“Activities conducted offshore Alaska are being held to the highest safety, environmental protection and emergency response standards”, said Salerno.
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The approval, granted by the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement on Monday, comes after Shell spent almost eight years and more than $7 billion overcoming regulatory, political, legal and logistical challenges – sometimes of the company’s own making. The foot hole is for holding a blowout prevent er that paves the way for drilling into the oil-bearing rocks.
The decision to allow Shell to drill into hydrocarbon-bearing zones was applauded by industry advocates National Ocean Industries Association (NOIA) and the American Petroleum Institute (API). “Safe, efficient operations will ultimately determine the progress we make”.
Shell’s determination to drill there has spawned funding drives and a wave of protests by environmentalists who want to protect whales, walruses and polar bears in a vulnerable region that scientists say is changing rapidly due to global warming.
“The weak provisions in the permit, along with the industry’s inability to clean up major spills and its inability to rehabilitate oiled wildlife, provide a strong technical rationale for the Obama administration to disallow Arctic Ocean oil drilling”, she said in a statement.
Shell halted Arctic drilling in 2012 after a rig ran aground, helping prompt the Obama administration to revisit U.S. rules for exploration activities in the region.
“When President Obama visits the Arctic this month, he must face the communities he is sacrificing to Shell’s profits”, intoned Marissa Knodel of Friends of the Earth.
Additionally they say that drilling in U.S. Arctic waters, which the federal government estimates holds 26 billion barrels of recoverable oil, will delay a transition to renewable power.
Placing the “fate of the Arctic” in the care of Big Oil, the Obama administration on Monday granted Shell the final permit to drill deep into the waters off the Alaskan coast. The company has until late September to complete this summer’s exploratory drilling.
A so-called capping stack, needed to control a spill, is 24 hours away from the drilling site.
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The Fennica and its yellow capping stack in Alaska’s Dutch Harbor on July 18. The vessel named the Fennica was repaired in Portland and briefly delayed from leaving July 30 by Greenpeace protesters in climbing gear hanging from a bridge over the Willamette River.
