Holistic management plans don’t make issues go away. There is not and never will be a wholly risk-free way to take offshore oil from the Arctic. The arguments are about risks and benefits. Their assessment ultimately falls into the sphere of human values and the same values will never be shared by all. But a holistic management plan can place the issues very clearly before the public gaze and provide objective assessment of what is happening. In that, Norway has been successful.
Thanks to a separate program, MAREANO, even the sea bottom is coming on public display in Norway. Cameras are being towed around the Barents Sea to make a video record of huge areas of the sea bottom and its inhabitants. “We need better maps and mapping of the bottom fauna to be able to pinpoint the most valuable habitats so the project is very important to the Barents Sea management plan,” says Olsen. Human impact is made very visible. In some areas, the bottom is everywhere crisscrossed by extraordinary numbers of trawl marks from fishing boats. One trawl mark per eighty feet is common and in the worst spots there is a trawl mark on the seafloor every thirty feet. Other areas are untouched and alive with sponges, starfish, sea pens, sea fans, and anemones. There is a vast cold-water coral reef as rich as any tropical rainforest, the true extent of which was discovered by oil industry exploration submersibles. Touring the project’s interactive maps of the sea bottom and stopping here and there to pull up pictures and videos of its luxuriant life—and the hidden damage that has been done to it—it becomes easy to see how intensive monitoring can be made to work. At the same time, the stunning beauty of the seafloor life makes you realize why it is so important that a balance must be achieved, and why it is so hard to argue with those who believe that some areas will really have to be protected forever.
Chapter Thirteen
HOW FAR CAN OIL GO?
In the summer of 2004, three of the world’s greatest icebreakers set off toward the North Pole. In the lead was the Russian Sovetskiy Soyuz, then the largest icebreaker in the world. With its 75,000-horsepower nuclear engine, the 500-foot-long Sovetskiy Soyuz can drive steadily through a field of ice that is a little over eight feet thick. In second place was the Swedish icebreaker Oden, diesel powered, 400 feet long, and able to break six and a half feet of ice. Following behind came the ship that they were there to protect, the Vidar Viking, 260 feet long, with a four-foot icebreaking capability that in lesser company would make it a powerful vessel.
The fleet passed the North Pole and went on to the Lomonosov Ridge, the chain of underwater mountains that Russia, Canada, and Denmark all claim as an extension of their territorial waters. Settling political disputes was not on the agenda for this scientific expedition. The fleet was here to drill into the ridge to gather data on the past climate of the Arctic that might help shed light on its future.
At the Lomonosov, the ice coverage was nearly complete, 9/10 to 10/10, a mixture of thinner first-year ice and floes of heavy multiyear ice. The Vidar Viking dropped a drill string though a moon pool installed in its hull for the project. Now it was essential that it remain exactly where it was, never drifting more than 150 feet off station, or the drill string would snap. The Sovetskiy Soyuz moved into position for “ice management,” as it is known in the business, where it could intercept the advancing ice fields. There it circled and looped endlessly, smashing the incoming ice into smaller floes. The Oden provided close support, breaking up and pushing away the chunks of ice as they closed in on the Viking. Further upstream, helicopters dropped buoys equipped with global positioning devices onto the ice to transmit advance warning of the direction from which the ice would attack. Hundreds of radar reflectors were placed out on the ice, too, so that satellites flying overhead could help to track the ice.
Just one week after arriving, the coring team drilled down 300 feet, a tremendous achievement given that no one before had drilled more than the top few feet in the central Arctic.1 The ship’s log reads: “Tough struggles against heavy ice…Viking almost lost its position and risked breaking the string but intense efforts by the two assisting icebreakers and a change of ice drift saved the situation….” Two weeks later, the fleet had to depart because winter was coming. They had set many new world records, including drilling to over 1,300 feet and managing to keep the drill ship “on station” in heavy ice for 125 hours. They had the cores they wanted. Their results were to help rewrite the early history of the Arctic, showing that 50 million years ago the Arctic was warm and capped by freshwater.2 A floating fern called Azolla grew here in such massive blooms that it may have triggered a cooling of the entire planet by sucking carbon dioxide out of the air and weakening the greenhouse effect. That Azolla died long ago and was likely transformed into oil and gas deep below the bottom of the sea.
