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CALGARY – With the public increasingly worried about oil spills, some aboriginal groups calling for an Arctic drilling moratorium, and the oil industry as keen as ever to tap Northern deposits, oil spill response preparedness was a big topic of discussion at the Arctic Council meeting in Sweden this week.
As Canada, which has large untapped deposits under the Beaufort Sea, assumed its chairmanship on Wednesday, the group of the eight nations that surround the North Pole signed a pact on oil spill prevention in Kiruna, Sweden’s most northern city.
Coinciding with the meeting, the London-based International Association of Oil & Gas Producers (OGP), whose member companies produce more than half of the world’s oil, was eager to talk about industry efforts to improve handling of oil spills in Arctic environments, which it says have advanced significantly in recent years.
Non-governmental organizations such as the OGP and Greenpeace requested observer status at the council but their requests were denied. The OGP, which had hoped to use the platform to engage and collaborate with those with an interest in Arctic oil-spill response, said much progress was made in the past year as a result of the establishment of a joint industry program (JIP) focusing on key areas of research.
The initiative is funded and supported by nine international oil companies — BP PLC, Chevron Corp., ConocoPhillips, Eni S.p.A, ExxonMobil Corp., North Caspian Operating Co. (NCOC), Royal Dutch Shell PLC, Statoil ASA, and Total S.A.
“A lot of time our stakeholders do not know that industry is extremely collaborative in particular areas, especially in oil-spill response. We do not see this as a competitive aspect of the business, so we are working together to strengthen our oil-spill response,” Becky Peavler, the program’s executive committee chair and a ConocoPhillips employee, said in an interview.
“When an incident occurs, it affects all of us. So we have a history of working together to be able to solve and advance the oil spill response capabilities.”
The initiative involves six major areas of research, said Joseph Mullin, who took over as manager of the program after a 40-year career with the U.S. government, with the last 25 dedicated to managing its oil-spill response research program.
With the help of company experts and scientific institutions, the program is probing into what happens to oil when it’s dispersed under ice, the environmental impacts of oil spills and the trajectory of oil spills in icy environments.
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