Bureaucrats fumble oil spill plan release
By
Pattrick Smellie
Nov 24 (BusinessDesk) – Officials at
Maritime New Zealand have spent the weekend scrambling to
create a public version of Texan oil explorer Anadarko’s
detailed plans to control a major oil spill at its drilling
rig 150 kilometres off the North Island west coast.
The
risk of such a spill is judged “extremely unlikely” in a
250 page environmental impact assessment report from
Anadarko, published on the Environmental Protection
Authority’s website.
But detailed annexes to the report
covering oil spill modelling, an emergency response plan and
a well control contingency plan are absent apart from their
cover pages, with the EPA saying those documents are the
responsibility of Maritime New Zealand.
But the MNZ
website carries no information on the plans and the agency
has instructed media, environmentalists and members of the
public wanting to see the plans to request them under the
Official Information Act.
As a result, Anadarko executives
and MNZ officials are now poring over the documents to
delete commercially sensitive or private elements of the
Discharge Management Plan (DMP), which was approved on
Friday, Nov 15, just four days before Anadarko’s drill
ship, the Noble Bob Douglas, arrived in New Zealand
waters.
Disclosure of the variable levels of disclosure
between different government agencies charged with
regulating the health, safety and environmental elements of
Anadarko’s plans came to light amid growing public protest
against deep-sea drilling.
A small Greenpeace-led flotilla
of protest yachts is seeking to disrupt exploration drilling
of the Romney prospect in the Deepwater Taranaki licence
area, and thousands of New Zealanders gathered on west coast
beaches on Saturday to protest against deep-sea oil
drilling.
The company is due to begin drilling operations
tomorow and it remains unclear whether there will be action
to remove protest yachts that are staying within the 500
metre exclusion zone created around oil infrastructure in
controversial circumstances earlier this
year.
Anadarko’s New Zealand spokesman Alan Seay said
the company was “very happy” with the way government
agencies had handled the application, although MNZ spokesman
Steve Rendle suggested the issue had not been well
handled.
“I don’t think I’m talking out of turn to
say we will be looking at ways to make sure this comes out
quicker in the future,” he told BusinessDesk. “We
acknowledge there’s obviously great public interest and we
will be looking to get that (the DMP) out as soon as we
practically can.”
The Environmental Defence Society
first drew attention to the lack of full disclosure last
week, arguing the new law covering economic activity in the
country’s Exclusive Economic Zone includes explicit
requirements on the EPA to assess the environmental impacts
of a major oil spill.
The documents published on the EPA
website were “not the final documents,” said
Rendle.
EDS head Gary Taylor said New Zealand was in the
process of “making the same mistakes” as had led to the
deadly oil well explosion and environmental disaster on the
Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico in
2010.
“We can’t be sure that the EPA has the
competence to cut the mustard,” he said.
In the
documents from Anadarko on the EPA website, the company
includes a map showing the most at-risk areas, in the
unlikely event of a major spill, run from the southern heads
of the Manukau Harbour south to Kawhia Harbour.
Anadarko
proposes to spend between 65 and 75 days drilling the Romney
prospect well before heading to Caravel, a prospect in the
Canterbury basin off the east coast of the South Island
early next year.
The documents say the Taranaki well is
not expected to encounter any zones of abnormal pressure”
but that the Noble Bob Douglas is carrying a Blow-Out
Preventer device for use if control of a well were
lost.
The company also has a contract with Oil Response
International, an insurance cooperative created by the
global oil industry to supply emergency oil well control
equipment by both sea and air, with the closest bases in
South Africa and Singapore.
The details of that contract
were important, said Taylor, because of the large difference
in delay between a commitment to airlifting equipment and
shipping it to New Zealand if a worst case scenario
occurred.
(BusinessDesk)
Independent, Trustworthy New Zealand Business News
The Wellington-based BusinessDesk team of former Bloomberg Asian top editor Jonathan Underhill and Qantas Award-winning journalist and commentator Pattrick Smellie provides a daily news feed for a serious business audience.
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Bureaucrats fumble oil spill plan release
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