Our policy director Doug Norlen recently attended the Western Gray Whale Advisory Panel meeting as an observer.  This panel, known as “WGWAP” for short, was set up by the World Conservation Union (IUCN) and Shell/Sakhalin Energy to make recommendations to minimize the impacts from oil and gas development around Sakhalin on critically endangered Western Gray Whales.  The primary feeding ground for Western Gray Whales is directly adjacent to Sakhalin Energy’s drilling area and two offshore platforms.  The whales are impacted from noise, construction activities, ship traffic, and potentially by oil spills. 

The idea behind the panel is a good one:  let’s bring together some of the best scientists in the world to review Shell’s plans and make recommendations to make sure that it minimizes the harm to Western Gray Whales.  This would work, if Shell took the panel’s recommendations seriously.  Unfortunately, when push comes to shove, Shell just does what it wants and ignores the panel’s recommendations. 

This is especially apparent on noise issues.  For over a year now, the panel’s scientists have asked Shell to use a certain set of noise criteria.  Shell has refused, saying this is unnecessary and could lead to shutdowns in their operations and delays of their construction schedules.  But isn’t the idea here to protect the critically endangered western gray whales?  Shell’s refusal means that it can create noise “spikes” without shutting down its operations.  Yet clearly this is not to the benefit of the whales. 

Environmentalists who were observing the construction this summer warned that a lot of noise in early July appeared to be frightening the whales away.  Shell says that its acoustic recordings either weren’t working or didn’t pick up the noise.  But since Shell refuses to abide by the panel’s reasonable recommendations, there’s no way to be sure.  Unfortunately, IUCN appears to have too close of a financial relationship with Shell to hold the company’s feet to the fire.  Meanwhile, potential public lenders, including the export credit agencies of the US, UK and Japan, have set adherence to the WGWAP recommendations as a condition of their financing.  Yet, they too appear to be letting Shell of the hook. After years of concern about Western Gray Whales, Shell is still avoiding its responsibilities to follow the advice of the scientists.   

As Sakhalin Energy plans to conduct new seismic testing in 2009 – and seismic testing can have some of the most serious impacts on whales – it is too bad that the company continues to put its construction schedules behind the well-being of Western Gray Whales.  This is just one more of the failures of the Sakhalin-II project, and one more reason the project should not be supported by public and private investors.

We received a rather strange press release from Shell and Sakhalin Energy over the weekend.  The press release stated that severe weather conditions had damaged production facilities at Sakhalin Energy’s platform of northeastern Sakhalin.  Apparently there was a “small release” of oil into the sea.  Even more strange, Sakhalin Energy spokespeople say that they don’t know when the release occurred!  They say the release was less than 10 liters – frankly hard to believe, given Sakhalin Energy’s track record so far. 

I don’t understand how the world’s largest integrated oil and gas project, built according to Shell and Sakhalin Energy to world-class standards, can have an oil spill and the company doesn’t even know when it occurred.  Meanwhile, I’m not surprised that this happened – severe storms hit Northeastern Sakhalin on a regular basis, especially going into winter.  Check out this photo to see the kind of waves you can get offshore of Northeastern Sakhalin. 

Of course, as global warming intensifies, so will the intensity of the storms.  This latest spill is similar to a September 1999 spill in which somewhere between 2 and 200 barrels of oil (depending on whether you ask the company or environmental groups) spilled when the floating storage tanker broke off from its moorings.  Let’s hope that independent analysis will show the actual amount of the spill and when it occurred. 

This latest incident – and Shell’s lack of information about when it occurred – proves once again that offshore oil development in arctic and subarctic conditions is just too risky for these fragile environments.  Shell just doesn’t know how to do it right. 

Yesterday, I attended a Congressional subcommittee hearing in San Francisco to talk about the Cosco Busan oil spill.  The hearing was led by Representative Elijah Cummings, chair of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Subcommittee on Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation (how’s that for a mouthful!).  Impressively, all of our Bay Area representatives showed – Pelosi, Woolsey, Lee, Miller, Tauscher, Lofgren, Lantos, and McNerney – what a turnout!  And we had Rep. Richardson from the Los Angeles area, who rightly pointed out that maritime safety is a national issue. 

I was impressed with the questioning from our members of Congress.  They were asking the right questions.  How could such a mistake happen?  Why was the response so slow and disorganized?  How do we improve our laws and regulations to make sure that a spill like the ‘Cosco Busan’ never happens again? 

I was not as impressed with the Coast Guard testimony.  While they owned up to the coordination problems, the Coast Guard kept saying that the response was appropriate.  I don’t understand how that can be, when no containment boom was placed around the ‘Cosco Busan’ to prevent oil from escaping out into the Bay?  For those interested, check out this YouTube version of the oil spill distribution, which demonstrates just how the strong tides and currents in San Francisco Bay made the oil churn through the Bay like it was in a washing machine.  Once the oil wasn’t initially contained, it was already too late. 

It seems like a lot of investigations have started.  The Coast Guard is doing its own investigation.  The National Transportation Safety Board is doing an investigation.  Governor Schwarzenegger has asked the Office of Spill Prevention and Response to conduct an investigation.  The US Attorney is doing an investigation.  And yesterday, Speaker Pelosi called for an Inspector General’s investigation.  Soon we will need an investigation to keep track of the investigations!  But unfortunately, none of these investigations are independent.  We need an independent, fresh look at our shipping safety regulations.  The regulations we have in place now are not enough to deal with the volume and size of ships we have moving through places like San Francisco Bay. 

