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MURMANSK, RUSSIA—For as long as humans have spread out to conquer the planet, despoiling as they progress, the Arctic’s punishing environment has been its best defence.
Like fortress ramparts, heavy snow, metres-thick ice and battering winds made it very hard for miners, oil drillers and industrialists to take much ground, let alone make a grab for the riches of a frozen sea. Those walls are crumbling fast.
The rush is on to drill offshore in the fragile Arctic, and Russia is at the front of the pack with ambitious, and risky, plans to exploit some of the world’s biggest untapped oil and natural gas reserves.
Around 1,200 kilometres northwest of here, squeezed from all sides by the powerful ice of the Pechora Sea, Russia’s first ice-resistant stationary oil rig in the Arctic shelf is set to begin drilling for crude.
Fifteen years in the building, the Prirazlomnaya drilling platform is 126 square metres, weighs 117,000 tons without ballast, and sits on a gigantic box of heavy steel designed to withstand the intense pressure of constantly shifting Arctic ice.
It took an icebreaker and three tugs to tow it from Murmansk to the drill site, a 10-day journey that ended Aug. 28. The voyage marked the beginning of a new, some say dangerous, era in the Arctic.
As Russia moves farther offshore to uncover the Arctic’s long-hidden treasures, its polar neighbours are following suit, and pressure is likely to build on Canada to follow suit.
Norway, a pioneer of drilling in harsh, icy conditions offshore, is pressing ahead with a 20-year plan to develop undersea Arctic fields despite public anger after an Icelandic cargo ship spilled an unknown amount of oil into a marine park in February.
Greenland approved exploratory oil drilling by a British firm this year in the waters shared by Canada’s eastern Arctic. So far, the $1-billion effort is a bust.
On Friday, U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration approved Royal Dutch Shell’s request to drill six exploration wells next year in the Chukchi Sea, off Alaska, and is considering proposals for drilling in the nearby Beaufort Sea. The waters border Canada’s Arctic.
There is no drilling off Canada’s Arctic coast today. The National Energy Board announced new requirements for permits Thursday, including a demand that drillers show how they would kill an out-of-control well in the same season.
The regulator doesn’t currently have any applications for offshore drilling before it, but added “we expect to see such applications in the future.”
The BP Deepwater Horizon blowout last year in the Gulf of Mexico is the stuff of nightmares for opponents of offshore Arctic drilling.
While the well gushed for three months, some 40,000 people, working on more than 4,000 vessels, deployed thousands of kilometres of containment booms to fight the spill, said Alexander Shestakov at the World Wildlife Fund.
There aren’t enough ice-class vessels to match that armada in the event of a large Arctic spill, and booms are useless in waters thick with ice, he added.
Oil companies, and the governments that allow them to drill in the fragile Arctic, are trying to learn as they conduct very hazardous work without proven technology and knowledge to make sure it’s safe, Shestakov said.
“That’s unacceptable everywhere in this kind of business, but especially in the Arctic because the cost of any mistake is enormous,” he said.
Ready or not, the Prirazlomnaya platform is now anchored to the bottom of the Pechora Sea, a shallow stretch of the southeastern Barents Sea that is fewer than 19 metres deep and is around 60 kilometres off Russia’s coast.
Starting with a test phase, workers will pump oil intermittently to check the quality, said Ilya Vinokurov, chief geologist at the state-owned company Sevmorgeo, which conducts seismic mapping of the seabed, including Russia’s Arctic shelf, to find oil and natural fields.
Testing will be completed by the end of next year, said Ivan Titkov, a spokesman for Gazprom, the state-owned firm that owns the rig and the fields it will drill. This summer, the company said the rig would be producing oil by now.
If it moves into full production, pipes called drill strings will slope down from the single platform, like the arms of a giant squid stretching to the seabed to bore as many as 40 slanted wells. The drill strings’ top ends will be surrounded by a heavy steel caisson, shaped like a large box, which rests on the sea floor.
It has double walls of steel, filled with concrete to add weight and durability, which are three metres thick, Titkov said.
The rig’s design features “completely eliminate oil spills from the platform,” he claimed.
As many as 200 crew members will live and work on the rig year round, in temperatures that can plummet to minus 50 deg C, pumping oil onto tankers that will ferry it closer to shore.
Oil stored in 16 tanks in the drill platform’s base will be pumped into shuttle tankers that will deliver the crude to a floating storage facility some hundreds of kilometres to the southwest, in Kola Bay.
The region is notorious for fierce storms, and drifting ice, so the tankers may prove much harder to protect than the rig itself.
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