In
2005, Royal Dutch Shell, then the fourth-largest company on Earth,
bought a drill rig that was both tall, rising almost 250 feet above the
waterline, and unusually round. The hull of the Kulluk, as the rig was
called, was made of 1.5-inch-thick steel and rounded to better prevent
its being crushed. A 12-point anchor system could keep it locked in
place above an oil well for a full day in 18-foot seas or in moving sea
ice that was four feet thick. Its drill bit, dropped from a 160-foot
derrick, could plunge 600 feet into the sea, then bore another 20,000
feet into the seabed, where it could verify the existence of oil
deposits that were otherwise a geologist’s best guess. It had a sauna.
It could go (in theory) where few other rigs could go, helping Shell
find oil that (in theory) few other oil companies could find.
The
purchase was important not because Shell needed oil in 2005. The
company had plenty of oil. It was important because Shell had spent the
previous year engulfed in a scandal involving what are known as proved
reserves: a petroleum company’s most sacred promise about the future.
Proved reserves are measured in barrels of oil, but the oil in question
is still in the ground. Its total volume is unknowable, or rather it is
constantly changing, because the amount a given deposit could produce
depends as much on human factors as it does on geology. The same deposit
will yield more or less if production methods improve (as was the case
with hydraulic fracturing), if prices go up or down (some tar-sand
deposits simply aren’t worth pursuing when oil is cheap), if the
regulatory environment changes (like the United States moratorium, after
the Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2010, on some offshore drilling) or
if the actual environment changes (melt in the high Arctic may put
difficult deposits within reach).
Despite
their unreality, proved reserves define the total worldview of an oil
company. They influence things like stock price and credit rating, and
in a series of announcements, Shell admitted that it had overstated its
proved reserves by 4.47 billion barrels of oil, or 22 percent. The
company’s stock dropped nearly 10 percent overnight. Its chairman was
forced out. The Securities and Exchange Commission in the United States
and the Financial Services Authority in Britain fined it a total of $150
million.
For
all its short-term growth, Shell still had to show investors that its
long-term future was as bright as it once looked on paper. But the
planet’s easy oil — along with its shallow backyard wells and most
pliant monarchs — was gone. In the era before the OPEC embargo in 1973,
the so-called “supermajors,” including Shell and the predecessors of BP,
Chevron and Exxon, controlled more than 80 percent of global reserves.
By 2005, more than 80 percent of remaining reserves were controlled by
state-owned oil companies: Aramco in Saudi Arabia, Petrobras in Brazil,
Petronas in Malaysia, Gazprom in Russia, Cnooc in China and many others.
As a result, the hunt for oil went to technical and geographical
extremes like shale oil in South Texas, tar sands in Alberta, deepwater
sites in Brazil and offshore wells in the Arctic. And the hunt became
more expensive: The break-even point for many unconventional projects
was $70 or more per barrel. They made economic sense only if oil prices
were high, which meant their reserves could be considered proved and
added to company balance sheets only if oil prices were high — and, for
the moment, oil prices were high.
In
Inuvialuktun, the language spoken in the settlement of Inuvik in the
Northwest Territories in Canada, the name Kulluk means “thunder.” (A
local schoolgirl won a naming contest in 1982.) The rig had been
purpose-built for exploring what was now recognized as the last great
energy opportunity. The United States Geological Survey said in a series
of reports that the Arctic held nearly a quarter of the world’s
undiscovered petroleum. Beneath just the American portion of the Arctic
Ocean, in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas, were an estimated 27 billion
barrels of recoverable oil and 130 trillion cubic feet of natural gas —
more than 30 times America’s annual imports from OPEC. The break-even
point was substantial, but so was the prize. One federal estimate
declared that at $80 a barrel, 12 billion barrels would be pulled out of
the Chukchi Sea alone.
In
2005, along with its purchase of the Kulluk, Shell bid $44 million for
84 blocks of seabed in the Beaufort Sea. In 2006 it hired a
subcontractor, Frontier Drilling, now part of the Noble Corporation, to
staff and operate the Kulluk. In 2007, it bid another $39 million to
double its Beaufort holdings. In 2008, it paid a record-breaking $2.1
billion on leases in the Chukchi. Over time, it spent $292 million to
upgrade the Kulluk. (The original purchase price for the rig was never
disclosed.) From its North American headquarters in Houston, where
executives oversaw logistics in the distant Arctic, Shell fought off
lawsuits from environmental and native groups. It waited out the
moratorium on offshore drilling imposed as a result of BP’s Deepwater
Horizon disaster.
The
Arctic was a long-term investment — Shell would not start production on
such a big project in such a distant place until at least a decade
after it found oil — but the future is always getting closer, and by
2010 the company was anxious. It took out ads in newspapers, hoping to
pressure the Obama administration into opening the Arctic. One pictured a
little girl reading in bed, a figurine of a polar bear next to the lamp
on her nightstand. “What sort of world will this little girl grow up
in?” it asked. If “we’re going to keep the lights on for her, we will
need to look at every possible energy source. . . . Let’s go.”
