Licence to drill

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Laura Braden, PhD

Shell Canada is hoping to begin exploratory drilling for oil and gas in the Shelburne Basin, about 155 miles southeast of Nova Scotia, with seven exploration wells over a four-year period. The oil reserves available from Shell's lease sites on the Scotian Shelf are estimated at 8 billion barrels, which could mean that Shell might be extracting oil for 80 years, according to John Davis, a photographer for National Geographic and director of the newly formed Clean Ocean Action Committee (COAC), which is comprised of fishermen's organizations and concerned individuals on Nova Scotia's South Shore.

Any oil that is extracted would be taken by tanker, which would likely be sent up the Bay of Fundy to the Irving Oil refinery in Saint John, New Brunswick, since it's the closest refinery. Interestingly, Irving Oil recently announced a $200 million project this fall to upgrade the refinery.

Conservative Environment Minister Leona Aglukkaq approved a plan that would allow Shell up to 21 days to cap oil blowouts.

If a subsea blowout were to occur, as happened with the BP Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, it could take 21 days to obtain a capping stack, since the closest one is in Norway. The federal government is not requiring that Shell has one available at its new sites in the east coast.

This would be catastrophic for Canada's fisheries, aquaculture, sea life, coastal communities and one of the world's most important nature reserves.

Capping stacks buy time for engineers to plan a permanent seal or a diversion of hydrocarbons at the site of a blowout. Because they can weigh 50 to 100 tonnes, transporting and maneuvering stacking caps to the site and onto a blowout can be time consuming and difficult.

Allowing Shell up to three weeks to contain a blowout means that the company does not have to retain the expensive capping equipment on shore in Nova Scotia or aboard a nearby vessel. Rather, Shell states in the assessment that the equipment can be deployed from Norway with backups in Scotland, South Africa, Brazil and Singapore.

"This proposal by Shell and contingency plan by the Canadian government is simply unacceptalbe", said a local fisherman. 

Shell has proposed using dispersants such as Corexit in its plan for dealing with oil spills at the Shelburne Basin site. In addition to being toxic to marine life, Corexit has been implicated in wide-ranging health concerns by those who worked on the clean-up of the Exxon-Valdez spill in Alaska. Dispersants do not deal with the problem – they simply break up the oil into smaller molecules that become visually undetectable. It is an unacceptable way to deal with oil spills, and would be devastating to all marine inhabitants in the area.

Research conducted by Dr Terry Snell, chair of the School of Biology at Georgia Institute of Technology, has shown that dispersants mixed with oil are substantially more toxic than oil alone. The study, done after the Deepwater Horizon blowout, found that mixing the dispersant with oil increased the toxicity up to 52 times and increased the mortality of microscopic grazing animals at the base of the Gulf's food chain. "Shell's environmental impact statement (EIS) is the first EIS where the procedure to mitigate a spill would make it worse," he comments.

COAC has proposed two demands to regulators concerning the Shelburne Basin project site: that dispersants not be allowed and that Shell must have the equipment and expertise to clean up any spilled oil.

Conflict of interest in the Petroleum Board

The Conservative government has been widely criticized for overhauling Canada’s environmental laws to make it easier for industries to obtain quick approval, including drastically reducing protection over fresh and marine waterways prior to the proposal of the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline. Federal environmental reviews like those conducted for Shell’s drilling plans now occur with shortened timelines and drastically restricted public participation, and only for projects determined by the federal government.

The Harper government has cut 40% of the budget of the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency and fired hundreds of scientists who contributed to environmental reviews, including shutting down a department in that specializes in environmental hydro-carbon analysis.

“The Canadian system of environmental oversight wasn’t very effective to start with, but the current government has made it much worse. They’ve sidelined departments with an ecological perspective or gutted their scientific capacity, and are moving toward making captive agencies like the Petroleum Board solely responsible for environmental assessments. At this rate, Nova Scotians may be watching in horror as an oil spill continues for weeks,” said Mark Butler, policy director of the Ecology Action Centre.

Since its election in 2006, the Conservative government has appointed dozens of former industry insiders or government officials with no environmental expertise to the agencies that oversee offshore oil and gas exploration.

Recently, the Conservative government introduced legislation that strips the federal environment assessment agency of its power to continue reviews of oil and gas projects around Nova Scotia and handed any authority over to the Petroleum Board – the agency conveniently tasked with giving approval for Shell’s deep-water drilling off Canada’s East coast. Members of the board include a Conservative-appointed official, Douglas Gregory, who has also worked for Shell for decades.

Gregory opened Shell Canada’s exploration office in Nova Scotia and oversaw early deep-water seismic exploration off the coast before retiring in 2003. He was appointed to the Petroleum Board by the federal Conservative government in 2007.

The federal government referred questions to the Petroleum Board, but a call to the Canadian Petroleum Board for comment was not returned.