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| Slick: Some 30,000 birds along the Strait of Kerch, where this one struggled yesterday, have perished. Alexander Natruskin/Reuters |
Black Sea oil spill blamed on Russia's lax standards
Environmentalists and critics say the country's booming energy industry has failed to enforce adequate standards.
from the November 15, 2007 edition
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But critics argue that privately owned companies are disproportionately targeted for environmental checks. "LukOil spends fives times more on environmental protection than the state-owned Rosneft does," says Alexei Gruzdev, an analyst with Kortes, a Moscow-based energy consultancy. "The system is contradictory and far from ideal."
Foreign-owned oil firms can find themselves subject to crippling environmental reviews. A year ago, as the state-owned natural gas giant Gazprom maneuvered to take over Royal Dutch Shell's control of the Sakhalin-2 Pacific coast oil-and-gas development, Mr. Mitvol arrived with a team of inspectors and declared that Shell had caused up to $50 billion in damage to the delicate local ecosystem. Within weeks, Shell sold its shares in the operation to Gazprom at a steep discount.
"If relations between a company and the authorities are good, inspectors tend not to find any problems," says Mikhail Krutikhin, an analyst with RusEnergy, an independent consultancy. "If relations are bad, all kinds of troubles can crop up."
22,000 pipeline bursts per year
Most of Russia's oil exports move through the vast 50,000-km pipeline network of Transneft, the state-owned pipeline monopoly, which offers little public information about its operations. But according to Regnum, a Russian online business news service, the company suffers an average of about 10 serious leaks a year, including a 14,000-gallon spill last year on the Europe-bound Druzhba-1 pipeline.
Experts say the real nightmare is the million or so kilometers of local trunk pipelines that feed the Transneft system. "Almost all of these are obsolete, and there are spillages on a daily basis," says Alexei Kiselyov, a campaigner with Greenpeace Russia. Figures published in the World Bank's monthly World Finance Review suggest that oil pipeline bursts grew from about 19,000 in 2002 to more than 22,000 in 2005.
"Newly built facilities tend to be OK, but these are a tiny percentage of the total," says Mr. Kisleyov. "The majority are in terrible shape."
Russia is planning a vast expansion of its export network, including a 2,500-mile pipeline across eastern Siberia that would supply oil to China, east Asia, and the US.
But environmentalists say their biggest concern is planned expansion of oil and gas exploration in the untapped Arctic, particularly if Moscow's pending claim for economic control over nearly half a million square miles around the North Pole is approved by the United Nations. Russia estimates the region may contain up to 10 billion tons of petroleum.
"We're extremely worried about attempts to open the Arctic, which is still a unique and untouched ecosystem," says Mr. Slivyak. "The safety record of Russian oil and gas companies is very low, and there's little indication that they learn from incidents like what happened in Kerch this week. I fear that when they start exploring in the far north, we can expect the same kind of carelessness."
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