Even
with permission, getting to the oil would not be easy. The Alaskan
Arctic has no deepwater port. The closest is in the Aleutian Islands at
Dutch Harbor, a thousand miles to the south through the Bering Strait.
In the Inupiat whaling villages dotting the Chukchi coast, only a
handful of airstrips are long enough for anything other than a prop
plane. There are few roads; human residents get around in summer by
boat, foot or all-terrain vehicle. Shell was trying the logistical
equivalent of a mission to the moon. During the short Arctic summer,
when the sea ice made its annual retreat, Shell would have to bring not
only the Kulluk but everything else: personnel, tankers, icebreakers,
worker housing, supply vessels, helicopters, tugboats, spill-cleanup
barges and a secondary rig to drill a relief well in case of a blowout.
In the wake of Deepwater Horizon, Shell would build a $400 million
Arctic-ready containment dome, an extra layer of spill protection that
it would also need to drag north.
By
2012, Shell had become the largest company in the world. It had $467.2
billion in revenue and 87,000 employees in more than 70 countries. It
was on track to spend $6 billion preparing for Arctic Alaska, and that
March the Obama administration approved exploratory drilling. The task
that remained was not to tame the frontier so much as to bring it within
reach, to bind Arctic Alaska to the rest of the world. Shell imagined a
future of new ports, new airports and permanent rigs. Squint your eyes
and you could see all the lines being drawn. Shell’s Arctic program
looked much like the Kulluk itself: something massive at the end of a
long thin line.
The plan was simple:
The Kulluk would anchor to the Arctic Ocean seabed above a suspected
oil deposit and sink a bit deep enough to take core samples — the same
operation carried out by hundreds of offshore rigs in warmer waters all
over the world. If it found significant oil, its test wells would be
replaced by a production well, the Kulluk by a permanent platform that
would sit in place for decades.
Shell
had the Kulluk refurbished at Vigor Marine shipyards in Seattle: new
crew quarters, new cranes, new generators and a new blue-and-white paint
scheme that was chosen, according to a Vigor news release, “to
accommodate the known preferences of whales.” The most important upgrade
completed at Vigor, at least from the perspective of later Coast Guard
investigators, was to the Kulluk’s steel tow shackles. These linked the
Kulluk to the towline of its tugboat, the Aiviq, which was built for the
Kulluk job by another subcontractor, the Louisiana shipbuilder Edison
Chouest, which would also provide its crew. Shell hired a surveyor
company, MatthewsDaniel, to give outside assurance that its tow plan was
safe. MatthewsDaniel recommended a more robust connection between rig
and tug for the rough Alaskan voyage ahead. But rather than order the
replacements new, workers located some apparently stronger shackles in a
shipyard storage bin. The shackles they found had no certification or
records — but appeared “as new,” investigators were told. Onto the
Kulluk they went.
On
a sunny Wednesday in June 2012, Shell’s fleet set out for the Arctic.
Behind the Kulluk and the Aiviq, in a blue-and-white convoy steaming
through Puget Sound, was a third vessel, owned by Noble Drilling, the
same subcontractor that Shell hired to operate the Kulluk. This was the
512-foot Noble Discoverer. Unlike the Kulluk, the Discoverer was
self-propelled. Like the Kulluk, it was old, one of the oldest drill
ships still operating anywhere in the world, having been built as a log
carrier in 1966 and converted to a mobile exploration rig a decade
later. The Noble Discoverer had its air-pollution controls refurbished
alongside the Kulluk in the Seattle shipyard. It was a rush job. In a
news release, Vigor declared that it had “mobilized a team of more than
500 skilled, quality-focused workers to complete upgrades which would
normally take up to six months in just 10 weeks.”
The
Kulluk, tugged along at the pace of a man jogging, and the Noble
Discoverer, somewhat more quickly, traveled north across the Canadian
border, past Vancouver Island and into the open Pacific Ocean. As the
few remaining signs of civilization faded away, the ships passed the
salmon grounds of Haida Gwaii, the fjords of Glacier Bay National Park
and the uncut expanses of the Chugach National Forest. They finally
turned west to reach the deepwater port at Dutch Harbor, which sits
alone in the middle of the long Aleutian Island chain, 800 miles from
Anchorage and 800 miles from the Russian mainland. The 2,000-mile voyage
from Seattle to Dutch Harbor took almost three weeks. Shell’s closest
Arctic leases were another thousand miles farther north and still
covered in ice. The fleet would park in Dutch Harbor for as long as it
took — weeks, not months, Shell thought — for the ice to melt.
The
troubles soon began. The Noble Discoverer, not the Kulluk, was at first
the problem ship. On July 14, a storm brought 30-knot winds, which were
nothing unusual for the Aleutians or crew members accustomed to Alaska
but enough to cause the Noble Discoverer to drag its anchor and be blown
south, where it grounded or appeared to ground on a sandy beach near
town. More than a dozen people watched from shore as tugboats pulled the
Discoverer back into the bay. Some of them posted snapshots on
Facebook. The biggest danger was political. For drilling opponents
following Shell’s every move — Greenpeace had dispatched a ship of its
own to Alaska — a grounding incident would provide another chance to
declare the company unfit to operate in the Arctic. Shell insisted, in a
statement emailed to reporters, that there had been no grounding and
that the drill ship had instead “drifted toward land and stopped very
near the coast.” The Coast Guard sent divers to inspect the hull. They
found no damage and cleared the ship to sail.
