tagged w/ Alaska
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The Interior Department is offering oil and gas leases on 1.8 million acres of Alaska's National Petroleum Reserve while promising to protect critical migratory bird and caribou habitat.
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar says the Bureau of Land Management will offer 190 tracts with bids to be opened Aug. 11 in Anchorage. The sale is one of dozens, mostly in Western states, that Salazar announced in November.
The petroleum reserve covers 23 million acres on Alaska's North Slope. That's an area slightly smaller than the state of Indiana.The Interior Department is offering oil and gas leases on 1.8 million acres of... more
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BP is in talks to sell up to $12 billion of assets, including its big stake in Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay, the largest oil field in North America, The Sunday Times of London reported.
A sale would be the latest of several steps the beleaguered oil giant is taking to raise money to pay for damages from the disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the Times said.
Anyone wanna go halfsies on it?BP is in talks to sell up to $12 billion of assets, including its big stake in... more
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Want to slow global warming? Save a sea otter. So says Chris Wilmers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, whose team has calculated that the animals remove at least 0.18 kilograms of carbon from the atmosphere for every square metre of occupied coastal waters.
That means that if sea otters were restored to healthy populations along the coasts of North America they could collectively lock up a mammoth 1010 kg of carbon – currently worth more than $700 million on the European carbon-trading market. Wilmers explained this at the annual meeting of the Society for Conservation Biology in Edmonton, Canada, this month.
The figures are part of a growing realisation that predators play a crucial ecological role, promoting the growth of vegetation by controlling herbivore populations. Just as wolves benefit trees and shrubs by killing deer, sea otters allow the luxuriant growth of kelp by consuming sea urchins.
In former kelp forests that have lost their otters, Wilmers says, "all you are left with is piles of urchins and very little else".
Sink sizing
To estimate the minimum size of the carbon sink that could be provided by sea otters in North America, Wilmers and his colleagues determined the total available habitat for kelp – rocky reefs in up to 20 metres of water – and summed the amount of carbon that would be locked up in kelp either if no otters were present, or if the animals were present throughout in populations sufficient to control sea-urchin numbers.
The true size of the sink is likely to be larger than the calculated 1010 kg, Wilmers suggests, as some carbon drawn from the atmosphere by kelp forests may find its way into the deep ocean and be sequestered for long periods.
The exact size of historical sea otter populations, before they were nearly wiped out by hunting for fur in the 18th and 19th centuries, is uncertain. But after bouncing back from the brink, the animals are now in decline once again in parts of their range. In Alaska, for example, populations have dropped from up to 125,000 in the 1970s to around 70,000 today – possibly due to a rise in killer whale populations.
The new calculations provide an added incentive to protect sea otters, but do terrestrial predators provide a comparable carbon sink? No calculations have yet been done, but Wilmers believes the numbers could be similarly impressive. As a result of the loss of wolves across most of their former habitat, he points out, deer populations in parts of North America are currently around five times as high as historical levels, dramatically changing vegetation.
Dense woods
Predators are not the only large animals that help create carbon sinks, suggests Jedediah Brodie at the University of Montana in Missoula. In October 2009 in Science (vol 326, p 364), he argued that hunting in forests for bushmeat removes fruit-eating animals, reducing the numbers of trees that rely on them to disperse their seeds. Because these trees tend to have denser wood than those with smaller seeds that rely on wind for dispersal, the net result will be a decrease in the amount of carbon stored by a forest.
Some ecologists remain to be convinced by his argument (Science, vol 327, p 30), but Brodie is now crunching the numbers using measurements of the growth of saplings in two Peruvian forests – one heavily hunted and one with an intact fauna – plus data on the density of wood from different species.
Merely protecting a forest from logging isn't enough to ensure that it functions properly as a carbon sink, Brodie says. "You've also got to be concerned about the large animals."
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19145-sea-otters-worth-700-million-in-carbon-credits.htmlWant to slow global warming? Save a sea otter. So says Chris Wilmers at the University... more
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The New York Times is reporting today that BP is on the verge of kicking off a “controversial and potentially record-setting” drilling project three miles off the coast of Alaska. The project, which is called “Liberty,” involves drilling down two miles below the ocean, then six miles horizontally to access an oil reservoir. If this process sounds eerily similar to hydraulic fracturing, a disaster-riddled natural gas extraction method that I’ve covered for much of the past year, that’s because it is.
