bribes or pull political strings to avoid prosecution.

There is a similar situation in Russia. Some commentators believe the situation is improving, but Transparency International recently ranked Russia at 154 out of 178 countries for levels of corruption. Nigeria was better placed at 134 while Venezuela was worse at 164.

The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented the killings of 52 Russian journalists since 1992, most of them business and political reporters. There has been little respite in the past few years. Only Iraq, the Philippines and Algeria have worse records, and the killings in Iraq, though shocking, are more to be expected.

Exxon executives will tell themselves they represent such a big company that they are immune to petty bribes at one extreme, or political attempts to strong-arm them at the other. Yet they should be wary. Russian news agencies report that prime minister Vladimir Putin expects Rosneft to develop oil fields in the Gulf of Mexico and Texas as part of the deal.

Will these ties make the world a safer place, or one where environmental and safety concerns are embraced? What transparency will there be in Rosneft's accounts and can its attempts at corporate social responsibility be trusted?

Exxon cannot claim an unblemished record. Nor can BP, which was the first in line as a marriage partner for Rosneft, but at least they are forced to disclose some important information about their activities and explain their mistakes.

www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/aug/30/exxonmobil-rosneft-deal-transparency

[Big Bunny]

Arctic oil spill response plans are triumphs of hope over expectation

As ExxonMobil and Rosneft move into the Arctic, an analysis of Cairn Energy's previously secret safety plan reveals worrying challenges

An oil spill response plan is, all can agree, a critical document, particularly when drilling is breaking new ground in the Arctic. But Cairn Energy's plan, released despite their best efforts to keep it secret, has now been analysed and the verdict, say campaigners, is damning.

Professor Richard Steiner, formerly at the University of Alaska and an authority on oil spills, said Cairn "dramatically understates the potential size and impacts of a blow out ... and dramatically overstates the potential effectiveness of any spill response."

The analysis comes from Greenpeace and Steiner, who resigned from his university over his anti-oil views, so it is not likely to be impartial. But you can see Cairn's spill response plan for yourself, in which a series of issues stand out. And don't forget two things: the shameful inadequacy of the response plan to BP's Deepwater Horizon spill and the full-steam ahead for Arctic oil and gas exploration represented by yesterday's multi-billion dollar deal between ExxonMobil and Rosneft.

So what have Greenpeace and Steiner found in the plan?

• Useless booms and skimmers: Cairn admits on page 78 of its plans that these conventional approaches to capturing spilled oil will be of "little or no use" and "very inefficient" in Arctic conditions.

• Arctic winter shut down of clean-up operations: The response to a spill during the Arctic winter "may be limited to monitoring the spill with recovery operations resuming once the thaw is complete", says Cairn on page 90. The problem there is that if a relief well is needed to stem a blow out, there would be a limited time to get it in before winter ice closed down operations. If unsuccessful, a blown out well would pump oil into the ocean unhindered for months.

• Shorelines that can't be cleaned. Cairn admits "the coastal environment in Greenland does not facilitate containment, recovery or protection due to the uneven rocky substrate that prevails in the region" (page 89) and says "in some circumstances oiled shorelines are best left to recover naturally" (page 90).

• Cleaning up ice, cube by cube: Cairn says that if ice and oil were mixed, it would cut out chunks of contaminated ice and melt them in a heated warehouse to recover the oil (page 70). To me, that doesn't sound like an operation that could work at scale and experts told Greenpeace there is no evidence that this technique is effective.

• Working in the dark. Cairn admits the near perpetual darkness of an Arctic winter would "cause serious operational complications" (page 70) during a spill clean up. It says "limited portable lights" are available for shoreline operations.

• Harm to wildlife: Cairn admits that significant long-terms impacts of a spill could be expected on narwhals, breeding colonies of Atlantic puffins and razorbill and other species (page 146). Steiner claims Cairn "dramatically understates the potential impacts".

• Dispersants ineffective: Cairn states that "low oil temperature increases viscosity" (page 70). Steiner says this renders the chemical dispersants used to break up oil ineffective, aside from their potential harm to wildlife.

Greenpeace are not happy. Campaigner Vicky Wyatt says: "It's no wonder Cairn Energy didn't want the public to see their secret spill plan. The company offers only giant assumptions and pie-in-the-sky solutions. This cowboy company are playing roulette with one of the most important and fragile environments on the planet, and must be stopped."

