Polar bear makes marathon swim 426 miles across Arctic seas

 
A polar bear in Alaska swam nine days across the Beaufort Sea before finding a piece of ice to haul out on, scientists at the U.S. Geological Survey, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the University of Wyoming have learned.

Her yearling cub didn't make it. What a scientist called the "ordeal" of Bear 20741 was documented in the journal Polar Biology, and while it may not have been unprecedented -- shrinking Arctic ice has led to frequent reports not only of long-distance swims, but even cannibalism -- the study provided some of the best documentation to date of the real-world conditions of a polar bear on a warming planet.

Researchers outfitted the bear with a GPS-equipped collar, and also a temperature sensor planted deep under her skin to track how her body adapted to swimming constantly in the frigid waters.

The bear lost more than 100 pounds during the swim, which began east of Barrow, Alaska and ended, after ranging more than 400 miles offshore, back at the Beaufort coast near the Canadian border.

-- Kim Murphy

Photo: Shrinking Arctic ice has led to frequent reports of not only long-distance swims by polar bears, but cannibalism as well. (This is not the polar bear that made the nine-day swim.) Credit: Arctic Bear Productions

RELATED: Polar bear's long swim illustrates ice melt

Initial proposal designating critical habitat for polar bears in the Arctic

Polar bears increasingly seen on land around Barrow, Alaska

 

 

West Coast coal exports to China challenged on greenhouse gases

 
Plans to open the first major coal export facility on the West Coast are likely to be delayed until next year because of an appeal filed by a coalition of environmental groups, which say shipping coal to Asia throws a wrench in U.S. efforts to reduce international greenhouse gas emissions.

On Nov. 23, commissioners in Cowlitz County, Washington, approved the 5.7-million-ton-a-year shipping facility on the Columbia River. The appeal argues that efforts to shut down coal-fired power plants in the U.S. are fruitless if American coal, unburned here, goes to power plants in China.

"The Pacific Northwest has dedicated a tremendous amount of energy to trying to reduce our coal use, and now the state of Washington would be allowing a massive amount of coal to be exported from our shores, while at the same time shutting down coal plants here," said Brett VandenHeuvel, executive director of Columbia Riverkeepr, one of four organizations asking the state Shoreline Hearings Board to overturn the permit.

Coal originating from the Powder River Basin in Wyoming and Montana would travel to Washington via rail to a former aluminum plant site in Longview. From there, Millennium Bulk Logistics, a subsidiary of Ambre Energy, proposes to ship it to clients in Asia, chiefly China.

Though there have been small-scale shipments in the Western U.S., British Columbia has handled the bulk of the region's coal exports. The Longview facility is only the first of several proposed along the West Coast, as coal producers scramble to adjust to markets that are booming in Asia and dwindling in the U.S.

Joseph Cannon, Millennium's chief executive, said shipping Montana and Wyoming coal to China would  result in fewer harmful emissions -- including of mercury, some of whose presence in the Columbia River has been traced to Asian industry -- because the coal is cleaner.

"China is building coal-fired electric power plants like crazy," Cannon said. "They have a near-insatiable appetite for electricity over there. So they're going to burn coal. This coal is vastly cleaner than the coal that's being burned in China. Not just less mercury, but less sulphur and less nitrogen. That's not a greenhouse gas, of course, but this will make it better for the people of China."

Arctic waters open for "cautious" leasing after 2012

 
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar's announcement about a "cautious" approach to offshore oil development opens the door to leasing new waters in the Arctic after 2012 and clears the way for full review of a proposed new exploratory well in the Beaufort Sea as early as next summer.

The proposal has been greeted with cheers by many in Alaska who've been waiting to move into the new offshore frontier of the Far North, but conservationists warned that more studies should have been done before including the Arctic in the administration's 2012-17 Outer Continental Shelf leasing plan.

“It is disturbing that Interior proposes to evaluate including the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas in the 2012-2017 five-year plan, despite a severe lack of information and an inability to clean up oil spills in Arctic conditions,” a coalition of the nation’s biggest environmental organizations said in a statement.

