Shell Oil Co. is touting its technology and record in the Gulf of Mexico to placate concerns about its plans to explore for oil off the environmentally sensitive shores of Alaska.
While activists were filing a lawsuit to halt Shell’s Arctic drilling plans Thursday, the company was hosting Alaskan journalists at a technology center on the Gulf Coast. Shell provided a tour of its New Orleans facilities, where it employs high-tech programs that the company says make its operations safer, from 3D seismic imaging to real-time video from offshore operations.
“We wanted you to see how we plan ahead and develop the technology to address the challenges we have,” Charlie Williams, Shell’s chief scientist for well engineering, told the Alaskan reporters.
“With deepwater there were significant challenges and we put all of this work and effort into technology that overcomes the challenges to ensure we can do it safe,” Williams said. “We take that very seriously and we do that work.”
Shell has long struggled to drill in Arctic waters against regulatory hurdles and public protests. In August, Shell received the federal government’s approval to explore the Arctic Beaufort Sea.
Over the past decade, the company has developed advanced methods to cut down on the risk of its most complex operations, Shell officials said, including in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico. For instance, geophycists explore numerous layers of the earth in NASA-produced 3D images on a 24-foot wide screen, increasing their ability to plan the safest and most promising wells. The company also operates 24/7 monitoring centers, where veteran operators watch data and video from the most precarious offshore drilling operations in real-time.
Those technologies would be used for operations in the Arctic, as well, company leaders said.
“Shell has invested billions of dollars in leases, et cetera, in Alaska and we have worked very hard to ensure that drilling a well in Alaska can be done in the safest possible way and the most responsible possible way,” said John Hollowell, Shell’s executive vice president of deepwater operations. “Whether you are in the Gulf of Mexico or Alaska, it’s an opportunity for this country to develop it’s own reserves to meet the demand that we have here domestically.”
There are key differences between oil production in the Gulf and the Arctic. Deepwater wells in the Gulf are drilled in as much as 10,000 feet of water and dig into as much as 15,000 feet of earth.
Wells in the Arctic are simple by comparison, said Steve Phelps, Shell Alaska exploration manager.
“It’s a fundamentally different thing. In all the lease holds that Shell has, there’s nowhere that’s greater than 150 feet” of water, Phelps said. “By the standards of technology and engineering that we’ve developed in the Gulf of Mexico, this is really shallow water.”
Shell officials said the company’s Arctic wells are likely to drill no more than 8,000 feet into the ground.
The simplicity that Shell’s Arctic plan gains from shallow water is made up for in its harsh climate.
The company plans to unveil to reporters Thursday a colossal ice-busting ship for its offshore Arctic operations. Built the length of a football field, the vessel will be the most advanced an strongest of its kind built domestically, Shell says.
Phelps noted that the Arctic holds a quarter of the world’s undiscovered hydrocarbons, according to geologists’ estimates, though national parks and environmental sensitivity limits access to them.
The Arctic has “so much oil potential, we just can’t ignore it,” he said. “That’s why we’re still here.”
