April 21, 2005
It Could
Be Worse Than the Exxon Valdez
Drilling
and Spilling in ANWR
By
JASON LEOPOLD
It’s
true that thousands of caribou and other types of wildlife will
be displaced if Washington D.C. lawmakers pass a measure to allow
drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
But
there’s an even bigger issue floating under the radar: the
very real possibility of an environmental tragedy that could be
as catastrophic as the 1989 oil spill caused by the Exxon Valdez
oil tanker if swift measures aren’t taken to address severe
safety and maintenance issues plaguing drilling operations in
nearby Prudhoe Bay—North America’s biggest oil field,
60 miles west of ANWR—and other areas on Alaska’s
North Slope.
That’s
just one of many alarming claims that employees working for BP,
the parent of BP Exploration (Alaska) Inc., the Anchorage company
that runs the 24-year-old Prudhoe Bay on behalf of Phillips Alaska
Inc., Exxon Mobil and other oil companies, have made over the
years as a way of drawing attention to the dozens of oil spills—three
of which occurred between March and April alone—that could
boil over and happen at ANWR if BP continues to neglect safety
issues and the area is opened up to further oil and gas exploration.
Now,
as President Bush renews his calls for opening up ANWR to development,
some of those very same BP employees are blowing the whistle on
their company yet again and are turning to the one person who
helped them expose oil companies’ cover ups on Alaska’s
North Slope.
Chuck
Hamel, an Alexandria, Va., oil industry watchdog has been leading
the fight for the past 15 years against corporations’ BP,
Conoco Phillips and ExxonMobil shoddy crude oil operations in
Alaska. The safety and maintenance issues that Hamel and the BP
whistleblowers brought to the attention of Congress and the public
four years ago were supposed to be addressed by the oil company.
Back in the 1980s, Hamel was the first person to expose weak pollution
laws at the Valdez tanker port and electrical and maintenance
problems with the trans-Alaska oil pipeline.
Hamel,
who is protecting the identities of the current whistleblowers,
says not only do oil spills continue on the North Slope because
BP neglects to address maintenance issues, but the oil behemoth’s
executives routinely lie to Alaskan state representatives and
members of the United States Senate and Congress about the steps
they’re taking to correct the problems.
The
company also denies its employees claims of safety issues at its
crude oil production facilities on the North Slope.
Hamel, however, has got some damning evidence on BP: photographs
showing oil wells spewing a brown substance known as drilling
muds, which contain traces of crude oil, on two separate occasions.
Hamel says he’s determined to expose BP’s shoddy operations
and throw a wrench in President Bush’s plans to open up
ANWR to drilling.
“I
am going to throw a hiccup into the ANWR legislation,” Hamel
said in an interview. “Until these oil companies clean up
their act they can’t drill in ANWR because they are spilling
oil in the North Slope.” If oil companies continue to fail
to address safety problems at the North Slope “they’ll
have another Exxon Valdez” type of oil spill on their hands,
Hamel said.
On
April 15, Hamel sent a letter to Senator Pete Domenici, chairman
of the Senate energy and natural resources committee, saying there
have been three spills between late March and early April, at
a time when BP and two of its drilling contractors are under investigation
for charges of failing to report other oil spills in late 2004
and in January of this year.
"You
obviously are unaware of the cheating by some producers and drilling
companies," Hamel said in the letter to Domenici, an arch
proponent of drilling in ANWR. "Your official Senate tour”
of Alaska in March “was masked by the orchestrated 'dog
and pony show' provided you at the new Alpine Field, away from
the real world of the Slope's dangerously unregulated operations."
Domenici’s
office said the senator is reviewing Hamel’s letter. In
that letter, Hamel also claimed that whistleblowers had told of
another cover-up, dating back to 2003, in which Pioneer Natural
Resources and its drilling contractor, Nabors Alaska Drilling,
allegedly disposed of more than 2,000 gallons of toxic drilling
mud and fluids through the ice "to save the cost of proper
disposal on shore.”
Hamel
has had his share of detractors, notably BP and several Alaskan
state officials, who said he’s a conspiracy theorist, and
the federal Environmental Protection Agency.
But
Hamel was vindicated in March when Alaska’s Department of
Environmental Conservation confirmed Hamel’s claims of major
spills in December 2004 and July 2003 at the oil well owned by
BP and operated by its drilling contractor, Nabors, on the North
Slope, which the company never reported as required by state law.
Hamel
filed a formal complaint in January with the EPA, claiming he
had pictures showing a gusher spewing a brown substance. An investigation
by Alaska’s Department of Environmental Conservation determined
that as much as 294 gallons of drilling mud was spilled when gas
was sucked into wells, causing sprays of drilling muds and oil
that shot up as high as 85 feet into the air.