Cairn disagree of course. A spokesperson told me the company now welcomes the release of its spill response plan by the government of Greenland. She added: "This plan has been reviewed and approved by third parties including Oil Spill Response Limited, the Danish National Environmental Research Institute and the Greenland government. All are satisfied that the plan is robust and appropriately designed to deal with an incident in this area."

Ove Karl Berthelsen, Greenland's minister for industry and mineral resources, said: "All exploration is being carried out in accordance with the utmost focus on meeting the stringent requirements we have put in place focusing on safety and environmental protection. In addition, our supervision of these requirements is among the most stringent anywhere in the world".

The problem for me is that cleaning up oil spills are like putting toothpaste back in the tube: there's just way to do it without making a big mess. As I have written before, the lure of the Arctic's sunken treasure is irresistible at present, despite the unique nature of the region and the extraordinary difficulty of operating there.

These spill response plans are in essence triumphs of hope over expectation, so I'll leave you with one more nugget from Cairn's plan: "Adult salmon and cod have been observed to avoid oil" (page 145). So, if there's a spill, the fish will just swim around it. Feel safe now?

[glow=red,2]Cairn Energy Spill Response Plan: www.greenpeace.org.uk/sites/files/gpuk/nodeless/pdfs/cairn-spill-response-plan.pdf[/glow]

www.guardian.co.uk/environment/damian-carrington-blog/2011/aug/31/cairn-energy-arctic-oil-spill

[Big Bunny]

The UK's lack of fracking regulation is insane

The UK government must not permit further drilling of shale gas until we can be assured that fracking is safe

Before the government approves a new industrial process in the UK it must have ensured that it won't harm either people or the environment. Mustn't it? That's what any sane person would expect. Any sane person would be wrong.

One year ago, a company called Cuadrilla Resources began drilling exploratory shafts into the rock at Preese Hall near Blackpool, in north-west England, to begin the UK's first experiments with extracting gas trapped in formations of shale. The process – called hydraulic fracturing, or fracking - involves pumping a mixture of water, sand and drilling fluids at high pressure into the rock, to split it apart and release the natural gas it contains. In June, Cuadrilla temporarily suspended its operations as a result of two small earthquakes in the area, which might have been caused by the fracking. The experiment is likely to resume soon. Cuadrilla has also started exploratory drilling at two other sites in the region.

Here are the issues that must be resolved if we are to be assured that fracking is a safe and responsible process.

1. Contamination

There are two issues here: the chemicals injected into the rocks and the contaminants released by the fracturing. Both have the potential to pollute water supplies.

The Tyndall Centre at the University of Manchester reviewed the impacts of fracking in the only country where it has so far been commercially exploited, the United States. It found that fracking poses "significant potential risks to human health and the environment."

"The fracturing and 'flowback' fluids … contain a number of hazardous substances that, should they contaminate groundwater, are likely to result in potentially severe impacts on drinking water quality and/or surface waters/wetland habitats."

Amazingly, fracking fluids in the US are exempt from regulation. Companies are allowed to treat the composition of the fluids as trade secrets. There is little information on what they contain and what risks they might present.

But, using data on the chemicals being stored by these companies, the Tyndall Centre has been able to identify at least some of the substances being injected into the rocks there. Of 260 chemicals, it finds that 58 give rise to concern. Some are known carcinogens, some are suspected carcinogens, some are toxic to people, some are toxic to aquatic life, some are mutagenic (which means they can cause genetic defects) and some have reproductive effects.

The fluids returning to the surface carry not only the chemicals injected into the rocks, but also those picked up in travelling through them. Among these, the Tyndall report shows, are heavy metals and radioactive materials.

Both the fracking fluids and the flowback fluids can contaminate water either through the cracks forced open in the rocks by the fracking process, or through drilling bores through aquifers. In the US this has happened repeatedly. The Tyndall Centre found that water supplies have been contaminated not only by the fracking chemicals and dissolved pollutants from the rocks, but also by gas bubbling out through the cracks.

The documentary Gasland shows people turning their taps on and setting light to the water. In some cases, gas bubbling up from underground fractures has caused explosions in the basements of people's homes.

Cuadrilla's bore passes through an aquifer before it reaches the shale formation. The company's chief executive told the Guardian: "You never have control. Fractures will always go into the path of least resistance."

2. Water use

Fracking requires the use of very high volumes of water. The Tyndall Centre report warns that it "could put considerable pressure on water supplies at the local level in the UK." All the zones in the catchment in which Cuadrilla's operations at Preese Hall take place are classified by the Environment Agency as "over licensed", "over abstracted" or "no water available".

