After the Ice

by Alun Anderson

  That’s not the frontier that oil companies are planning to tackle right now. “Once you get out beyond the transition zone, beyond the fast shore ice and into moving ice, even in thirty to thirty-five meters [one hundred to one hundred and fifteen feet] of water depth, that is the next frontier,” says Paulin. “Deeper water with heavy ice is the far frontier where there are no off-the-shelf solutions, just concepts.”

  There is just one project on the Russian side of the Arctic that is trying to make a leap.

  “Shtokman” is a name that excites everyone in the Arctic oil and gas business. Russia’s Gazprom, Norway’s StatoilHydro, and France’s Total have come together to try to exploit a gas field, 370 miles off the Arctic coast, much farther out than anyone has gone before. The Shtokman project is a “step up” from what has been done before, says StatoilHydro’s Dalane. “On the Grand Banks the main issue is icebergs, but in Shtokman we also have severe sea ice, so the floating facility will operate in relatively harsh conditions.” “Relatively harsh” is an understatement. The water is quite deep, at 1,100 feet. The area can be covered in ice, and some of it is old, strong ice, ten feet thick with ridges. But there is open water too and big waves, up to sixty feet high. In 2003, fifteen icebergs were recorded, two of them weighing more than 3 million tons. Then there is the intense cold, with winter temperatures of-35°C so sea spray can quickly freeze to superstructures and weight them down with ice. All work must be done in totally enclosed areas, and that increases the risks of gas explosions. In winter it will always be dark, placing a great strain on crew, especially as the field is at the very limit of a helicopter rescue flight. And there are the polar lows, the unpredictable and intense storms that can spring up in the Arctic that could cause big problems for the support vessels. The only plus is that it is a gas project; pumping gas to shore is a lot easier than pumping oil, and the environmental risks are much lower.

  The technical challenges are all worth taking because this is not just any gas field but the second-largest gas field in the world, capable of producing gas for Europe for half a century. The solution is a ship-shaped floating platform which can turn to face the oncoming ice, which will be broken up by accompanying icebreakers. If a giant iceberg or unmanageable ice threatens, the ship can disconnect from the field below and move away.

  Designing that ship is not easy. Per Kjaernes, who is managing the project for StatoilHydro, described the hard part as “the platform and everything around it” at a conference held by icebreaker designer Aker Arctic in Helsinki. To reinforce the Norwegian view of “hard,” he ended his talk with a picture of Roald Amundsen and his men standing at the South Pole after their epic journey in 1911. How quickly would the ship have to disconnect its mooring lines and a gas riser if an iceberg threatened, he was asked. “We need to disconnect in fifteen to thirty minutes,” he says. “It’s a challenge.”

  Next comes the problem of getting the gas to shore. “A piece of cake” is how Kjaernes describes the job of laying a 370-mile pipeline across the bottom of the Barents Sea. Still, it didn’t sound so easy to me, so I visited J P Kenny, the pipeline company in Aberdeen that had been awarded the initial Shtokman design work. Jonathan Lindsay, the company’s international business manager, answered my naive questions. He trained as a mining engineer and “qualified just as all the mines were closing down,” he explained, and moved into the oil business.

  The only gas pipes that I had ever seen were rigid lengths of steel tube being lowered into a trench on land by a crane. I was wondering how you could bolt all those pipes together at the bottom of the sea. “You are going to be surprised,” said Lindsay. “The pipes are made of exotic carbon steel. You can take a rigid piece of pipe and bend it right round a giant reel.” He showed me pictures of pipe-laying vessels at work. Pipe comes off the reel through a straightener and runs off the back of the ship in a long curve right down to the seabed, almost as though it were rope. Steel pipe that can be rolled up and unwound seemed miraculous to me. “Up to sixteen-inch-diameter pipe can be reeled but not much bigger,” explained Lindsay. “The small diameter reeled pipe is just for short distances. Bigger diameter pipes are usually put down from large lay barges, moved around by tugs.”

