Greenpeace campaigners who attached a purpose-built reinforced survival pod to an oil drilling ship to stop it moving are spending their third day hanging from the anchor chain.
The occupation off Shetland continues as former Lothian and Borders Police chief constable George Esson, who led the Shell operation to remove Greenpeace from the infamous Brent Spar rig 15 years ago, said there were no easy options for the operators of the ship.
"Occupations like this are difficult enough to deal with in a building on land, but the sea makes it even more difficult to deal with," Mr Esson told the Press and Journal newspaper. "Critics looking on from the sidelines have to understand how difficult this is. There is no simple remedy - if there was, it would have been used."
The Greenpeace activists are today attaching solar panels to the 8ft diameter pod to ensure they have power to sustain their occupation for as long as a month. The ship, operated by energy giant Chevron, was about to sail for a site in the Lagavulin oil field before drilling an exploratory well in 500 metres of water. Since the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, environmental campaigners have joined forces with politicians across the world to demand a ban on new deep water drilling.
Greenpeace campaigner Leila Deen spent her birthday yesterday in the pod. Today she said: "We're secure, safe and comfortable, and we're in this for the long haul. With our pod attached to the twelve tonne anchor there's no way this ship can leave to drill for oil in the pristine deep waters off Shetland. I've just come back from the Arctic, I saw the effects of climate change and we all saw what the BP disaster did to the Gulf of Mexico. We have to stop drilling in ever more dangerous places and finally go beyond oil."
Greenpeace is threatening legal action against the Cameron government in an effort to stop the granting of new permits for deep water drilling. Last month Greenpeace lawyers wrote a so-called ‘letter before action' to ministers - the precursor to seeking a judicial review of the decision to push ahead with new deep water drilling before the lessons from the BP disaster have been learned. Permits are granted by Lib Dem Energy Secretary Chris Huhne.
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Notes:
Geroge Essen comments here:
http://www.pressandjournal.co.uk/Article.aspx/1930720/?UserKey=#ixzz10LFSyRrX
Investigations into the Gulf of Mexico spill are still underway and the full extent of the tragedy is only now being discovered. Any clean-up operation off Shetland could be severely hampered by rough weather, making it more expensive and difficult than the operation in the US, which as of September 2010 had already cost $8bn (£5.2bn), with continuing costs of $90m per day. Colder waters would also mean that oil would disperse much more slowly, and therefore cause greater damage to wildlife.
Harsh weather conditions west of the Shetlands, in what is described by the Government as ‘a particularly challenging location', have so far deterred major exploitation of oil, but recently energy firms have lobbied for tax breaks to make production more attractive. In January this year Alistair Darling announced changes that could be worth £12 billion over the next eight years. The Eggar review, led by former Conservative Energy Minister and oilman Tim Eggar, is expected to recommend further incentives. The Lib Dem-Conservative coalition government is refusing to release the contents of the Review.
The process by which exploration and production licenses are issued to the industry is being ‘streamlined'. As a result, Chevron, BP and other oil majors have announced their intention to push further into the region west of the Shetlands, drilling wells in riskier deeper water and more remote locations than before.