Because
both spills exceeded 55 gallons, BP and Nabors were obligated
under a 2003 compliance agreement that BP signed with Alaska to
immediately report the spills. That didn't occur, said Leslie
Pearson, the agency's spill prevention and emergency response
manager.
BP
spokesman Daren Beaudo said the company did report the spills
after learning about it and said the spill wasn’t that big
of a deal.
"In
this case, the drilling rig operators did not feel this type of
event qualified for reporting," Beaudo told the Anchorage
Daily News in March. "Obviously the Alaska Department of
Environmental Conservation felt otherwise and that's what they're
saying as a result of their investigation. It's a matter of interpretation."
Beaudo said the agency’s findings are in line with BP's
own investigation that the spills did not cause any harm to the
environment, aside from some speckles on the snow.
But
what’s troubling to Hamel is that Alaska’s Department
of Environmental Conservation has let BP off with a slap on the
wrist. The agency is not penalizing BP; rather it said that it
will ensure that the company reports other spills in a timely
manner.
That
plays into Hamel’s other theory: that the state of Alaska
is in cahoots with the oil industry and routinely fails to enforce
laws that would hold those companies liable for violating environmental
regulations.
Safety
Issues and Poor Maintenance at North Slope Oil Facilities Ongoing
For Years
In
April of 2001, whistleblowers informed Hamel and Interior Secretary
Gale Norton, who at the time was touring the Prudhoe Bay oil fields
that the safety valves at Prudhoe Bay, which kick in the event
of a pipeline rupture, failed to close. Secondary valves that
connect the oil platforms with processing plants also failed to
close. And because the technology at Prudhoe Bay would be duplicated
at ANWR that means that the potential for a massive explosion
and huge spills are very real.
"A
major spill or fire at one of our [processing centers] will exit
the piping at high pressure, and leave a half-mile-wide oil slick
on the white snow all the way" Hamel said at the time in
an interview with the Wall Street Journal
That
type of catastrophic scenario was wiped out of everyone’s
minds after 9/11 happened.
But
then in March of 2002, a BP whistleblower brought up the very
same issues and went public with his claims of maintenance backlogs
and employee shortages at Prudhoe Bay that he said could worsen
spills on the North Slope, particularly if ANWR is opened up to
exploration.
The
whistleblower, Robert Brian, who worked as an instrument technician
at Prudhoe Bay for 22 years, had a lengthy meeting with aides
to Senators Jospeh Lieberman and Bob Graham, both Democrats, to
discuss his claims.
At
the time, Brian said he supported opening up ANWR to oil exploration
but said BP has imperiled that goal because it is ''putting Prudhoe
workers and the environment at risk.”
''We
are trying to change that so we don't have a catastrophe that
ends up on CNN and stops us from getting into ANWR,'' according
to a March 13, 2002 report in the Anchorage Daily News.
In
2001, the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission found high
failure rates on some Prudhoe wellhead safety valves. The company
was put on federal criminal probation after one of its contractors
dumped thousands of gallons of toxic material underground at BP's
Endicott oil field in the 1990s. BP pleaded guilty to the charges
in 2000 and paid a $6.5 million fine, and agreed to set up a nationwide
environmental management program that has cost more than $20 million.
But
Hamel and the whistleblowers’, including Brian, said BP
continued to violate environmental rules and then attempted to
cover it up.
A
BP spokesman said those claims “are an outright lie.”
Still,
despite the charges leveled against BP by the whistleblowers,
which were aired as early as April 2001, the Senate never held
hearings on the safety issues that over the years have caused
dozens of oil spills at oil production facilities on the North
Slope. Drilling in ANWR and President Bush’s energy bill
took a backseat following the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the ensuing
war in Iraq. Now, with gasoline prices soaring and Bush’s
claims that drilling in ANWR would reduce this country’s
dependence on foreign oil lawmakers are being urged to once again
investigate the issue and hold hearings before approving any legislation
that would open up ANWR to development.
BP
has long been criticized for poorly managing the North Slope’s
aging pipelines, safety valves and other critical components of
its oil production infrastructure. The company has in the past
made minor improvements to its valves and fire detection systems
and hired additional employees but has dropped the ball and neglected
to maintain a level of safety at its facilities on the North Slope,
Hamel said.
"Contrary
to what President Bush has been saying, the current BP Prudhoe
Bay operations -- particularly the dysfunctional safety valves
-- are deeply flawed and place the environment, the safety of
the operations staff and the integrity of the facility at risk.
The president should delay legislation calling for drilling at
the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge,” Hamel told the Wall
Street Journal.
Jason
Leopold’s explosive memoir, Off the Record
was days away from being printed when his publisher, Rowman &
Littlefield, abruptly canceled the book in February after receiving
a complaint from an attorney representing Steve Maviglio, the
former press secretary to California Gov. Gray Davis, over the
way he was portrayed in the publisher’s press release about
the book. Visit Leopold’s website at www.jasonleopold.com