  For these bigger lines, lengths of pipe are welded onto the end of the line on the barge and led off its back, down a “stinger”—a device that supports the pipe in a gentle curve as it descends on rollers. Once again the pipe has to support its own weight as it gradually settles on the sea bottom. “It’s a slow process,” said Lindsay, “as the ship lays pipe, it inches forward.” Another supply barge keeps craning fresh pipe aboard. It won’t be any old pipe. Design companies like JP Kenny have to find the right pipe for the fluids it will carry, under the range of temperatures and pressures it will experience and without corroding for a quarter of a century or more.

  In the Arctic the ice and the weather mean the construction season is very short, so laying the Shtokman pipe is a challenge. On the seabed, however, there are a whole lot of extra problems. First there are icebergs with deep keels that run into the sea bottom and dig out great gouges. Submarine pictures of some parts of the Arctic show the seafloor crisscrossed with great trenches cut by monster bergs. “At the moment there isn’t a design that will allow you to lay a pipe that can be hit by an iceberg,” said Lindsay. “The iceberg will wipe it out.” An obvious solution is to bury the pipe.

  But pipe burying turns out to require yet another set of specialist ships. Some use giant subsea plows. “You have to lift the pipe up and plow underneath and let the pipe go down again,” explained Lindsay. “Or you can use water jets. That is a gentler way of doing the job: if the bottom is made of the right material, you can fluidize the trench and pump the stuff out. Then the pipe just settles down in.”

  That doesn’t quite solve the problem, though. In the Arctic you have to watch out for “strudel scour,” holes that form in the ice in spring into which meltwater drains. That flow can turn into a torrent and the whirlpool below can drill deep holes into the seabed, exposing buried pipes. With big icebergs and risks from strudel scour you might have to bury pipes very deep indeed. This is tricky, as Lindsay explained. “It is difficult to bury anything more than a few meters below the surface. With a plow it is difficult to cut a vertically shaped box, especially in sand which collapses in again, so you have to cut at an angle. The angle usually has to be 30–35 degrees.” To make a deep furrow, you would need a truly gigantic underwater plow.

  The last thing I learned is that it is a big mistake to think of the seafloor as a flat and comfortable plain. Lots of specialist survey work is needed before you can even start. The pipeline from Shtokman has to find routes around hills and across valleys avoiding giant boulders that have been dropped from ancient icebergs and, as land approaches, climb a steep rise. Not quite a “piece of cake.”

  Shtokman is the one project underway that pushes oil and gas exploration to new limits. If it succeeds in its very ambitious target of delivering gas by 2013, it will have raised the limits of what is possible in the Arctic. There are rumors of other projects that may push the boundaries beyond those shallow shelf seas, including in the Beaufort Sea off the coast of Canada where the water is more than 2,000 feet deep and there is ice, although not as tough as at Shtokman. In this region, one big lease runs out in 2012 so there’s pressure to begin exploratory drilling by then.

  Long before production vessels or subsea production can get going, other special ships have to conduct the surveys, find the oil or gas, and drill the first wells. Only one drill ship has ever been built specifically to work in the Arctic ice and that’s the circular Kulluk, launched in 1983 during the first Arctic oil age and brought back to life by Shell for the Alaskan drilling program that ran into so much opposition.

  New drill ships are emerging only slowly. Houston-based Frontier Drilling is working with Shell to build two in Singapore. With icebreaker bows and ultraflexible steel to protect the hulls from shattering in extreme
cold, they will be able to work among the ice using computers to control thrusters which keep the ship in one place. Another ship, the Stena Drillmax Ice, is being built in Korea for Aberdeen-based Stena Drilling at a cost of $1.3 billion.

  Even these amazing new ships don’t necessarily signal a rush for the Arctic. All are designed to be capable of drilling in ultradeep water—the oil world’s other frontier. The first of the new ships will likely spend its first five years on charter in deep water exploration in the Gulf of Mexico, according to Frontier Drilling. The Stena Drillmax Ice, which will be finished at the end of 2011, could go off and drill among summer ice in the Arctic, but it would be just as happy tackling water 10,000 feet deep off the coast of Africa.

