Menace of deep water Shetland oil project

Environmental organisations have joined forces to plead with environment secretary Chris Huhne not to give BP the chance to repeat the oil giant’s disastrous mistakes, by allowing expansion in deep water west of Shetland, in the sea area known as North Uist.

The oil-leaking corporate giant BP has just got permission from the UK for a £4.5bn expansion of drilling in the Clair field west of Shetland. But the North Uist project is in far deeper water.

And we know all about BP and risky drilling. The US government has just served them, and their partners, formal notice of 15 safety violations leading up to the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico last year that could mean fines of up to £45m. You win some, you lose some - that's the oil business.

The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), Greenpeace, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and Friends of the Earth have warned that a spill in North Uist would ruin one of the UK's most environmentally sensitive areas.

The Deepwater Horizon well was 1,500 feet down - the North Uist wells could be 4,000 feet. The company's “safety plan” for North Uist admits any leak could be the biggest ever, pouring 75,000 barrels into the North Sea for 140 days. That is more than double the rate during Deepwater Horizon disaster.

But BP says we should not worry because whilst legally they must model the worst-case scenario “the reality is the chances of a spill are very unlikely”. That surely has to be taken with a pinch of salt.

"It would be utterly reckless for Chris Huhne to approve this plan as if the Deepwater Horizon disaster never happened," said John Sauven, executive director of Greenpeace UK.

"Instead of chasing the last drops of oil from one of our country's most sensitive and important natural environments, ministers should be developing a comprehensive plan to get us off the oil hook."

But that is not going to happen. Prime Minister David Cameron was cock-a-hoop about the Clair development, because, he claims, it will provide a “massive boost for jobs and growth”. Growth at any price is the Coalition's holy grail, as the economy stagnates and unemployment soars.

Development west of Shetland will bring almost £10 billion of new project investment by BP and its partners into the UK continental shelf over the next five years - and of course massive profits. The claim is that there will be 3,000 new jobs building platforms and 3,000 operational jobs from Clair alone.

By permitting high-risk projects like North Uist, the “free money” pumped into the UK economy since the oil started flowing in the 1980s, can be dragged out a bit longer.

The fact is that capitalist governments will permit any kind of growth, because the plans and projects of the corporations are the only economic plans they have. The Coalition has a destructive deficit reduction plan for the public sector, but absolutely no positive plans for the future of the economy.

Even in the face of a crisis in the biosphere that threatens the chain of life (including human beings) energy planning, if you can dignify it with that term, will be left in the hands of corporate cowboys.

The only way to protect the environment is to remove this unelected power from determining the future of energy production and instead take all energy resources into common ownership, to use them carefully, safely and with an entirely different set of priorities than raw profit.

Penny Cole

Environment editor

Science and profit are the wrong mix

Disasters like the Mexican Gulf oil well leak shine a spotlight on capitalism’s everyday disregard for safety and its short-term approach to scientific data and knowledge.

For example, chemicals used to disperse oil pouring into the sea from the exploded Deepwater Horizon platform will do almost as much damage as the oil. Dispersal simply spreads the exposure of marine life to toxic chemicals over a greater period of time.

Riki Ott, a leading toxicologist who has written extensively about the Exxon Valdez oil tanker disaster in 1989, said in an interview: "This dispersed oil is extremely toxic to young life forms [which] are a lot more sensitive to toxic chemicals than adults. What we have in the open Gulf is a continuous exposure.”

The announcement this week of a new “life form” created in a laboratory at the J. Craig Venter Institute is another example. This self-reproducing organism made from “off-the-shelf” genes by a computer, has been labelled “extreme genetic engineering” by the ETC Group, which has been monitoring developments in synthetic biology for the past five years .

Dubbed Synthia, the organism was developed in a joint venture between geneticist Craig Venter and Synthetic Genomics Inc. This profit-driven initiative is targeted for use in agro-fuels, pollution clean-ups and industrial agriculture.

No surprise then to discover that one of Synthetic Genomics key investors is – BP. And the other? Exxon! And the third? The US government.

