Rob Edwards

Accusations fly on anniversary of oil disaster

31 December 2012

Twenty years after the Braer crashed and gushed tens of thousands of tonnes of crude oil into the seas around Shetland, the multinational oil and gas industry has been accused of failing to learn lessons from the disaster.

Environmental groups pointed out that the world was still suffering “massive scale oil spills with horrendous consequences”. And they warned that venturing into the Arctic to extract more oil would be “devastating” for the planet.

Just before noon on Tuesday 5 January 1993, the Liberian-registered oil tanker, MV Braer, ran aground in hurricane force winds just west of Sumburgh Head, at the southernmost tip of the Shetland Islands. It was carrying 85,000 tonnes of light Norwegian crude oil.

Over the next ten days all the oil leaked into the sea, causing one of Scotland’s worst environmental disasters. Thousands of seabirds were killed, salmon farms were contaminated and fishing was banned for up to seven years.

Compensation payments totalling £45 million were paid out to businesses that had been hurt. If it had not been for fierce winter storms breaking up and dispersing the oil, the damage could have been much greater.

Outrage as RBS and Shell shortlisted for green awards

from Sunday Herald, 25 November 2012

Two multinationals regularly criticised for their environmental record are up for the title of Scotland's most environmentally friendly business at the nation's leading green awards.

The Edinburgh-based bank, RBS, and the British oil multinational, Shell, have both been shortlisted for the government-backed 2012 Vision in Business for the Environment of Scotland (Vibes) awards, to be announced in Glasgow this week.

The selection of the two firms has infuriated environmentalists, who label them as among the world's worst polluters. They are demanding that the companies’ nominations be abandoned.

“To suggest RBS and Shell are paragons of virtue and to brand these awards as green is to corrupt the meaning of the word,” said the Green MSP, Alison Johnstone. 

The environmental reputation of RBS was “shredded” and Shell was guilty of major oil spills, she argued. “I don't know who decided on the shortlist for these awards but they're astonishingly out of touch.”

Sleepless in the North Sea: the risks of working long hours

from Hesamag, June 2012

Jake Malloy is angry. Sitting in his cramped and recently flooded office near the docks in Aberdeen, he is talking about his union’s 20-year campaign to reduce the working hours of North Sea oil and gas workers.

The UK’s highest court has recently ruled against the union. “Nothing’s changed,” he says. “Offshore workers continue to work 12 hours a night in very hazardous, high risk environments, and nothing’s changed.”

Malloy, the offshore energy organiser with the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT), lost a legal battle in the Supreme Court in London in December 2011. Technically, it was about the application of the European Union (EU) Working Time Directive to offshore workers, and what that meant for legal holiday entitlements.

But it was also about how long working hours degrade quality of life, endanger workers’ health and ultimately put lives at risk. It was about shift patterns, living accommodation and the danger of leaks and accidents.

Underlying the arguments were different visions of the kind of working life, and the kind of society, that people in a modern industrial age deserve, and how to balance that against profits made for shareholders. For many, the outcome clearly demonstrated that the UK North Sea oil industry has a long way to go to deliver a decent job for its employees.

RBS involved in £40 billion loans for fossil fuels

from The Guardian, 28 May 2012

The publicly-owned Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) has been involved in at least £40 billion worth of loans to fossil fuel companies around the world over the last six months, according to a new analysis seen by The Guardian. 

RBS has played a leading role in funding coal, oil and gas industries in the US, Europe and Asia, despite their major contribution to the carbon pollution which scientists say is disrupting the global climate. 

The bank, which is 82% owned by the UK government, is due to stage its annual general meeting at its Edinburgh headquarters on 30 May. It has come under fierce fire from environmental groups for bankrolling projects that are “environmentally and socially destructive”.

RBS, however, pointed out that it was not the only bank involved in the loans, and that society was “heavily reliant” on fossil fuels. The bank was the biggest lender to renewable projects in the UK, it said.

But the analysis for Friends of the Earth Scotland (FoES) concluded that only £3 billion of all the £67 billion power and energy loans that RBS helped fund between October 2011 and March 2012 were for renewable electricity projects.

By far the biggest chunk - £37 billion – went to oil and gas extraction, refining and distribution industries, with a further £2.5 billion to fossil fuel electricity generation. The remaining £24.5 billion were for electricity and gas utilities, networks, financiers and others, where it’s difficult to know the level of fossil fuel investment. 