But there’s more. You might be wondering how BP can just up-and-start-drilling three miles offshore when there’s a moratorium that’s supposed to prevent, well, offshore drilling. Here’s how:
BP’s project … has been exempted as regulators have granted it status as an “onshore” project even though it is about three miles off the coast in the Beaufort Sea. The reason: it sits on an artificial island — a 31-acre pile of gravel in about 22 feet of water — built by BP.
A motherf**king BP island!? Come on, people!
This isn’t even the most outrageous part of the story, though. Two scientists from Alaska’s MMS told the Times that “in a break from usual practice,” federal regulators allowed BP to write its own environmental review for the Liberty. BP also wrote its own “consultation documents relating to the Endangered Species Act.” Incidentally, the rig sits smack dab in the middle of a migratory area for bowhead whales.
Critics are charging that a 31-acre pile of gravel will not contain a major spill, if one were to occur on the Liberty. One scientist quoted in the story sums things up pretty well:
“It makes no sense,” said Rebecca Noblin, the Alaska director for the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental watchdog group. “BP pushes the envelope in the gulf and ends up causing the moratorium. And now in the Arctic they are forging ahead again with untested technology, and as a result they’re the only ones left being allowed to drill there.”
Apparently, for BP, “Liberty” still means doing whatever the hell you want, whenever the hell you want, however the hell you want to do it.The New York Times is reporting today that BP is on the verge of kicking off a... more
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By Sarah Laskow, Media Consortium Blogger
Image courtesy of Flickr user talkradionews via Creative Commons license.President Barack Obama and Congressional leaders spent this week trying to stand up to the oil industry. In the wake of the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Obama pushed BP to siphon $20 billion into a escrow fund that will cover liability claims, and Congress grilled BP CEO Tony Hayward and other oil bigwigs as to how they were protecting the country’s coastal waters.
While these developments are promising, mopping up the current crisis and guarding against future incidents will take more momentum than a speech, a meeting, or a few hearings can deliver.
$20 billion
BP’s escrow fund indicates that the company is willing to take some responsibility for the damage this spill has visited on the Gulf Coast. But not everyone in Washington is pleased with the fund. As TPMDC’s Eric Kleefeld writes, “some Republicans have come out strongly against it—with the sum total of charges being that it will turn into a political slush fund procured through dirty Chicago thug tactics that will be paid out to ACORN.”
Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) became the poster boy for this sentiment when, at a Thursday hearing, he apologized to BP for the president’s actions. TPM sheds some light on the Congressman’s possible motivation. It seems Barton might have his own interests at heart, not the needs of the spill’s victims (or of the Republican Party—by the end of the day, House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) forced Barton to retract his apology).
“Barton’s number one career campaign contributor, Anadarko Petroleum, has 25% ownership in the well where the April 20 rig explosion occurred,” Justin Elliott writes. “The firm, which has given Barton $146,500 over the years, has been sent a bill by BP for cleanup costs.”
Clean-up coasting
As far as the clean-up efforts, Mother Jones’ Mac McClelland reports that the company is not doing all it can for Elmer’s Island Wildlife Refuge. McClelland talked to one clean up worker who said:
“They’re up to 120 guys on Elmer’s now, but I can’t see any considerable difference. They’re only working five sites and it’s eight miles of beach. No one seems concerned about cleaning it up. The contractors are getting their money; they don’t care. They’ve got all these people out there, but they’re not accomplishing anything.”
So far it doesn’t seem like BP—or the oil industry—is learning from these failures, either. Also at Mother Jones, Kate Sheppard reports that as bad as BP’s clean up response has been, at this week’s hearing, the public “got a glimpse of how ridiculous it was on paper.” The clean up plan, Sheppard writes, referenced a deceased sea turtle expert and ways to protect walruses and sea lions, which do not live in the Gulf Coast.
“It gets even worse,” Sheppard says. “The other four oil giants are using almost the exact same plans.”
The next disaster?
BP, at least, needs solid disaster plans, and not just for spills like the one in the Gulf. As Truthout reports, the Deepwater Horizon site isn’t the only BP project that poses a safety risk. In Alaska, the Prudhoe Bay oilfield is host to “a long list of safety issues that have not been adequately addressed,” reporter Jason Leopold writes. Marc Kovac, a BP employee, told him:
“The condition of the [Prudhoe Bay] field is a lot worse and in my opinion a lot more dangerous. We still have hundreds of miles of rotting pipe ready to break that needs to be replaced. We are totally unprepared for a large spill.”
