Greenland’s oil hunt might trigger disaster
OFFSHORE: The Greenlandic self-ruled government’s environmental adviser, National Centre for Environment and Energy at the University of Aarhus / DCE, are warning that oil exploration in the rich and fragile Arctic environment can have disastrous consequences.
According to ingenøren.dk, DCE has published the first strategic environmental assessment of future oil and gas activities in the Greenlandic part of the Labrador Sea and the southeastern Davis Strait.
The most serious potential accidents associated with oil activities is major oil spills. It can happen during a blowout, or by an accident during storage or wile transporting the oil. Although those accidents are fairly rarely occuring today, a risk of such character should not be forgotten according to the environmental assessment, which not only takes knowledge from existing sources, published and unpublished, but also the results of new field studies to describe the physical and biological environment, including protected areas and endangered species, light levels and human exploitation of natural resources.
It appears, however, that there are still large gaps in this knowledge, such as the characteristics of iceberg masses and dimensions along Greenland’s coast; the last Danish study was conducted in the late 1970s. Seeing that icebergs are frequent in precisely the investigated area, the absence of systematic measurements of their maximum draft is a serious deficiency.
Conclusively the gaps in knowledge are to be filled out in order to create more licenses in the area, and until that has been done, the environmental assessment to be regarded as preliminary.
So far the Greenland Mineral Resources Directorate has only licensed exploration of hydrocarbons. The phase also includes plenty of risks of serious environmental impacts ranging from damage to the baleen whales from seismic surveys and release of toxic chemicals to the growth of CO2 emissions, where just a single exploration well results in a significant increase in Greenlandic discharge of kuldioxide.
Source: ingenøren.dk
