GREENPEACE TOURS NORTH SEA OIL RIGS ON BRENT SPAR ANNIVERSARY

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The Brent Spar Sets the Industry Precedent

The 20th of June, 1995 was a great day for Greenpeace and the environment. This was the day when the occupation by Greenpeace of the disused Brent Spar oil platform, a massive public protest and boyc ott, forced Royal Dutch Shell to reverse its decision to dump the installation in the north-east Atlantic. However this was only a provisional victory . The Brent Spar is one of 400 oil and gas installations to be decommissioned from the North Sea.
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Following the Brent Spar campaign the nations of the Oslo Paris Commission (OSPAR), which regulates marine pollution, passed a moratorium on the dumping of platforms at sea. The moratorium was passed on June 29, 1995 by 11 votes to 2 (Norway and the United Kingdom). The next step, a permanent ban by 1997, will be discussed at the OSPAR meeting this week (June 17-21) of government offic ials in Oslo. Greenpeace's marine policy expert Remi Parmentier and offshore industry campaigner Simon Reddy will be attending the OSPAR meeting.

Since the Brent Spar campaign last summer Shell has announced that it will bring its Leman BK platform ashore. Three other platforms will now also be decommissioned on land: the North-East Frigg (Elf), the Viking A (Conoco/BP) and the Odin platform, after the Norwegian government turned down an application by Esso to dispose of the structure at sea. (The Brent Spar is currently in the Erfjord in Norway and Shell has received 400 proposals on what to do with it. A decision on the fate of the Brent Spar is expected in 1997).

Continuing on the work of the Brent Spar campaign the new Greenpeace ship, the Arctic Sunrise, is documenting North Sea oil and gas platforms whose owners have publicly stated that they want to dump their installations at sea. These include North West Hutton (Amoco) and (Unocal).

For over 20 years, Greenpeace has demonstrated its commitment to protect the oceans and the diverse forms of life which depend on them. Successful campaigns have led to the global ban on the dumping of radioactive and industrial wastes at sea. If the Brent Spar had been dumped at sea it would have undermined these existing bans.

The alternative to dumping these installations is to take them ashore to be dismantled and recycled. this would not only be best for the environment but would safeguard or create jobs in a decommissi oning industry with global market potential. It would allow the re-use of vast quantities of materials - including 2.6 million tonnes of steel from the 400 installations in the North Sea alone.

The Greenpeace Mistake in the Brent Spar Campaign

Greenpeace campaigned to stop the dumping of the Brent Spar primarily on the basis of the concern over principle and precedents. However we also recognised that there were deficiencies in the waste inventory supplied by Shell. This inventory stated that the structure contained 100 tonnes of toxic sludge, including heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury, 30 tonnes of low level radioactive wast e and a quantity of waste oil. Had identical wastes been created on land and packed in barrels, rather than on an oil installation, it would have been strictly illegal to dump them in the sea.

A political response to Greenpeace's Brent Spar campaign began on June 8-9, 1995, when the North Sea Conference called for a ban on disposal at sea offshore installations.

Four days before Shell announced it would not dump the Brent Spar on June 20, 1995, and seven weeks after the campaign had begun, Greenpeace attempted to address one of the deficiencies in Shell's waste inventory for the Brent Spar by trying to measure the quantity of waste oil. This also fol lowed a decision by the Ministerial Meeting of the North Sea Conference to call for a ban on disposal at sea of offshore installations, which must be implemented by OSPAR. Unfortunately Greenpeace ma de a mistake in its oil sampling which led to an overestimate of the amount of oil on board. Greenpeace publicly released these estimates on June 16 stating that up to 5,500 tonnes of oil was aboard the Brent Spar. When this error was discovered, Greenpeace apologised for the error to Shell by letter. Later analysis of the Brent Spar by independent experts, the Norwegian certification company Det Norske Veritas (DNV), revealed there was only about 75-100 tonnes of oil on board. Shell originally estimated there was 50 tonnes of oil on board.

However the Greenpeace letter to Shell was reported in the media as an apology which completely undermined the whole basis for the campaign. This could not be further from the truth. The estimates of oil on board the Brent Spar were incidental and not central to Greenpeace's argument s against dumping the structure at sea. The Brent Spar campaign was based on the information Shell provided to the UK government, the necessity of avoiding a precedent being set for other platforms a nd the principle that the ocean is not a dumping ground.