July
turned to August and August to September. The ice in the Alaskan Arctic
had melted weeks late — at least by the new standards of the warming
north — and drilling had not begun. The hangup was the company’s new
Arctic containment dome and the spill barge another contractor, Superior
Energy Services, was building to carry the dome north. The dome and the
barge weren’t ready, and without them, Shell would not be permitted to
go for oil. Its plan to drill five exploratory wells — three in the
Chukchi Sea, two in the Beaufort — began to crumble. In September, in a
sea trial in the calm waters of Puget Sound, a faulty electrical
connection caused the $400 million containment dome to shoot to the
surface without warning, where it “breached like a whale,” a federal
inspector wrote, before sinking 120 feet. When it was pulled to the
surface again, it had been “crushed like a beer can.”
Shell didn’t give up
before the containment dome was crushed, the company proposed a
new plan that would allow them to show results before winter set in. The
Kulluk and the Discoverer would each sink a partial well to roughly
1,400 feet, stopping just before the oil zone, then cap it, leaving the
“top hole” primed for completion when Shell could come back with a
working containment dome. The rigs were moved into place: the Discoverer
in the Chukchi, north of the Bering Strait, and the Kulluk in the more
distant Beaufort, which straddles the Alaska-Canada border to the east, a
1,700-mile tow from Dutch Harbor. The Department of the Interior signed
off on the plan.
The
Beaufort and Chukchi Seas are shallow, which makes them biologically
productive and easier to explore. On the silty seabed, which kicks up
plumes of sediment when an anchor or submarine sets down, are sea stars
and snow crabs. The floating sea ice of the Chukchi, some of it thickly
ridged and cracked like a glacial sérac, is home to roughly half of
America’s polar bears, which feed on its ringed and spotted seals, and
to tens of thousands of walruses. In the spring, as the ice begins to
recede toward the North Pole, bowhead whales migrate along the Chukchi
coastline and into the Beaufort, and the local Inupiat hunt for them.
When the ice is gone, the seas are a dark shade of green, and there is
frequent fog. Winds that scoured the frozen emptiness now push the water
into rolling waves. There is little on the surface to see. Ships can go
for weeks without sighting another vessel.
Pete
Slaiby, Shell’s vice president for Alaska, had worked hard to assure
Alaskans that Arctic drilling would be safe. His previous posting for
the company was in Brunei. Now he traveled to hundreds of meetings in
villages and cities across the north. “Bruneians are every bit as tied
to their live coral reefs as the Inupiat are to the whale,” Slaiby said
at a 2011 conference near Anchorage, emphasizing that he wanted “to
highlight those ties as well as our sensitivity to those who are being
asked to trust that an oil company can and will do the right thing.”
On
Sept. 8 in the Chukchi Sea, Shell achieved a milestone. The Discoverer
attached a web of anchors to the seabed. The drill began to spin. Barely
24 hours later, the Arctic wind pushed an ice floe 30 miles long and 10
miles wide right at the ship, and it was forced to retreat. It didn’t
matter. A grainy video appeared that same day on Shell’s official
YouTube page. “Shell readies the drill bit for first spud!” the caption
read. (To spud is to begin drilling.) “This marks the culmination of
more than six years of effort by Shell. . . . This is the first time a
drill bit has touched the sea floor in the U.S. Chukchi Sea in more than
two decades.” On Oct. 3 in the Beaufort Sea, which had been off limits
for weeks during the local bowhead-whale hunt, the Kulluk performed much
the same operation. Shell made the most of having only partly drilled
just two of its five planned wells.
Then
it was time to leave. By late October on the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas,
it was dark more than 16 hours a day. The Arctic produced its standard
mix of clouds, fog, wind and snow. Sea ice was already creeping back
after its annual low point the previous month. Patches of it blotting
out stretches of open water. This is when ships must either leave the
Arctic or risk getting stuck fast in the ice.
The
Discoverer departed the Chukchi for Dutch Harbor on Oct. 28. The voyage
was uneventful, but two weeks later, in port, its revamped exhaust
system emitted a loud blast that port officials felt hundreds of yards
away. They called 911. The ship’s crew extinguished a small blaze
minutes before the police and fire departments arrived. In an email to
the local radio station, a Shell spokesman denied that the explosion had
been anything other than “a common backfire.”
Ten
days after that, near Seward, Alaska, the Discoverer’s propeller shaft
began vibrating so badly that the crew shut down its engines and had it
towed to port. Coast Guard safety inspectors boarded for a routine visit
and found 16 violations, many of them serious. “As a result of
backfires,” they wrote, “main propulsion machinery and all auxiliary
machinery essential to the propulsion and safety of the unit may be
compromised.” They temporarily impounded the ship so that it couldn’t
leave port and called in a Coast Guard criminal unit from outside
Alaska. Noble Drilling, Shell’s subcontractor, rushed to provide lawyers
for the crew. When the criminal team arrived, the crew refused to talk.
