If there is ever a deepwater oil blowout, help could be weeks away

It could take weeks to get a disaster-stopping piece of equipment to Newfoundland and Labrador in the event of a subsea oil blowout, according todocuments filed by Statoil, now known as Equinor, the company behind the province's first foray intodeepwateroil development.

Documents filed by the company to the CanadianEnvironmental Assessment Agency in relation to an application for exploratory drilling projects in the Flemish Pass, near the newly-announcedBay du Nordproject, indicate that if a well blew,a capping stacka device used to reign in blowoutswould have to be shipped in from Norway or Brazil.

"Statoil's[Environmental Impact Statement] indicates that the capping of a well is estimated to take between 18 and 36 days," the document reads.

"A conservative estimate fora capping operation, including mobilization, installation offshore and capping operations, is estimated to take 36 days," it says.

Several other companies, including BP, Husky and ExxonMobil, are also exploring deepwater prospects in the province and face similar challenges bringing in capping stacks to stop blowouts.

Capping stack endedDeepwater Horizon spill

A capping stack is a special device used to divert or contain a leaking subsea well.It was a capping stack that was finally able to stop the 87-day gush of oil from a blown-out subsea well during the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico, recognized as one ofthe most disastrous oil spills in U.S. history.

In 2015, Shell Canada proposed a deepwater drilling project off Nova Scotia, with an estimatedtimeline of between 12 and 21 days to cap a blowout.The Canada-Nova Scotia Offshore Petroleum Board made Shellreduce that windowto between 12 and 13 days, despite demandsfrom environmental groups thatthe standard be set toone day.

EquinorCanadais leading the Bay du Norddeepwater oil project, championed as the province's first deepwateroil development project, along with Husky Energyin the Flemish Pass Basin, in water more than a kilometre deep about 550 kilometres off the coast of St. John's.

The company will be filing a separate environmental impact statement to the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency for the Bay duNorddevelopment, and a spokesperson for EquinorCanada said the companydoesn't expectthetimeline for the capping device's delivery and installation to change.

Equinorand the government of Newfoundland and Labrador announced an agreement to develop the Bay du Nord project in July. It'sexpected to be sanctioned in 2020.

Bay du Nordarea not well understood

It's a volatile, complicated area of the sea, and a confluence of a number of strong currents, according to Brad de Young, a physical oceanographer at Memorial University.

"It's a complex region with strong surface currents, so maintaining position for an offshore platform there would be, and has been, a challenge," he said. "If there were a spill ... it's like releasing oil in the middle of an intersection."

"It's not a region that one has a great deal of kind of oceanographic confidence in," he added, noting that the present scientific understanding of how the currents interact is "not so perfect."

Strong, kilometre-deep currents don't help things in deepwater spills, de Young said, which pose completely different problemsthan spills in shallower water.

When a line or a well leaksfar beneath the sea, the oil can stayunder the water for long periods of time, makingitimpossible to track or clean up, he said.

"Not knowing where it is and not being able to recover it means you don't really know where it ends up or what damage it's doing."

Producing oil at depths beyond a kilometreis a practice only a decade or two old, de Young said, which means there are still a lot of unknowns to grapple with. And the further down we go, he said, the farther away we move from the historical expertise of oil companies.

"The culture of oil development foroil companies is much more land-focused than it is marine-focused," he said.

"They're not like fishermen who ...have this experience and awareness of the ocean kind ofbuilt intotheir genes. When you talk to oil companies, you get that understanding that the ocean for them is a real nuisance and it's not something they're particularly interested in. It's something that's in the way of them getting out their oil."

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