Oil giant reveals intentions for Fennica.
BY JACOB PALMER | DIGITAL NEWS EDITOR
Shell recently revealed its intentions for the ship that was delayed by protestors in Portland.
The icebreaker Fennica is headed to the Arctic to help the company expand its operations.
Bloomberg reports:
Despite the July 21 meeting’s military-like precision, peculiarities become evident. Radar shows an icebreaker called MSV Fennica heading in the wrong direction—south toward Portland. Three weeks earlier, the 380-foot vessel ripped open a 39-inch-by-2-inch gash in its hull, the result of scraping against a shallow-water hazard in Dutch Harbor, Alaska. Because the multipurpose ship also carries spill response gear, the accident caused federal regulators to restrict drilling to the topmost 3,000-foot section of Burger J—and not farther down into the oil-bearing zone—until the Fennica gets patched up in a Portland repair facility and travels 2,300 miles back north. The detour gave Greenpeace the chance to stage a social media-friendly “#ShellNo” photo op on July 30, with protesters in climbers’ slings hanging from a Portland bridge and temporarily inhibiting the Fennica’s movements, while “kayaktivists” heckled from the harbor. In another setback, U.S. wildlife officials concerned about noise-sensitive Arctic walruses have vetoed Shell’s original plan to drill two wells simultaneously. “That caught us by surprise,” Pickard concedes.
Surprise lurks in the Chukchi, whose frigid waters north of the Bering Strait span from Alaska to Siberia. Logistical and legal obstacles have repeatedly delayed the Arctic initiative, on which Shell is spending more than $1 billion a year—more than $7 billion so far and counting. The single well in the Chukchi Shell aims to excavate this summer could be the most expensive on earth, and it hasn’t yielded its first barrel of crude.
RELATED NEWS: Greenpeace (temporarily) prevents Shell oil ship from leaving Portland
Were the activists’ efforts for naught or did they secure an important moral victory, as they claim?
