ENVIRONMENT: North Sea Conference to Focus on Floating Oil Platform

By Pratap Chatterjee Reprint | | Print |

John Roberts and Pratap Chatterjee

EDINBURGH, Scotland, Jun 1 1995 (IPS) - The future of an unwanted giant floating oil platform in the North Sea off the coast of Scotland is expected to feature high up the agenda of a meeting of European environment ministers in Denmark next Thursday.

The ministers are meeting at the North Sea conference in Esjberg, Denmark, close to the Danish-German border. The conference was set up in 1984 to discuss commitments to reduce pollution in the North Sea by the eight countries that border the North Sea plus Switzerland and the European Union (EU).

Shell oil company which owns the 14,500-tonne floating oil platform, known as Brent Spar, is planning to tow the platform from the North Sea to the Atlantic.

The oil company’s plans were temporarily thwarted by activists from Greenpeace, the international environmental group, who occupied the platform for over a month until they were evicted last week.

The Greenpeace activists say that Shell should take the rig back to land and dismantle it and dispose of the 130 tonnes of toxic waste that they say the platform contains.

The activists have been backed by the governments of Belgium, Denmark and Iceland, who have lodged formal protests with the British government for approving the dumping operation. In addition commercial fishing groups have come out against the dumping who see it as an alarming precedent.

“If a permit is given now, the same is to be expected of the other 400 plus installations out there. Economic factors are working in favour of just leaving everything there once the profits have been gained,” Peter Sand Martensen, the chairman of the fisherman’s section of the International Transport Federation in Copenhagen, told Danish TV on Tuesday.

Shell, alarmed by the media attention given to the issue, sponsored a trip of Danish journalists to London Wednesday for a briefing by the British government and Shell in a bid to convince them that the operation is harmless.

But environmentalists disagree. “Shell knows that it cannot remove all the toxic waste from the Spar whilst it is at sea — in fact it doesn’t even have a proper picture of exactly what waste is in the Brent Spar,” said Jan Rispens, one of the Greenpeace activists removed from the Spar on May 23.

Greenpeace has accused Shell of carrying out “one of the most irresponsible acts of environmental vandalism in years”.

Shell disputes this claim although it acknowledges that the six giant storage tanks, which now contain seawater instead of crude oil, still has around 100 tons of sludge at the bottom of the tanks, consisting of silt, oil residues and small amounts of heavy metals that originated in the Brent Field reservoirs.

Shell statements note the silt also contains Low Specific Activity scale, which comprises naturally occurring radioactive salts, that the company says is a normal part of the marine environment.

It adds that there is as much radioactivity on Brent Spar as in a cluster of granite buildings in the Scottish oil capital of Aberdeen, and that the impact of the silt on the environment is minimal “and has no implications for health or the food chain”.

Further in its defence, Shell says that it has spent more than three years analysing alternative approaches for decommissioning the Spar — a floating storage and tanker loading buoy — before deciding on sinking its carcass on an deep water ridge some 150 miles west of the Outer Hebrides.

The company’s is currently stripping the rig — a task expected to be completed in the next two or three weeks. “We plan to remove all equipment first,” says Dave Stuart, a Shell spokesman.

The rig will then be towed to the Feni Ridge, an underwater mountain chain in the Atlantic where the seabed is 2,000 metres deep.