  I am still wondering whether there are final frontiers which no oil company will ever attempt, perhaps the kind of place where those three powerful icebreakers struggled to drill on the Lomonsov ridge. So I ask the two engineers from StatoilHydro. “We are technologists, so we are optimists. It depends on the size of the reservoir,” says Sirevaag. “And the price of oil,” adds Dalane. What if there is thick, permanent ice? “There are concepts for seabed rigs which you could use to drill underneath the ice,” says Sirevaag. “The tie-back distance to any kind of infrastructure in ice-free areas would be the biggest issue to solve. Maybe you could use sub-seabed storage and big submarines to go and get the oil and compressed gas.” I ask if they are kidding me. Sirevaag replies, “Somebody got to the moon.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  TOO MANY SHIPS, TOO SOON?

  On my desk is an odd little memento which I was given more than twenty years ago. I shared an office in the National Press Building in Washington, D.C, with a journalist who had gone out to Prince William Sound in Alaska to write about the Exxon Valdez oil spill. When he came back, he handed me a small plastic box and said, “Hundreds of miles of beach are like this.” Inside was a pebble encased in black, gooey oil. The pebble had been lying in the cold, clear waters of the sound, home to cormorants and otters and hundreds of other creatures until the Exxon Valdez ran aground and spilled 10 million gallons of Prudhoe Bay crude.

  After twenty years the oil in the little box is still sticky and the wildlife of Prince William Sound has still not recovered completely. The pigeon guillemot, a close relative of the black guillemot, shows little signs of rebuilding its population; others like the sea otter, the goldeneye, and the black oystercatcher, along with the clams and mussels at the bottom of the sound, are not yet back to full health.

  This anecdote might seem an odd place to begin a chapter about shipping in the Arctic but it is an essential preamble. A boom in the numbers of ships traveling back and forth into the Arctic has already begun. There are tankers traveling round the Arctic coast of Norway, ore carriers crossing Siberian and Canadian waters, drill rigs and icebreakers heading into the Chukchi Sea, and, in the fastest boom of all, tens of thousands of tourists traveling on cruise ships everywhere they can go, from the coasts of Greenland to the North Pole itself. All this is happening without new regulations to prevent and deal with shipping accidents or oil spills.

  That is making many people worried. In April 2009, the Arctic Marine Shipping Assessment was delivered to the Arctic Council’s top-level ministerial meeting.1 Four years in the making, and with an executive summary that is almost 200 pages long, it confirms the boom in shipping and predicts where further growth is most likely. It stressed concerns raised a year earlier, when experts on oil spills from all over the world met at the University of New Hampshire. They too produced a report.2 It was much shorter and much scarier.

  Imagine the following scenario. A cruise ship carrying 1,400 passengers is traveling along the west coast of Greenland. That’s not unusual. I’ve seen ships that size sneak into a fjord to give passengers a really close-up view of a calving glacier. This time the ship hits bottom on its way back out to sea and begins to sink. The passengers, along with 700 crew, must abandon ship; most of them are between fifty and eighty years old, some are infirm, and a few are in wheelchairs. It is mid-September and cold enough that passengers have a 4.3 hours functional time (the time before they are incapacitated by cold). Within that functional time there is only a 67 percent chance of survival.

  Small fishing vessels and a coast guard cutter arrive within a few hours to help, but they cannot take on the passengers; other cruise ships that could do so are a day’s journey away. The sinking ship begins to spill its fuel oil which drifts toward the Ilulissat glacier World Heritage site. The nearest pollution response vessels are in the United States and would take two to three days to arrive. Almost nothing can be done to save the passengers or contain the drifting oil.