Jim Thomas of the environmental watchdog ETC Group calls synthetic biology a “high-risk profit-driven field” that threatens existing natural bio-diversity with no benefit to humanity as a whole.

But corporations and their client governments love bio and gene science because they smell profits. Supporters are right at the heart of governments. Steven Chu, Obama’s Energy Secretary, was formerly head of an institute which ran a synthetic genome project funded by – you’ve got it, BP.

There may be enthusiasm, and investment of taxpayers money, but there’s little regulation or oversight. Just as in the existing dirty old oil business, these new “clean” industries are left to chase the money, regardless of safety concerns.

In the UN year of bio-diversity, capitalism is engaged in an orgy of destruction, leading to extinctions on a scale greater than the era of the dinosaurs. And as a recent study in the UK found, the rate of emergence of new species is at a standstill.

But new species created recklessly in the laboratory, are being released into the eco-system with little concern for the impact on other species – including human beings.

In China, the introduction of GM cotton has led to an explosion in pests destroying fruit, vegetable and maize crops grown nearby. The GM cotton has its own insecticide built in, allowing unrelated pests to thrive – so nearby farmers are overwhelmed, and even by spraying can’t get the pests under control.

Such unintended consequences are characteristic of the application of science in the capitalist era. The corporation’s use of scientific knowledge has only one intended consequence – the expansion of profit. Leaving science in the dirty hands of the corporations is a recipe for disaster.

Penny Cole

Environment editor

BP is beyond the pale

The oil corporation BP likes to brand itself as “beyond petroleum”. Beyond the Pale might be more appropriate after the latest of a series of disasters which the company has to take responsibility for.

Four hundred species of sea life, from turtles to shrimp and octopus, plus miles of coastline, ocean and wetland, hundreds of homes, beaches and livelihoods are threatened by a massive oil slick heading towards the Louisiana coast.

A week on from the explosion at the BP-operated Deepwater Horizon rig, which killed eleven workers and fractured underground pipes, the oil is gushing at a rate of 42,000 gallons a day. It could prove to the be the worst oil leak since 1969.

It is only 20 miles from the Mississippi Delta, an area that contains 40 per cent of all the wetlands in the United States. It covers an area of 2,138 square miles. It will arrive sometime on Friday, or sooner, it is said.

Attempts to halt the flow which is 5,000 feet down have failed, and so oil is now being coralled behind floating barriers and set on fire. It could take weeks to find a way of blocking the pipe.

A federal investigation is being launched into this latest disaster involving BP. In 2005, 15 people were killed at a BP oil and gas plant in Texas, and in 2006, BP was responsible for the biggest-ever oil leak in Alaska, damaging wildlife and the fragile eco-system of Prudhoe Bay.

In spite of that, BP was one of the corporations who lobbied successfully against new, fairly modest proposals for safety regulation of off-shore drilling. In September 2009, vice president for Gulf of Mexico production Richard Morrison, wrote: "We are not supportive of the extensive, prescriptive regulations.” He claimed that voluntary codes of practice "have been and continue to be very successful”.

And so it was with this same hopeless system of self-regulation in force that the Obama administration recently issued licences for extensive new oil exploration and pumping in areas formerly off limits for a whole range of safety and environmental reasons, including in the Gulf of Mexico.

Every time a disaster like this takes place, hands are wrung, crocodile tears shed – but then it’s back to business as usual. Because such events are not aberrations – they are the normal working of the profit-driven oil industry which has as its priority to get the stuff out of the ground as quickly as possible, whatever the effects.

The Piper Alpha disaster in the North Sea in 1988 remains the biggest ever loss of life in the oil industry, when 167 people died when the rig caught fire. The recommendations of the Cullen Enquiry that followed have never been fully implemented.

As the oil runs out, what is left becomes harder to get at and the pressure for profit forces operators to keep costs low and put safety a long way second. Governments shy away from introducing tough regulations because they live in fear of the global corporations, especially the energy giants like BP.

The only way to resolve this issue is to recognise that the products of the earth cannot be treated as a free-ride for carpet-bagging capitalists and must be taken into common ownership. The whole decision-making process about what is extracted, what methods are used and for what purpose has to come under social control.

Penny Cole

Environment editor