With the prospect of expanded offshore petroleum exploration operations on the Scotian Shelf looming on the horizon, a recent first-hand account on the devastation to the marine environment and local fishers in the Gulf of Mexico caused from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon blowout, was serious food for thought.
Antonia Juhasz, award-winning investigative journalist and author of Black Tide: The Devastating Impact of the Gulf Oil Spill, was guest speaker on a N.S. tour, which was organized by the Council of Canadians and the Campaign to Protect Offshore Nova Scotia (CPONS), with support from the Sierra Club of Canada Foundation, Ecology Action Centre and the Clean Ocean Action Committee (COAC).
“What happened in the Deepwater Horizon disaster was a confluent of events that happened to this rig but are not isolated to this rig,” said Antonia during the tour.
“One of the important components to this, it just didn’t involve BP. It involved Transocean who they leased the rig from, one of the largest rig operators in the world. It involved all the oil companies operating in the Gulf of Mexico… It turns out none of the companies operating in the Gulf of Mexico actually knew what to do in deep water. Instead what they did was shallow water technology to a deep water well and it failed and it failed and it failed.”
It took three months to temporarily cap the well and another 152 days to drill a relief well. It is estimated 4.9-million barrels (210-million U.S. gallons) spewed into the Gulf of Mexico because “they had let the batteries run out” on the blow-out preventer, “the most important piece of equipment on the rig,” said Juhasz, noting the other failure in the disaster was the rig didn’t deploy from the well, killing 11 people. “The rig didn’t get away so it was locked to an exploding well.”
During her investigation, Juhasz spent time in a submarine exploring the seabed in the Gulf of Mexico, several years after the disaster. She described it as a “moonscape.”
“The species that were supposed to be there were not. The life that was there was buried under the oil,” adding research found “a carpet of oil” up to two inches deep remains on the ocean floor. “The critters that are there are eating the oil and they are carrying it up the food chain.”
According to statistics from the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Gulf-wide catches of oysters declined by 6.6-million pounds between 2009 and 2016, while Gulf shrimp catches declined by 37.5-million pounds during the same period. Over the same time period, the percentage of U.S. oysters from the Gulf fell from 61 per cent to 45 per cent, while Gulf shrimp declined from 81 per cent of the U.S. total to 72 per cent.
According to a comprehensive five-year study of the damage done by BP to natural resources, conducted by multiple federal and state agencies, as many as 8.3-billion oysters in the Gulf were lost as a result of the oil spill and that the subsequent “dramatic decreases in oyster densities and the associated reproductive injury imperils the sustainability of oysters in the northern Gulf of Mexico.”
The study also concluded the Deepwater Horizon disaster killed as many as five-trillion larval fish, at least 20 per cent of the Kemp’s Ridley adult female turtles, with at least 93 species of birds exposed.
“Nearly all of the populations of dolphins and whales in affected areas have demonstrable, quantifiable injuries.… In the five years after the disaster, more than three-quarters of pregnant bottlenose dolphins in the oiled areas failed to give birth to a viable calf,” the report found.
Their populations “could ultimately decline by more than half before they recover,” which could take as long as 50 years. The most affected species of marine mammal living in deeper waters were Bryde’s whales — nearly half were exposed to oil and nearly a quarter died, jeopardizing the possible survival of the species in the Gulf.” Juhasz said she has been told by Louisiana oystermen they are basically ruined.
In an interview following the tour, Juhasz said one of the most disturbing things is the ongoing impact.
“I was just emailed a beached whale photo. People down there are saying this was not common before the Gulf oil spill. They are now seeing beaches of dead juvenile whales much more frequently and based on the studies on the overall impact of the oil spill on the marine ecosystem, they are starting to feel confident and concerned this continues to be the ongoing impact of the oil still migrating its way through the food system… being bioaccumulated in the food system to the top of the food chain, which is whales. There were whales that swam through the oil and were immediately impacted and killed, but as result of the ongoing impact they are suffering from bioaccumulation of the presence of the oil in the eco-system so are still not being able to successful recover.”
Juhasz said there remains “a tremendous amount of concern in the Gulf about the impact of the oil spill. A tremendous amount of resistance was born in the Gulf of Mexico towards offshore oil drilling and I think that started reverberating across the country,” she said in response to President Donald Trump’s proposal to open up all the United States to offshore drilling.
“There has been overwhelming opposition to that from Republicans, Democrats, local citizens, elected officials… almost every single state on the Atlantic. It’s very clear they do not want drilling in the U.S. Atlantic because they are concerned about fisheries, tourism and the environment.”
BY COMPARSION
In offshore Nova Scotia, BP Canada Energy Group has plans to drill as many as seven exploratory deep-water wells in the Scotian Basin between 2018 and 2022 (exploration licences 2431, 2432, 2433 and 2434). Statoil Canada Ltd. is seeking the approval of 3D seismic survey exploration licenses for offshore parcels 2435 and 2436. Both applications are pending final approval by the Canada Nova Scotia Offshore Petroleum Board (CNSOPB).
The plans BP has for Nova Scotia is to drill in waters twice as deep as the Gulf of Mexico, 30 kilometres closer to landfall, in sea conditions that are much rougher and in proximity of several marine conservation areas, marine nurseries and spawning grounds.
Juhasz said one of the lessons learned in the Deepwater Horizon disaster is the capping stack is the way to temporally shut down the well.
“The lesson learned is have a capping stack with you in case you have a blow out. Here (in Nova Scotia) the capping stack is going to be in Norway which is two weeks away. The only way to permanently cap a deep water well is drill something called a relief well. It took 152 days to drill the relief well in the Gulf of Mexico during which time the temporary cap could have failed at any moment,” said Juhasz, noting there are no plans by BP Canada to drill a relief well simultaneously to save time. “That’s not happening here.”
Nova Scotia seafood exports, currently valued at $1.8 billion, are worth more in a year than the total of oil and gas revenues paid to the province over the last 16 years ($1.9 billion). And with the nine to 10 per cent growth in the lobster fishery over the past three or four years, Colin Sproul, vice president of the Bay of Fundy Inshore Fishermen’s Association, finds it hard to understand why senior levels of government are willing to take the risk of an offshore petroleum disaster happening in the pristine waters of the North Atlantic.
“I don’t think it can be underestimated how different it is here from the Gulf of Mexico,” said Sproul, who also spoke on the tour.
“There is no precedent for drilling in water this deep in conditions this harsh and this close to possibly the greatest spawning grounds on the face of the earth. We are in a unique position in Nova Scotia where sustainable fisheries management and sound policy has led to booming catches across this province. We share more value from our fishery than we did before the groundfish collapse and at the same time we have expanded markets in Europe and Asia and for the first time in history are enjoying a 20 per cent export advantage over our American competitors. We’re going for explosion in value in seafood in the next 10 years. In the last four years, we’ve enjoyed nearly 10 per cent growth each year in the lobster industry. That’s incredible.”
Sproul said the greatest concern is LFA 40, the lobster box. “This area is closed to all fishing for one reason. It’s the highest concentration of lobster larvae on earth. That is literally the economic engine of this province. There’s nothing more important to the economy of southwestern Nova Scotia than the distribution of that lobster larvae. The tidal flow populates the entire Gulf of Maine and the Bay of Fundy and its all being placed in jeopardy. The duplicity that it exhibited by our provincial and federal government in ocean protection is outrageous to fishermen.”
