Seismic airguns are being fired underwater off the east coast of Greenland to find new oil reserves in the Arctic Ocean. But this activity “could seriously injure” whales and other marine life, warns a new report conducted by Marine Conservation Research and commissioned by Greenpeace Nordic.

The oil industry is increasingly looking towards the region, as oil and gas reserves become more accessible as climate change causes large areas of Arctic sea ice to melt.

Global oil companies including BP, Chevron and Shell all own drilling rights in the Greenland Sea and are the likely customers for the data gathered by the Norwegian geophysical company conducting the seismic testing, TGS-Nopec.

Wildlife Impacts

However, this seismic operation is taking place adjacent to ‘closed areas’ and overlaps with ‘areas of concern’ that have been appointed by the Greenlandic authorities, for the protection of narwhals, walruses and a critically endangered population of bowhead whales.

According to Greenpeace, the airguns emit 259-decibel blasts towards the seabed in order to find possible oil reservoirs. Above water, this sound intensity would be perceived by humans as approximately eight times louder than a jet engine taking off.

As the report details, seismic testing can damage marine mammals’ hearing and their ability to communicate as well as disrupting behaviour, feeding and migration patterns. This is because these mammals, and whales in particular, rely on sound to navigate, communicate and search for food.

There are also increasing indications that seismic testing can cause reproductive failure and increase the risk of strandings and ice entrapments.

Seismic Activity

Seismic testing has been conducted every summer in Greenland since 2011. And in April, TGS announced it had also begun doing seismic testing of the Barents Sea. As DeSmog UK has reported, Norway is leading the charge in Europe for Arctic oil development as production at its first offshore oilfield is set to begin “in a few weeks”.

The report's author, Dr Oliver Boisseau, a senior research scientist at Marine Conservation Research, said: “It is alarming to consider the vast amount of seismic activity being planned and conducted in the High Arctic, given the fragile nature of the ecosystem and the potential for disturbance and harm to whales.

“It seems justified to urge for extreme caution given both the lack of data and the limited understanding of the short and long term impact of seismic noise on sensitive Arctic species, especially the narwhal.”

Photo: Glenn Williams via Wikimedia Commons

As Boisseau highlights, the narwhal is particularly vulnerable to seismic testing. While some whales react to seismic sounds tens of kilometres away by trying to avoid them, narwhals are unique in their tendency to "freeze and sink" in response to a threat.

The report explains: “This means narwhals are more susceptible to damage from airgun blasts as they are not inclined to avoid regions impacted by noise.”

Narwhals are also more susceptible to becoming trapped in the ice in response to blasts from seismic vessels. Between 2008 and 2010 three entrapments of narwhals were reported coinciding with seismic activities in Greenland during the summer period. The narwhals delayed their autumn migration from Baffin Bay, leading to them travelling while winter sea ice started forming, causing thousands of narwhals to become entrapped in the ice and die.

This was the first time narwhal entrapments had ever been reported in this area.

Research Gap

However, the Marine Conservation Research report stresses that there is a “massive research gap” in this field. To date, no strandings of Arctic whale species have been reported, “which could mean they have not occurred or that they have not been reported due to the remoteness and extremely thin population density,” the report explains.

“Based on available data, the authors ‘urge for extreme caution’ amongst decision makers before allowing seismic activity in the Arctic,” the report argues. “From the research at hand, it is clear that noise from seismic activity impacts whales.”

Arctic campaigner Sune Scheller, on-board Greenpeace ship Arctic Sunrise headed to Greenland, said: “Seismic blasting in icy waters is just one of the horrific practices the oil industry is doing in the Arctic, firing airguns into this important and beautiful ocean.

“Shell and other oil companies are hoping the world won’t know that seismic blasting exists, even less notice the danger it poses to endangered whales and other marine life, but we’re here to expose this madness and keep eyes and ears on a harmful operation.”

@kylamandel

Photo: Greenland Travel via Flickr

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Think of Norway and your mind likely conjures up a Narnia-like folklore: vikings, salmon, fjords, Svalbard reindeer.

But there’s another element — albeit slightly less fabled — that’s been added to the list recently: the Government Pension Fund Global. It’s also known as the “most successful sovereign wealth fund in the world,” according to a February 2015 report from the MacDonald-Laurier Institute.

It might not be popular enough to inspire a cable television show, but it’s prominent nonetheless.

“There’s almost this myth about Norway,” acknowledges Andrew Leach, energy policy professor at University of Alberta, referring to Norway’s sovereign wealth fund.

The investment fund, created in 1990, now houses $1 trillion (it’s not a typo) in savings from non-renewable resource revenue. As oil prices have plummeted, comparisons between the Norwegian reserve and Alberta’s Heritage Savings Trust Fund have spiked. Alberta Oil editor Max Fawcett jested that a CBC News feature from late March was “probably the 429th time in last year” that a Canadian news outlet had compared the two.

And with the increase in the number of comparisons has come a surge in the number of critiques of that comparison — complete with a new term born in the Twitterverse: "Norwailing."

On March 26, Fawcett published his piece Why we're not like Norway, which looks at the country's different tax regimes (as in, in Norway citizens pay enough taxes to cover program spending), the subsidized history of extracting oil from the oilsands and the differences between Alberta as a province and Norway as a country.

A few days later, the National Post published an argument by Stephen Gordon, an economics prof at Laval, that the proposition ignored the sheer amount of oil left in Alberta compared to Norway and oversimplified the unique fiscal responsibilities of a province (think: transfer payments to the feds).

