Brent Spar

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The Brent Spar under construction in the Netherlands, 1975
The location of the Brent oil field

Brent Spar was a floating oil tank in the North Sea owned by Shell and Esso . "Brent" is the name of the oil field and the subsidized there type of oil , saving means in English spar buoy . She became known to the public through a publicity campaign by the environmental organization Greenpeace , which was directed against the disposal of industrial waste in the sea.

function

Brent Spar was located 190 kilometers northeast of the Shetland Islands ( Great Britain ) in the Atlantic and served as an interim storage facility for crude oil from 1976 to 1991 , at which tankers docked to transport the oil to refineries on land. In the media, Brent Spar was often incorrectly referred to as a funding platform .

The construction was 147 meters high - most of it under water - and weighed 14,500 tons, of which 6,700 tons were steel and 1,000 tons were equipment. It consisted of a steel tank 93 m long and 29 m in diameter for 50,000 tons of oil, making Brent Spar one of the smaller tanks. There were also various machines and pumps, crew quarters and a helipad on board .

By pipelines which the oil to the oil terminal Sullom Voe convey the Brent Spar was unnecessary. Therefore, it was supposed to be sunk in 1995 in the Rockall Trough , a deep sea trench west of Ireland.

Dispute over disposal

The oil storage and loading platform became known when activists from the environmental protection organization Greenpeace occupied it from their ship Altair on April 30, 1995 to prevent it from sinking. Greenpeace argued that the sinking could set a precedent for disused platforms in the North and Baltic Seas . The organization advocated that industrial scrap should not be dumped in the sea, but should be recycled on land, as was feasible and in many places already done. This is countered by a long-term review of disposal alternatives according to BPEO criteria, with the involvement of the responsible institutions, fishing associations, the OSPAR countries and the British approval authorities, by Shell.

Greenpeace accused Shell, however, of only wanting to save costs. The environmental protection organization initially correctly assumed toxic oil residues of around 100 tons, but later changed this estimate, based on Shell figures, upwards.

The cast received a lot of media attention, especially in the Netherlands , Denmark and Germany . There were calls for boycotts that met with a great response from the media and the general public. Some German authorities also stopped refueling their cars at Shell. As a result, the sales of the German Shell petrol stations fell by up to 50%. An arson attack was carried out on a Shell petrol station in Hamburg .

On June 16, 1995, after the media became aware of the campaign, Greenpeace released a new estimate of the amount of toxic oil residues. The original estimate of 100 tons has been increased to 5,500 tons. After long media disputes, Shell decided on June 20, 1995 to dispose of the platform on land. Shell responded to the crisis with a campaign (motto: "We will change"). In it, the company took up its own social marketing campaign, which had been operating in the spring of 1995 under the title “We want to change that”.

On September 5, 1995, Greenpeace admitted that their estimate of the amount of toxic oil residues in the tank was grossly inaccurate: the figure of 5,500 tons mentioned was far too high. According to the test report of the Norwegian ship classification society DNV ( Det Norske Veritas ) of October 18, 1995, B. the oil residues on 75 to 100 tons, about 1.37-1.8% of the claim. The measured values ​​largely corresponded to the figures submitted by Shell, which had also been used by Greenpeace at the beginning. Greenpeace has apologized to Shell and the public for the wrong numbers.

In July 1998 the 15 states participating in the OSPAR conference decided to ban oil platforms in the North Atlantic from being dumped . In the same year, the dismantling of the Brent Spar in Norway began with the support of Thialf , which was then the largest floating crane in the world. A large part of the cleaned outer shell has been the basis for a quay foundation 140 meters long and 20 meters deep in Mekjarvik , ten kilometers north of Stavanger (Norway) , since 2003 . The rest of the Brent Spar was scrapped. The scrapping costs amounted to DM 70 million (the equivalent of € 36 million in purchasing power at the time).

Scientific evaluation

Studies carried out beforehand on behalf of Shell had shown that the sinking of the Brent Spar would not cause any significant environmental problems. Although there were concerns about local contamination that could result from subsidence, the experts came to the conclusion that the negative environmental impacts would be very small compared to other pollution of the oceans. These assessments have been confirmed by the UK Select Committee on Science and Technology . The committee also recommended sinking as the best solution.

Following the Greenpeace campaign, the Scientific Group on Decommissioning Offshore Structures (Shepard Commission), consisting of independent scientists, was set up in May 1996 . This essentially confirmed the results of Shell's original analysis, but limited that further research was needed and that public perception could not be neglected.

In an editorial in the science journal Nature , Greenpeace was accused of not being interested in facts in connection with the Brent Spar campaign. Two British marine researchers have indicated that large amounts of heavy metals and crude oil are released from hot springs on the seabed in many areas. It is precisely in these areas that a rich deep sea life thrives. Sinking the Brent Spar would even have been beneficial for microorganisms on the seabed. According to the scientists, overrating relatively small problems would lead to the most pressing environmental problems, such as overfishing in the North Atlantic, being neglected.

documentation

literature

  • Thomas Löding, Kay Oliver Schulze, Jutta Sundermann: Group, criticism, campaign! Ideas and Practice for Social Movements. VSA-Verlag, Hamburg 2006, ISBN 3-89965-199-5 , pp. 37-40.
  • Greenpeace: Brent Spar and the consequences. Ten years later. ( Memento from November 1, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) 2005. (PDF; 1.8 MB) Brochure.
  • Ragnar Löftstedt, Ortwin Renn: The Brent Spar Controversy: An Example of Risk Communication Gone Wrong. In: Risk Analysis. Volume 17, 1996, No. 2, pp. 131 ff.
  • Paula Owen, Tony Rice: Decommissioning the Brent Spar. CRC Press, 2003, ISBN 0-203-22205-9 .

Footnotes

  1. ↑ a b War in the North Sea. In: Der Spiegel . one day mirror online
  2. ^ The big lie of television - ducks on TV from the archive of the WDR
  3. ^ A b c Bianca Schubert: Shell in the crisis . on the relationship between journalism and PR in Germany, illustrated using the example of “Brent Spar”. LIT Verlag, Münster 2000, ISBN 3-8258-5187-7 ( limited preview in the Google book search).
  4. ↑ a b Sinks the shell . In: Der Spiegel . No. 25 , 1995 ( online - 19 June 1995 ).
  5. ↑ Protests against Shell expand. In: The world . June 21, 1995.
  6. ^ Elisabeth Klaus: PR campaigns: About the staging of the public . Ed .: Ulrike Röttger. Springer Science + Business Media , 2009, ISBN 978-3-531-16228-7 ( limited preview in Google book search).
  7. ↑ Wilfried Kratz: Learning hurts . In: The time . No. February 27 , 1995 ( online [accessed April 1, 2014]).
  8. ^ The Shell Campaign . In: Der Spiegel . No. 26 , 1995 ( online - 26 June 1995 ).
  9. ↑ Greenpeace: Credibility - the most important asset of an NGO ( Memento from November 1, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) June 22, 2005.
  10. ↑ a b Ragnar Löftstedt, Ortwin Renn: The Brent Spar Controversy: An Example of Risk Communication Gone Wrong. In: Risk Analysis. Volume 17 (1996), No. 2, p. 133.
  11. ↑ Editorial comment: "Brent Spar, broken spur". In: Nature. 1995, Volume 375, pp. 708 f.
  12. ↑ British researchers against Greenpeace. In: Der Spiegel. 29/1995.