Shell Arctic Progress

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Shell Oil poised for new era on cold frontier Posted on September 7, 2012 at 6:50 pm by Jennifer A. Dlouhy in Drilling, Environment, Offshore, Oil, Safety
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		 				 											 							[IMG]http://fuelfix.com/files/2011/07/Discoverer1-306x229.jpg[/IMG]							The Noble Discoverer drill ship is set to begin drilling in Alaska's Chukchi Sea. (Photo Courtesy of Shell Oil Co.)
					
				 									
			WASHINGTON — A new era of  oil exploration in the Arctic frontier is set to begin this weekend,  when Shell  is slated to launch drilling in the Chukchi Sea.

After connecting the Noble Discoverer drillship to anchors at Shell Oil’s Burger Prospect on Friday, the company is set to begin boring an 8.5-inch-wide pilot hole that will extend roughly 1,400 feet below the seabed, creating the foundation for the oil well to come and ensuring no physical obstructions or hidden gas pockets are in the way.
Shell then plans to excavate a 20-foot by 40-foot mud cellar to hold emergency equipment called a blowout preventer that is a last defense against unexpected surges of oil and gas from the well. Although blowout preventers generally rest above the sea floor, the location of Shell’s below the seabed is designed to keep it clear of any large ice floes.
Later, Shell will drill a wider hole about 1,300 feet below the seafloor, filling it with drillpipe and cementing it into place.
Although oil companies drilled more than 30 wells in the Chukchi Sea and the Beaufort sea to its east starting in 1982, Shell’s exploration is the first in a decade.

Federal regulators are barring the company from drilling into oil- and gas-bearing zones until a critical oil spill containment system is on site. And for now, that containment barge, the Arctic Challenger, is still in Washington state, where it has been undergoing retrofits and is ready for trials.
“Testing on the first-ever Arctic containment system is planned for this weekend,” said Shell spokeswoman Kelly op de Weegh.
The containment barge must win certification from the Coast Guard and approval from the Interior Department’s Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement before it can begin a trek of at least two weeks to Arctic waters north of Alaska.
It appears unlikely Shell will be able to complete a single Chukchi Sea well this year, unless regulators relax a Sept. 24 deadline for drilling in hydrocarbon-bearing zones in the region.
The company has asked regulators to grant it 18 extra days to continue drilling in the Chukchi Sea.
Similar drilling in the Beaufort Sea could continue until Oct. 31, but that work has not yet been approved and would be blocked anyway while native Alaskans conduct their fall hunt of the bowhead whale migrating through the area.
Shell’s conical Kulluk drilling unit is now near the Beaufort Sea prospect waiting for the conclusion of the whale hunt to move closer in.
The recent mooring work took longer than anticipated, slowed in part by heavy seas on Friday. Crews connected Discoverer to eight anchors, staged on the seafloor in a circular pattern more than 6,500 feet across.
Shell will need government-approved amendments to its well permit to continue drilling the Burger well and go beyond the initial top-hole drilling at the site.
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar told reporters last week that Shell’s work is being conducted “under the closest oversight and most rigorous safety standards ever.”
Safety bureau inspectors will be on the Discoverer drillship around the clock.
A fleet of vessels flanks the Discoverer, including the Fennica, which carries a capping stack system for reining in a runaway well.
Op de Weegh said the oil spill response vessel Nanuq and supply vessel Harvey Spirit are handling refueling for the fleet, drawing fuel from the Affinity tanker located nearby. The icebreaker Nordica also is in the region.
Environmental activists complained that regulators appeared to be bending over backward to accommodate Shell’s plans, despite major recent setbacks.
The Discoverer drillship dragged its anchor in Dutch Harbor earlier this year. Deadlines for the completion of the Challenger have long since come and gone. And last Friday, the Environmental Protection Agency gave Shell permission to operate the Discoverer in the Arctic, even though the company had conceded it could not meet previously permitted air pollution limits.
The company has spent nearly $5 billion preparing to drill in the region.
The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that the area north of the Arctic Circle contains 90 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil and 1,670 trillion cubic feet of technically recoverable natural gas.

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http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/NEWIMAGES/arctic.seaice.color.003.png

3

Arctic sea ice falls to record low. Global warming?

The decline in sea ice coincides with warming at the top of the world that has been occurring twice as fast there as it has for the northern hemisphere as a whole as the global climate warms.