The loans included £414 million for coal-fired power stations in India, plus investments in the US coal giant, Duke Energy, and the London-based exploration company, Tullow Oil. RBS was also said to be involved in arranging a £7.5 billion loan package to the US oil firm, ConocoPhillips, which has been criticised for a spill in northern China and for its links to tar sands extraction in Alberta.

Revealed: the dinners that drove disputed Indian oil deal

from Sunday Herald, 20 May 2012

Westminster secretly lobbied the Indian government to give the go-ahead to a disputed multi-billion pound deal with a leading Scottish oil company, internal emails passed to the Sunday Herald reveal. 

UK government officials, briefed “over dinner” by Edinburgh-based Cairn Energy, offered to “polish” and send a letter drafted by the company. At a lunch, they also had a quiet word urging a key Indian government minister to back the deal.

The Indian government subsequently gave permission for Cairn’s £5.5 billion deal to sell off the bulk of its Indian oil business to Vedanta, an Indian mining and metals giant much criticised by human rights and environmental groups. The deal, labeled “the largest transaction ever to happen in India”, is now being challenged in the Indian Supreme Court.

The UK government has been condemned for doing Cairn’s bidding “slavishly” and “shamelessly” by campaign groups. “The political and industrial elite of India conspire with their counterparts in other countries to short-change local people and hand over national resources on a platter to multinationals,” said the leading Indian campaigner, Nityanand Jayaraman.

The controversial deal with Vedanta was at the root of the shareholder rebellion that swept through Cairn’s AGM in Edinburgh on Thursday. Plans to reward the company’s founder and chairman, Sir Bill Gammell, up to £5 million in bonuses for securing the deal were voted down two-to-one by shareholders.

Revealed: the oil pollution that plagues the North Sea

from Sunday Herald, 08 April 2012

Big oil companies, led by BP, Total and Shell, have polluted the North Sea with 69 oil and chemical spillages over the last three months, the Sunday Herald can reveal.

As many as 18 companies from across the world have been named and shamed by the UK government for a catalogue of blunders on offshore oil and gas rigs, including numerous equipment failures, pipe leaks, breaks and flaws.

The revelations have shocked and angered environmentalists who attack the oil and gas industry for “conning” the public about safety. Companies are putting workers, wildlife and ultimately the world at risk, they say.

Professor Andrew Watterson, head of the Occupational and Environmental Health Research Group at the University of Stirling, accused companies for playing down “the potentially catastrophic consequences” of gas and oil leaks.

“These are very worrying figures that cannot be slicked over by government agencies and industry,” he said. He blamed “corporate failures” for polluting the sea, and pointed out that the number of reported chemical leaks had more than doubled since 2005.

The Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) has released details of all spillages of oil and related chemicals in the North Sea since the beginning of January. This follows growing controversy over the implications of the continuing gas leak from the Elgin rig, run by the French company, Total, 140 miles east of Aberdeen.

Gas leak ‘could take months’ to fix

from Sunday Herald, 08 April 2011

Efforts to plug the gas leaking from Total’s Elgin rig in the North Sea could stretch over many months, experts warn, as the French oil company comes under renewed fire for its handling of the accident.

Total is pursuing two options aimed at preventing 200,000 cubic metres of methane from spewing out of the rig every day. One, known as “top kill”, is to block the well by smothering it with heavy mud, and the other is to drill relief wells.

Although top kill could be achieved within a matter of weeks, according to Dr Simon Boxall, an oceanographer from the University of Southampton, there was only a “slim chance” it would work. He pointed out that it had failed at BP’s 2010 blow-out in the Gulf of Mexico, and that the gas leaking from Elgin was at similarly high pressure.

It was more likely that Total would have to revert to digging relief wells in from the side to try and reduce the pressure, he argued. “But that’s a huge task and will take from six months to a year,” Boxall said.

There was an ever-present risk of an explosion, particularly in still weather conditions, while poor weather could cause serious delays. “It’s a risky operation,” he told the Sunday Herald. “It will be expensive and take a while."

It took 74 days to fix a similar leak at the Montara oil rig north of Western Australia in 2009. And there, remedial work triggered an explosion and fire in the last few days of the leak.

Oil companies will destroy my grandchildren’s world, warns scientist

from Sunday Herald, 08 April 2011

Jim Hansen has five good reasons to worry about the fossil fuel industry: Sophie, Connor, Jade, Lauren and Eric. 

