AFP has an article on the impact of offshore oil exploration on whales - Sonar mapping for oil killed Madagascar whales: study

A noisy technology that blasts high-frequency sounds below water to map the ocean for oil probably caused the deaths of 75 melon-headed whales off Madagascar, experts said Thursday. An independent panel of scientists found that sonar surveying by ExxonMobil in late May 2008 led to the sudden displacement of around 100 whales, of which at least three-quarters died.

Der Spiegel has an article on oil exploration in the Arctic - The Exorbitant Dream of Arctic Oil.

Two complete failures and one aborted test drill -- a miserable outcome. When Scottish company Cairn Energy published the preliminary results of its search for oil off the coast of Greenland last October, the firm's share price plunged 7 percent in one day. Its findings revealed not a trace of black gold. On the contrary: the company said it would have to write off costs totalling €180 million ($246 million).

And still, the Arctic fascinates oil and gas firms more than virtually any other region at the moment. Companies are hoping to tap massive, undiscovered reserves in this remote area that is free from the political instability plaguing other oil-rich parts of the world. The polar treasure was the subject of the conference "Arctic Frontiers" that began on Monday in the northern Norwegian town of Tromsö. Almost 1,000 visitors made the journey far beyond the Arctic circle to attend.

Cairn's oil exploration off the western coast of Greenland has attracted intense interest because it was the first such venture in years. It's unclear how many will follow, because the vast cost of drilling in the Arctic is likely to become evident in the coming years. This is made abundantly clear in unpublished interim findings by the US Geological Survey obtained by SPIEGEL ONLINE. They refer to an area in the northeast of Greenland that had so far been regarded as a particularly promising location for oil exploration. Geologist Don Gautier and his research team examined what it would cost to search for oil in the East Greenland Rift Basins.

Scientists had previously estimated that the region could yield some 7.5 billion barrels of oil -- 1.2 trillion liters. But statistically, the likelihood of producing that amount is the same as failing to find even a drop. However, the geology of the area is interesting -- after all, on the other side of the Greenland Sea, along Norway's west coast, there are attractive oil reserves that have been bringing in billions of euros for the Norwegian government for decades. Greenland is hoping for a similar boom.

Significantly Lower?

But the amount of oil that can actually be pumped out of this region is likely to be significantly lower than previous estimates indicated, according to the latest findings. Assuming production costs of up to $100 per barrel, only 2.5 billion barrels of oil could be lifted, according to the USGS calculations -- and only with a 50 percent probability.

In order to reach further reserves, companies would have to spend much more. Even based on outlandish exploitation costs of $300 per barrel, only 4.1 billion barrels could be raised, with the same 50 percent probability. "And that is before paying a cent of tax or making any profit," says Gautier.

The figures are based on statistical calculations and should therefore be treated with caution. But they indicate that only a fraction of the oil and gas believed to be in the Arctic could likely be exploited at economically viable costs. Canadian companies have already found that out for themselves. They carried out major exploration projects in the 1970s but ended up sealing off even promising test drillings because commercial production would have been too expensive.

TomDispatch has an article asking "Will the Obama Administration Allow Shell Oil to Do to Arctic Waters What BP Did to the Gulf?" - BPing the Arctic ?.

Unfortunately, as you've already guessed, I’m not here just to tell you about the glories -- and extremity -- of the Alaskan Arctic, which happens to be the most biologically diverse quadrant of the entire circumpolar north. I’m writing this piece because of the oil, because under all that life and beauty in the melting Arctic there’s something our industrial civilization wants, something oil companies have had their eyes on for a long time now.

If you’ve been following the increasing ecological devastation unfolding before our collective eyes in the Gulf of Mexico since BP’s rented Deepwater Horizon exploratory drilling rig went up in flames (and then under the waves), then you should know about -- and protest -- Shell Oil’s plan to begin exploratory oil drilling in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas this summer.

On March 31st, standing in front of an F-18 "Green Hornet" fighter jet and a large American flag at Andrews Air Force Base, President Obama announced a new energy proposal, which would open up vast expanses of America’s coastlines, including the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas, to oil and gas development. Then, on May 13th, the United States Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals handed a victory to Shell Oil. It rejected the claims of a group of environmental organizations and Native Inupiat communities that had sued Shell and the Interior Department's Minerals Management Service (MMS) to stop exploratory oil drilling in the Arctic seas.

Fortunately, Shell still needs air quality permits from the Environmental Protection Agency as well as final authorization from Interior Secretary Ken Salazar before the company can send its 514-foot drilling ship, Frontier Discoverer, north this summer to drill three exploratory wells in the Chukchi Sea and two in the Beaufort Sea. Given what should by now be obvious to all about the dangers of such deep-water drilling, even in far less extreme climates, let’s hope they don’t get either the permits or the authorization.

