Black Sea oil spill: who's to blame?

Russian workers point to oil as the problem
Sergei L. Loiko and Megan K. Stack, Los Angeles Times 15 Nov 07;

"Somebody is making millions of dollars by selling oil and sending those ancient tankers to our shore, ready to sink at any minute. But they are not here to help with this mess, are they? Where are the trucks? Where is the heavy machinery we need?"

"It's the disaster we've been dreading for many years. It's not a spill on a vast scale, like some of the massive oil spills, but the Black Sea is a totally enclosed basin. There's no place for the oil to go, except on shore somewhere."

"Giving Russian businessmen a chance to trade in oil is like giving children matches to play with"

Black Sea oil spill blamed on Russia's lax standards
Fred Weir, Yahoo News 16 Nov 07;

"We're extremely worried about attempts to open the Arctic, which is still a unique and untouched ecosystem," says Mr. Slivyak. "The safety record of Russian oil and gas companies is very low, and there's little indication that they learn from incidents like what happened in Kerch this week. I fear that when they start exploring in the far north, we can expect the same kind of carelessness."


Russian workers point to oil as the problem
Sergei L. Loiko and Megan K. Stack, Los Angeles Times 15 Nov 07;

TUZLA SPIT, RUSSIA -- Crunching through oil-crusted seashells scattered on fouled beaches among dead and dying birds, exhausted volunteers fumed Wednesday about the uneven distribution of Russia's petroleum wealth.

As far as the eye could see, the pale sands of this narrow finger poking into the Black Sea were coated with a heavy film of black and piles of oil-soaked seaweed. A strong smell of diesel hung in the air.

Three days after a mighty storm cracked a decrepit tanker in two and dumped 2,000 tons of oil into the Kerch Strait, a small army of workers toiled to clear the mess.

Dead dolphins began to wash ashore, adding to the thousands of birds and untold numbers of fish known to have been poisoned.

"Somebody is making millions of dollars by selling oil and sending those ancient tankers to our shore, ready to sink at any minute," said Alexander Gayduk, a middle-aged farmworker from nearby Taman. "But they are not here to help with this mess, are they? Where are the trucks? Where is the heavy machinery we need?"

"All of our problems are because of this oil," said vineyard worker Alexander Ostapenko, 43. "But what's in it for us? They are polluting our sea and land."

With oil prices soaring, Russia is earning vast sums through petroleum exports. The country's oil income not only is fueling the increasingly assertive foreign policy of President Vladimir V. Putin's government, but creating a new class of fabulously wealthy businessmen, many with ties to the Kremlin.

The government says oil accounts for about half of Russia's economy; some analysts say the figure is much higher. Up to a third of the exported oil moves through the Black Sea.

Russia and Ukraine agreed Wednesday to form a working group led by the deputy transportation ministers of each country to combat the effects of the oil spill, Ukrainian Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich said in Kiev, the Ukrainian capital. He said that he and Russian Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov, who flew to the region Tuesday to oversee cleanup efforts, also agreed to develop joint plans for dealing with other emergencies.

The oil spill was only the latest in a history of man-made insults to the Black Sea, which once was a famously polluted, low-oxygen "dead zone." The sea's fortunes improved when the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 put an end to central economic planning and closed down giant feedlots and pig farms.

Since then, the Black Sea has come back to life. Fisheries had steadily improved, along with other sea life and water quality, said Laurence Mee, a British oceanographer who coordinates the United Nations' Black Sea Environmental Program.

But with the world ever thirstier for fuel, the Black Sea has also turned into what Mee calls "the great superhighway for oil," bustling with tankers hauling oil pumped in Central Asia, the Caspian Sea and Russia.

"It's the disaster we've been dreading for many years," Mee said. "It's not a spill on a vast scale, like some of the massive oil spills, but the Black Sea is a totally enclosed basin. There's no place for the oil to go, except on shore somewhere."

Mee predicted that the spill would have a lingering effect on wildlife and tourism at Black Sea beaches and nature preserves in Russia and Ukraine.