The case was passed on to the Justice Department. Eventually, with the
help of a confidential informant, investigators would learn of the
ship’s multiple unreported engine failures and makeshift hose-and-barrel
system for bilge water that discharged oily waste into the ocean. (Two
years later, on Dec. 19, 2014, Noble Drilling pleaded guilty to eight
felony charges and agreed to $12.2 million in fines and in
community-service payments.)
While
the Discoverer was making its way south from the Chukchi, the Kulluk
was still sitting in the Beaufort Sea. It couldn’t leave until it
discharged most of its 83-person drilling crew. To shuttle workers to
and from the Beaufort shore, Shell had hired PHI, a helicopter company
that it had long used in the Gulf of Mexico. As the weather worsened,
the helicopters were often unable to make the trip. They had no de-icing
equipment, and their pilots were unfamiliar with the Arctic. Adding to
the delays, rough seas made it difficult to refuel the Kulluk’s tugboat,
the Aiviq. The rig remained at 70 degrees north well into November.
Snowdrifts piled up on its deck, and ice the consistency of a Slurpee
formed in the water around it.
As
Shell prepared the rig for the return voyage to Dutch Harbor and
potentially on to Seattle, it again tried to hire MatthewsDaniel, the
marine warranty-survey company that it had asked to independently
examine and approve its June 2012 tow north. This time the company was
unavailable, Shell told investigators. But according to a 152-page
report on the grounding of the Kulluk that the Coast Guard released in
April 2014, MatthewsDaniel was concerned that the second leg of the
voyage might prove too dangerous. In an email, MatthewsDaniel told Shell
that it “would not approve a tow of the Kulluk from Dutch Harbor to
Seattle during the month of November as weather data shows that seas can
reach as much as 10 meters in the Gulf of Alaska.”
Shell
hired a different warranty surveyor, GL Noble Denton (not affiliated
with Noble Drilling), that agreed to approve both legs of the trip. When
the Kulluk arrived back at Dutch Harbor, it was almost Thanksgiving.
By December,
the Gulf of Alaska is one of the stormiest places anywhere. According
to the National Weather Service, gale-force winds are present 15 percent
of the time during December and January; 20 percent of the time, the
sea swells top 17 feet; and in an average year, hurricane-force winds
hit two or three times. The sensible approach would have been to wait
out the winter in Dutch Harbor, safe in the Aleutians, on the edge of
the gulf. The Kulluk had a customized berth in Dutch Harbor — rounded to
match its hull — and would be better positioned to go back up to the
Arctic the following summer and complete the new wells. But the company
wanted to make off-season upgrades to the Kulluk that would be either
impossible or too expensive in Dutch Harbor. And there was another
consideration: If the Kulluk was in an Alaskan port on New Year’s Day,
executives believed, it would be subject to a state oil-facilities tax
of as much as $6 million. In late December, a spokesman confirmed
Shell’s fears in an email to a longtime reporter at a local newspaper,
The Dutch Harbor Fisherman, writing, “It’s fair to say the current tax
structure related to vessels of this type influenced the timing of our
departure.” (“That was an unfortunate article,” Pete Slaiby, the Alaska
vice president for Shell, told a crowd in Kodiak in early January,
reiterating the need for “very specific things” it needed done on the
mainland.)
The
Aiviq also had problems. Towing the Kulluk over the summer, the tug had
run into a storm that sent saltwater flooding over its back deck and
into the fuel vents and interior spaces, damaging cranes, electronics
and heating systems. In a separate incident on the November return from
the Beaufort Sea, the tug had an electrical blackout, and one of its
main diesel engines overheated, rendering it unusable until it was
repaired in Dutch Harbor. By law, according to the Coast Guard report,
such system failures should have been reported to the Coast Guard. They
were not. The Aiviq’s captain sent an email to Chouest headquarters
titled “Storm Damage Lessons Learned” and recommended that they raise
the height of its fuel vents to avoid future submersion during the next
big tow through heavy Alaskan seas, but this was never done.
On
the morning of Dec. 21, as the Aiviq and Kulluk crews prepared to
depart on the three-week journey back to Seattle, Shell’s new warranty
surveyor took careful note of the certificates for the steel shackles
that would connect the two vessels and bear the dead weight of the giant
Kulluk — without noticing that they had been replaced with
theoretically sturdier shackles of unknown origin. He examined the
shackles but had little means by which to test their strength. He did
not ask the crew to rotate the shackles, as one might rotate tires on a
car. He did not consider it part of his job, he would tell Coast Guard
investigators, to examine whether Shell’s overall plan to cross the Gulf
of Alaska made any sense.