We’re calling for an independent commission that will make recommendations about how to improve our shipping safety laws.  Check out our op-ed and go to this action alert to send a message to our elected leaders.

And let’s hope we can put the safeguards in place to make sure that our waters and wildlife don’t have to suffer from this pollution again in the future! 

Photo of the Selendang Ayu crash. Photo by US Coast Guard.

Liubov is right in her comment to my post about the oil spill in San Francisco Bay.  News reports say about 15% of the oil has been recovered, but I’m not sure that’s the whole story.  Once oil is in the water, it will often emulsify – mixing with water into an oily, liquidy goop.  Essentially, it expands – so even though they’ve recovered 15% of the total, that 15% may include both oil and water.  Historically, although the oil companies don’t like to advertise this, there is a very low recovery rate for cleanup of oil after spills. 

The catastrophe Liubov mentions in Kerch Strait, between the Black Sea and Azov Sea, is devastating.  Several ships, including an oil tanker, went down in a very severe storm.  Some of our Russian partners have been following this accident since it happened over the weekend.  And yes, the damage from the Volganeft-139 – the ship that went down in Kerch Strait – could be even greater, as it was carrying much more oil.  We’ve heard that the spill could be as much as 2,000 metric tonnes – far greater than the amount spilled from the Cosco Busan in San Francisco Bay. 

From what we’ve heard, the Volganeft-139 was a ship built to transport oil up rivers.  That means it’s a lighter boat, without a deep draft like ocean-going boats.  The oil is transferred from an ocean-going boat to the river boat before it heads up river (or vice-versa, depending on the direction).  As a river boat, the Volganeft-139 simply was not built to ride out a storm in an ocean with 18-foot waves.  So one has to ask:  was this accident preventable?  Should the Volganeft-139 have been in Kerch Strait at all, or once it new the storm was coming, could it have sheltered in an area that would not have been hit with such fierce conditions? 

Lots of investigations will start happening both with the Cosco Busan in San Francisco and the Volganeft-139.  Both are tragedies whose impacts will be felt for many years to come.  We’re putting together recommendations as part of our shipping safety work here in the States, and some of our Russian colleagues are doing the same for the Russian government.  Let’s hope we can learn from these mistakes to help prevent such accidents in the future.

Bird covered in oil from a spill on Sakhalin Island

One of our worst nightmares came true yesterday, when a cargo ship spilled 58,000 gallons of bunker fuel into San FranciscoBay.  The ship was traveling out of San FranciscoBay in heavy fog when it hit the BayBridge.

I commute into work on the ferry, so I was on the look-out for oil and oil spill response this morning.  Standing out on the front deck of the ferry, I smelled the oil before I saw it; there’s certainly a strong smell of oil hanging in the air.  I saw ribbons of oil, many with dark globules of floating oil, fromRichardsonBay in Sausalito to the FerryBuilding in San Francisco.  Some areas were harder hit than others – I particularly saw a lot of oil near Alcatraz and Fisherman’s Wharf, two of San Francisco’s biggest tourist attractions.  

According to news reports, beaches to the north of Golden GateBridge on the Pacific have been the worst hit so far – apparently the tide and the currents pushed the oil that direction.

This article starts to talk about some of the effects of the oil spill:  http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/11/08/MND7T870A.DTL  We’re just starting to see a lot of birds come back into the Bay for the winter, including cormorants, grebes, and pelicans, all of which I saw this morning from the ferry. We can only hope and pray that the effects on fisheries and birds are not serious.

To my surprise, I did not see any oil skimmers or other oil spill response equipment working in the Bay this morning.  I did see one Coast Guard helicopter, hopefully looking for oil sheens.  But I was surprised at the lack of oil spill response boats, especially since the weather is pretty good right now and the Bay is calm – as good conditions as you can get for cleaning up spilled oil.

According to this article, officials are “meeting” about how to respond:  http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/11/08/BAD8T8PLU.DTL  On the radio this morning, one official said proudly that 13 agencies were involved in the response.  I have a sinking feeling that it’s going to take a lot of meetings to get everyone on the same page before we see oil spill response vessels out on the Bay!

This is why we talk about the need for good oil spill response plans BEFORE accidents like this happen!  Once they happen, time is of the essence to clean up whatever is possible.  This is why we are so worried about the potential for oil spills in places like SakhalinIsland and Alaska – where the biological resources or so rich, yet we don’t have the cleanup technologies to prevent the damage from a major oil spill when it happens.  And as this oil spill shows, even with some of the best oil spill prevention measures, accidents do happen.  It’s not a question of if, but a question of when.

Of course, once the oil is in the water, it’s pretty much too late.  At best it will be possible to clean up a tiny fraction of the oil spilled, even in the best conditions.  I’m sure we’ll be spending a lot of time figuring out who’s guilty.  From the ferry, I could see the guilty cargo ship, with Hanjin spelled in large letters on the side.  But in this article (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/11/08/BAH3T81G7.DTL), the finger-pointing for responsibility is already starting:  “The ship is owned by a Greek firm that is chartering the vessel to Hanjin Shipping Co. Ltd. of Seoul. Hanjin spokeswoman Sonya Cho said the ship ‘is operated by the Greek owner and his crew’ and that Hanjin ‘has no responsibility in any matter concerning this accident.’”  Hmmmm, sounds like Exxon to me!  Nice way to start avoiding responsibility.