If the coal and oil companies keep misleading the public about their climate-wrecking pollution, he said, his grandchildren would inherit a planet that is dangerously out of control.

Of all people, Hansen should know. Based at the NASA Goddard Centre for Space Studies and Columbia University in New York, he is one of the world’s leading climate scientists, and has played a major role in alerting governments to the risks over the last three decades. 

“In the last few years the fossil fuel industry and its supporters have done a very good job in confusing the public,” he told the Sunday Herald. “With their resources, it’s not too difficult. Money talks.”

He pointed out that, globally, governments were subsidising the fossil fuel industry to the tune of between $400 and $500 billion a year (£250-£320 billion). “The public is really unaware of the situation,” he said.

Students launch RBS boycott

from Sunday Herald, 12 February 2012

Students at St Andrews University have voted to boycott the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) because of its “unethical” and “destructive” investments in support of the exploitation of tar sands in Canada.

A heated meeting of the university’s Student Representative Council agreed last week to move its account to another bank in protest at RBS’s backing for what environmentalists describe as one of the most climate-wrecking projects on earth.

“Tar sands are a major threat to human rights and the global environment and we want to make sure that our union does not support it,” said Lauren King, a member of St Andrews students’ environmental group, One World, which has been campaigning for a ban on RBS.

She visited Alberta last summer with campaigners from the People and Planet student network to learn about the impact of extracting oil from under the ground by strip mining. She was horrified to see toxic waste leaching into rivers, and local communities suffering from cancers previously unknown in the region.

Dress up as polar bears but don’t post pictures, Greenpeace told

Exclusive, 28 November 2011

It may be legal to dress up as polar bears and occupy the offices of a big oil company, but if you post pictures of your costumed protest online you could go to jail.

That is what the Greenpeace activists who invaded the Edinburgh offices of Cairn Energy to complain about climate pollution have been told. Though they were last week cleared of breach of the peace charges by Edinburgh Sheriff Court, the company is still enforcing an interdict that prevents pictures of the protest being published.

Cairn’s lawyers have insisted that a photo showing people clad as polar bears lying around the company’s offices be removed from a Greenpeace website. The penalty for not doing so would be a fine of up to £10,000 or imprisonment.

In response Greenpeace has blacked out the picture, and asked the court to withdraw or reduce the scope of the interdict. It was served in July after more than 40 activists dressed as polar bears took over Cairn’s offices in an early morning raid.

Revealed: BP’s repeated safety failures in the North Sea

from Sunday Herald, 16 October 2011

The British oil giant, BP, has repeatedly breached legal safety rules on all its rigs in the North Sea over the last year, according to the government watchdog, the Health and Safety Executive (HSE).

The multinational company has kept failing to comply with the HSE’s statutory instructions to improve risk assessments after a series of alarming near-misses on several oil platforms, including Clair and Schiehallion west of Shetland and a network of nine fields in the Central North Sea.

The revelation comes after BP and its partner oil companies last week announced a massive £10 billion investment in exploiting new oil and gas reserves around the UK, triggering warm congratulations from the UK Prime Minister, David Cameron, and the Scottish First Minister, Alex Salmond.

The investment is centred around opening up the more dangerous waters west of Shetland, and promises to reverse the decline in UK oil production, if only for a few years. It is forecast to create 3,000 jobs in the oil and gas supply chain, sustain the Sullom Voe terminal in Shetland for decades and bring in billions of pounds of tax revenues.

At a time of economic recession, this has been greeted as good news by many. And it was heralded by BP on Thursday as proof that the 40-year-old story of the North Sea oil industry was far from over, with drilling now projected to continue to 2050.

Exposed: Shell’s poor safety record in the UK

from Sunday Herald, 21 August 2011

Shell has been officially censured for breaking safety rules 25 times in the last six years and has one of the worst safety records of the major oil companies in the UK, an investigation by the Sunday Herald has revealed.

The British oil multinational has been prosecuted, fined and formally reprimanded for repeatedly failing to maintain pipelines and other vital equipment in the North Sea, for failing to report a dangerous incident, and for failing to protect workers from hazardous chemicals. 