On May 14th, I called Robert Thompson, the current board chair of Resisting Environmental Destruction on Indigenous Lands (REDOIL). “I’m very stressed right now,” he told me. “We’ve been watching the development of BP’s oil spill in the Gulf on television. We’re praying for the animals and people there. We don’t want Shell to be drilling in our Arctic waters this summer.”

As it happened, I was there when, in August 2006, Shell’s first small ship arrived in the Beaufort Sea. Robert’s wife Jane caught it in her binoculars from her living-room window and I photographed it as it was scoping out the sea bottom in a near-shore area just outside Kaktovik. Its job was to prepare the way for a larger seismic ship due later that month.

Since then, Robert has been asking one simple question: If there were a Gulf-like disaster, could spilled oil in the Arctic Ocean actually be cleaned up?

He’s asked it in numerous venues -- at Shell’s Annual General Meeting in The Hague in 2008, for instance, and at the Arctic Frontiers Conference in Tromsø, Norway, that same year. At Tromsø, Larry Persily -- then associate director of the Washington office of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, and since December 2009, the federal natural gas pipeline coordinator in the Obama administration -- gave a 20-minute talk on the role oil revenue plays in Alaska’s economy.

During the question-and-answer period afterwards, Robert typically asked: “Can oil be cleaned up in the Arctic Ocean? And if you can’t answer yes, or if it can’t be cleaned up, why are you involved in leasing this land? And I’d also like to know if there are any studies on oil toxicity in the Arctic Ocean, and how long will it take for oil there to break down to where it’s not harmful to our marine environment?”

Persily responded: “I think everyone agrees that there is no good way to clean up oil from a spill in broken sea ice. I have not read anyone disagreeing with that statement, so you’re correct on that. As far as why the federal government and the state government want to lease offshore, I’m not prepared to answer that. They’re not my leases, to be real honest with everyone.”

A month after that conference, Shell paid an unprecedented $2.1 billion to the MMS for oil leases in the Chukchi Sea. In October and December 2009, MMS approved Shell’s plan to drill five exploratory wells. In the permit it issued, the MMS concluded that a large spill was “too remote and speculative an occurrence” to warrant analysis, even though the agency acknowledged that such a spill could have devastating consequences in the Arctic Ocean’s icy waters and could be difficult to clean up.

It would be an irony of sorts if the only thing that stood between the Obama administration and an Arctic disaster-in-the-making was BP’s present catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico.

The Australian has an article on the opening up of some fairly inhospitable oil exploration regions off the south coast of Australia - Finds fuel deep-sea oil rush.

THREE significant new oil and gas regions have been identified off Australia's coast, raising the potential for a wave of offshore exploration that could create booming new resources hubs around the nation.

A combination of new technology and the high price of oil has prompted the commonwealth's Geoscience Australia survey body to push technical limits and explore frontier areas in deep water, turning up startling new resource potential.

One of the regions, the South Australian end of the Great Australian Bight, has been opened for exploration and has already attracted strong bids ahead of the April 29 deadline.

But extracting any oil and gas from this area will mean overcoming significant challenges, including heavy seas and wells deeper than any in operation around the nation.

In addition to the Bight, Geoscience Australia has uncovered strong indications of petroleum in basins near the Lord Howe Rise, 800km east of Brisbane, and on the Wallaby Plateau, 500km off the West Australian coast and next to the existing North West Shelf gas zone.

All three areas are at the deepwater edge of Australia's vast maritime zone - an area almost twice the size of the continent.

Geoscience Australia is using an advanced aeromagnetic survey also to examine basins to the west and north of Tasmania, recently collecting data over a flying distance of 140,000km. The results are being analysed.

With extra funding for frontier exploration, Geoscience Australia has employed an array of technology in the search for resources and has turned up enticing new evidence. It has found potential source rocks in the Bight, which has never produced oil or gas.

The new evidence has emerged at a time of dwindling oil production in Australia, with reserves equal to 10 years of production. ...

Ms Totterdell said the Bight had been regarded as "too hard" by many oil companies, and the rough seas and location of the basin made exploration work in the area "challenging".

In 2003, Woodside Petroleum, the nation's biggest independent oil and gas company, drilled the Gnarlyknots well to a depth of 4000m in the seabed, at a cost of $55m, but it had to abandon the project due to 10m swells. But Ms Totterdell's team was undeterred. They believed the bitumen rocks that washed up on beaches along the coast gave strong indications there was petroleum offshore.

Under Australia's petroleum exploration regime, all information acquired by companies must be given to the federal government. Geoscience Australia re-analysed Woodside's data, and then began looking for rocks in an area about 200km west of where Woodside had drilled.