By Pete Spotts, Staff writer / September 8, 2012

A polar bear in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. Arctic sea ice has reached its lowest summer extent since satellites first began keep in track in 1979

Subhankar Banerjee/AP
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Earth’s icy skull cap, floating atop the Arctic Ocean, has reached its lowest summer extent since satellites first began keep in track in 1979, and by some estimates its lowest reach in nearly 1,500 years.
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As of Sept. 7, the Arctic Ocean’s expanse of summer ice this month spanned less than 1.54 million square miles, nearly six times the size of Texas and some 45 percent less than for the average for the same month through the 1980s and '90s, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo. And the ice is still retreating; the summer melt season typically ends in mid to late September.

The previous record low was set in 2007, a result of an unusual set of conditions – clear skies during most of the summer and wind patterns that drove large amounts of ice past Greenland and into the North Atlantic. This summer, no such “perfect storm” for ice loss appeared.

Instead, much of the ice left over from winter – coming out of a summer that until now had been the second lowest melt-back in the satellite record – was thin enough to break no matter which way the wind blew, according to NSIDC researchers.

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Indeed, the ice hit hardest by the long-term decline is the thick ice that once survived several years of thaw and freeze. With more of the Arctic Ocean starting the freeze season as open water, an increasing proportion of winter ice heading into the melt season is relatively thin – more vulnerable to wind-driven break-up when the melt season returns, which can speed melting.

The summer sea-ice cover at the end of the melt season has been declining since the early 1970s, although since 1979 satellites have provided the most consistent measurements of the decline.

The decline coincides with warming at the top of the world that has been occurring twice as fast there as it has for the northern hemisphere as a whole as the global climate warms. Climate scientists attribute the general warming to rising concentrations of atmospheric greenhouse gases – mainly carbon dioxide – from burning fossil fuels since the start of the Industrial Revolution as well as from land-use changes.

The higher pace of Arctic warming, linked in part to rising greenhouse gases as well as to the interplay between ice, snow, and ocean that is reinforcing the warming trend, has implications for more than caribou and polar bears.

This so-called Arctic amplification increases the likelihood of severe weather at mid-latitudes in the northern hemisphere, where most people live, according to a study published earlier this year in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
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“The Arctic is warming so much faster than mid-latitudes, and it’s that difference in temperature that drives the jet stream,” a river of air that triggers and steers storms, says Jennifer Francis, an atmospheric scientist at Rutgers University who focuses much of her research on the Arctic and is the lead author on the study.
Related stories

Gallery: Rising seas
Another tough summer for Arctic sea ice
Arctic sea ice melting faster than expected

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As the temperature difference shrinks, the jet stream’s speed slows and the north-south meanders it makes as it snakes from west to east grow longer. Both changes slow the jet stream’s pace, contributing to the blocking patterns that lead to persistent bouts of heat, cold, or precipitation.

In the fall, the heat the Arctic Ocean stores in summer is released as the air above it gets colder. This slows the return of sea ice. And it reduces the temperature contrast between Arctic and mid latitudes, Dr. Francis explains, contributing to the blocking patterns that can appear in the late fall and winter. The jet streams’ elongated meanders can bring one storm after another to parts of the continent while keeping other parts relatively storm-free. And the slowdown in the jet stream’s migration across the hemisphere sets up the blocking patterns that can hold those conditions in place for weeks.

In the spring and summer, a different process can reduce the temperature difference between latitudes, she continues, one she says that has received far less attention than declining summer sea ice.

“In the last few years, we’ve also had record-low snow amounts in June and July on land at high latitudes,” she says, resulting from what she calls a very robust trend toward earlier spring weather that melts the snow.

The land dries out sooner, with less moisture available to evaporate and keep a rein on rising temperatures. Air over the land areas warms sooner, reducing the temperature contrast into the spring and summer.

The effect on temperatures from a landscape deprived of its normal supply of rain or snow has been operating on overdrive this year, bringing severe to exceptional drought to much of the US.

Francis adds that the blocking pattern that kept the center of the US virtually rainfall-free, held temperatures over Greenland high enough to trigger melting across the entire top of the ice sheet, and gave Britain a persistently dreary, rainy summer, is consistent with the effects she and her colleague, Stephen Vavrus, a climate scientist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, identify in their study.