More energy disasters
These sorts of dangers are not limited to BP’s operations or the oil industry. As Forrest Whittaker writes for The Texas Observer, “In the past three months, each of the three major fossil fuels—coal, oil and natural gas—has had its own Kaboom! moment. It’s almost like Mother Nature is trying to tell us something about our energy policy.”
In addition to the BP spill, Whittaker is thinking of the Upper Big Branch coal mine explosion in April, and two more recent blowups of natural gas wells in Texas.
“On June 7, workers struck a 36-inch gas pipeline near Cleburne, causing a massive eruption of flames seen miles away,” he writes. “One worker was killed, and eight others were severely injured. An eyewitness described the heat from 300 yards away as “unbearable.” The next day, another pipeline explosion in the Panhandle killed two workers when their bulldozer punctured another gas pipeline.”
GritTV reports on yet another oil spill—this one in Utah, where a hole in a Chevron pipeline starting pouring thousands of gallons of oil into a Salt Lake City creek a week ago.
“Oil is a messy business, even when it’s legal,” filmmaker Joe Berlinger tells GritTV’s Laura Flanders.
Colorado drilling
In Colorado, on-shore drilling is most definitely legal, and BP is looking to restart natural gas drilling there, the Colorado Independent reports.
“[BP] found the jackpot,” Josh Joswick, a Colorado organizer, said. “Not only are they on top of the most productive coal-bed methane field in the United States, they are paying next to nothing compared to what they would be paying elsewhere.”
The BP disaster in the Gulf is resonating here, too. “Several much smaller incidents in Colorado and neighboring states are quietly highlighting the need for increased onshore oil and gas drilling regulation,” the Colorado Independent’s David O. Williams writes.
There is an opportunity right now for lawmakers at the federal and state level to push for real reform; it’s not clear yet that anyone’s jumping at that chance.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.By Sarah Laskow, Media Consortium Blogger
Image courtesy of Flickr user... more
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Wasilla, Alaska’s Lisa Kelly Returns on Ice Road Truckers, Season 4, Episode 1 Premiere
Associated Content
June 06, 2010
Roy A. Barnes
Ice Road Truckers, Season 4, Episode 1 premiered on the History Channel Sunday, which saw Wasilla, Alaska driver Lisa Kelly return for her second season. This season is to last some 90 days which is needed
to get those 2500 loads from Fairbanks to Prudhoe Bay (500 miles) and other places.
Click to see(HOT PHOTOS) Wasilla, Alaska’s Lisa Kelly Ice Road Truckers, Season 4…VIDEO....http://ctpatriot1970.wordpress.com/2010/06/06/hot-photos-wasilla-alaskas-lisa-kelly-returns-for-ice-road-truckers-season-4-video/
Season 4, Episode 1 of Ice Road Truckers also witnessed the return of Alex Debogorksi and “The Polar Bear” Hugh Rowland (at the end). The interesting character studies alone on this show make this History Channel program a must-see.Wasilla, Alaska’s Lisa Kelly Returns on Ice Road Truckers, Season 4, Episode 1... more
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As demand for freshwater increases globally, a few companies and water-rich countries envision water shipped in large tankers designed for oil as the next big supply-side solution.
Sitka’s Blue Lake receives water from snowpack and glacial melting in the surrounding u-shaped valley. True Alaska Bottling holds the rights to export 2.9 billion gallons annually, at a penny a gallon, from the lake reservoir.
Two American companies and a small Alaska city are drawing closer to an export agreement that ships fresh water from North America to a bulk bottling plant in India in order to supply the thirsty Middle East, according to Terry Trapp, the chief executive of True Alaska Bottling, one of the companies in the partnership.
Trapp’s company holds the rights, at a penny a gallon, to export 2.9 billion gallons (10.9 billion liters) per year from the Blue Lake reservoir owned by the city of Sitka, Alaska. Meanwhile the company’s partner in the venture, San Antonio-based S2C Global Systems, is negotiating with developers in India to build facilities at a deepwater port south of Mumbai.
