Frade Deepwater Oil Spill – Lies, Lessons & Consequences

The recent deep water oil spill at the Frade appraisal well in the Campos Basin off Rio de Janeiro, has already highlighted the lack of transparency by well operator Chevron and local regulator ANP (National Petroleum Agency). The ANP basically just took as gospel Chevron´s minimalistic information on the spill, without actually digging for the true facts. It took Skytruth and the Brazilian Federal Police, which in these parts does the work of a Coast Guard organization, to blow the whistle. While Chevron insists that there is only around 65 barrels on the surface at this point and the total spill did not surpass 650 barrels, Skytruth geologist John Amos however, estimates a spill of at least 3,738 barrels per day from November 9th to November 12th, based on NASA satellite images. This would add up to a total of at least 15 thousand barrels spilled. Unfortunately there was no more satellite imagery available after the 12th due to cloud cover. This is 23 times more than Chevron´s estimate. It is important to note that Mr. Amos was also the first to blow the whistle on the disinformation used by British Petroleum to try to down play the consequences of the Deepwater Horizon tragedy at the GOM. Government is also trying to downplay the accident by saying it expects the spill to be contained in a week. There is no firm indication that this will happen. Although the well has been sealed, the spill itself emanated from a fracture on the seafloor. According to Brazilian Federal Police Marshall Fábio Sciliar, who is in charge of the investigation on the accident, as long as the fracture on the seafloor remains open, the spill will continue. He went on to inform that the person responsible for closing this fracture, has stated to his investigation team that there is NO forecast for how long it will take to close the fracture and stop the spill. In other words there is a true possibility that the spill will continue, even at a lower rate for quite some time to come, turning a mere accident into a full-fledged catastrophe. National operator Petrobras, which is Chevron´s partner in this field has also declined to make any kind of comment. According to Chevron and the ANP there are 18 support vessels in the area working on spill containment. 8 from Chevrom and 10 from Petrobras, Statoil, BP, Repsol and Shell. Ominously, recent helicopter patrols by the Federal Police were only capable of identifying one PSV working on the spill, which at one point had a surface area of 163 km². Although the spill was only detected by satellites on November 9th, Skytruth maintains that there is a possibility that the spill began even before this date. And the cause of the spill is, according to ANP, due to operations undertaken by Chevron, the operator maintains that the cause of the spill was exclusively due to the fracture in the seafloor. What is a given is that there will be serious environmental impacts to fishes and seabirds in the areas. Specialists hope that whales, which at this time of the year are going down the coast to the colder water of the South Atlantic, will be able to avoid the spill. The same is hoped for dolphins, turtles and sharks. The worst off may really be the seabirds as they dive for their pray below the oil sheen, they will come up covered in oil, which for them will be fatal. Fish and crustaceans are also a main worry, as many will be contaminated with oil, directly affecting their habitat and causing serious loss to local fisheries. What lesson we can take from this is that the song remains the same, even after the highly publicized GOM tragedy, Oil operators still try to downplay the scope of their accidents and are far from willing to be transparent in their reports to regulators, government and the general public. As I have said before this new accident will hardly slow down the high rate of deepwater exploration in Brazil, but there needs to be a greater effort in regulation, independent monitoring and more efficient O&G accident contention plans, along with more transparency from operators. Claudio Paschoa - Image courtesy of Greenpeace