Chủ Nhật, 24 tháng 11, 2013

Bureaucrats fumble oil spill plan release


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)



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Bureaucrats fumble oil spill plan release

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