  That is one of five scenarios which were put together for the workshop. Reading them all, I wondered if this weren’t a convention for Hollywood disaster movie scriptwriters rather than a scientific meeting. In other scenarios, an icebreaker catches fire and rams the drill ship it is supporting within the disputed U.S.–Canadian border zone, causing it to lose fuel; a tug laden with fuel and towing a barge loaded with a cargo of explosives for the mining industry loses power in the Chukchi Sea near a haul-out spot for walrus, the tug spews fuel while containers of explosives wash up on shore; and a tanker smashes into a fishing boat near the disputed Russian–Norwegian boundary and spills huge quantities of oil while the fishing boat sinks.

  A conference call to the workshop organizers, Amy Merten from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Seattle and Nancy Kinner of the University of New Hampshire, confirmed what I feared—this could all happen today. “That’s correct,” said Merten. “We had a committee that helped us put together the scenarios and the goal was to make them real, something we could consider right now, knowing that we are going to see more and more activities in the Arctic water.” Even that cruise ship scenario where hundreds of older people may die? “Just to reinforce,” says Kinner, “the group that looked at that cruise ship scenario consisted of people who had familiarity with those cruise ships. That scenario was not really extreme. The statistics about passengers are the reality of the cruise ship industry.”

  Accidents in polar waters have already happened. In 2007, the cruise ship MS Explorer, with 150 passengers and crew, sank off the coat of Antarctica. I’d been in the same area in a ship the same size earlier that year, so I was transfixed by the images of the bright red ship heeling over amid the ice floes and then disappearing. Everyone was rescued thanks to the lucky presence of another cruise ship, the Norwegian vessel Nordnorge. “In that situation they had everything on their side,” says Merten. “They had pretty calm weather, they had another vessel that was right there that was able to offload the people. The problem is exponentially greater when you’re talking about 1,400 people.”

  Bigger ships have been in trouble in the past. Back in October 1980, the cruise ship Prinsendam caught fire and sank in the Gulf of Alaska with 510 passengers and crew on board. Once again, everyone was saved, including many older cruise passengers, thanks to a piece of luck. A supertanker, the Williamsburgh, was nearby and provided a landing pad for U.S. Air Force helicopters.3

  The point of these scenarios was to push for urgent action. If the Arctic is going to see more shipping, it needs “ports-of-refuge” (there are virtually no ports across the top of the North American side of the Arctic; the Soviet Union built a chain of now run-down ports from Murmansk on east through Dikson, Dudinka, and Tiksi to Pevek, the most northerly port in the world). It needs better charts, better weather and ice forecasting, internationally coordinated search and rescue, survival equipment on ships, salvage tugs on standby, oil spill countermeasures in place and equipment ready to go, new international rules on ship safety, and, of course, better knowledge of the impact of spills and technology to deal with them, especially among broken ice.

  The AMSA report was able to take a one-year snapshot of traffic in the Arctic, drawn from records of all the circumpolar nations. It recorded the expected mix: ship
s carrying bulk cargoes to and from mines and oil fields at the edges of the Arctic seas, ships and barges carrying supplies for Arctic communities in the summer, tourist ships making multiple summer voyages as far north as they can go, and many small fishing vessels, especially in the Bering and Barents Seas. Approximately 3,000 vessels were operating in the Arctic that year (the number doubles if ships just cutting through the Aleutian Islands on the Arctic route between the U.S. West Coast and East Asia are included).

  But those numbers come from 2004, the latest year for which data could be found, and all the signs are they are already out of date. A boom is just beginning. For the bulk carriers, it is at the western end of the “Northern Sea Route.” That route leads from Norway right across the top of Russia and on to the Pacific, but it is on the European end that traffic is building now, as tankers and ore ships travel back and forth to the oil fields and mines along the Siberian coast and around the Norwegian coast to foreign markets.

  Vardø, a small town perched on the most northeasterly point of Norway, with a view out to the Barents Sea and across the top of the Kola Peninsula to Murmansk, is the place to see the ships. Norwegians have known for a long time that a traffic buildup was coming and have been deeply worried about the consequences of a spill for the rich fisheries of the Barents Sea. Unlike almost any other place in the Arctic, they have already executed a plan to spot trouble on their coast and have built a new tracking center.