Here on the Tuzla Spit, some of the birds that were still alive tried to fly away Wednesday, but their wings wouldn't carry them. They tried to shake off the slimy black coat, but couldn't.

So they sat quiet as black silhouettes against the rocks, trying to get warm against the autumn wind and waiting to die. Seagulls circled overhead, waiting to feast on their corpses.

Firefighters, farmworkers and soldiers spread out over the sands. A cluster of soldiers in heavy rubber chemical suits moved slowly among the black-coated boulders, armed with spades and pitchforks. Sweat ran down their faces.

"Comrade lieutenant," pleaded one, "can we take off these costumes?"

"No," the young commander replied from the road. "You don't want to get sick if the rain comes back again."

Asked whether his men were volunteers, the officer laughed. "Yes, they are. They are ordered to volunteer."

Nearby, a fisherman named Alexander Vnukov stood in his motorboat, fuming. Facing the collapse of his livelihood, he had hoped to salvage his nets. But he found them ruined, clogged with oil.

"We caught a lot of fish, but we had to throw it all away. The fish smelled like oil," he said. "Who would want to buy it? Even I wouldn't eat it."

The closest town is Taman, onetime home to ancient Greeks and considered one of Russia's oldest settlements. Today, bleak rows of dusty and dilapidated houses give no hint of the town's rich history. Jobs are scarce, so most residents eke out a livelihood off the thousands of vacationers and fishermen who flock to the isolated shores. Now, they are fearful for their future.

"This catastrophe hit my business right in the eye," griped Yevgeny Tupilkin, a 47-year-old owner of a fishing shop.

On Wednesday, townspeople lamented the loss of tourists and swapped theories about who was to blame for the breakup of the Volganeft-139 tanker, built in Bulgaria in 1978. The vessel, which belonged to the Moscow-based oil shipping company Volgotanker, broke apart in a stretch of water between Russia and Ukraine known for rough seas and high winds.

People accused the Russian government, Ukraine, oil tycoons, or the captains of wrecked ships who failed to heed storm warnings.

Hearing the last criticism, a former cargo vessel assistant captain jumped to their defense.

"What could they do?" said Vladimir Alexeyev, 53. "We ended up with two scrap-metal, flat-bottomed, ancient river tankers caught up in the middle of a real, big-time sea storm. The captains are not the only guilty party here. The system itself is to blame."

Taman town council member Igor Golubenkov agreed.

"Giving Russian businessmen a chance to trade in oil is like giving children matches to play with," Golubenkov said.

The cleanup was inching slowly forward. About 1,000 volunteers were working by Wednesday, and 1,000 students were expected to join the effort today.

A rescue helicopter hovered over the water, scanning the sea for signs of five missing Russian seamen. The bodies of three seamen washed ashore Monday.

When the crews on the beach spotted the helicopter, they brightened, waving their arms at the pilot.

"We will eventually clean up our beaches," said Alexander Metashop, another Taman town council member. "Some birds will die. Some fish will die too. But that is not the end of the line. The Black Sea and the Sea of Azov will manage to mend themselves."

Loiko reported from Tuzla Spit and Stack from Moscow. Times staff writer Kenneth R. Weiss in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

Black Sea oil spill blamed on Russia's lax standards
Fred Weir, Yahoo News 16 Nov 07;

Sunday's Black Sea storm was admittedly one of the worst on record. But nature's ferocity may pale next to human recklessness as an explanation for what Russian Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov described as "the biggest mass sinking of ships" in the country's history.

"You can't blame everything on the weather," noted Mr. Zubkov, as he opened an inquiry into the disaster, in which an aged river tanker spewed at least 560,000 gallons of fuel oil in the narrow Strait of Kerch – nearly 10 times the size of San Francisco's Nov. 7 spill.

As Russia's oil exports ramp up amid spiking global prices that reached almost $100 per barrel last week, officials say ecological protection is improving. But environmentalists and critics of the burgeoningenergy industry say standards are applied selectively and warn that Russia's oil exports travel through ill-maintained pipelines, some of which are four decades old. Much domestic transport, meanwhile, operates far below world standards, they contend.

