Alaska’s main oil and gas regulatory body has ordered a review of all North Slope wells after a spill last spring was connected to thawing permafrost, subsidence and a cracked casing.
The emergency order, issued Monday by the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (AOGCC), said the outer casing that cracked had been set in the permafrost.
In April, one of BP’s older wells leaked oil and gas for days before it could be shut down. The company reported that roughly 45,000 kilograms of gas and 63 gallons of crude leaked. According to Alaska Public Media, BP blamed the failure then on a piece of a well casing that buckled under pressure from thawing permafrost.
As a result, the AOGCC said it has ordered all companies on the North Slope to review their wells to look for similar issues and to shut down any wells that have the same construction.
In parts of the Arctic, permafrost is thawing as temperatures warm due to climate change. But on the North Slope, the thawing that can cause problems at oil wells is likely to be attributed to human error.
Tim Robertson, an oil spill response and prevention consultant who has worked on the North Slope, said that companies typically use a packing fluid between the pipe that carries the oil or gas and its outer casing. “That fluid is intended to protect the heat transfer from the products being produced so it doesn’t transfer out to the permafrost,” he said. “It’s like an insulation.”
Failing to protect the permafrost can have extreme consequences. “A well goes thousands of feet through the permafrost, and that whole layer has to be protected or the integrity of the well itself is threatened if the heat transfers and melts.”
Though the call for a review of all wells is not unprecedented, Robertson said, it’s also not an everyday occurrence.
AOGCC Commissioner Kathy Foerster told Alaska Public Media that the BP well that leaked was older, and that she didn’t anticipate newer fields on the North Slope having similarly designed wells. Operators on the slope will have until the end of the year to complete their review.
About This Story
Perhaps you noticed: This story, like all the news we publish, is free to read. That’s because Inside Climate News is a 501c3 nonprofit organization. We do not charge a subscription fee, lock our news behind a paywall, or clutter our website with ads. We make our news on climate and the environment freely available to you and anyone who wants it.
That’s not all. We also share our news for free with scores of other media organizations around the country. Many of them can’t afford to do environmental journalism of their own. We’ve built bureaus from coast to coast to report local stories, collaborate with local newsrooms and co-publish articles so that this vital work is shared as widely as possible.
Two of us launched ICN in 2007. Six years later we earned a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting, and now we run the oldest and largest dedicated climate newsroom in the nation. We tell the story in all its complexity. We hold polluters accountable. We expose environmental injustice. We debunk misinformation. We scrutinize solutions and inspire action.
Donations from readers like you fund every aspect of what we do. If you don’t already, will you support our ongoing work, our reporting on the biggest crisis facing our planet, and help us reach even more readers in more places?
Please take a moment to make a tax-deductible donation. Every one of them makes a difference.
Thank you,
Sabrina Shankman
Reporter, Maine
Sabrina Shankman is a reporter for InsideClimate News focusing on the Arctic. She joined InsideClimate in the fall of 2013, after helping produce documentaries and interactives for the PBS show “Frontline” since 2010 with 2over10 Media. She worked as a co-producer, field producer or associate producer on the Frontline films League of Denial (2013); Money, Power and Wall Street (2012); A Perfect Terrorist (2011); Dr. Hotspots (2011) and Law and Disorder (2010). In 2012, she produced the online interactive A Perfect Terrorist: David Coleman Headley’s Web of Betrayal, which won an Overseas Press Club of America award. She is the author of Meltdown: Terror at the Top of the World. She has also reported for ProPublica, the Wall Street Journal and the Associated Press. Her work has been honored by the Society of Professional Journalists and the Society of Environmental Journalists, and she was named a finalist for the Livingston Awards for Young Journalists in 2010 and again in 2015. Shankman has a Masters in Journalism from UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism.