Sitka’s Resource Piggy Bank is Water Sitka and Alaska Resource Management LLC, the partnership formed by the two companies, are seeking to be the first to introduce bulk supplies of freshwater, transported in huge tanker ships, as a new commodity in global trade. The concept is straightforward. Where local supplies cannot meet demand, a small group of wildcatter companies and water-rich countries are positioning themselves to provide large shipments of water via 80-million-gallon capacity tanker ships and floating polythene bags–bulk water, in the industry parlance.
“The concept we have with our partner is constructing a water depot in India or the Middle East where water is unloaded and stored with an adjacent bottling tank.”“The concept we have with our partner is constructing a water depot in India or the Middle East where water is unloaded and stored with an adjacent bottling tank,” Trapp told Circle of Blue. “The water would then be distributed to countries in two-and-a-half liter or five liter containers.”
The consequences of bulk water exports are not nearly as clear cut. Proposals to export water supplies out of their natural basins has sparked fierce political resistance in some parts of the globe. The Great Lakes region of the U.S. Midwest established laws and regulations over the last decade that sought to ban the practice. Moreover, reliance on imports could perpetuate water-wasting practices in dry regions. And the capacity of wealthier regions to afford their water in five-liter containers could widen the economic and quality of life gulf between rich and poor countries.
Bulk Water’s Past and Present
Bulk water transfers are not new. Diversions out of river basins both within and between countries have occurred for decades: Singapore imports water from neighboring Malaysia; Lesotho sends water to South Africa via the Highlands Project; Southern California exists as we know it today because of water channeled from the Sierra Nevada hundreds of miles to the north. Historically, engineers have moved water through pipelines, canals or rivers under government control and oversight.
Graphic by Aubrey PakerClick on image above to see the full infographic. Sitka, Alaska to sell bulk water exports to India.Water is also exported by bottling companies. But the volumes sold from a single source are much smaller than the volumes available in bulk. Danone, the world’s second largest bottled water producer, sold 18 billion liters (4.8 billion gallons) in 2009 from all its bottling plants combined, a sales volume that is roughly half of the water available from Sitka.
What is new is the idea of shipping water in tankers across oceans. It differs in scale and the notion that big commercial advantages exist when a scarce commodity is supplied to eager communities willing to pay the price. Accompanying the shift in supply also is a shift in perspective, said George Paterson, chief executive of Aquazeal, a New Zealand company with water rights for export.
continuedAs demand for freshwater increases globally, a few companies and water-rich countries... more
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by Sarah Laskow, Media Consortium blogger
A cap placed over a severed pipe is siphoning some oil from the broken BP well in the Gulf Coast, the company said today. The company’s CEO said this morning on CBS that it was possible that this fix could capture up to 90% of the oil, but that it will take 24 to 48 hours to understand how well this solution is working. Adm. Thad Allen, the former Coast Guard chief and oil spill incident commander, called the cap “only a temporary and partial fix.”
Despite the capping procedure, it became clear this week that the onrush of oil from the BP Deepwater Horizon rig will not cease any time soon. Even in the best case scenario, thousands of barrels of oil will still flow into the ocean. Destruction is already spreading along the Gulf Coast, and before the oil stops leaking, species might be extinct and industries destroyed.
In the coming months—it’s not clear how many—oil will continue to pollute the Gulf of Mexico. BP and the Obama administration are talking about August as the end of this crisis, but other experts have projected that the spill could last until Christmas.
As Justin Elliott reports for TPMMuckraker, BP told the government it could handle a spill much larger than this one. In the initial exploration plan for the well, BP claimed “it was prepared to respond to a blowout flowing at 300,000 barrels per day — as much as 25 times the rate of the current spill,” Elliott writes. BP cannot, it turns out, respond to a blowout flowing less than 20,000 barrels per day, and the consequences for the Gulf communities are only beginning to emerge. The first casualty will be Gulf ecosystem and its inhabitants. The second casualty will be the livelihood of Gulf communities that have depended on fish, shrimp, and oysters for survival.
How long?
In 1979, another company released torrents of oil in the Gulf of Mexico, in much shallower waters than where BP was drilling. As Rachel Slajda writes for TPMMuckeraker, the clean-up methods the oil industry relied on three decades ago are similar to the technology BP is trying now. The Ixtoc spill was comparatively easy to address; yet it still took 10 months to stop.