The
Aiviq pulled the Kulluk away just after lunchtime. The Aiviq’s usual
captain was on vacation for the holidays, as were Slaiby and other
members of Shell’s senior Alaska staff. The rest of the tug’s crew had
limited experience in the operation of the new, complex vessel. Onboard
the Kulluk was a skeleton crew of 18 men, along for the ride in large
part because of an inconvenience of the rig’s flag of convenience. The
Kulluk was registered in the Marshall Islands, the same country where
BP’s contractors had registered the Deepwater Horizon, and the Marshall
Islands required that the rig be manned, even when under tow. The new
captain of the Aiviq, Jon Skoglund, proposed aiming straight for the
Seattle area, a direct and faster “great circle” route that would leave
the two ships alone in the middle of the North Pacific but would avoid
the shoals, rocks and waves of the Alaskan coast. There would be no
shore to crash into. They could lengthen the towline for better shock
absorption and would have room to move if problems arose. The idea was
dropped because the Kulluk’s 18 crew members would then be out of range
of Coast Guard search-and-rescue helicopters. Perversely, a flag of
convenience, seen as a way to avoid government regulation, had Shell
seeking a government safety net — and a longer, more dangerous,
near-shore route.
Skoglund
was so concerned as he began his first Gulf of Alaska tow that he sent
an email to the chief Kulluk mariner on the other side of the towline.
“To be blunt,” he wrote, “I believe that this length of tow, at this
time of year, in this location, with our current routing guarantees an
ass kicking.”
The Kulluk’s crew
celebrated Christmas Day three days later with a lonely barbecue on the
deck of the rig. As forecast, the weather was turning. By midnight
there were gale-force winds and swells the size of houses. Rather than
crash forward through the building swells, as other ships might, the
Kulluk marked their passage like a giant metronome, pitching and rolling
a stomach-churning five, then seven, then 10 degrees off vertical. Six
hundred yards ahead, the same waves were bucking the Aiviq, but the two
ships were out of sync. The towline between them was slack one moment,
then crackling with tension, then slack again.
The
Coast Guard report describes the harrowing series of events that
followed. At daybreak on Dec. 27, still two weeks out of Seattle, the
Edison Chouest employee managing the towline on the Aiviq side, Third
Mate Bobby Newill, shot a cellphone video for his wife as he gradually
let out a hundred yards more line, trying to find a sweet spot. The
ship’s tow system was built by Rolls-Royce: a winch on the back deck and
computerized controls up in the wheelhouse. Newill’s video shows the
view through the wheelhouse window as the stern of the Aiviq bobs in the
Gulf of Alaska, the Kulluk in the distance, then it pans to a computer
monitor that displays towline tension. From 35 tons, the tension shoots
rapidly into the triple digits — “Here we go,” Newill says — and peaks
at 228 tons. “That is a good quality piece of wire,” he says as the
numbers drop again.
Between
5:34 a.m. and 11:29 a.m., according to a later computer analysis by
Rolls-Royce, the Aiviq’s “wire tensile strength overload” alarm went off
38 times. It was set to trigger at 300 tons. The alarm, a piercing
ring, would not stop until Newill acknowledged it on the computer
screen. New to Alaska and new to a ship that was new to the world,
Newill later claimed that the alarm never went off. Coast Guard
investigators concluded that he mistook the tension alarm for another
alarm that was known to be acting up.
At
11:35 a.m. the towline snapped. Video shot from the Aiviq’s
closed-circuit cameras shows the moment. It is unremarkable: The taut
line stretches into the sea. The tail of the tug rises once again, and
the line suddenly whips back and goes limp. The Aiviq keeps bobbing.
Aboard the Kulluk, the crew prepared an emergency towline. Retrieving
and reconnecting with the original line was impossible, investigators
would learn, because “the Kulluk cranes could only be used in ideal sea
and wind conditions seldom found in the winter Gulf of Alaska
conditions.” Instead, the Kulluk would now be towed from what was
considered its stern, from a bracket beneath the helicopter deck, where
an emergency line was already in place. Because the Kulluk was perfectly
round, it was hard to imagine that the new orientation would make any
difference.
To
pick up the emergency towline from the Kulluk, the Aiviq made a U-turn,
just as a water-ski boat might go back for a fallen skier. But it did
so in swells that exceeded 25 feet. Briefly perpendicular to them, it
took a heavy roll. A steel hook the size of a grand piano, secured to a
wall when not in use, came crashing down, damaging handrails and vents.
The engineer welded it to the floor to keep it from sliding; sailors
chased down inflatable “anchor balls” now rolling loose around the ship.
Seawater poured onto the deck and, once again — because no one had
acted on the captain’s recommendation to move them higher before the
Aiviq left Dutch Harbor — into the fuel vents.
Three
hours after the Aiviq lost the Kulluk, the ships were connected again.
To reduce stress on the emergency towline and shackles, the crew of the
Aiviq reduced engine power, keeping tension to no more than 60 tons.
They tried to put distance between the ships and a nearby area of
shoals, where giant swells could crest or the Kulluk, with its 35-foot
draft, could drag on the seabed. This, at the time, seemed the primary
danger. The nearest land, Kodiak Island, was still 65 miles away. The
wind backed off, but the seas remained heavy. By 4:30 p.m. it was dark.
