Yereth Rosen, Reuters 6 Oct 09;
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) - Oil companies scouring the coastline of Alaska's North Slope for new production sites are converging on the same territory as hungry polar bears trying to escape shrinking and thinning sea ice.
Polar bears have not attacked any workers recently, but oil companies are reporting four times as many sightings as they did last decade.
"These bears will walk the coast," said Craig Perham, a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. "So if you've got an operation right on the coast, you're going to see bears."
There were 321 polar bear sightings in and around Alaska oil and gas operations in 2007 and 313 in 2008, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. That is about four times the annual average posted for the period of 1994 through 2000.
The last polar bear mauling at a North Slope industrial site occurred in 1993 at a military facility. A bear crashed through a window and severely hurt a contract worker inside.
But close encounters are getting more frequent. Even reality television has documented the phenomenon. On the closing episode of "Ice Road Truckers" on the History Channel, one truck driver was briefly held up from delivering his final load of diesel fuel to Exxon Mobil Corp's Point Thomson field because wandering polar bears had shut down traffic.
Oil companies probably are recording multiple sightings of individual bears that, instead of making brief stops on land, are extending their stays, Perham said.
"What this appears to be is bears looking for another option because their traditional habitat is not as healthy as it used to be," said Steve Amstrup of the U.S. Geological Survey. This summer, Arctic sea ice shrank to its third-lowest area on record [ID:nN17442487].
Like roaming bears awaiting freeze-up, denning females -- mother bears giving birth and nursing cubs -- are settling on land rather than on sea ice, according to a study by Amstrup and others.
Oil-field workers rarely see denning females, the scientists said, but there have been some interactions. A mother bear with cubs forced a late-season shutdown of the ice road to Point Thomson last spring, state officials said.
The Exxon-operated Point Thomson prospect, 55 miles east of Prudhoe Bay, is at a site holding the coastal bluffs that naturally draw polar bears.
"Clearly, Point Thomson is in the midst of polar bears," Amstrup said.
Other sites attractive to polar bears but targeted for drilling are Oliktok Point west of Prudhoe, where the Italian company ENI is developing its Nikaitchuq prospect, and the offshore Liberty prospect, which BP plans to drill from the edge of land east of Prudhoe Bay.
Meanwhile, oil companies are making more efforts to document sightings, said Marilyn Crockett, executive director of the Alaska Oil and Gas Association.
She said last year's designation of polar bears as threatened under the Endangered Species Act adds new monitoring responsibilities for operators in polar-bear habitat.
Most companies hold letters from the Fish and Wildlife Service authorizing "incidental takes" of polar bears, meaning generally minor, accidental disturbances, said Crockett, who added that companies take great efforts to avoid any potentially dangerous encounters.
"So if you have more companies operating under LOAs (letters of authorization), then reporting sightings are going to increase," she said.
(Editing by Bill Rigby and David Gregorio)
New polar bear rule sent to White House
Deborah Zabarenko, Reuters 7 Oct 09;
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Protection for polar bears' shrinking icy habitat is the subject of a proposed rule sent to the White House by the Interior Department.
The proposed rule, "Endangered and Threatened Wildlife and Plants; Critical Habitat Designation for the Polar Bear" is the latest step in a long process aimed at shielding the big white bears from the effects of climate change.
Details of the proposed rule were not immediately made public, but it was filed on Monday with the White House.
The Bush administration designated polar bears as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, on the grounds that the sea ice they use as hunting platforms is literally melting under their paws.
However, the 2008 threat listing allowed oil and gas companies to operating in the polar bear's habitat, which environmental groups pointedly criticized as a flawed understanding of the relationship between fossil fuels, climate change and the fate of Arctic wildlife.
In May, the Obama administration said it would keep a Bush-era "polar bear special rule," which weakens protection for the polar bear's habitat and plays down links between the threatened status of the species and climate change.
The rule exempts from government review all activities that occur outside the polar bears' range, which means that individual sources of greenhouse gas emissions that lead to climate change cannot be directly linked to the polar bear's habitat.
'ENVIRONMENTAL TRAGEDY'
Obama administration Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said on May 8 that the melting of polar bear habitat is "an environmental tragedy of the modern age."
But Salazar went on to say, "The best course of action for protecting the polar bear under the Endangered Species Act is to wisely implement the current rule, not revoke it at this time."
Polar bears depend on Arctic sea ice as a platform for hunting seals, their main prey. Malnourished polar bears have more problems reproducing and raising their young. The U.S. Geological Survey has said two-thirds of the world's polar bears -- some 16,000 -- could be gone by 2050 if predictions about diminishing Arctic sea ice hold true.
Asked about the new proposed rule, John Kostyack of the National Wildlife Federation said the Obama administration needs to be more "honest with the science than the previous administration."
"There is extremely strong link between climate change and the decline of the polar bear, and if we hope to conserve the polar bear for future generations, we're going to have to take some strong steps to reduce the non-climate stressors ... the chief one would be oil and gas development," Kostyack said in a telephone interview.
Arctic sea ice has declined in the last three years to its smallest area since satellite views began in 1979, according to the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center. The 2009 summer ice had grown from the previous two years but was still less than in 1979.
"It's nice to see a little recovery over the past couple years, but there's no reason to think that we're headed back to conditions seen back in the 1970s," the center's director and senior scientist, Mark Serreze said in a statement on Tuesday. "We still expect to see ice-free summers sometime in the next few decades."
(Editing by Philip Barbara)