Also hopping on the bandwagon with provocative swagger was Maclean's writer Colby Cosh, who wrote “The case for blowing Alberta’s oil riches."

What to make of all of this? Well, first off let's look at why the Alberta vs. Norway makes sense. Both are industrialized places with social-democratic values. Both rely on resource revenues for a decent chunk of revenue (22.6 per cent in 2014 for Norway, almost 18 per cent for Alberta). Comparing Alberta to Norway certainly makes mores sense than comparing Alberta to Saudi Arabia or Venezuela.

Alberta’s Heritage Savings Trust Fund was created almost 40 years ago by former premier Peter Lougheed with a one-time investment of $1.5 billion. Since then, the fund has dwindled in priority. At last count, it held $17.4 billion in oil and gas revenue. That’s less than two per cent of the amount in Norway’s savings account. (That makes 430 comparisons this year so far.)

Getting trapped in the saving vs. spending debate is a red herring, argues Mitchell Anderson for The Tyee: "What is missing from these arguments is that you can't save what you don't have. Alberta has done such a wretched job of capturing public wealth from a globally significant public resource that arguing about savings versus government spending is an exercise in red-herring hair-splitting."

He also breaks down which place is doing a better job of capturing public value from a public resource.

"Dividing resource revenues by production reveals some shocking figures. Norway realized revenues of $87.69 per barrel in 2013. Alaska managed $38.54. And Alberta? Just $4.38 — one-twentieth what our Norwegian cousins managed to rake in," Anderson writes.

Back in Alberta, that money has flowed into corporate coffers instead of into the public bank account.

“They chose, rather than putting a torch to the money, to transfer into another form of capital — from a natural resource into one that accumulates interest for them in perpetuity,” explains Greg Poelzer, professor of political studies at University of Saskatchewan and author of the MacDonald-Laurier Institute report. “Sometimes it’s seen that this is a social-democratic orientation that Norway’s taken. Quite the opposite. They’re ruthless capitalists and understand fiscal conservatism and capital finance.”

On the flip side of the coin, Leach says that the comparison to Norway just doesn’t recognize the history of the resource. Back in Lougheed’s day, Leach points out, there was an incredible amount of excess revenue due to oil embargoes. There was too much money not to invest. But then came the oil glut of 1986. Investments in the fund plummeted with the returns. But by 1999, revenues had bounced back.

“If you look at Alberta, as far back as the 2000s and such times, we’ve always had the view that our future revenues are going to be greater than our current revenues,” Leach says. “This, from an economics perspective, is not good motivation for savings: it’s the equivalent of taking someone in their first job and saying ‘you should save now so you have time to spend when you’re a well-paid executive.’ ”

As Anderson notes, the royalties game is at the heart of the issue. Remember when former premier Ed Stelmach introduced a 20 per cent hike in the royalty rate back in 2007? That didn’t even last 1,000 days. Leach emphasizes that while another royalty hike wouldn’t pressure companies out that have already enormously invested infrastructure, it certainly wouldn’t encourage future prospectors.

That said, everyone from the Fraser Institute to the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives can agree that Alberta shouldn't be relying on non-renewable resource revenue to fund its operating expenses, so something has got to change.

Amin Asadollahi — oilsands program director at Pembina Institute — argues that growing the savings fund would serve to protect the economy from the boom-and-bust cycles the province is currently experiencing. Eventually, those dollars could be invested in sectors that are less prone to uncertainty and high levels of emissions.

“If the capital investments are targeted appropriately, they can also support sectors that might be disadvantaged as a result of the resource boom,” he says. “There’s the focus on one sector, the governments can use these kinds of capital investments to incentivize growth in other sectors. I think you can guess which sectors I’m talking about here: renewable and low-carbon pathways.”

Poelzer defends the Norway comparison for similar reasons: namely, that the amount in the Norwegian fund extracted for general revenue serves as a buffer for supply shocks like the one Alberta is current undergoing. Added to its glory is that the principal is never touched, only the interest. Poelzer compares the outcomes — massive and predictable investments in roads, schools, welfare — as the golden eggs of a white goose, boosting competitiveness, education and well-being.

But he’s not naive about the significance of social consensus. Albertans aren’t exactly well-trained in delayed gratification. Some simply work here for a few years before moving somewhere with a better view of the ocean. Norway sports heavily regulated immigration and taxation. Most Albertans are incredibly averse to the latter, making it difficult to fill the gap that investments in the fund would require.

“The interprovincial migration in Lougheed’s day was nothing like once the expansion of the oilsands took place. Then, there were greater political values and heterogeneity and a weaker social consensus," Poelzer says. "When we ran into fiscal trouble in declining oil commodity prices during Getty and his successors, there wasn’t the political consensus to stay the course. That’s where the wheels came off. And they’re very difficult to put back on.”

In Alberta’s greatly anticipated budget, released on March 26, the provincial government committed to halving its reliance on non-renewable resource revenue for budgeting by 2020, from its current level of 100 per cent. The remainder will pay off debt and get invested in the fund.

Asadollahi says that's a good sign. But how the gap left by resource revenues will be filled is yet to be determined.

“If it’s just a question of, ‘Would you like to have a trillion dollar sovereign fund,’ the answer is, ‘Yeah, sure, I would love to,’” Leach says. “But are we prepared to reduce government expenditures and/or increase government take?”

Image Credit: Fjordtravel.no

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