During that spill, the nearest state, Texas, had two months to prepare for the oil to hit shore, and still “1,421 birds were found with oiled feathers and feet,” Slajda writes. The fishing industry escaped much damage, but the tourism industry lost 7-10% of its business.
Dead fish
In Louisiana, Mississippi, Florida, and other states affected by this spill, fish, fowl, restaurateurs, and oystermen won’t get off easy. As Care2 reports, the National Wildlife Federation has already documented the deaths of more than 150 threatened or endangered sea turtles and of 316 seabirds (“mostly brown pelicans and northern gannets”).
And BP is trying to keep images of the animal victims away from the public. Julia Whitty, reporting from Louisiana, writes for Mother Jones:
All up and down this shoreline angry and scared people told me some scary and infuriating stories in the past few days. I heard about the the dead and dying wildlife we’re never going to see because the victims are being carted away to early responder ships and to inaccessible buildings onshore. I’ve seen some of those photographs which can’t be shown (according to BP’s new orders) of dolphins swimming through thick gunky oil, struggling sperm whales trailing wakes a mile long in thick gunky oil, dead jellyfish in gunky oil.
Extinction
The impact of the oil spill goes beyond those individual bodies, though. As Inter Press Service reports, environmentalists and scientists “are beginning to reckon with the reality of a massive annihilation of sea creatures and wildlife.”
“You could potentially lose whole species, have extinction events,” Michael Blum, a Tulane ecology professor told IPS. “Brown pelicans were just taken off the endangered species list. On this threshold, a big dieback and mortality event, they would be pushed back into a situation where they could be endangered.” Also at Care2, Jay Holcomb, Executive Director of the International Bird Rescue Research Center, demonstrates a brown pelican being de-oiled, her feathers shampooed with Dawn detergent, her head and pouch cleaned with Q-tips.
Livelihoods destroyed
For generations, Gulf Coast residents made their living by fishing. Their fishing grounds are now off-limits. Some have found short-term work with BP fighting the oil. But those jobs come with new hazards.
Some clean-up workers have reported dizziness, nausea, and shortness of breath that they think comes from exposure to chemical dispersants. BP is not providing safety gear that would clean the air workers breathe and has threatened to fire clean-up workers who bring their own, Colorlines reports.
In the long-term, Gulf Coast fishermen may have no source of income and will have to abandon their homes and professions.
“It’s a way of life,” shrimper Dean Blachard told Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman this week. “They destroyed a way of life, a way of life that if you take it away too long, you can’t learn this in a school. This is passed from generation to generation, so the daddy teaches the son, and the son teaches his son. And, you know, once the chain is broke, you’re never going to get it back.”
It’s understandable that the residents of the Gulf Coast might want BP to pay for the damage. At The Nation, Chris Hayes reveals that BP could be on the hook for mitigation, the cash value of injured property, and for punitive damages–all beyond the cost of cleanup itself. But, as Zygmunt J. B. Plater, a law professor who chaired a legal task force on the Exxon Valdez spill, explains:
“In Alaska, most of the damage was suffered by communities who had their quality of life destroyed, and there’s no way to put a dollar value on that.”
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.by Sarah Laskow, Media Consortium blogger
A cap placed over a severed pipe is... more
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Writer moves next door to Sarah Palin. Is it to spy? She thinks so and built a higher fence.Writer moves next door to Sarah Palin. Is it to spy? She thinks so and built a higher... more
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The North Slope oil producers late Wednesday were asked to slow production even more to give operators of the trans-Alaska pipeline more time to deal with a big oil spill and get the pipeline restarted.
By telling oil producers that they can deliver only 8 percent of their normal production, Alyeska Pipeline Service Co., which runs the pipeline and the pump station where the spill occurred, is buying itself until noon Friday to get the pipeline running again, said company spokeswoman Michelle Egan.
"We don't want to move too quickly or miss something that could cause a longer shut-down by some subsequent action," she said.
Egan said she still does not know when the pipeline will be running again.
The 800-mile pipeline between the North Slope oil fields and the Valdez tanker port is shut down due to a spill Tuesday of several thousand barrels of oil at Pump Station 9 near Delta Junction. A spill of that size -- totaling over 100,000 gallons -- is one of the largest ever for the 33-year-old pipeline.
The shutdown is disrupting about $45 million a day of North Slope production and about $13 million a day in state revenue. The pipeline carries about 650,000 barrels a day of crude oil, about 10 percent of U.S. production.
