Another Arctic Spill Is Inevitable, and We Are in No Way Prepared

The relentless search for new oil sources and increasingly ice-free seas are setting the stage for a petroleum gold rush in the Arctic. And with expensive, risky deepwater drilling in harsh seas will come inevitable oil spills—spills that the industry and regulators aren't ready to handle.

That's the finding of a broad study from the National Research Council that surveyed the future of Arctic oil exploration. The lengthy report looks at a wide variety of potential scenarios, and comes to a stark conclusion: As oil and shipping companies begin to invest in the Arctic, there isn't enough research examining how the Arctic is changing and how to respond to oil spills in such a unique environment. And there currently aren't enough resources in place for spill response, either.

In total, the hurdles posed by the Arctic are vast. "Arctic oil spill response is challenging because of extreme weather and environmental conditions; the lack of existing or sustained communications, logistical, and information infrastructure; significant geographic distances; and vulnerability of Arctic species, ecosystems, and cultures," the report explains.

The authors note that, since 1979, end-of-summer Arctic sea ice cover has declined 13.7 percent per decade. That has left vast parts of the Arctic more open than they've ever been, which already has shipping companies rethinking their global routes. And with more ships traversing the Arctic, the risk of the next Exxon Valdez—whose spilled oil is still present, by the way—increases.

At the same time, the Arctic's massive petroleum reserves are getting closer and closer to being exploited. In the past we've spoken of Russia's petro-giant Rosneft, which has worked hard to control the Russian Arctic offshore oil fields, despite the massive difficulty of building billion-dollar oil platforms and enough infrastructure to pipe crude and natural gas to on-shore refineries and onward to where it will actually be put to use.

The NRC notes all of those as potential problems in the American and Canadian portions of the Arctic. But with an estimated 30 billion barrels of technically recoverable, undiscovered oil in the US Arctic alone, oil companies are already working on developing the tech needed to drill in such a harsh climate. Shell's 2012 failure was a notable, multi-billion dollar setback, but developing more capable drilling platforms is an inevitability.

"We're getting in deeper and deeper water," ConocoPillips executive Ed Stokes said at the Offshore Technology Conference, which is dedicated to deepwater drilling, according to the Wall Street Journal. "We're not doing this necessarily by choice, but out of necessity—the energy requirements in the world are going up."

To be clear, Stokes wasn't speaking specifically to the challenges of the Arctic, but to innovation in the drilling history as a whole. Higher-tech drilling platforms will meet the needs for Arctic drilling. Even so, drilling isn't the only concern. The NRC report lists a wide range of potential sources for spills, including:

• Passenger cruise ship accident 
• A large tanker spill
• Bulk ore carrier driven in bad weather
• A tug and barge incident
• Break in pipeline from near-shore production 
• A well blowout
• Structural failure of an oil storage tank

Understanding the effects of such a variety of potential problem areas requires location-specific research, which is notably lacking. The NRC report states that "a comprehensive, collaborative, long-term Arctic oil spill research and development program needs to be established."

Additionally, the report found that there simply aren't enough local resources for combating and managing spills. "Marine activities in US Arctic waters are increasing without a commensurate increase in the logistics and infrastructure needed to conduct these activities safely," the report states. "US support for Arctic missions, including oil spill response, requires significant investment in infrastructure and capabilities."

It's not clear where that "significant" funding will come from. "There is presently no funding mechanism to provide for development, deployment, and maintenance of temporary and permanent infrastructure," the report states. "One approach to provide a funding mechanism for infrastructure development and oil spill response operations would be to enable a public-private-municipal partnership to receive a percentage of lease sale revenues, rents, bonuses, or royalty payments that are currently deposited in the federal treasury."

In short: The Arctic is set to boom, and we currently don't have the body of research or infrastructure necessary to mitigate potential oil spills to the best of our ability.

It's a strong conclusion, but it's not unprecedented. It's been made clear before that both the US and Canada are having trouble catching up with the increasingly-crowded Arctic. Developing unified response protocols is a key issue raised by the NRC.

The solution the NRC lays out is essentially to improve in all aspects of oil spill mitigation, from monitoring and prevention, to logistics and planning. Simply put, what's on the ground isn't enough, and not making an effort puts the region at risk.

"Balance. This is an important word in the Arctic, an area that serves as an integrator of many of the Earth's large-scale systems and processes, and also an area where choices made have substantial impact on the Arctic and its neighbors," Dr. Martha R. Grabowski, chair of the committee that produced the report, wrote in its preface. "Balancing the needs and requirements of these forces is part of the challenge and opportunity presented in the complex, large-scale system that is the Arctic."