The rocks were dredged from a 5km-wide canyon that enabled geologists to uncover samples that lie thousands of metres below the seabed in the centre of the basin, about 200km to the east. It is in the centre where the exploration blocks have been offered.

The Bight's water depth ranges from 500m-4000m; the Wallaby Plateau ranges from 2000m to 4000m and Lord Howe Rise ranges from 1300m-2500m.

National oil production has declined from a peak of 35 billion barrels a year early last decade to about 20 billion at present. [BG: these numbers are rubbish - we produce about 210 million barrels of oil per year]

Forbes has an opinion piece by Jeremy Leggett on peak oil - The Next Crisis: Peak Oil.

“The next five years will see us face another crunch--the oil crunch. This time, we do have the chance to prepare. The challenge is to use that time well… Our message to government and businesses is clear: act. Don't let the oil crunch catch us out in the way that the credit crunch did.”

So wrote the CEOs and Chairmen of the companies involved in the U.K. Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil and Energy--Richard Branson of Virgin, Ian Marchant of Scottish and Southern, Brain Souter of Stagecoach, Phillip Dilley of Arup and I--in the forward of our second annual report, released on Feb. 10.

In the report, we produce data that suggests a peak of global oil production at less than 95 million barrels a day, up from some 85 million now, and we summarize fears that could result in a peak of less than 92 million, plus a steep fall beyond the peak, all at a time when demand is rising well in excess of 100 million barrels a day. The data is based on research conducted by consultancy Arup into current and projected oil production levels, extraction costs, exploration projects that are underway or in the pipeline and growth projections for developed and developing nations.

This is a loud blast of the whistle from a fairly broad group of companies. Neither are we alone on this side of the “premature peak oil” debate. The CEOs of oil companies Total and Petrobras are on record as saying the world will never produce more than 89 million barrels a day. The IEA has warned of an oil supply shock within five years and on Thursday raised its oil demand forecast for 2010 to 86.5 million barrels a day.

Reuters has a report on the increasing cost of finding and developing new fields - Oil exploration costs rocket as risks rise.

Finding oil and gas to replace the world's fast dwindling reserves is increasingly risky as rigs probe areas once seen as too difficult or too dangerous, and costs are rocketing, which could imperil future supply.

The cost of discovering each new barrel of oil and gas has risen three-fold over the last decade as technology has pushed the frontiers of exploration into ever more remote areas.

As old fields run dry, oil companies are drilling wells in some of the most inhospitable regions, where political, physical, geological, geographical, technical and contractual risks are high, and they have had remarkable success.

Despite escalating challenges, the annual rate of discovery of new fields has remained remarkably constant at 15-20 billion barrels, more than enough to compensate for the loss of existing reserves that are declining at between 5 and 15 percent a year.

But the cost of this success is staggering, and unless consumers pay more for oil in future, some analysts think we could face an energy supply crunch within a few years.

"The age of cheap oil has gone and it is not going to come back," said Paul Stevens, senior research fellow at the Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House in London. "The world is not going to run out of oil tomorrow, but it is more and more expensive to find and will continue to be so," he said. "The worry is that investment may be squeezed as risks rise, and that could bring us to a looming supply crunch."

The Age has a report on a drilling accident off northern Australia - Oil spill threatens ocean as driller faces multimillion bill.

THE operator of an oil rig responsible for a massive oil leak off the West Australian coast will be forced to pay millions of dollars to clean up the spill, which authorities warn poses a serious threat to the environment.

The Australian Maritime Safety Authority yesterday launched a major clean-up operation as oil and gas continued to seep from a 1200-metre-deep well drilled by the West Atlas - an oil rig located 690 kilometres west of Darwin, 250 kilometres off the far north Kimberley coast and 150 kilometres south-east of Ashmore Reef.

The spill, which is eight nautical miles long and 30 metres wide, began early on Friday, forcing the evacuation of 69 workers to Darwin.

The company responsible for the rig, PTTEP Australasia, said the leak had not yet been brought under control.

PTTEP director Jose Martins said the leak was mainly gas, with a much lower oil content than when the spill began, but the related fire risk meant it was impossible to get back on to the platform. ''So that option for bringing the leak under control is ruled out for now,'' he said.

He said early reports that poisonous hydrogen sulphide gas had been released were wrong. The company has called in gas and oil spill experts to help with the clean-up.

The Australian Maritime Safety Authority was put in charge of the operation after the size of the spill became apparent. It warned that the remote location of the rig would make the clean-up difficult.

Science Daily has a report on using satellite data to explore for oil, which may improve success rates and thus lower exploration costs (thus improving, for a time, the EROI of oil production) - New Oil Deposits Can Be Identified Through Satellite Images.