The teams of scientists on this trip were not much interested in oil, but the oilmen certainly knew all about their expedition. And with good reason: in asking how far the quest for oil can go into the deep Arctic and what technology is available, this expedition is a good place to see the outer limits.
I’ve been to quite a few Arctic oil conferences and at some stage somebody will show a picture of the three icebreakers at work, taken from a plane flying high overhead. The picture shows a white, frozen sea fractured into hundreds of ice floes amid rubble ice. You can just pick out the Vidar Viking, hanging onto its station in the ice, by the little patch of open water at its stern where the ice rubble has passed. The magnificent Sovetskiy Soyuz and the Oden are easier to spot; their bigger wakes each make a protective curve of open water in front of the Viking while the ice field comes on against them.
When this picture comes up, the room always falls silent. These are the most powerful icebreakers in the world, but their efforts look puny amid the Arctic ice. Imagine drilling not a thousand feet to pull out a scientific core but tens of thousands of feet beneath the ocean floor to reach oil imagine staying on station not for a snatched few weeks before winter returns but for years on end to pump that oil to…what, exactly? A pipeline? Not at these distances and depths. To storage on board a ship (a “floating production storage vessel,” or “FPS” as it’s known in the trade) so that tankers can shuttle back and forth to pick up the oil? State-of-the-art icebreaking oil tankers can’t come close to what Sovetskiy Soyuz and Oden fought in the height of summer. Wait until global warming melts the ice away? Summer in the central Arctic lasts barely a month and then the ice and perpetual dark return.
Whenever I chat with people at these conferences they all agree that stories of a “cold rush” for the riches of the central Arctic lie very far in the future. Right now, they want to look at the technology that will let them put a toe in Arctic waters, in the most accessible areas, as close to land as possible, preferably in shallow water with little heavy ice. That feels comfortable. There are ideas for working farther out, but the combination of deep water and multiyear ice far from shore produces long, reflective silences. A structure will have to withstand both ice and big waves, dodge icebergs, and somehow get its oil or gas to shore: the reaction then is always, “maybe in twenty years, maybe a lot longer, and only if the price of oil is very high.”
The U.S. government’s Minerals Management Service (MMS) shares the oilmen’s view of the hard parts of the Arctic. In 2008, it published a 339-page overview of Arctic oil technology, focusing on Alaskan waters but reviewing developments around the circumpolar world.3 “Floating production systems for the Beaufort Sea, Chukchi Sea, and North Bering Sea are not considered to be technically feasible, even with continuous ice management,” it concluded. “No floating production structures could be economically designed to stay on station with multiyear ice loads found in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas.”
The deep Arctic has not been conquered yet, and talk of imminent fights over the riches at the North Pole is nonsense. To explore what has already been done, what might be possible soon, and what might have to wait for decades, I turned to the principal author of that MMS report, Michael Paulin, president of IMV Projects Atlantic (
IMVPA) in St. John’s, Newfoundland. IMVPA is part of the Wood Group, a multinational engineering group with headquarters in Houston but built up by a couple of fishermen from Aberdeen in Scotland who seized the new opportunities emerging in the British North Sea oil industry thirty years ago.
The technology for the coming “second oil age” builds on the technology of the oil age which began in the 1960s with the discovery of oil on Alaska’s North Slope and boomed in the 1970s when the Yom Kippur War sent oil prices soaring. After oil prices fell to $20 a barrel in the late 1980s and refused to go up again, Arctic offshore oil exploration ground almost to a halt.
The first time around, oil companies began venturing offshore into the Beaufort Sea “by working with Mother Nature,” as Paulin put it, building islands made out of ice. Nothing could be simpler in principle. Just spray a lane of seawater onto the shore-bound fast ice, let it freeze and harden, and keep going until you have built an ice road out over the sea ice. At the end of the road repeat the process until you have created your very own island to support a drill rig. You just need to be careful that the island is firmly grounded and will not unexpectedly turn into an ice ship. More than twenty such ice islands were built all over the Beaufort Sea during that first oil age. Of course, the islands melt away in summer so they are suitable only for an exploratory drilling campaign. What if you want something more permanent?