"It is the goal of the Russian government to export as much oil as possible while the prices are high and, since they are obeying official policy, the oil companies often feel they can ignore safety concerns with impunity," says Vladimir Slivyak, head of Ecodefense, an independent environmental watchdog based in Kaliningrad. "Nobody thinks about safety, everybody thinks about money," he says.

The sunken Russian oil tanker, the Volganeft-139, was a riverboat not equipped for operation on the open sea and should never have been there, experts say. The captain of that and several other ships set off into the narrow and dangerous Strait of Kerch in defiance of weather warnings, for which they may face legal action. Three bodies have washed ashore, five men are missing, and up to 30,000 birds have perished in the wake of the shipwrecks and resultant oil spill.

Better standards, but fairly applied?Oleg Mitvol, deputy chief of Russia's official environmental protection agency, says he can't comment on alleged violations in the mass sinking of ships at Kerch since the matter is under criminal investigation but insists that ecological protection is improving in Russia's oil industry.

"Companies didn't think about environmental safety at all until we started inspecting them stringently," he says. He cites his recent inspection of the private LukOil's operations in the Arctic territory of Komi, site of a 1994 accident in which 33.6 million gallons of oil flooded into the fragile tundra, where he forced the company to pledge about $3 billion for new safety technology. "Russian companies are learning to work to world standards," he says.

But critics argue that privately owned companies are disproportionately targeted for environmental checks. "LukOil spends fives times more on environmental protection than the state-owned Rosneft does," says Alexei Gruzdev, an analyst with Kortes, a Moscow-based energy consultancy. "The system is contradictory and far from ideal."

Foreign-owned oil firms can find themselves subject to crippling environmental reviews. A year ago, as the state-owned natural gas giant Gazprom maneuvered to take over Royal Dutch Shell's control of the Sakhalin-2 Pacific coast oil-and-gas development, Mr. Mitvol arrived with a team of inspectors and declared that Shell had caused up to $50 billion in damage to the delicate local ecosystem. Within weeks, Shell sold its shares in the operation to Gazprom at a steep discount.

"If relations between a company and the authorities are good, inspectors tend not to find any problems," says Mikhail Krutikhin, an analyst with RusEnergy, an independent consultancy. "If relations are bad, all kinds of troubles can crop up."

22,000 pipeline bursts per yearMost of Russia's oil exports move through the vast 50,000-km pipeline network of Transneft, the state-owned pipeline monopoly, which offers little public information about its operations. But according to Regnum, a Russian online business news service, the company suffers an average of about 10 serious leaks a year, including a 14,000-gallon spill last year on the Europe-bound Druzhba-1 pipeline.

Experts say the real nightmare is the million or so kilometers of local trunk pipelines that feed the Transneft system. "Almost all of these are obsolete, and there are spillages on a daily basis," says Alexei Kiselyov, a campaigner with Greenpeace Russia. Figures published in the World Bank's monthly World Finance Review suggest that oil pipeline bursts grew from about 19,000 in 2002 to more than 22,000 in 2005.

"Newly built facilities tend to be OK, but these are a tiny percentage of the total," says Mr. Kisleyov. "The majority are in terrible shape."

Russia is planning a vast expansion of its export network, including a 2,500-mile pipeline across eastern Siberia that would supply oil to China, east Asia, and the US.

But environmentalists say their biggest concern is planned expansion of oil and gas exploration in the untapped Arctic, particularly if Moscow's pending claim for economic control over nearly half a million square miles around the North Pole is approved by the United Nations. Russia estimates the region may contain up to 10 billion tons of petroleum.

"We're extremely worried about attempts to open the Arctic, which is still a unique and untouched ecosystem," says Mr. Slivyak. "The safety record of Russian oil and gas companies is very low, and there's little indication that they learn from incidents like what happened in Kerch this week. I fear that when they start exploring in the far north, we can expect the same kind of carelessness."