“We will proceed with utmost caution,” Salazar said, adding that “cautious, limited exploratory activities” can help improve scientific understanding of the remote, little-known region. He said no new leases would be offered before 2013, and even then, they would proceed only after comprehensive studies of environmental impacts and oil spill cleanup capabilities.

In one of the most closely watched developments, Officials also said they were proceeding with a final environmental assessment for Shell Oil’s proposal to drill at least one exploratory well in the Beaufort Sea as early as next summer, which would be the first substantial new drilling in U.S. Arctic waters in many years.

That announcement was applauded by Shell, whose more ambitious program to drill several wells in both the Beaufort and Chukchi seas has been held up in the courts by conservation and Native Alaska groups concerned that oil operations in one of the world’s most fragile environments could lead to disaster.

National monument status urged for Arctic National Wildlife Refuge

 

Forget healthcare reform, cap and trade, deficit reduction. For congressional stalemates, there's no more evergreen a fight than whether to drill for oil in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Don't expect it to get resolved next year. With the Republicans taking over the House, a new drilling bill is likely to get slightly more traction than an equally inevitable move to try to lock up the refuge as wilderness.

But with the 50th anniversary of the refuge coming up next month, some of the nation's biggest environmental groups hope to persuade President Obama to play a trump card, and designate the refuge as a national monument.  Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) headed a list of 25 senators in a letter backing full permanent protection for the refuge. 

"By being designated a national monument under the antiquities act, we believe that it would send an additional message to the Congress and to the public about the resource values of this area, and we hope that would help discourage future efforts to legislatively promote drilling in the refuge," said Robert Dewey, vice president for government relations at the Defenders of Wildlife.

But as usual, Alaska's congressional delegation is forming a mighty wall aimed at holding off any new attempts to impose additional federal controls. The state's Democratic senator, Mark Begich, downplayed talk of a monument and said new directional drilling technology can allow oil companies to access the petroleum reserves under the refuge from outside, without despoiling the wildlife-rich coastal plain.

"We should be discussing how to make that happen, and reduce America’s dependence on foreign oil, rather than writing more letters that paint  [the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge] as this last bastion of wilderness," Begich said in a statement. "I would invite all of these senators to come to Alaska and see first-hand how we do exploration correctly on the North Slope, the millions of acres already protected in ANWR, and the relatively small area of ANWR that would ever be touched for development.”

RELATED: An Arctic oil spill could linger for years

                    Shell proposes to move forward in Beaufort sea

                    Arctic sea ice reaches historic summer low

-- Kim Murphy

Photo: The 1002 area of the coastal plain on the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, a 1.5 million-acre section of the refuge set aside for possible future oil and gas development. Credit: Associated Press

An Arctic oil spill could linger for years

 

Almost everyone can agree that, however bad the Deepwater Horizon oil blowout in the Gulf of Mexico was, a major spill in an icy Arctic sea would be worse. How much worse? A new report commissioned by the Pew Environment Group tries to examine that question, and the answer is: Get ready for a cleanup that could take years.

Pulling together a lot of the existing research on cleanup technologies and how well they might work under the kind of nightmare scenarios that are all too easy to imagine -- a spill underneath a solid sheet of pack ice, for example, or oil that attaches itself to drifting ice floes and travels hundreds of miles out to sea.

Cleanup could be hampered by wintertime temperatures that drop on average to minus 49 degrees, fierce Arctic storms, endless darkness and fog that shrouds the region for more than half the days of the year, said the report, prepared by Nuka Research and Planning Group LLC, and Pearson Consulting LLC.

BP's upcoming Liberty production unit, slated to pump oil from beneath the Beaufort Sea by means of long-range drilling tunnels reaching from near shore, has the potential for a blowout of 20,000 barrels a day -- the highest rate in the U.S. Arctic, the report said.

"A blowout from a Beaufort Sea well that occurs during the end of the brief open-water season could continue uncontrolled over the nine-month ice season and result in a spill larger than the Deepwater Horizon blowout that is trapped within and among sea ice until the spring melt," it warned.

The big reason for concern, the survey suggests, is the wide body of research that indicates all the various and confounding places oil can end up in an ice-strewn environment: trapped in "ice pancakes," frozen in place, seeping beneath the pack ice, or caught in the structure of "grease ice."

