Seattle Councilmember Mike O’Brien’s head floats atop Elliott Bay like a beach ball. The rest of his body is submerged in the 50 degree water, a drysuit holding back the Bay’s chill. This is his second time in the water today; after an initial, embarrassing spill while launching from a rocky gray beach in West Seattle, he’s reluctantly re-dunked himself in order to learn how to un-capsize his kayak.
“My body didn’t want to go into that water,” says O’Brien afterward, laughing. “It’s, uh, definitely refreshing.”
He’s here with maybe 25 other kayaktivists, training for a row-down showdown against Shell’s arctic exploration fleet in mid-May (family-friendly floating protests on May 16, and a non-specified “direct action” on May 18). The oil behemoth intends to drill exploratory wells in the Chukchi Sea off the northwest coast of Alaska, where it hopes to find “some of the most prolific, undeveloped hydrocarbon basins left in North America,” according to Shell spokesperson Curtis Smith. This would a big, long-term project: if Shell strikes black gold in the cold north, says Smith, that oil won’t appear on the market for more than a decade.
To that end, Shell planned to use Terminal 5 of the Port of Seattle as a repair site for its exploration fleet before setting sail toward frigid, potentially lucrative northern seas. Planned, in the past-tense. Now Shell hopes to use Terminal 5, since the Seattle Department of Planning and Development concluded on Monday that the Port played a little bit too fast and loose when it quietly leased Terminal 5 to Shell-proxy Foss Maritime earlier this year. Oops: “An additional use permit is required for the proposed seasonal moorage at the Port of Seattle’s Terminal 5 facility of a drilling rig and accompanying tugboats,” the finding stated. Shell will need to get that new permit sooner rather than later if it wants to take full advantage of the arctic drilling season, which runs from July 1st through October.
Whether or not Shell and Foss Maritime get that permit is ultimately up to the Port Commission (whose next public meeting is at 1pm on Tuesday, May 12th at Pier 69 on Alaskan Way). This is the same Commission that originally OK’d the Terminal 5 lease. But it’s also the same Commission that’s been receiving enormous pressure from the public and other elected officials to find a way to nix that lease.
“A lot of folks have said, ‘Look, this is a done deal. Like it or don’t like it, there’s not much we can do about it,’” says O’Brien. “There’s now something we can do about it.”
Port spokesperson Peter McGraw declines to “speak for [the commissioners] or where they’re at” on the issue of a new permit until the Port’s lawyers have reviewed DPD’s finding. “Anything else would just be speculation,” he says.
The DPD’s finding is purely a technical one regarding Port policies, not touching on the environmental impacts of the Shell drilling rig. But don’t think climate change isn’t on the city’s mind. It’s embarrassing, for a city that regards itself as a leader in sustainability, to find itself the repair garage for a fleet that’s endeavoring to drill, baby, drill. Counting the ongoing debate over oil and coal trains through Seattle, the Shell rig counts as at least the third fight Seattle has had with corporations hoping to use the city as a weight station for its carbon industry. Mayor Ed Murray said in a statement Monday accompanying his administration’s finding on the rig that warned these companies that they will continue to have headaches with Seattle. “To prevent the full force of climate change, it’s time to turn the page on things like coal trains, oil trains and oil drilling rigs,” Murray said.
The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management reckons Shell could profitably pull 4.3 billion barrels of crude oil from Alaska’s ocean shore, in part with the rigs soon to be calling port in Seattle.. Economists estimate the social cost of the carbon released when that oil is burned–the negative effects which, like a fart in an elevator, don’t have a price tag but end up hurting everyone–to be about $11.23 per burned barrel of oil. That means the rig coming here now could cost society at large $48 billion, real dollar impacts that stay off Shell’s books because oil companies have successfully convinced enough people that oil companies aren’t responsible for global warming.
That’s the lowball cost, Greenpeace wonk John Deans says As Greenpeace has argued in court, government estimates put the total amount of “technically recoverable” oil beneath the Chukchi Sea at 15.38 billion barrels (although it could be as high as 40 billion). Multiply a social cost of $11.23 per barrel by a potential oil reserve of 15.38 billion barrels and you get just a hair over $172 billion worth of carbon farts that the public will pay for if Shell’s arctic drilling plan proceeds.
For comparison, total carbon emissions for the lowball estimate would be equivalent to 12.3 years of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline pumping at full capacity; the highball estimate would be equivalent to 44 years. And Deans cautions that the Chukchi project is a kind of test-run for other drilling in the arctic, which already has 10 percent of the world’s known oil reserves and is estimated to hold another 90 billion undiscovered barrels. If the Chukchi project succeeds, Shell and other companies may decide it’s worth their while to invest in more arctic drilling.
It’s unclear how long this city–between its kayaktivists and the infamous “Seattle process”–will be able to hold off the exploration. But if O’Brien’s head bobbing in Elliott Bay is any indication, it will be spectacle as long is it does.