In
the early-morning hours of Dec. 28, the Aiviq’s four main diesel
engines began to fail: No. 2, then No. 3 and No. 4 and, finally, No. 1.
The apparent cause was saltwater intrusion. What remained were small,
electric thrusters — not powerful enough to keep both vessels moving
forward, but they could at least keep the Aiviq facing into swells and
away from the Kulluk. The Aiviq’s course was now determined by the
westerly current and southwesterly winds. In calls to the Coast Guard
that day and the next, Skoglund, the Aiviq’s captain, would make
reference to “some water in our fuel” and “some signs of water
intrusion.” But in the aftermath of the Kulluk incident, the Aiviq’s
engineer, Carl Broekhuis, theorized that saltwater intrusion wasn’t to
blame after all. He suggested that an unknown fuel additive had ruined
the Aiviq’s injectors, shutting down its main engines. Perhaps what
happened was outside his or Edison Chouest’s or Shell’s control. But
when the engine manufacturer later analyzed the spent injectors, it
found rust and high levels of sodium, chlorine, calcium and potassium.
“These elements,” notes the Coast Guard report, “are major components of
seawater.”
Skoglund
and his counterpart on the Kulluk, a Shell subcontractor known as the
“tow master” — in the official tow plan for the journey to Seattle,
Shell never made clear who between them was in charge — notified Shell
and Chouest almost immediately after the troubles began. Shell notified
the Coast Guard. Early on Dec. 28, just as the Aiviq’s four diesel
engines failed, a Coast Guard cutter appeared. The cutter tried to
connect to the Aiviq by an emergency towline — it would tow the tug,
which would tow the Kulluk — but in heavy seas, the line somehow became
wrapped around the cutter’s own propeller. The rescue ship limped back
to base on Kodiak. The Aiviq and Kulluk remained adrift. The second of
what would be four successive low-pressure systems approached.
In
Anchorage, 350 miles to the north, Shell, Chouest and the Coast Guard
established a formal structure to deal with the growing crisis. The
unified command, as it was called, reporting ultimately to a Coast Guard
captain. It took over a downtown Marriott and quickly grew to hundreds
of people wearing vests and lanyards and huddling in conference rooms.
They updated Lisa Murkowski, a United States senator from Alaska. They
called in more tugboats, including the Alert, one of the most powerful
in Alaska, which began chugging toward the scene from Prince William
Sound, a day away.
By the early,
dark hours of Dec. 29, the unified command was convinced that lives
were at risk, and it dispatched two Coast Guard Jayhawk helicopters to
evacuate the 18 increasingly anxious men stuck aboard the Kulluk.
The
rescuers had thought it would be a relatively easy job. The Coast Guard
air base on Kodiak Island, the northernmost such facility in the
country, is an outpost at the edge of a wilderness of water and
mountains. Its search-and-rescue area spans four million square miles.
To have a case “so close to home plate,” as one of them put it — 45
flight minutes and roughly a hundred miles away — seemed a stroke of
incredible luck. Further, the Kulluk’s size suggested stability, a
straightforward rescue.
When
it appeared out of the night, “the Kulluk was wicked lit up,” said
Jason Bunch, the Coast Guard rescue swimmer on the first of two
helicopters. “It was like a city.” The pilots illuminated the rig
further with hover lights and spotlights. They wore night-vision
goggles, just in case the lights weren’t enough. They had no problems
seeing the rig and the crippled Aiviq and the taut line between them,
but the surrounding darkness still eroded the pilots’ depth perception.
With no horizon to reference, it was harder to hover, and the goggles
took away their peripheral vision.
There
are two primary ways Jayhawk crews save people at sea: They lower a
basket to the deck of the stricken vessel and hoist them up, or they
pluck them out of the water by lowering a basket and a swimmer like
Bunch, a 12-year Kodiak veteran, who in 50-foot swells and 35-degree
water will drag them to the basket himself.
But
now that the Kulluk was being towed from its “stern,” the point of
attachment for the emergency towline, it and the Aiviq were oriented
exactly the wrong way for an approach. In order to maintain control, the
helicopters would ideally face the heavy winds head-on, but the derrick
blocked their path. If they tried to hover above the flight deck, the
only obvious place for a hoist, there was a perfect tail wind, which
made steering unpredictable and dangerous.
The
wind blew the tops off some of the massive swells, but otherwise they
weren’t breaking. The swells came in close sets, one right after
another, interrupted by long sets of “monster waves” more than twice as
high. The Kulluk tipped severely but somewhat rhythmically until the
monsters arrived. “As the bigger and bigger ones came, they made it go
around in a circle,” Bunch told me in Kodiak. His eyes went buggy. His
right hand gyrated wildly. The deck, normally 70 feet above the water,
“was dipping so deep that the water was surging on it.”
“You
know when you have a bobber on a fishing pole,” he asked, “and then you
throw it out there and reel in really fast, and it makes a wake over
the bobber? That’s what it looked like.” If the Kulluk’s deck was
pitching that badly, he said, you could imagine what the derrick was
doing. It looked as if it were trying to bat the helicopters out of the
sky.
