A little starpower lit up a rainy week in Stavanger, as Hollywood actor-turned-oil spill cleanup advocate Kevin Costner hit town for the ONS 2010 conference and exhibition. Russell McCulley reports.
Nearly 50,000 visitors coursed through the Stavanger Forum over four days in late August for the biennial conference, which included 1351 exhibiting companies and 18 national pavilions. The party spilled out to the promenade lining Stavanger’s inner harbor, where, the rain having let up for the occasion, locals joined delegates for a closing concert and fireworks.
Costner sightings around town generated some buzz on the street; inside, the actor talked up the company he co-founded, Ocean Therapy Solutions, and its signature technology, a centrifugebased oil and water separator that can be deployed at the scene of oil spills. During a presentation in the main ONS conference room, Costner delivered a scathing, if at times unfocused, critique of the oil industry’s environmental record – and its reluctance to embrace the star’s centrifuge technology, which he acquired in 1993 after the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska.
‘For more than a dozen years,’ he said, ‘my machine sat quietly in a modest Nevada facility. An industry expert later told me that I had come up with a solution for a problem that didn’t exist. I thought, what in the hell have I been smoking?’
The actor/director wasn’t the only big-name draw at ONS, however: Norway’s King Harald V was on hand for the meeting’s inaugural session, preceded by a surprisingly polite security detail (‘he’s a cool king,’ one local explained to a visiting US journalist as the monarch’s entourage squeezed through a corridor outside the conference hall). ‘The age of easy oil and gas is over,’ the king proclaimed in a speech calling for safer and more efficient production methods.
Safety was at the top of the ONS agenda, which took place as BP was still dealing with fallout from the deepwater Gulf of Mexico Macondo blowout. The company’s chief economist, Christof Ruhl, offered a vigorous defense of BP’s spill response and reaffirmed the company’s commitment to the US gulf region, despite a $32 billion hit BP took in 2Q 2010. ‘We have taken some heavy flak for how it was handled,’ Ruhl said. ‘But I do believe in the long term, this will stand up, and hopefully will help us to rebuild some of the lost credibility.’
‘Many other companies would not have done that,’ he said of the money BP spent during the crisis, and the billions in remediation and damages still to come. ‘It really was a massive response, in terms of putting company resources there to try to rectify the situation. Many smaller companies could not have done it.’
Norwegian prime minister Jens Stoltenberg stressed the need to reduce carbon emissions and pointed to his nation’s own considerable work on that front, including the Mongstad carbon capture and storage test project, scheduled to open in 2012. Stoltenberg also addressed the Deepwater Horizon tragedy and vowed action to ‘prevent new accidents’ as Norway’s domestic offshore industry moves into far northern regions off the Lofoten and Vesterålen Islands. ‘We must maintain Norway’s high environmental and safety standards,’ he said. ‘These, of course, entail costs for the industry. But it has also become clear that they can provide a competitive advantage in the long run.’
Most speakers built on the conference’s ‘energy for more people’ theme by pointing out the correlation between rapid world population growth – projected to approach 7 billion by 2015, up a billion from the turn of the century – and energy demand, which will continue to be met in large part by fossil fuels. The trend is at odds with targeted cuts in emissions, as Norway’s minister of petroleum & energy Terje Riis-Johansen pointed out.
‘These challenges are tied together,’ he said. ‘The global population is growing. We must combat poverty and raise human welfare. This fuels energy demand, especially in developing countries.
‘At the same time deep emission cuts are called for.’
Like most discussions at ONS 2010, the minister’s remarks eventually turned to the ongoing drama in the Gulf of Mexico. ‘For the oil industry, which is expected to provide energy in a safe, technologically sound and environmentally responsible manner, the incident represents a setback. It was a shock to many that a blowout of this dimension could happen,’ he said.
Riis-Johansen defended Norway’s stringent regulations and safety record, but said the Deepwater Horizon incident offered no place for complacency.
‘Statistics do not tell us what will happen tomorrow, and shall not lead to indifference. Low risk is not a static state,’ he said. ‘We need to be better prepared when the unthinkable happens,’ Riis-Johansen said. A well leaking for three months must be avoided. Solutions that can stop a leak quicker must be technologically qualified. What the appropriate solution is might differ from well to well and from country to country according to differences in, amongst other things, geology.
‘We have challenged the Norwegian oil industry in this regard. They are working on this as we speak. OE