Threat of oil spill menaces Russian Pacific island

Alexander Osipovich Yahoo News 25 Feb 09;

KORSAKOV, Russia (AFP) – Standing on the icy shoreline, Dmitry Lisitsyn recalled the day when over 100 dying birds washed up on this beach, coated in a thick layer of oil and helplessly flapping their wings.

"We believe there were several thousand birds killed in all," said Lisitsyn, an environmental activist on Russia's Sakhalin Island, located in the Pacific Ocean just a few dozen kilometres (miles) north of Japan.

"In such weather few birds can make it all the way to shore covered in oil without drowning. Most drown out there in the sea," Lisitsyn added, waving his hand at the frigid waters of Aniva Bay near the island's southern tip.

Activists fear that the incident late last month could be a sign of things to come on Sakhalin, whose rich oil and gas fields have drawn billions of dollars' worth of investment in recent years.

The development of Sakhalin's energy industry has brought jobs and gleaming new business centres to this impoverished piece of Russia that used to be a prison colony in the 19th century.

It also promises to serve energy-hungry Asian economies, as underlined by the new liquefied natural gas (LNG) plant expected to send its first cargo to Japan next month.

But locals worry about the ecological impact on Sakhalin, a long and narrow island whose 800-kilometre (500-mile) length includes forests, taiga and rivers rich in salmon.

Kim Limanzo, a fisherman from the town of Nogliki in northern Sakhalin, complains that fish populations have suffered since drilling began at offshore oil and gas fields nearby.

"Sometimes the fish tastes like oil," he said.

Activists have called for stronger safeguards to prevent a major spill, noting that tankers visiting Sakhalin must navigate harsh and icy waters and cross narrow straits spiked with dangerous rocks.

"It is a question of when, not if, an oil spill will happen on Sakhalin," said Leah Zimmerman, head of Russia programmes at Pacific Environment, a US-based group that monitors ecological threats in the Pacific region.

"Spills can come from extraction wells, subsea pipelines, or a major tanker accident like the Exxon Valdez spill," she said by e-mail, referring to the notorious 1989 spill in Alaska.

Others fear that the Trans-Sakhalin pipeline, which runs underground from northern Sakhalin to Aniva Bay in the south, could leak and spill tonnes of crude oil into rivers where salmon come to spawn.

In 2006 the Russian government accused Sakhalin Energy, the consortium that built the pipeline, of environmental abuses including the endangerment of salmon spawning areas.

The legal dispute was settled after Russian state-run energy giant Gazprom bought a majority stake in the consortium, which had previously been led by British-Dutch oil major Shell.

"There were some things that we did not get right the first time, but I think we learned and adapted what we were doing," Sakhalin Energy chief executive Ian Craig told AFP last week.

Craig stressed that the worst was over: "All of these impacts were limited to the construction phase. In two or three years' time people will largely not know where the pipeline is," he said.

But activists note that Sakhalin is seismically active and worry that the pipeline could be ruptured by an earthquake or a landslide, potentially devastating salmon runs.

January's incident in which dying, oily birds washed up in Aniva Bay has also raised fears of a major spill along Sakhalin's coast.

The cause of the incident has yet to be established, but it took place near the terminal operated by Sakhalin Energy where tankers load up on crude.

Lisitsyn does believe it was necessarily caused by a spill from a tanker, however, saying it could have been caused by an accidental discharge of oil from a cargo vessel.

Still, he fears it could presage a big spill like the Exxon Valdez disaster of March 1989, when the Exxon-operated tanker hit a reef and released over a quarter of a million barrels of oil into Alaska's Prince William Sound.

"Exactly 20 years ago the Exxon Valdez oil spill took place in Alaska," Lisitsyn said. "We are very afraid that something similar could happen here."

Natives in Russia's far east worry about vanishing fish
Alexander Osipovich Yahoo News 25 Feb 09;

VENI, Russia (AFP) – There is only one family left in this once-thriving fishing village on the northeastern shores of Sakhalin Island, where the Nivkhs, a small indigenous ethnic group, have lived for centuries.

But on a recent winter day, Pyotr Popka was not lamenting the fact that there are only 2,500 of his fellow Nivkhs on Sakhalin or that only several dozen of them can still converse in the Nivkh language.

The 27-year-old fisherman was instead concerned about the lack of fish.

"Every year there are fewer and fewer," Popka complained after returning by snowmobile from a disappointing trip to haul up his family's fish traps from beneath the ice of Nyisky Bay, a small inlet of the Sea of Okhotsk.

The Nivkhs have long grown accustomed to the harsh climate of Sakhalin, a large island in Russia's far east located much closer to Japan and China than Moscow, seven time zones away.

They survived the Soviet era when they were forced onto collective farms and their children were made to study Russian in a bid to modernise their ancient culture of fishing, hunting and gathering.

But now it is capitalism which is changing their lives, in the form of huge offshore oil and gas projects that have brought Sakhalin billions of dollars' worth of investment but also, the Nivkhs say, deeply eroded fish stocks.

"When the drilling began, the problems started," Popka said as he stood outside his family's wooden house. "Before that there were fish."

At an oil field just a few kilometres (miles) away, pumpjacks rock back and forth and pipes belch fire over a patch of blackened soil, burning off unneeded gas, a legacy of the Soviet oil industry that began on Sakhalin in the 1920s.

However the offshore projects launched in the 1990s, led by foreign oil majors Shell and Exxon, pose an even greater danger to indigenous groups and their way of life, said Nivkh activist Alexei Limanzo.

Fish stocks crucial to the Nivkhs have been in a "depressed state" since offshore development started, said Limanzo, head of the Union of Indigenous Peoples of Sakhalin, a local group which lobbies for the rights of natives.

"Today's projects are much bigger and more aggressive in relation to the environment and bioresources, despite what they tell us about the use of up-to-date technologies," Limanzo said.

Nivkhs say that the dwindling opportunities to fish, hunt and gather mean that they can rarely prepare traditional foods such as "mos", made of fish skin, berries and seal liver.

"Our national foods are now delicacies that we eat only two or three times a year," said Lyubov Sadgun, a Nivkh who works as an English teacher in the north Sakhalin town of Nogliki.

In 2006 Sakhalin Energy, a consortium developing a massive offshore project near the Nivkh lands, pledged to spend 1.5 million dollars (1.17 million euros) over five years to assist indigenous peoples.

The consortium -- which was then led by Shell but is now majority-owned by Russian energy giant Gazprom -- agreed to the programme after Nivkhs carried after a series of protests in 2005.

Limanzo, whose union spearheaded the protests, praised the programme and said the Nivkhs were fortunate to deal with a Western oil major.

"We are lucky here on Sakhalin that we had dealings with multinational companies, because they have to deal with Western public opinion and it hurts their image if they are seen as being against native peoples," Limanzo said.

In the village of Veni, Pyotr Popka's family has a new Buran snowmobile courtesy of Sakhalin Energy's assistance programme.

But the snowmobile will be of little use if there are no fish and the family is forced to move to the city, away from the coast where Nivkhs caught fish and hunted seals long before the oil companies arrived.

That prospect terrifies Lidia Muvchik, the 68-year-old matriarch of the family and one of the last speakers of the Nivkh language.

"We are accustomed to living in the taiga, on the periphery, with forests, rivers, the sea, with berries," she said, seated inside near the stove. "That's all we want. In the city we would just die, because there are no fish!"