4

Arctic ice melting at ‘amazing’ speed, scientists find
Comments (850)
David Shukman By David Shukman Science Editor, BBC News, in Svalbard

David Shukman visits the Ny-Alesund research base in Svalbard
Continue reading the main story
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Ice loss 'like 20 years of CO2'
Arctic sea ice melts to record low Watch

Scientists in the Arctic are warning that this summer’s record-breaking melt is part of an accelerating trend with profound implications.

Norwegian researchers report that the sea ice is becoming significantly thinner and more vulnerable.

Last month, the annual thaw of the region’s floating ice reached the lowest level since satellite monitoring began, more than 30 years ago.

It is thought the scale of the decline may even affect Europe’s weather.

The melt is set to continue for at least another week - the peak is usually reached in mid-September - while temperatures here remain above freezing.
‘Unprecedented’

The Norwegian Polar Institute (NPI) is at the forefront of Arctic research and its international director, Kim Holmen, told the BBC that the speed of the melting was faster than expected.

“It is a greater change than we could even imagine 20 years ago, even 10 years ago,” Dr Holmen said.
BBC Map

“And it has taken us by surprise and we must adjust our understanding of the system and we must adjust our science and we must adjust our feelings for the nature around us.”

The institute has been deploying its icebreaker, Lance, to research conditions between Svalbard and Greenland - the main route through which ice flows out of the Arctic Ocean.

During a visit to the port, one of the scientists involved, Dr Edmond Hansen, told me he was “amazed” at the size and speed of this year’s melt.

“As a scientist, I know that this is unprecedented in at least as much as 1,500 years. It is truly amazing - it is a huge dramatic change in the system,” Dr Hansen said.

"This is not some short-lived phenomenon - this is an ongoing trend. You lose more and more ice and it is accelerating - you can just look at the graphs, the observations, and you can see what’s happening."
Thinner ice

I interviewed Dr Hansen while the Lance was docked at Norway’s Arctic research station at Ny-Alesund on Svalbard.

Key data on the ice comes from satellites but also from measurements made by a range of different techniques - a mix of old and new technology harnessed to help answer the key environmental questions of our age.

David Shukman explains the positive feedback caused by melting polar ice

The Norwegians send teams out on to the floating ice to drill holes into it and extract cores to determine the ice’s origin.

And since the early 90s they have installed specialist buoys, tethered to the seabed, which use sonar to provide a near-constant stream of data about the ice above.

An electro-magnetic device known as an EM-Bird has also been flown, suspended beneath a helicopter, in long sweeps over the ice.

The torpedo-shaped instrument gathers data about the difference between the level of the seawater beneath the ice and the surface of the ice itself.

By flying transects over the ice, a picture of its thickness emerges. The latest data is still being processed but one of the institute’s sea ice specialists, Dr Sebastian Gerland, said that though conditions vary year by year a pattern is clear.

“In the region where we work we can see a general trend to thinner ice - in the Fram Strait and at some coastal stations.”

Where the ice vanishes entirely, the surface loses its usual highly reflective whiteness - which sends most solar radiation back into space - and is replaced by darker waters instead which absorb more heat.

According to Dr Gerland, additional warming can take place even if ice remains in a far thinner state.

“It means there is more light penetrating through the ice - that depends to a high degree on the snow cover but once it has melted the light can get through,” Dr Gerland said.

"If the ice is thinner there is more light penetrating and that light can heat the water."
Continue reading the main story
Arctic summer ice melt graphic
Continue reading the main story
1/6

The most cautious forecasts say that the Arctic might become ice-free in the summer by the 2080s or 2090s. But recently many estimates for that scenario have been brought forward.

Early research investigating the implications suggests that a massive reduction in sea ice is likely to have an impact on the path of the jet stream, the high-altitude wind that guides weather systems, including storms.

The course and speed of the jet stream is governed by the difference in temperature between the Tropics and the Arctic, so a change on the scale being observed now could be felt across Europe and beyond.

Alan Thorpe of the European Weather Centre explains the link between melting ice in the Arctic and the UK’s poor summer

Kim Holmen of the NPI explained how the connection might work.

"When the Arctic is ice free, it is not white any more and it will absorb more sunlight and that change will influence wind systems and where the precipitation comes.

“For northern Europe it could mean much more precipitation, while southern Europe will become drier so there are large scale shifts across the entire continent.”

That assessment is mirrored by work at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting, based in the British town of Reading.

The centre’s director-general, Alan Thorpe, said the link between the Arctic melt and European weather was complicated but it is now the subject of research.

