August 2000. Six Greenpeace volunteers (including four Britons) today occupied a British Petroleum transport barge off the Alaskan coast as it was being towed to the construction site of the Northstar project - the first offshore oil development in the Arctic Ocean. The volunteers (from the Greenpeace ship Arctic Sunrise) boarded the massive sea barge at 9.00am GMT (midnight in Alaska). The barge carries the main operating and accomodation modules for Northstar.
Greenpeace has been campaigning for more than 20 years to stop oil exploration and drilling in the Beaufort Sea, and our particular focus over the past four years has been BP's Northstar project. Greenpeace has reviewed thousands of documents and permits on the project, and has provided oral and written comment at every stage of the permitting process.
Ever since the discovery of the massive Prudhoe Bay oil field on Alaska's North Slope in 1968, the oil industry has longed to search for and develop offshore. Extreme Arctic conditions and the immensely powerful and shifting Arctic ice pack meant that exploration, and particularly production, would be extremely expensive and risky. Flying in the face of it's 'green' rhetoric and pronouncements on the dangers of climate change, BP Amoco is now trying to move offshore, to develop new oil which will inevitably add to the burden of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
Greenpeace responded with disappointment to Tuesday's announcement that despite an increase in renewable investement, BP's spend on oil and gas exploration and production would be 50 times greater than its investment in green energy technology.
A coalition of environmentalists and investors from Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom, have combined to challenge BP Amoco's oil expansion plans in the Arctic and the company's lack of action on climate change.
Beaufort Sea, Alaska, 1700 BST, -- For the second day running, Greenpeace activists confronted the construction of BP's controversial Northstar offshore oil project. Braving wind chills of minus 50 degrees F (-46C), activists towed a fiberglass dome into the construction area with two Greenpeace activists locked inside, while UK activist Martin Cotterell and one other protestor made for the man-made gravel island to display banners reading, "Stop BP's Northstar, Save the Climate".