The revelations, from records held by the government’s Health and Safety Executive (HSE), have sparked renewed criticism of Shell in the wake of last week’s oil leak from a pipeline to the Gannet Alpha platform 185 kilometres east of Aberdeen. The company has been under fierce fire for failing to be open about the leak, which it claimed to have “sealed” on Friday.

Now, critics have lambasted Shell for being a “serial offender” that refuses to learn from its past mistakes. And they warn that the regulatory regime meant to ensure the safety of the North Sea oil industry is no longer fit for purpose.

“This shocking history of warnings, violations and prosecutions reveal a company that is cutting corners on essential maintenance and skimping on safety,” said Dr Richard Dixon, director of the environmental group, WWF Scotland.

Emergency tugs needed to prevent disaster, says leaked report

from Sunday Herald, 13 February 2011 

The Westminster government is risking environmental disasters by scrapping emergency tugs in breach of its own expert advice, the Sunday Herald can reveal.

A leaked report prepared for the UK government’s Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA) warns that four tugs are needed to prevent “catastrophic” spillages of oil, toxic chemicals or radioactive waste from accidents at sea.

Yet UK ministers have decided to cancel the £12-million-a-year contract for the tugs from September in order to save money. Alongside plans to close coastguard stations and withdraw Nimrod rescue aircraft, this has provoked a storm of protest from the Scottish government and local authorities.

Withdrawing funding for the tugs was “reckless and wrong-headed”, according to the Scottish Rural Affairs Secretary, Richard Lochhead MSP. “It has potentially serious consequences for human and environmental safety,” he said.

“Recent incidents have underlined the vital role that these emergency tugs play in some of the most dangerous and sensitive areas of our coastline, and we continue to press UK ministers to reconsider their decision.”

2010: the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico

for Sunday Herald, 26 December 2010

It started around 9.45 pm on 20 April. Methane gas came shooting out of BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil well in the Gulf of Mexico, ignited and exploded.

The ensuing fire engulfed the rig, killing 11 workers. And then the oil started gushing into the sea, becoming the largest accidental marine oil spill in history, and the worst environmental disaster so far faced by the US.

For the next three months it kept on gushing, and estimates of the amount of oil escaping every day kept rising. BP initially suggested it might be 1,000 barrels day, but then US authorities said it could be 5,000, then 30,000, then 60,000 barrels a day.

In total nearly five million barrels of oil are now thought to have spilled into the sea between 20 April and 15 July, when the well was eventually capped. That’s over 200 million gallons – a massive amount of the black stuff, which has resulted in huge pollution problems.

In May 6,814 square miles of water were closed to all fishing by the US government, an area that was increased to nearly 87,000 square miles in June. That covered more than a third of all the federally-controlled waters in the Gulf of Mexico.

SNP government ‘ignores’ pollution from oil rigs

12 November 2010

 

Nationalist ministers have been accused of deliberately ignoring massive amounts of pollution from North Sea oil and gas in an attempt to rig government climate targets.

 

The Scottish Greens allege that Scotland’s climate emissions are really 25% higher than the government claims because over 14 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year from the offshore industry has not been counted.

 

The missing pollution is more that the entire amount emitted by Bolivia, and ten times Fiji’s emissions. It is equivalent, say the Greens, to putting five million more cars onto Scotland’s roads.

 

"Alex Salmond wants the oil but he's deliberately ignored the pollution that comes with it,” said the Green MSP, Patrick Harvie. 

 

“The SNP were weaned on oil and they're still hooked on it. An independent Scotland would have to deal with these emissions, so why won't SNP ministers come clean now?"

 

The SNP has long argued that the revenues from 90% of the oil and gas extracted from the North Sea belong to Scotland. But the large amount of pollution directly generated by rigs is officially categorised as “unallocated” and is not counted as part of Scotland’s carbon budget.

‘Drill, baby, drill’ say big oil MEPs

from Sunday Herald, 10 October 2010

Scotland’s politicians in the European Parliament have been accused of “environmental hypocrisy” and dubbed the “shameful six” because of their enthusiastic lobbying for the oil industry.

Scottish Nationalist, Labour, LibDem and Conservative MEPs are all fighting to stop the European Commission introducing a ban on drilling for deep sea oil. The Commission wants to prevent another disaster like that at the Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico.

But the MEPs argue that a ban could cost oil companies billions of pounds, and isn’t necessary because UK safety standards are better than those in the US. This has infuriated green groups, who have lambasted the politicians for protecting company profits instead of the planet.

