The Citizen is busy scrutinizing the threat of oil spills in Canadian waters while most other media outlets appear to be dozing. Readers should be most grateful, because not only is this an issue crucial to the future of our planet, it is one we can actually do something about.
I do, however, have a bone to pick on the Citizen's assessment of what needs to be done to redress the Harper government's quiet decision to relax offshore drilling regulations -- a decision that has proven to be patently ludicrous given the ensuing disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.
In Wednesday's Citizen, two points of view were advanced on the oil spills issue. Columnist Dan Gardner pointed out how essential it is that humanity get over its insatiable dependence on fossil fuels, expressing his fears that the public will once again go back to sleep when the Gulf of Mexico spill becomes stale news. He's right -- it has happened many times before.
The lead Citizen editorial in the same edition took a complementary tack. It pointed out how an offshore spill would be even more deadly in cold Canadian waters. It also panned the federal government's decision to do away with the need to provide advance plans for drilling relief wells in case of a spill.
"Note," the editorial said, "the Canadian rules never required oil companies to drill an actual (relief) well. They just forced companies to draw up a plan, which seems enormously sensible in the wake of the BP accident."
Allow me to offer a third opinion. First, I agree with Dan Gardner in principle that we humans should be making every effort to shake our addiction to oil. But the numbers say that even if we were to make a full-tilt effort in that direction, it will take decades to reduce our dependence.
Second, while the Citizen editorial's argument that forcing companies to have a plan to put relief wells into place in the case of a spill is "sensible," much tougher steps need to be taken to get to the point at which Canadian safeguards are "enormously sensible."
Being modestly sensible isn't enough when we are talking about oil blowouts. We should be treating potential oil blowouts like potential nuclear meltdowns. Cleanup simply isn't a solution. I worked in the industry. I served for 20 years on the Senate Energy and Environment Committee. Insiders will tell you you're lucky to recover 15 per cent of an oil spill -- even in ideal conditions.
Relief wells need to be drilled before working wells. If that had been done in the Gulf of Mexico, British Petroleum wouldn't be wasting months of precious time trying to staunch the blowout.
Advance relief wells would not be drilled right into the oil pocket, but far enough down that crews could move quickly to complete the drill in the event of a blowout.
The oil industry has been pushing the National Energy Board to relax safety regulations for proposed drilling in the fragile Beaufort Sea. They claim that drilling relief wells during the same season that working wells are drilled is difficult because Arctic working seasons are so short.
In fact, the government should be stiffening regulations in this problematic area, requiring relief wells be substantially in place before working wells, but also requiring blow-out preventers of the type that failed in the Gulf of Mexico be tested regularly, with multiple redundancies in place so if one mechanism fails, another kicks in.
These two measures would cost the oil industry a lot. It will make oil at precarious wells more expensive to lift. But sooner or later --when oil prices inevitably rise -- the one thing Danny Williams and every other hands-off advocate knows, is oil will surely be lifted.
The oil drilling off Newfoundland may not be as problematic as it will be if wells are drilled in the Beaufort Sea, but nobody should be deluded into believing that a Grand Banks blowout would not endanger marine life there and in the far reaches of the Atlantic Ocean.
Here is testimony from a Committee hearing held on Oct. 24, 1990, during which I questioned Bill Hopper, then head of Petro-Canada. This is an excerpt from his testimony that day:
Hopper: Well, on ... the Grand Banks, under reasonably rough sea conditions, there is really not much you can do with a blowout. The currents would carry that oil high into the North Atlantic. ... Current from the Grand Banks could carry (Atlantic offshore) oil south of Iceland, toward Ireland, but it would never get there. It would in fact disappear. I am not suggesting that we would not have some clean-up to do. Depending on the state of the sea, we would probably have to clean some of it up.
Kenny: But not much capability? Five or 10 per cent?
Hopper: Well, if you are talking about 10- or 20-feet waves, you are not going to clean much up with that kind of sea state.
No technology has emerged that would change that scenario. Prevention of spills must be the rule, not so-called "recovery."
This should be a huge political issue on Parliament Hill right now. Instead, picayune issues rule the day. Long after we have forgotten about whether there should be a "fake lake" in Toronto, we will be wondering why we didn't take rigorous measures to protect what used to be our real waters.
Senator Colin Kenny is a former executive with Dome Petroleum. He was a member of the Senate Committee on Energy and the Environment for nearly two decades, and served as its deputy chair. E-mail: kennyco@sen.parl.gc.ca
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