A new map of the Earth’s gravitational force based on satellite measurements makes it much less resource intensive to find new oil deposits. The map will be particularly useful as the ice melts in the oil-rich Arctic regions. Ole Baltazar, senior scientist at the National Space Institute, Technical University of Denmark (DTU Space), headed the development of the map.

The US company Fugro, one of the world’s leading oil exploration companies, is one of the companies that have already made use of the gravitational map. The company has now initiated a research partnership with DTU Space.

“Ole Baltazar’s gravitational map is the most precise and has the widest coverage to date,” says Li Xiong, Vice President and Head Geophysicist with Fugro. “On account of its high resolution and accuracy, the map is particularly useful in coastal areas, where the majority of the oil is located.”

Ole Baltazar’s map shows variations in gravitational force across the surface of the Earth and knowledge about these small variations is a valuable tool in oil exploration. Subterranean oil deposits are encapsulated in relatively light materials such as limestone and clay and because these materials are light, they have less gravitational force than the surrounding materials.

Ole Baltazar’s map is based on satellite measurements and has a hitherto unseen level of detail and accuracy. With this map in your hands, it is, therefore, easier to find new deposits

The last comment from Belinda Robinson of the APPEA in this article is interesting - she must be a closet peaker. From the ABC - Soaring petrol prices spark oil hunt Down Under.

The price of petrol has nudged past $1.70 in some Australia cities, prompting people to question whether there are any untapped oil reserves in our own backyard. And the president of the Geosciences Council, Dr Trevor Powell, has been singled out by the oil exploration industry to identify potential sites. "The areas that appear to have the greatest promise is the southern margin from Australia - extending from roughly Kangaroo Island, round the south-western tip of Western Australia," Dr Powell said.

"The reason why that area is thought to have prospectivity is because there are a series of sedimentary basins which have very thick sediments. They are of the right geological age and there are other characteristics, such as their structure, which may be correct to contain petroleum."

The Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association's chief executive, Belinda Robinson, says the best place to look is usually next to existing operations. "That's certainly where the risks and the costs are a lot lower, and that is where we traditionally go and explore," she said.

"But if we are interested in wanting to find another new oil province, then we would need to start looking in those areas that we call frontier areas, or those areas where we haven't explored before. They include places down around the Great Australian Bight in the south-west of Australia, right up north in the Arafura Sea, further in the north-west and in the far east. They're the sorts of areas that Geoscience Australia believes could hold the prospect of another oil and gas province."

The problem is, it won't be cheap to explore there. "Before you've even got the infrastructure challenges, there would also be challenges in actually getting there and exploring because the water is very deep," Ms Robinson said. "But thanks to developing technology, we are able to go into deeper and deeper water. But it is risky and it is costly."

The theory is higher oil prices encourage investment in exploration, but Ms Robinson says costs are also increasing, so exploration efforts won't be enough to replace depleting reserves.

The SMH has an article on a "Plan to drill for oil off NSW coast", with the would be explorers hoping to have a drilling rig exploring the area in May next year and touting estimates of 1 billion barrel find.

An Australian joint venture is planning to drill off the NSW coast in search of oil and gas in a move that has outraged green groups. The venture says the skyrocketing world oil price has made it feasible to establish a drilling rig 22 kilometres offshore between the Central Coast and Newcastle, The Sunday Telegraph newspaper reports.

One of the firms, Perth-based MEC Resources, says air surveys indicate there is petroleum at the target site. The listed company told the Australian Stock Exchange on Friday: "MEC was reviewing new data from an airborne survey conducted east of Newcastle which detected evidence of petroleum seeps on the sea surface." ... The MEC report estimates undersea reserves of up to 1 billion barrels of oil and enough gas to meet Sydney's needs for a decade. It is seeking shareholder approval to restructure its oil and gas assets to improve access to capital for exploration.

Leaving aside the optimism of the promoters, the bizarre part of this article was the response by the state opposition, who seem to be oblivious to the fact that oil is an internationally traded commodity and think that producing oil locally will make the cost of petrol fall. Now - that might be the case if any political party was actually advocating mandating oil export restrictions or subsidised petrol - however none are and the NSW Liberal party would probably be the very last to adopt such measures even if the left leaning parties proposed them.

Drilling in NSW will send petrol prices down: Opposition

If the venture is successful the public will benefit from a drop in petrol prices, NSW Opposition Leader Barry O'Farrell said. The promise of oil would be welcomed by the public, Mr O'Farrell said. "The beneficiaries are the public," he told reporters in Sydney. "As is evident by the increasing price of oil, we're reliant on international oil cartels and the prices are currently only going in one direction. If we're talking about oil rigs 20 kilometres off the coast, if that offers the hope of increased oil [and] reduced petrol prices, I think the community will welcome it.