“One of the simple things, well relatively simple, because none of it is that simple, is to build a gravel island,” explains Paulin. “In the shallow Alaskan Beaufort Sea you have North Star, Ooguruk, and another one coming called Nikaitchuq. North Star is built in the deepest waters—it is about fourteen meters [forty-six feet].” To build North Star, six miles from land, a winter ice road was put in, then a convoy of trucks ran along it and dumped over 100,000 loads of locally quarried gravel into the sea at its end.
Between 1976 and 1990, when the first Arctic oil age was going flat out, seventeen gravel islands were built on the Alaskan side of the Beaufort and more than thirty on the Canadian side, some by simply dredging the sea bottom and piling up mud, rather than trucking gravel out from land in winter. But gravel islands have their limitations. They settle into a giant pile with long sloping sides, so in deeper water staggering volumes of gravel are needed. “Gravel becomes uneconomical beyond a water depth of about twenty-five to thirty meters [eighty to one hundred feet],” Paulin explains. “That is when you can start to look at ground-bottomed structures.”
Ground-bottomed structures are built of steel or concrete and are essentially artificial islands with vertical sides. They are towed to location, sunk on the sea bottom and filled up with dredged ballast to keep them in place. What guides the design? “In the Arctic they have to be installed in the open water season, during summer. The season may be very short so it’s important that you can just bring it in and set it down on the bottom fairly quickly. Even when there is no ice today, you can have ice tomorrow, suddenly blowing in from the polar pack,” warns Paulin. “Your foundation—the geotechnical condition of the sea bottom—is very important. The structure must not slide or tip over. Obviously water depth is very important,” he continues. “Then there are the sea-ice conditions: is it first-year ice? Multiyear ice? A mixture? In places like Sakhalin in Russia, you only get first-year ice which is not as strong as something that has trailed around the Arctic for two, three, or more years. Do you get any icebergs? Here on the east coast, we can get a lot of icebergs. There are not so many in the Beaufort Sea, but you can get enormous ice islands and icebergs that trickle through from the High North. These are huge pieces of ice, weighing maybe a million tons. How do you design for it? Then you need to know what sort of waves you have. What does the structure need to carry on top of it? Is there some kind of storage requirement? If you are looking at a platform with no pipeline to shore, you would have to have some storage for oil. A lot of that will dictate what your structure looks like.”
The Molikpaq was the giant that took the ground-bottomed idea to its limit. Built in 1984, it was a colossal steel octagon, 300 feet across, 26 feet deep, and it weighed 43,000 tonnes even before it was sunk to the bottom and filled with sand. The “Giant Wave,” as its name translates from Inuktuk, did good service until 1990 when the era of low oil prices arrived. Almost a decade later it was brought back to life and towed away to Russia’s far eastern Sakhalin field. En route, it stopped to be “mated” with a second octagonal structure so that it then stood some 50 feet taller and 15,000 tonnes heavier. Now it sits ten miles out from the Russian coast in a hundred feet of water, collecting oil from the wells beneath it. When the winter ice melts, tankers shuttle back and forth, offloading stored oil. Some 120 people live on board.
I’ve seen a film of the new-look Molikpaq taken from an icebreaker circling it. From a distance, the sheer reach of its smooth steel walls and the cluster of towers, derricks, and enormous storage buildings on its topsides make it look far more like a medieval castle than anything from our century. The engineers who build these structures are perhaps the true heirs to the castle builders: they rely on size, strength, and mass to subdue the ice and storms, and they impress by the gigantic scale of their creations.
An even bigger platform will be coming soon. That’s the giant structure being slowly constructed at the Sevmash yard in Archangel, and intended for Russia’s Prirazlomnoye field, forty miles offshore in the Pechora Sea. This monster swallowed another giant platform, the Hutton, which was no longer needed in the North Sea and towed off to Russia. Although the Hutton weighed 37,000 tonnes, it is now just a part of a bigger structure that is 400 feet across, weighs 100,000 tonnes, rises 400 feet above the sea and will carry a crew of 200 workers. Once full of ballast it will weigh 500,000 tonnes. Its only rival is the Hibernia platform, the largest bottom-grounded structure in the world, which sits off Newfoundland and weighs over a million tonnes.