The fact that Greenpeace was arguing a case on principle and precedent did not mean that we did not or do not still have specific criticisms of the science used by Shell in the case of the Brent Spar.

The use of science by Shell and the Government was influenced by a different set of principles - primarily self-serving commercial expediency. Where there were scientific uncertainties, the benefit of the doubt always went to Shell at the expense of environmental precaution.

Shell's scientific case for deep sea dumping had serious failings including:

• - the omission of a proper inventory of the wastes on the structure.
• - an incorrect appraisal of the marine environment at the dump site.
• - an unconvincing projection of how the structure would degrade during and after dumping.
• - inadequate consideration of alternatives to sea dumping and benefits of recovered materials
• - unsubstantiated assumptions, confidentiality of supporting evidence and poor consultation

For each of these reasons there can have been no proper assessment of the environmental impact. Scientists from the Scottish Association of Marine Sciences with great expertise in the marine enviro nment of the proposed dump site have described aspects of Shell's environmental assessment as "very far fetched and shoddy" and described the local ecology as having species diversity that "may rival that of the tropical rainforest".

More recently in April 1996, the Scientific Group on Decommissioning Offshore Structures, a panel of scientists set up by the UK's Natural Environment Research Council at the request of Mr T Eggar, the Energy Minister, concluded:

• - Both cumulative and case by case impacts of the disposal of offshore oil installations should be assessed, because continued disposals with small individual impact might give rise, by small in crements, to an unacceptably large overall impact.
• - Some means should be sought to take public acceptability into account in evaluating future marine environmental impact assessments
• - Nothing in [their] report should be taken as promoting the deep sea disposal of decommissioned offshore structures, or of any other wastes.
• - Any decision to proceed, or not to proceed, with dumping oil structures or other wastes in the ocean involves social, economic, ethical, and aesthetic considerations which are outside the compe tence of the group, and judgements in which the technical assessment of the environmental impact is only one factor, and not necessarily the most important one.
• - From an engineering point of view the difficulties and hazards of onshore disposal are no more than have already been encountered and successfully overcome for other installations.
• - Many factors should influence a decision on whether disposal of offshore structures as waste is an appropriate course of action. They should have included such general considerations as the nee d to conserve energy and natural resources by reducing, re-using and recycling potential waste whenever practicable.
• - The deep sea environment can be surprisingly biologically rich, but our level of certainty regarding the environment, and hence our predictive ability with regard to environmental impacts, is mu ch lower (in the deep sea) than for inshore areas on the continental shelf.

These scientists reserve judgement on the best fate for the Brent Spar, but they are clear that the scientific work done so far has serious shortcomings. Therefore the dispute between Greenpeace and Shell should not be seen as only one of 'emotion' versus `science'.

Rigs to Reefs: Not in the North Sea

Some representatives of the oil industry have suggested that the "Rigs to Reef" programme in North America could be adopted by North Sea states to produce reefs that would benefit North Sea fish stocks. Greenpeace does not consider that this is a serious option. Neither does the fishing community.

In America, over 1000 platforms have been decommissioned. Approximately 900 to land and 100 to reefs. Reefs have been created in designated areas. These are warm water areas with reef forming species in water depths of 30 metres. Their primary benefit has been for the sports angling organisations.

In the North Sea the same ideas have been argued for our deep water platforms, but the two are not compatible. In the Northern North Sea, the platforms are in up to 180 metres of water, with future operations in even deeper water (down to 800 metres), and sitting on top of toxic drill cuttings piles (25000 cubic metres under NW Hutton). The species present are very different to those in the Gulf of Mexico and their responses to artificial reef structures are largely unpredictable. Furthermore, the creation of a few reefs will not solve the North Sea overfishing problems.

The NERC report on the Brent Spar for the UK government agreed: " We accept these reservations and believe that it would be similarly difficult to claim a significant beneficial effect from the emplacement of any structure in the deep sea, even one completely stripped of any contamination. It is true that studies of deep ocean wrecks (eg the Titanic and the Central America) often report the presence of more fishes, and often of other animal groups, on and around the wrecks than in the neighbouring area. However, we know of no evidence to suggest that a wreck increases the total biomass or affects its taxonomic make-up or, indeed, how such a change could be judged an 'improvement'..... "

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