In 1995, Shell planned to dispose of a defunct North Sea oil platform – the Brent Spar – by sinking it in the Atlantic. Greenpeace started a high-profile campaign against this and eventually Shell changed their plans and agreed for the rig to be towed to shore and dismantled. This was a clear victory for the environmentalists, with a major company bowing to public pressure and taking action which they considered not to be in their best interests.
The message was that an oil company was prepared to dump its dirty rubbish in the sea with no thought for the consequences; a large-scale version of throwing a drink can into the bushes rather than recycling. Greenpeace also estimated there were 5,500 tonnes of oil and other potential pollutants on the platform (the Brent Spar had been a storage and transfer facility). After Shell had caved in, it turned out that there were far fewer residues on the rig than the campaigners had suggested.
Dismantling the Brent Spar on shore was much more time-consuming and costly but also, of course, used considerable amounts of energy. The metal could be recycled, but this did not make the operation an economic one and there were greater risks to workers in doing the work. As it happened, Stavanger port authority agreed to use sections of the hull as the base for a new ferry facility in Mekjarvik, but the upper parts were cut up and recycled.
It was later found that rare cold-water coral was growing on the legs of the platform and that this was not uncommon for oil facilities in the North Sea, suggesting that there was little harm and, indeed, some benefit, from the installation of oil rigs. However, Lord Melchett, then director of Greenpeace saw it differently, as quoted in the New Scientist: "[dumping] a car in a wood – moss would grow on it, and if I was lucky a bird may even nest in it. But this is not justification to fill our forests with disused cars".
In fact, although dumping cars in the forest would offend our aesthetic sensibilities, and it clearly impacts the immediate environment, it is difficult to argue that it has any real negative impact overall. Leaving aside the separate issue of possible pollutants, built or engineered structures simply become part of the environment and are absorbed into the natural world.
The situation was clearly far more nuanced than environmental campaigners suggested, but it suited their purposes at the time as a focus for campaigning against using the sea as a dumping ground. In other parts of the world, defunct oil rigs have been used to create artificial reefs (rigs to reefs). As with all things, there is a balance to be struck.
Perhaps rather ironically, Greenpeace is an enthusiastic supporter of wind energy, both on- and off-shore. There are now hundreds of metal columns embedded in concrete around the shores which will certainly have disrupted local ecosystems but which doubtless still provide habitats for a range of species.
For lobbyists and campaigners, messages which catch people’s attention are invaluable. They need to be simple and encapsulate an issue in a single word or phrase: Brent Spar, genetic modification, acid rain, ozone hole and, most recently, fracking. Campaigners are masters of the art of public relations. The aim is to tap into latent concerns on a particular topic and create a negative halo around it.
The Brent Spar campaign was high profile, with a number of activists occupying the platform and making headlines on a daily basis. It tapped into existing concerns and aroused strong passions: a number of Shell petrol stations in Germany were physically attacked, while there was a partial boycott in some other countries.
This is a powerful strategy. Once public opinion has been brought to bear the die is cast, even if subsequently the original concern is found to have been overstated or, in some instances, just plain wrong. A similar pattern has emerged with fracking, which has become a convenient shorthand to use to attack oil and gas companies.
Fracking – hydraulic fracturing – is a technology which has been used for many years and enables oil and gas to be recovered from shale rock. Conventional reserves are tapped simply by drilling into the reservoirs, and come to the surface under their own pressure of by straightforward pumping.
Shale reserves (so-called ‘tight’ oil and gas) cannot be recovered in the same way, and need a combination of two techniques: drilling of a number of horizontal wells (from the same well head) to penetrate different sections of the shale layer and fracturing under hydraulic pressure to release the oil and gas from the rock. This is not a radically new technology: it has developed from the 1940s onwards, although its use on a wide scale did not begin until ten years ago in America (A brief history of hydraulic fracturing).
Despite this, some activists are vociferously opposed to it, and have put forward objections ranging from the dangers of supposed ‘earthquakes’ (in reality, minor earth tremors of the sort always associated with mining and drilling) and contamination of water supplies with methane (the film Gasland shows gas being lit from a water tap). However, more recently, it has been reported that Leaky gas wells – not fracking itself – are polluting water in Pennsylvania and Texas.
In the UK, this opposition resulted in a major protest at a test drilling site in Balcombe (How summer fracking protest unfolded in Sussex village). Caudrilla, the company involved, planned to drill a vertical test well for oil. In practice, the ‘fracking’ label gave protestors a high-profile issue on which to protest, but in reality this was as much about fossil fuels as fracking.
People are free to get their message over however they want to, but there is a clear contrast between the behaviour of activist protestors and their celebrity fellow travellers and industry. If a company was found to have distorted the truth in its own lobbying, it would, quite rightly, be pilloried. No such sanction is used against protestors, and yet they are often taking part in well organised and coordinated campaigns which have a significant impact on public opinion.
This is not a complaint, rather a statement of fact. In high-profile issues, emotive campaigns with little evidence to support them can have a major impact. Companies ignore this at their peril.
Martin Livermore
The Scientific Alliance
St John’s Innovation Centre
Cowley Road
Cambridge CB4 0WS
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