The
two helicopters took turns circling the drill rig, looking for a way
in, for any place to lower the basket. They radioed back and forth with
the Kulluk’s crew — “Very, very professional, very squared away,” Bunch
said, “considering the environment” — and briefly wondered if there was a
way to get them in the water to be picked up by the swimmers. It was
impossible. The jump from the deck to the sea could kill a man if he
timed it wrong. If it didn’t, the Kulluk could kill him on the next
swing of the bat. They flew back to Kodiak, refueled, brainstormed some
more at the base, then went back out.
Six
hours had passed from the moment Bunch and his crew first flew over the
Kulluk. It was still night. Bunch took out his watch and began timing
the gaps between big sets of swells. “We started coming up with some
harebrained schemes,” he said. They looked for “maybe doable” spots for
the hoist. “We’d have 90 seconds to be in and out, which is just
impossible, but we were actually talking about it.” Reality — what their
commander called “the courage not to do it” — slowly set in. The two
helicopters returned to base. “We were experienced,” Bunch said, “so
eventually we were like, ‘This is stupid.' ”
It was just before
dawn when a helicopter crew led by Lt. Cmdr. Jim Cooley replaced Bunch
and the other fatigued rescuers from the night before. The Kulluk was
still about 16 miles from Kodiak Island but also 16 miles from another
island, Sitkinak, and being blown toward it.
The
sun was coming up as Cooley, a blond distance runner with a broad
smile, reached the rig. The seas had slightly calmed. The wind angle had
slightly changed. “Hoisting was still in the dicey category,” he said.
But it now seemed possible. They did a test run first, hovering without
the basket. The deck of the Kulluk still rose and fell significantly
with every swell. The derrick was still pitching, and one of its cables
had come loose and was whipping around in the air. But if they hovered
in just the right spot and paid attention to the swell, it seemed
possible.
There
was another problem: The smallest of the 18 men aboard the Kulluk
weighed 235 pounds. The largest ones were well over 300. Cooley seems to
feel guilty even remembering how big they were. But when you’re flying a
rescue mission, you notice. “They were huge,” said his flight mechanic,
James Smith. “They were all huge — huge guys. There’s no other way to
describe it.” Weight is everything to a helicopter pilot. You want just
the right amount of fuel. Too much fuel, and you’re too heavy to fly.
Too little fuel, and you don’t make it back to base. The same goes for
the people you save: You want to be able to pack as many into the
aircraft as possible, so you don’t have to do multiple sorties. But you
don’t want to pack in so many big people that you can’t maneuver.
If
they added an extra flight to Kodiak and back, if they were fast, they
might just be able to do it before darkness returned. Cooley and his
rescue swimmer watched the coming waves and called out “large . . .
medium . . . small.” Smith, in charge of lowering the basket, directed
the other pilot, who was at the controls that morning: “Easy left. Easy
back and right. Back and left 30 feet. 30. 20. 10. Hold.” Lowering the
basket and more than a hundred feet of line from the helicopter to the
pitching deck below was like a mad version of going after a stuffed toy
in an arcade claw-machine game. “Then a flat sea came in, and we could
crank out a hoist,” Cooley said.
One
by one, the Kulluk’s crew were hauled up. Most were calm. But the rig
rose up and gave the basket a bump just as one man was being lifted off
the deck. “This guy’s a little nervous,” Smith said. “He’s got a death
grip.” Cooley looked down and saw his face. “I’m seeing the reality,” he
told me. “This guy is scared.” They pulled him into the helicopter and
sat him on the floor. Four hours after the rescue crews arrived, they
plucked the final man off the Kulluk and flew back to base.
The
crew was safe, and now the Aiviq was coming back to life: Before and
during the rescue, the helicopters had also hoisted 2,000 pounds of
replacement parts to the crippled tug: injectors that had been flown to
Alaska in a private jet, then transferred to the Jayhawks. All four main
diesel engines on the Aiviq would eventually be restarted. With another
low-pressure system on the way as the first engines fired up, the tug
began trying to tow the Kulluk south into the open ocean.
The tugboat Alert arrived
on
the scene on Dec. 30, and one of the first communications that Craig
Matthews, the Alert’s chief engineer, recalls hearing was more bad news.
“Be advised,” a Southern drawl said over the radio. “We just parted our
cable.” Communications — carried out over multiple radio channels and
satellite phones between multiple ships and multiple federal and state
agencies and Shell officials in Kodiak and Anchorage — had become so
complex that they were now filtered through a Coast Guard C-130 flying
somewhere in the clouds above. But the voice had come from the Aiviq.
The emergency towline had snapped. The Kulluk was once again adrift,
this time 30 miles from land.
Compared
to the Aiviq, the Alert was small — half the Aiviq’s horsepower, a
third of its length — but next to every other tug in Alaska, it was big.
It usually worked in Prince William Sound, escorting oil tankers from
the terminus of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System in Valdez past Bligh
Reef, the site of the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989, the worst in Alaska
history. The escorts were mandated after the spill. The Alert’s job was
to prevent another disaster, and its crew took that to heart when sent
to keep the Kulluk off the rocks.