The North Slope production slowdown is the second Alyeska has requested since Tuesday's spill. Alyeska asked that production be slashed to 16 percent of normal right after discovering Tuesday's spill.
Less than a day's production can be stored on the North Slope, and the new production slowdown means the storage tanks there won't be full until midday Friday.
Investigators from six state and federal agencies headed to the pump station to investigate the accident.
Although the spill was contained within the pump station site, "some procedures weren't properly implemented, apparently" said Mike Thompson, the state pipeline director at the Joint Pipeline Office, a group of federal and state agencies that regulate the pipeline.
The spill occurred while the pipeline was shut down for routine maintenance, Alyeska said. At 10:20 a.m. Tuesday, Alyeska turned off its main power to test its battery-controled backup system. But the batteries failed.
The power outage triggered valves to open and divert oil from the pipeline into a partially filled 2.3 million-gallon storage tank, according to Alyeska. The valves protect the trans-Alaska pipeline from too much pressure.
The storage tank quickly filled and workers noticed it overflowing at 11 a.m. The valves then were closed by 11:15, Alyeska said.
The oil spilled into a large, outdoor bermed containment area and hasn't escaped the site, company and state officials said.
The tank is damaged and oil continued to seep from it Tuesday night and Wednesday. Alyeska said the dripping is from thermal expansion of the oil as the sun bakes the tank. On Tuesday, a state Department of Environmental Conservation official estimated about 5 gallons a minute was escaping, but it was unknown how much was leaking Wednesday.
Why did it take Alyeska 40 minutes to realize the valves were open and the storage tank was overflowing?
Egan said workers were focused on getting power back and they didn't know what was happening in the tank. Thompson, the state pipeline director, said it's not clear why the backup power failed and why no one anticipated at that point that the storage tank would begin filling with oil.
"They may have dropped the ball on that," he said.
To stop the oil flow into the storage tank, workers manually cranked a series of other pipeline valves. Even though the pipeline was shutdown, there was still oil in it that was moving because of gravity, Egan said.
Alyeska evacuated the pump station and kept power shut off to avoid igniting volatile fumes.
Crews were able to go into the spill area Wednesday morning to stir the oil, said Tom DeRuyter, state DEC on-site coordinator. That enabled them to estimate how much of the lighter components -- including benzene, ethylbenzene, toluene and xylene -- had dissipated. Those lighter components are flammable and are known toxins that can be absorbed by the lungs and through the skin.
Alyeska said the next step will be to restore power to the pump station when it is safe to do so.
The pipeline will likely be operating before all of the spilled oil is cleaned up, said Egan, Alyeska spokeswoman.
Alyeska is owned by an oil-company consortium. The companies that own Alyeska and the pipeline are BP (46.9 percent), Conoco Phillips (28.3 percent), Exxon Mobil (20.3 percent), Koch Industries (3.1 percent) and Chevron (1.4 percent).
Egan said it is fairly common for Alyeska to advise North Slope producers to deliver less oil, for example when there's bad weather in Valdez preventing oil shipments. But she said Alyeska usually asks for at the most a 50 percent reduction.
Analysts expected the temporary shutdown to have a minimal effect on oil prices and gasoline supplies, although Wednesday's price for Alaska oil -- $71.01 a barrel -- was up 9 percent since Monday.
While the shutdown may have been a "supportive factor" in the price rise, "I don't think it was an overwhelming factor," said Phil Flynn, a senior market analyst for PFGBest. "The market is pretty well supplied right now, and we probably could miss it for a short time."
State revenue depends on the continued flow of North Slope from the state-owned oil fields. Revenue Commissioner Pat Galvin said the state anticipates down-times and that production has been far ahead of projections so far this year.
"If they are able to get it back on line fairly quickly it wouldn't necessarily change our budget expectations for this fiscal year," Galvin said.
Alyeska must get approval from federal and state regulators before restarting the pipeline, according to DeRuyter.The North Slope oil producers late Wednesday were asked to slow production even more... more
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Life has been changed forever as have the ecosystems of this once pristine land, and people still wait for compensation. The parallels to the current BP Gulf Oil gusher disaster are stark... especially since it was BP that was the leader in the consortium sent to clean up the Exxon spill in 1989, and was negligent in that as well.Life has been changed forever as have the ecosystems of this once pristine land, and... more
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http://www.flickr.com/photos/greenpeaceusa09/4635783171/
7 Greenpeace activists arrested in anti-drilling protest
By the CNN Wire Staff
May 24, 2010 8:03 p.m. EDT
Greenpeace activists smeared messages on the vessel with raw crude from the Gulf Coast oil spill.