The LibDem MEP, George Lyon, and the Tory MEP, Struan Stevenson, will this week be pressing for a meeting with the European Energy Commissioner, Günther Oettinger, to urge him not to propose a moratorium.

Leaked Commission documents suggest that on Wednesday Oettinger is going to put forward a proposal for a temporary moratorium on deepwater drilling for oil and gas while the implications of BP’s spill in the Gulf of Mexico are investigated.

Revealed: the £13 billion that RBS puts into polluting industries

from Sunday Herald, 22 August 2010

The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) has provided nearly £13 billion worth of funding to the world’s dirty oil and gas industries since it was bailed out by the taxpayer two years ago.

The figures, being revealed today by the Sunday Herald, are the first authoritative and detailed account of the bank’s controversial financing of the companies blamed for causing global warming.

Among the 66 companies backed by RBS are well-known names like BP, Shell, ConocoPhilips, Tullow Oil, Trafigura and Cairn Energy. The bank has helped them raise many hundreds of millions of pounds to finance oil exploration, extraction and development around the world.

To environmental groups and the hundreds of climate protestors currently camped on RBS’s lawn near Edinburgh, the revelations prove that the bank is guilty of an unforgivable crime against the planet.

But to the bank, which does not dispute the figures, they just show that someone has to raise the money to extract the fuels on which we all depend before we can work out how to phase them out.

The singer who wants to save Greenland from oil

for Sunday Herald, 22 August 2010

Simon Lynge is watching his country melt. Every time he goes home to Greenland on the edge of the Arctic, something has gone.

When he was last there in June, the snow had disappeared from the hill, and there were no icebergs in the water. It was 28 degrees centigrade, the hottest he has ever known.

Previously, the drinking water that used to supply Alluitsoq, the small village where he was brought up, ran out. The mountain lakes from which it flowed had evaporated in the heat.

His country is changing so fast that he fears for its future, and he has no doubts what is to blame. “We’re spewing too much carbon dioxide into the air and drilling for more oil makes it worse,” he says.

“To paraphrase an old native American saying: only when the last tree has died, the last river been poisoned, and the last fish been caught, will we realise that we cannot eat money.”

Revealed: BP’s 54 safety breaches in the UK

from Sunday Herald, 27 June 2010

The troubled oil giant, BP, has broken vital health and safety rules 54 times over the past five years in the UK, according to the government watchdog, the Health and Safety Executive (HSE).

The British multinational corporation, under international condemnation for its polluting gusher in the Gulf of Mexico, has been accused of a series of maintenance and operating lapses which put workers and the environment at risk from major leaks, fires and accidents in the North Sea and elsewhere.

As a result BP companies have been served with 21 legal enforcement notices since 2006 by HSE, requiring lax and dangerous practices to be improved. The company, however, has not been prosecuted by the watchdog since 2005.

The revelations have been greeted with horror by experts and environmentalists, appalled at BP’s track record in the UK. The company’s failings here are directly linked to the unfolding disaster in the Gulf of Mexico after the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig in April, they say.

An analysis of the HSE enforcement database by the Sunday Herald shows that four BP companies - BP Exploration, BP Oil UK, BP Chemicals and BP Shipping - have been hit with legal notices in the last five years. Altogether, there have been 54 breaches of eight health and safety laws or regulations (see table below).

RBS chairman to meet protesters

from Caledonian Mercury, 27 April 2010

The chairman of the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), Sir Philip Hampton, is to meet with environment and human rights campaigners this week in an attempt to defuse escalating protests about the bank’s “dirty” investments.

The bank’s annual general meeting (AGM) in Edinburgh on Wednesday has become the target for a wide range of protest groups. They accuse RBS of putting up to £10 billion of public money into fossil fuel and mining projects in Canada, India and elsewhere which wreck the environment and violate human rights.

RBS was bailed out for £45.5 billion by the UK government during the banking crisis and is now 84% owned by British taxpayers. It has argued in the past that it cannot be held responsible for all the actions of the companies in which it invests.

But by agreeing to meet with campaign groups in Edinburgh after the AGM, Hampton may be signalling a new approach. “We are keen to listen to their perspective,” said an RBS spokeswoman.

“We recognise that a broad range of stakeholders have a very legitimate interest in the way that we conduct our business. Although we will not always agree with the many different opinions expressed, we welcome feedback and constructive engagement.”