Nicolas Perpitch, The Australian 15 Aug 09;
THERE was plenty of backslapping in Perth yesterday over the final approval for the $43 billion Gorgon gas project, but another story involving Australia's oil and gas industry continues to paint a different picture. The West Atlas drill rig has been belching up to 400 barrels of light sweet crude oil a day into the Timor Sea off Australia since a leak developed in a well deep below the ocean floor.
Along with unknown quantities of methane gas and condensate, as much as 1215tonnes of oil may have seeped into the sea since the blowout almost four weeks ago.
PTTEP Australasia, the Thai-owned company that operates the wellhead platform 250km northwest of the Truscott air base in Western Australia's Kimberley region, has put in place a complex and highly technical operation to plug the leak.
But the operation, if successful, will take another 3 1/2 weeks. By then, more than 2400 tonnes of oil could have spilled out.
It's not a crisis on the scale of the Exxon Valdez disaster, when 40,000 tonnes of crude oil devastated Prince William Sound in Alaska after the tanker struck Bligh Reef in March 1989, but it already ranks as Australia's third worst oil spill. In 1991, 17,280 tonnes of light crude oil spilled out of the Greek tanker Kirki when it lost its bow off the coast of Western Australia. Serious coastal pollution was avoided only because severe weather conditions and the Leeuwin current helped disperse much of the oil.
And 14,800 tonnes of oil seeped into the sea off WA after a large crack developed in the hull of the Princess Anne Marie in 1975.
Prevailing winds and tides have so far kept the oil away from the pristine Kimberley coast, but environmentalists are worried about the effect of the oil and the chemical dispersants used to break up the spill on marine life and migrating birds.
Commercial fishermen are furious PTTEP has offered to pay only for the clean-up and not any potential future damage to the fishery and their livelihood. They are threatening to take the company to court.
PTTEP, which operates oil and gas projects in 13 countries and has a market capitalisation of $US13.4bn ($15.65bn), was given approval by the Howard government to drill at the Montara oilfield in 2003.
It was part of the company's Montara Development Project, which takes in the Montara, Skua and Swift/Swallow oilfields, and has oil reserves of about 37million barrels. The project had been due to start production by the end of the year, but a federal sign-off on its oil spill contingency plan was not secured until June.
Early on August 21, as the West Atlas entered the final stages of pre-production, a crack developed in the temporary system sealing one of its five wellheads.
With vast amounts of oil and gas spewing out and no idea exactly what had happened, those on board the rig knew they had to get off quickly.
In an emergency evacuation, all 69 workers on the jack-up rig were airlifted to Dili and more than 60 workers on a nearby pipe-laying barge were also evacuated, as divers who surfaced found themselves surrounded by the oily substance. The damaged well is sunk to a depth of 2.6km, then curves into the oil and gas reservoir for a total length of 3.6km. A concrete and rubber plug was meant to hold the oil and gas until it was ready to be pumped.
PTTEP Australasia director and chief financial officer Jose Martins admits he is unsure what had happened.
"There's a pipe that's gone down 3.5km," Martins says.
"That pipe is sitting in a reservoir and, because it's a development well, it's not in production, because of that it's plugged. So it has quite a sophisticated system of plugs and about 20 odd metres of concrete, or cement, pumped into the well bore.
"And that is designed to keep it from flowing. And on top of that is always a whole lot of seawater in the pipe as well. That's what stops it from flowing. However, there must be some fracture in the system somewhere which we can't detect, which is causing the leakage."
An emergency response team for PTTEP ruled out the quickest option for fixing the leak, which would have been to land a crew on the West Atlas and block the flow at the top of the pipe.
But they decided that was far too dangerous because the gas could ignite. They decided instead to bring in another rig to drill a relief well down to the damaged pipeline and fill it with heavy mud.
But that would take a whopping 50 days to implement, while oil and gas continued to gush out unabated.
Two barges towed a relief drill rig, the West Triton, from Indonesia's Batam Island, near Singapore to the West Atlas rig.
The 2963km journey took more than three weeks. Last Thursday, the West Triton anchored 2km off the West Atlas, on the edge of an exclusion zone set up by the Australian Maritime Safety Authority. It began drilling through rock, dirt and sediment on Sunday and will take another another 3 1/2 weeks to plug the leak. That is, if everything goes according to plan. The operation is so delicate that PTTEP has called in a team of engineering specialists from ALERT Well Control, which helped extinguish the fires at hundreds of oilwells set ablaze as Saddam Hussein's troops fled Kuwait.