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
* Greenpeace activists want interior secretary to ban new drilling
* Protesters used crude from BP spill to write messages on boat
* Activists boarded private vessel contracted by Shell for Alaska operations
(CNN) -- Seven members of the environmental group Greenpeace were arrested Monday after protesting at a private ship that the group says is scheduled to depart for Alaska this summer as part of a drilling mission.
The group said it was sending a message to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to ban new drilling in the Arctic or any U.S. waters. The ship was docked at Port Fourchon, Louisiana, near the site of the massive BP oil spill that for more than a month has been gushing thousands of barrels of oil daily into the Gulf of Mexico.
Photos from the scene show two protesters repelling off the side of Harvey Explorer, a 240-foot supply vessel, with one holding a sign reading "Salazar: Ban Arctic drilling." The activists also smeared messages -- "Arctic next?" -- on the boat in raw crude from the BP spill in the Gulf.
The seven arrested, between ages 24 and 32, face unauthorized entry charges of a critical infrastructure and an inhabited dwelling, according to the Lafourche Parish County Sheriff's Department. They could face additional charges pending an investigation into the incident, authorities said.
The protest comes as the Obama administration has decided to establish a presidential commission to investigate the disaster and look into federal oversight of offshore oil drilling, safety aboard rigs and environmental protection. Permits to drill offshore were suspended last month pending an Interior Department safety review after the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon drill rig.
Still, the government is under pressure to issue new permits for offshore drilling as early as next week. The safety review is due this Friday, and the Obama administration will use it to help decide when and how drilling should resume.
The Harvey Explorer is a vessel contracted by Shell for offshore operations off the Alaskan coast that had been scheduled for July.
"The safety and security of this contracted vessel and its crew are a top priority," Shell said in a statement Monday. "While we welcome discussions regarding Shell operations, we are disappointed in the approach taken by Greenpeace today."
Greenpeace and other environmental groups argue there should be no new drilling until the investigation into the disaster is complete, which will take months.
"As long as we continue to rely on dirty and dangerous fossil fuels and offshore drilling, we can't prevent future disasters from destroying our oceans and the industries and wildlife that depend upon them," said John Hocevar, oceans campaign director for Greenpeace.
"Pulling the plug on plans to drill in the Arctic would be a first step towards a comprehensive ban on all new drilling in the United States," he said.http://www.flickr.com/photos/greenpeaceusa09/4635783171/
7 Greenpeace activists... more
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by Sarah Laskow, Media Consortium blogger
Oil has hit shore in Louisiana, and despite BP’s best efforts to keep the media away, reporters can now touch the greasy stuff with their hands and feet. The onrush of oil into the Gulf has continued for over a month now, and while BP is still trying to staunch both the spill and media spin, the company is losing control over the information that’s reaching the public.
The Environmental Protection Agency demanded this week that the company use a less toxic dispersant to clean up the spill, and independent scientists are releasing estimates of the spills volume that dwarf BP’s numbers in terms of magnitude.
Right now, a catastrophe of this scope seems like an unprecedented, one-off event. But across the energy industry, at other drilling sites, in other industries, companies are taking risks and courting environmental disasters on the same scale.
“Bayou Polluter”
BP, which was operating the rig before the spill, has other sins on its head. In Louisiana, “fishermen say BP spills oil every year and they point out marshes still dead from dispersants that were sprayed there,” marine biologist Riki Ott writes for Yes! Magazine.
The latest disaster could cause more exponentially more damage, but it is far from unique. On Democracy Now!, former EPA investigator Scott West, describes a case in which one of the company’s Alaska pipelines burst, spilling oil out onto the frozen tundra. BP had ignored workers’ concerns about the integrity of the pipeline, West says, and during warmer months, the resulting spill could have reached the Bering Sea and created a much bigger mess.
“Now we’re seeing the same sort of thing in the Gulf, in this catastrophe,” West said. “And information is coming to light that corners were cut and that employees’ concerns were being ignored. It’s the exact same pattern that we saw with BP in Alaska.”