"Ice floes may transport oil hundreds of miles from the spill source. The slick can also move underneath ice floes...or be tossed on top of them in wave action," the report said. "Oil trapped under multiyear ice could remain in the marine environment for many years...and may not be released until it slowly migrates to the surface. Some scientists estimate that oil could be trapped under multiyear ice for up to a decade."

Shell proposes to move forward in Beaufort Sea

 

With the BP oil well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico successfully contained, Shell Alaska announced that it has filed an application to proceed with exploratory offshore drilling in the Beaufort Sea off Alaska.

The Obama administration suspendedall offshore operations in the remote, fragile Arctic seas this year in the wake of the BP spill, but Shell officials said they have prepared a more robust oil blowout containment plan and are ready to proceed next summer with a single well 17 miles off the North Slope.

The company said it is postponing an even more controversial plan to drill in the more-distant Chukchi Sea until litigation over that proposal is resolved.

“We think we’ve got what we need in place to make a strong program even stronger,” Pete Slaiby, Shell Alaska’s vice president, said in a conference call with reporters in Anchorage.

The company has not submitted a new exploration plan, as drilling critics have sought, but has scaled back its original drilling schedule and put into place new oil spill containment equipment, including a dome that could be quickly put over a leaking well, and a beefed-up blowout preventer.

In addition, Shell said it is proposing to install a subsea panel that would allow the blowout preventer to be engaged in an emergency, even if the connection were lost between the emergency device and the surface drilling rig.

In coordination with research now underway in the Gulf of Mexico, the company is continuing to look for ways to build a containment cap that would allow any blowout to be immediately sealed. The containment dome now proposed would collect oil from any blowout and funnel it to surface vessels for collection, much like what happened for several months after the BP blowout.

“We have every reason to believe the administration will permit 2011 exploration drilling in Alaska,” Slaiby said in a statement. “The president himself endorsed our Alaska exploration program last spring. Unfortunately, the Deepwater Horizon tragedy occurred and led to a suspension of offshore activities in Alaska. Since then, Shell has taken extraordinary steps to build confidence around our 2011 program, which involves a limited number of exploration wells in shallow water with unprecedented, on-site oil spill response capability.”

 

'Avatar' director urges slowdown for Canadian oil sands

The epically ruinous "unobtainium" mine on Pandora that provided the scene of most of the villainy in James Cameron's hit movie "Avatar" was modeled, he said, on an open pit copper mine. But that hasn't stopped many in his native Canada and elsewhere from comparing it to the massive oil sands developments underway in northern Alberta -- something the director has called a "black eye" on his homeland's reputation as an environmental leader.

This week, in the latest case of focusing star power on zones of environmental controversy, Cameron traveled to Alberta for a first-hand look at the oil sands, a coda to his much-publicized jaunts to the Amazon rain forest earlier this year.

"What you see in pictures is nothing compared to what you experience when you fly over it, and you just see this devastation going from horizon to horizon," Cameron said in a telephone interview at the conclusion of his trip. "And to think that only 3% of this resource has been developed so far. The scale of this thing is just unimaginable."

First Nations aboriginal representatives, who brought to the director emotional, sometimes tearful testimony of polluted waters, deformed fish and early cancer deaths, have begged Cameron to become a spokesman for the fight to stop the carbon-intensive extraction of heavy oil trapped in sands and clay -- one of the most important new sources of hydrocarbon energy for North America.

Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach, in turn, pledged that the film director would get a different, more positive view of the massive new energy projects after their meeting on Wednesday, a helicopter tour of the region and on-the-ground demonstrations hosted by oil company engineers.

Cameron's take-away: Slow down and get more science.

"There are a lot of people in the First Nations community and the environmental community who would love to see it stopped. I don't think that's practical, I don't think it's going to happen, and I'm not convinced it should be stopped," he said. "If we move aggressively to a renewable energy future, which we should be doing, we still have to have a viable interim plan that involves burning fossil fuels. And I'd rather see us, since we're going to be burning oil for a while, burning oil that is more secure, in the sense that it originates in North America, rather than OPEC oil."