An Australian Senate committee announced Monday it will consider BP's proposal to drill in search of oil reserves off the country southern coast.
BP's previous proposal, which was rejected by the National Offshore Petroleum Safety and Environment Management Authority (NOPSEMA) last November for not meeting environmental standards, would see four exploration wells drilled 1-2.5 kilometers into the Great Australian Bight, a large body of water to the country's southwest. But BP has confirmed that, pending approval from NOPSEMA on its revised plan, drilling of the first two wells will begin late 2016.
The plan faces significant community pushback from groups including Sea Shepherd, the Wilderness Society, elders from the Mirning and Kokatha peoples, and others.
"If this project goes ahead we really are gambling with the future of the Great Australian Bight," Greens senator Robert Simms said told the ABC.
The worst-case scenario for allowing drilling in the Bight is of course an oil spill, which was what happened to BP in 2010 during the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Oil flowed into the Gulf for 87 days until it was finally capped, causing the largest oil spill in history. Last year, BP agreed to pay $24.5 billion to settle claims against the company around the disaster.
"A spill would be devastating for South Australia's $442 million ," said the Wilderness Society's South Australian director Peter Owen.
Owen told VICE that while there has been oil exploration in the Bight before, it's never been as far off the coast or to the depth that BP is proposing. In the Gulf of Mexico, BP was working in an established and relatively sheltered oil field, "with the might of the American oil industry on its doorstep." The Great Australian Bight, as Owen pointed out, is both remote and treacherous, with the Southern Ocean facing some of the windiest climates in the world. In the mid 2000s Woodside Petroleum had to pull out of its drilling in the Bight due to the harshness of the conditions.
Yet the Bight's isolation is also what makes it so attractive to drilling companies looking for new opportunities. BP isn't the only oil giant interested in the relatively untapped area, with both Rio Tinto and Chevron both applying for exploratory licenses as well. It's attention that would be attractive to South Australia, which faces the prospect of becoming Australia's worst-performing state economy. As oil and gas industry body APPEA spokesman Matthew Doman noted: "The economic benefits are potentially enormous. While it is very early days, success in the would attract investment to South Australia and see significant local job creation."
Critics of the proposal argue that its economic benefits don't outweigh the environmental risks posed by deep sea exploratory drilling. As the Wilderness Society points out, 85 percent of the species found in the Bight cannot be found anywhere else in the world. The area is also a breeding nursery for the endangered southern right whale, with up to 55 calves born at the head of the Bight each year.
Last year, the Wilderness Society commissioned oceanographer Laurent Lebreton to independently assess the potential impacts of an oil spill in the Bight. In the best-case scenario, with the spill having an "optimistic" flow rate and being capped within 35 days, the modeling predicts that 175,000 barrels of oil would be released into the Bight. Worst-case scenario looks more like 50,000 barrels a day for 87 days (the same as Deepwater Horizon)—close to 4.35 million barrels.
BP's own modeling paints a less disastrous picture, positing a 35-day spill in summer would have less than a 12 percent chance of reaching Kangaroo Island, and less than an 11 percent of hitting the Eyre Peninsula. Both sets of modeling agree on one point though—whether conditions would mean the impact of a spill would be a lot more harmful in winter, with the likelihood of reaching Kangaroo Island rising to potential as high as 37 percent.
Putting the risks to one side, Peter Owen says opening up the Bight to deep sea drilling is the completely wrong direction for Australia to be moving in after the Paris climate talks. "There's no way we can allow this, we should be transitioning our economy away from fossil fuels," he said. "It's just not something we believe we should be gambling with."
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