The ALERT team is providing technical and other advice on the drilling effort, including the use of electromagnetic equipment that will guide the drill down to the original well and flood it with heavy mud to block the leak.
Two ships with high-capacity water pumps are also on site to deluge the West Atlas and minimise the risk of fire.
PTTEP has refused to say how much the operation will cost, but industry analysts estimate it will easily extend into tens of millions of dollars.
PTTEP also long refused to publicly disclose how much oil was flowing from the wellhead. It now says that although the flow rate appears to be slowing, it gave AMSA an initial estimate of 400 barrels a day so it could assemble enough resources to deal with thespill.
AMSA initially began spraying the spill with dispersants brought in from Victoria, using a chartered C-130 Hercules, paid for by PTTEP. But as the dispersants started taking effect and breaking up the oil, AMSA switched to smaller and more manoeuvrable fixed-wing planes that could target specific patches of oil.
The slick was estimated to be up to 30km long, although AMSA stressed it was hard to pin down the size because of the dispersants.
Back on land, environmental groups had also immediately swung into action mode.
They were incensed by federal Resources and Energy Minister Martin Ferguson's comments that the spill was smaller than first thought and there was no threat to the coast.
The spill was evaporating naturally and AMSA would help in the process, he said.
Amid calls for all gas and oil development and exploration to stop following the spill, the industry was also playing down the crisis.
The Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association noted it was a very unusual event and was the first offshore gas well blowout since 1984.
But Australian Greens leader Bob Brown called for a judicial inquiry into how the oil rig was run and the clean-up operation.
He also wanted to know whether the dispersants were more toxic to marine life, including migrating whales, than the oil.
A direct link was drawn to the Gorgon project when WWF Australia said tracking research showed flatback turtles had left their nests on Barrow Island off WA's Pilbara coast, where Gorgon gas will be processed, for foraging grounds in the affected areas.
Greens senator Rachel Siewert flew over the spill and subsequently claimed the public had been seriously misled and the slick was merely 20km from the coast.
She said it stretched 180km from horizon to horizon.
But when AMSA announced the spill's nearest point to the mainland was in fact 130km, the senator admitted some of what she though was oil could have been algae.
There was no dispute, though, when commercial fishermen started reporting finding sea snakes and flatback turtles covered in oily slime.
Some said they could smell the detergent-like dispersant on the turtles.
AMSA has defended the use of dispersants as effective in breaking up the spill.
It says the dispersants break up the oil into small globules, which then fall into the water column where the natural breakdown of the oil is enhanced.
AMSA says most laboratory tests rated Australian-approved oil spill dispersants as "slightly toxic" to "practically non-toxic".
But marine researcher Richard Costin, who flew over the spill area with Siewert, says the dispersants and oil pose a significant risk to fish and other marine life as they sink into the ocean.
"What's at risk is all the sea grasses, all the sponges, all the corals," Costin says. "The other issue is the ingestion of oils by fish, turtles, sea snakes and cetaceans."
Environs Kimberley director Martin Pritchard has also flown over the spill.
"It's like a scene from a disaster movie: there's a sea of oil, the gas is still billowing out of the rig," he says.
"We know there've been sea snakes that seem to have died from ingesting the oil and dispersant. There've been turtles that appear to have been very sick from ingesting it.
"The dispersant is particularly bad for seagrass beds and seagrass beds are really important for dugongs (and) threatened species of turtles, and are fish-breeding areas.
"There's at least 12 species of whales and dolphins in that area.
"It's known by biologists as a marine superhighway because of the diversity of species in that area."
Environmentalists and fishermen are concerned the oil and dispersants could harm fish eggs and cause long-term harm to the Demersal Scalefish Fishery, which includes snapper and red emperors and is estimated to be worth about $8 million a year.
The Kimberley Professional Fishermen's Association is putting the company on notice that it will seek damages if its members' income takes a blow and the area's pristine brand is damaged.
But others don't have the same level of concern. Monique Gagnon, who specialises in marine health, toxicology and the petroleum industry, believes the dispersants will be diluted in 100m of water.
"The concentration of dispersants and oil in the water will remain very small," she says. "The exposure of the fish will be higher, but I don't think it will be at levels that will cause ill-effects in fish or in the marine biota."
She thinks dispersants are being used as a precautionary measure to ease public concerns and ensure no oil reaches the shore.
"I think the use of dispersants is not mandatory in this case because it is a very light crude oil and because it is so far away from any shoreline and it is in deep water," Gagnon says.
"The oil would disperse and disappear naturally and it would take a little longer.
"But dispersants makes the slick disappear a lot more rapidly and politically, economically and from the public relations point of view, it creates advantages."