“Where Arctic sea ice is reducing in summer - and if we have warmer than average sea surface temperatures in the north-west Atlantic - these twin factors together lead to storms being steered over the UK in summer which is not the normal situation and leads to our poorer summers.”

But the research is in its earliest stages. For science, the Arctic itself is hard to decipher. The effects of its rapid melt are even tougher.

5

[QUOTE=tugsailor;81621]Shell Oil poised for new era on cold frontier Posted on September 7, 2012 at 6:50 pm by Jennifer A. Dlouhy in Drilling, Environment, Offshore, Oil, Safety
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		 				 											 							[IMG]http://fuelfix.com/files/2011/07/Discoverer1-306x229.jpg[/IMG]							The Noble Discoverer drill ship is set to begin drilling in Alaska's Chukchi Sea. (Photo Courtesy of Shell Oil Co.)
					
				 									
			WASHINGTON — A new era of  oil exploration in the Arctic frontier is set to begin this weekend,  when Shell  is slated to launch drilling in the Chukchi Sea.

After connecting the Noble Discoverer drillship to anchors at Shell Oil’s Burger Prospect on Friday, the company is set to begin boring an 8.5-inch-wide pilot hole that will extend roughly 1,400 feet below the seabed, creating the foundation for the oil well to come and ensuring no physical obstructions or hidden gas pockets are in the way.
Shell then plans to excavate a 20-foot by 40-foot mud cellar to hold emergency equipment called a blowout preventer that is a last defense against unexpected surges of oil and gas from the well. Although blowout preventers generally rest above the sea floor, the location of Shell’s below the seabed is designed to keep it clear of any large ice floes.
Later, Shell will drill a wider hole about 1,300 feet below the seafloor, filling it with drillpipe and cementing it into place.
Although oil companies drilled more than 30 wells in the Chukchi Sea and the Beaufort sea to its east starting in 1982, Shell’s exploration is the first in a decade.

Federal regulators are barring the company from drilling into oil- and gas-bearing zones until a critical oil spill containment system is on site. And for now, that containment barge, the Arctic Challenger, is still in Washington state, where it has been undergoing retrofits and is ready for trials.
“Testing on the first-ever Arctic containment system is planned for this weekend,” said Shell spokeswoman Kelly op de Weegh.
The containment barge must win certification from the Coast Guard and approval from the Interior Department’s Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement before it can begin a trek of at least two weeks to Arctic waters north of Alaska.
It appears unlikely Shell will be able to complete a single Chukchi Sea well this year, unless regulators relax a Sept. 24 deadline for drilling in hydrocarbon-bearing zones in the region.
The company has asked regulators to grant it 18 extra days to continue drilling in the Chukchi Sea.
Similar drilling in the Beaufort Sea could continue until Oct. 31, but that work has not yet been approved and would be blocked anyway while native Alaskans conduct their fall hunt of the bowhead whale migrating through the area.
Shell’s conical Kulluk drilling unit is now near the Beaufort Sea prospect waiting for the conclusion of the whale hunt to move closer in.
The recent mooring work took longer than anticipated, slowed in part by heavy seas on Friday. Crews connected Discoverer to eight anchors, staged on the seafloor in a circular pattern more than 6,500 feet across.
Shell will need government-approved amendments to its well permit to continue drilling the Burger well and go beyond the initial top-hole drilling at the site.
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar told reporters last week that Shell’s work is being conducted “under the closest oversight and most rigorous safety standards ever.”
Safety bureau inspectors will be on the Discoverer drillship around the clock.
A fleet of vessels flanks the Discoverer, including the Fennica, which carries a capping stack system for reining in a runaway well.
Op de Weegh said the oil spill response vessel Nanuq and supply vessel Harvey Spirit are handling refueling for the fleet, drawing fuel from the Affinity tanker located nearby. The icebreaker Nordica also is in the region.
Environmental activists complained that regulators appeared to be bending over backward to accommodate Shell’s plans, despite major recent setbacks.
The Discoverer drillship dragged its anchor in Dutch Harbor earlier this year. Deadlines for the completion of the Challenger have long since come and gone. And last Friday, the Environmental Protection Agency gave Shell permission to operate the Discoverer in the Arctic, even though the company had conceded it could not meet previously permitted air pollution limits.
The company has spent nearly $5 billion preparing to drill in the region.
The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that the area north of the Arctic Circle contains 90 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil and 1,670 trillion cubic feet of technically recoverable natural gas.

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more great news.
glad for all involved…