But even a ground-bottomed structure has limits, Paulin explains. “As the water gets deeper, the tower gets taller. Farther out from land, there may be harsher, stronger multiyear ice bearing down on you. A fixed structure is only so good, so far. Then you have to have a full subsea tie-back to shore or a floating structure.”
Designs cannot simply be borrowed from deep-water fields like the Gulf of Mexico, where thousands of drill rigs operate safely in hurricanes. These rigs are often built up on “jackets,” latticeworks of welded steel pipes rising from the sea bottom. Some can be enormous: the Bullwinkle, launched in 1988, is 1,365 feet tall. Such open structures can handle waves well enough, but not the incredible load of a moving field of thick ice.
So what is a “full subsea tieback”? We pass from the ages of castles to that of high technology. Subsea tiebacks are the pipelines that directly connect a well on the seabed (perhaps hidden in a “glory hole” to stop anything running into it) back to the shore. Paulin points me to Ormen Lange and Snøhvit (Snow White) as the two projects, both gas rather than oil, that have pushed the limits of subsea tiebacks.
Ormen Lange and Snøhvit, which came on stream in 2008, are the pride of Norway’s StatoilHydro. The energy giant reckons that they set the agenda for low-environmental impact work in northern waters. Ormen Lange carries gas from a set of wells in the North Sea nearly seventy miles to land, while Snøhvit up in Norway’s Arctic seas off Hammerfest carries gas ninety miles. Two of StatoilHydro’s senior engineers, Jan Inge Dalane and Roald Byhre Sirevaag, talked over the basics with me.
Down beneath the water is a big steel frame (around seventy to a hundred feet across) that is fixed to the seabed and connected to the wells, with sloping edges to stop trawlers snagging their gear. To operate the system, you need a pipe to carry the gas away and others to take electric power, control signals and anything you might need to add to the flow (to stop water in the pipe freezing, for example). Subsea wells aren’t unusual—StatoilHydro alone has almost 500 around the world—but such long tiebacks to shore are special.
One of StatoilHydro’s
goals is to make even longer tiebacks possible. The biggest problem was a surprise to me. “We need to develop power transmission systems,” explains Sirevaag. “You can use AC power up to some hundred kilometers, but you can’t use it for longer distance. You need to go to a DC system and quite a significant development effort is needed to make that happen.” Pumps or compressors placed on the seabed to push oil or gas to the shore will need lots of power. In the future, it may be possible to carry oil over a hundred miles and gas two or three hundred miles like this. That would enable oil and gas to be taken away from under the ice, even in deep water, provided drill ships could break through the ice for long enough to install and maintain the equipment. Thick, permanent ice is a different matter.
“What happens if you are under ice for nine months of the year?” asks Paulin. “And what do you do to work over your wells or correct something or repair something? That’s a challenge. In the Gulf of Mexico and other places where they do very deep water subsea installation, if you want to put a clamp on a pipeline or cut out a section of pipeline and weld it in, those things all can be done using remote vehicles. If you are covered with ice, how are you going to do that? You’d better think about it because you need to prove that you could do that in the Arctic.”
The alternative is to build a floating structure that can face icebergs and ice, rather than hide from them under the sea. No one has done that in the Arctic yet, but one answer has taken shape not so far from Paulin’s office. Out on Newfoundland’s Grand Banks is the White Rose field where two floating oil platforms connect to wells 400 feet deep in the waters beneath them. They don’t face heavy ice, but they do have to deal with giant icebergs that come wandering down from Greenland, the kind of iceberg that sank the Titanic just 375 miles from the shore here. The platforms have been designed so that when a big iceberg approaches, they can shut down the flow of oil, disconnect a flexible riser coming up from the well on the sea bottom, and move to safety. Since starting work in 2005 they haven’t had to flee from an iceberg once, though they were on high alert in 2008. That’s partly because there is an earlier line of defense. Powerful tugs are on standby to go out and lasso incoming icebergs by circling them with a giant rope. Although icebergs easily weigh over a million tons, a slow steady pull over a few miles of drift can put them on a safe course. But this is not an option where icebergs mingle with heavy ice in the High Arctic.
After the Ice Page 22