Beyond BP
But a new report, which combs over the oil industry as a whole, shows that “BP can’t be singled out,” writes Public News Service. The report “found that operating errors and incidents around the globe are more common than the public likely realizes because most events don’t make the news.”
As countries like the United States become more desperate for fuel, accidents like the spill in the Gulf Coast become more likely. Extracting oil from tar sands, hydrofracking, deep-sea oil drilling: these are tricky techniques for extracting fossil fuel that are becoming popular only because the world’s store of easily accessible energy is almost gone. In The Nation, Michael Klare writes about the new quest for “extreme energy options” and the contingent risks.
“By their very nature, such efforts involve an ever increasing risk of human and environmental catastrophe—something that has been far too little acknowledged,” Klare writes. “As energy companies encounter fresh and unexpected hazards, their existing technologies…often prove incapable of responding adequately to the new challenges. And when disasters occur, as is increasingly likely, the resulting environmental damage is sure to prove exponentially more devastating than anything experienced in the industrial annals of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.”
Tar sands a slow-motion spill
It’s not just BP that’s playing fast and loose with its environmental impact. Extracting fuel from tar sands, a source for oil that’s gaining in popularity as an alternative to off-shore drilling, takes a dramatic toll on the environment.
Inter Press Service writes that, according to a new report, “Oil sands development is “kind of like the gulf spill but playing out in slow motion.”
The extraction process demands lakes of water, which, once contaminated, are held in pools. “Those toxic ponds pose a hazard to migrating birds, risk contaminating nearby soil and water resources, present health problems to downstream communities and, the report notes, pose the risk of “a catastrophic breach,”” IPS explains.
A director at the National Resource Defense Council described tar sand extraction as “a slow-motion oil spill every day,” writes The Texas Observer’s Forrest Whittaker. The United States is poised to consume even more oil from this source, too, he reports:
“In the works is a 2,000-mile underground pipeline from Alberta to refineries in Houston and Port Arthur, including BP’s Texas City facility. The high-pressure pipeline, proposed by TransCanada, would be capable of carrying 900,000 barrels per day, enough to more than double consumption of tar-sands oil in the U.S.”
Government intervention
As Whittaker reports, the Obama administration has been supportive of these sorts of efforts, and this week questions about the government’s leniency towards BP and the energy industry started bubbling up. In this climate, the government should be stepping in to defend the safety of the country’s people and its environment; instead, even the Obama administration is giving the energy industry a long leash to pursue its projects. On Democracy Now!, Scott West, the EPA investigator, described the pattern he saw during his investigation:
“What the government has done over the past several years is taught BP that it can do whatever it wants and will not be held accountable. So, decisions have been made, very poor decisions have been made, to increase profits and put workers at risk and been allowed and endorsed by the federal government.”
The current oversight has not much improved. Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) and his colleagues are pushing for a $10 billion cap on liability for oil companies, for instance, but the administration has argued for a lower limit, the Washington Independent reports.
Without real accountability from the government, BP could escape with little damage, Riki Ott explains in her Yes! Magazine piece.
“In the Exxon Valdez spill, people counted on the oil company to respond to and clean up the mess, and we counted on Congress and the legal system to hold the oil industry accountable for damages to the environment and local communities and economies. In hindsight, these turned out to be bad ideas,” she writes. “Exxon dodged penalties through long court battles, systematically underestimating the scope of the spill, and leveraging the costs of clean-up to avoid fines and penalties.”
BP doesn’t need to escape accountability in the same way, though; Ott has suggestions for actions that anyone can take to ensure the company pays the price for the damage it has caused.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.by Sarah Laskow, Media Consortium blogger
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Act now and stop this land grab!
Protect America's rainforest.
"Legislation working its way through Congress could allow a single corporation, Sealaska, to log some of the best, oldest, most biologically-rich areas left in America's Rainforest, the Tongass National Forest in Alaska.
Sealaska Corporation, which has a history of clearcutting its lands, is seeking ownership of some of the most ecologically and biologically diverse parts of the Tongass National Forest. In fact, the lands targeted by Sealaska have more than ten times the habitat value of other Tongass forest land!"
http://www.change.org/wilderness/petitions/view/stop_expanded_logging_in_alaskas_tongass_national_forest
Join the Organic Movement:
http://current.com/groups/organicgreen/Act now and stop this land grab!
Protect America's rainforest.... more
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