3. Greenhouse gases

The natural gas produced by fracking is the same simple chemical (methane) as the gas extracted by conventional means. When it is burnt, a given volume produces the same quantity of carbon dioxide as conventional gas does. Even so, the impact of shale gas on the atmosphere could be much greater than the impact of the same volume of conventional gas. Here's why.

Methane is itself a powerful greenhouse gas. It does not persist in the atmosphere for as long as carbon dioxide, but during the first 20 years following its release, it is 56 times as effective at trapping heat.

More methane is likely to escape from the process of splitting rocks open than from drilling into conventional aquifers.

A paper published earlier this year in the journal Climatic Change found that methane emissions from shale gas fracking, "are at least 30% more than and perhaps more than twice as great as those from conventional gas." This, it says, boosts the climate changing impact of shale gas to such an extent that it is not just worse than conventional supplies, but worse even than coal, which is the most carbon-intensive fossil fuel. The paper found that, per unit of energy released, burning shale gas produces between 120% and 200% of the emissions produced by burning coal.

4. Raising fossil fuel reserves

Last month the Carbon Tracker Initiative worked out the proportion of current fossil fuel reserves that humanity can burn while keeping the chances of exceeding 2C of global warming to 20% or less. It found that current reserves contain roughly twice as much carbon as we can afford to release in the entire millennium.

Fossil fuel companies have already found far too much, in other words. It seems like madness to be prospecting for new reserves, especially new reserves with such a high potential to do harm, when we can't afford to use existing supplies.

So I asked the government some simple questions. The answers should stop anyone with a concern for human health or the environment in their tracks.

I asked to see the environmental impact assessment (EIA) for Cuadrilla's fracking operations, which it hopes to resume soon. Answer: there isn't one. The Department of Energy and Climate Change told me:

"The local planning authority has concluded that Cuadrilla's exploration activities do not fall within the criteria for EIA, and none has been performed."

I asked to see the Health Impact Assessment. This is what the government said:

"We are aware of no requirement on Cuadrilla to perform a health impact assessment, and we gather that they have not to date done so."

I asked to see the Life Cycle Analysis for the full impacts of extracting shale gas. The department told me:

"Government has not conducted a specific analysis of the size and variability of greenhouse gas emissions from the shale gas extraction process."

But, apparently disregarding the paper in Climatic Change, it produced the following guess:

"We would expect that shale gas should have a carbon footprint of the same order as natural gas from conventional onshore fields, and significantly lower than that of coal."

The government passed my questions about contamination to the Environment Agency (EA). I asked which chemicals have been licensed for underground injection by gas fracking operations in the UK.

It told me that the chemicals being used by Cuadrilla have been "assessed as 'non hazardous' under the Groundwater Directive".

But which chemicals are they? I had to press the agency for a list. It sent the following:

Hydrochoric acid; FR-40, which it calls "a blend of chemicals including Polyacrylamide"; Ucarcide, a bacteria-killing pesticide whose active substance is Glutaraldehyde; and Stimlube-W, which it simply described as "a polymer".

I asked the Environment Agency where it had got this list from. Cuadrilla sent it to them. Has the EA taken its own samples? Yes, or so it claims. But despite my repeated requests, it has failed to send me the results.

Has it analysed the trade-marked substances to determine whether they contain only the chemicals listed by Cuadrilla? I have now asked this question several times, and the agency, while giving minimal and uninformative answers to my other requests, has pointedly ignored it.

Worse still, in responding to me, the Environment Agency appears to have cut and pasted a phrase from Cuadrilla's website: "The fluids used by Cuadrilla are 99.75% composed of fresh water and sand." Is this how the agency sees its job? Lifting phrases from the site of a company it's supposed to be regulating? And has it ensured that this claim is true?

But there's nothing to worry about, the agency says, because "Groundwater is not present in the shale formation at the Preese Hall site."

As the disasters in the US demonstrate, the point is not just whether groundwater is present in the shale formation, but whether it is present in the overlying formations, through which the drill must pass, or into which the fractures might spread. At Preese Hall, Cuadrilla's drilling cuts through an aquifer to reach the shale.

Earlier this month, two campaigners hung banners from Blackpool tower in protest against Cuadrilla's plans to resume drilling at Preese Hall. In mid-September a group of activists will be setting up Camp Frack, not far from Cuadrilla's rig, to plan a campaign against the exploitation of shale gas. We should wish them luck.

www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2011/aug/31/fracking-issues-resolve