“I
really wanted to do this thing,” said Matthews, who is 57 but looks at
least a decade younger. “I really did.” He settled on a plan: His
captain would back the Alert carefully up to the Kulluk, which was still
lurching wildly in 30-foot swells. Matthews would go out on the deck
with a grappling hook. When they got close enough to the rig’s snapped
emergency towline, he would throw the hook. He would reel it in by hand.
Then he would get the Alert’s own tow cable and tie the two together
with the knot he suggested: a bowline.
The
crew of the Alert stared at the Kulluk from a distance, through
binoculars, in low light and tossing seas. It was drifting near
Albatross Bank, “a wonderful halibut spot,” Matthews said. He used to
fish it. It was wonderful but shallow, and now the waves were so big
that the Alert was looking down on the giant rig one moment and looking
up the next. They worried that if they got too close, the Kulluk, half
the weight of the Titanic, would crash on top of them.
The
captain backed in until they were barely 200 feet from the heaving
Kulluk. Matthews spotted the orange emergency line. He threw the
grappling hook. He missed. The captain backed in closer. Now the Kulluk
filled the sky, and Matthews threw again and hooked the towline. It was
thicker than a man’s arm, a soggy dead weight. “By the time I pulled it
out of the water,” he said, “I was so winded I didn’t know whether I
could tie a knot.”
He
and the tug’s chief mate laid the orange line on the deck next to the
yellow one from their tug. A third man stood on it so it wouldn’t slip
back into the water. Now Matthews tried to orient himself. A knot he
could normally tie with one hand without looking would have to be
tackled by two people, chunk by chunk. The chief mate helped him lift
the line again, and together they hurriedly bent it and forced the
rabbit through the hole. As the tugboat bucked in the passing swells,
they dragged and pulled the rope tight. Matthews had planned to do a
second bend, just in case, but he was exhausted. “Is that it?” Matthews
recalls the chief mate asking. His answer was to let the towline slide
over the edge. They let out more line from their winch, slowly putting
tension on it as the tug pulled away from the Kulluk. “Please hold,
please hold,” he whispered. The line went tight. Everyone onboard
started hooting.
For
the next four hours, the Alert made halting progress against heavy
winds and strong currents. Just before dawn, the Aiviq appeared on the
horizon: Its crew wanted a last shot at the Kulluk.
“We’re
gonna come around the Kulluk’s stern and grapple that other wire,”
Matthews recalls the drawl announcing over the radio. “Don’t worry. We
do this all the time. You won’t feel a thing.” The Aiviq snagged the
2,000-foot wire still trailing the rig. Soon a violent shudder was felt
across the Alert — but Matthews’s knot still held. Now the Aiviq and
Alert were towing the Kulluk side by side, one to starboard and one to
port, a few hundred yards of churning Pacific Ocean between them.
Despite the building storm, everything seemed to be under control.
Matthews had been awake all night. He descended to his stateroom.
He
doesn’t remember how long he slept, just what woke him up. Matthews
keeps his space organized, his stateroom tied down. But suddenly pens
and water bottles were loose and sliding across the floor. His corkboard
dislodged from a wall and crashed to the ground. An alarm sounded. He
rushed up to the wheelhouse.
They
were stuck “in irons”: The stronger, younger Aiviq had moved away from
the Alert in the storm. No longer were they towing in parallel — and the
Alert couldn’t do anything about it. It was now at 9 o’clock to the
Aiviq’s 12 o’clock, almost perpendicular to the wind and unable to turn
upwind and catch up to the larger tug because the Alert’s towline to the
Kulluk was too taut. The Alert was locked in place, slamming sideways
into the troughs of the waves. “The waves were just beating us,”
Matthews said. “Our entire deck was exposed.”
The
line was riding so tight over the edge of the stern that there was a
danger the Alert would flip if the right swell came along. Its captain
made an urgent call to the Aiviq. The larger tug maneuvered closer to
the Alert, which increased its speed. The two ships were just coming
back together, straining against the storm, when the Aiviq’s cable
snapped for the third and final time.
The
Alert slid right into place ahead of the Kulluk, suddenly out of irons
and facing the waves and winds head on. “It was immediately so much
better,” Matthews said. “The only problem was that we were now the sole
tow.” Sitkalidak, a barrier island off Kodiak Island, was little more
than 10 miles downwind. From that moment on, the wind would push the
Kulluk inevitably toward the island, dragging the Alert along behind it.
Now more was at
stake than the Kulluk or the prospects of the company that owned it.
The men on the Alert had to save themselves. “Winds to 50 knots,”
Matthews recalled. “Seas 35 feet. We were going backward” — pulled by
the Kulluk — “at 2 knots.” They pondered the endgame. With their
spotlight, they watched the tow wire pull out of the water and vibrate
under the tension. They worried that it would break and snap back. At
first, Matthews wanted to remain tethered to the Kulluk and take it into
the beach at Sitkalidak Island. The tug could stay just offshore, he
reasoned, away from any breakers; when the storm went down and the tide
went up, it could pull the rig back off the beach.
The
captain called the Coast Guard, but no one wanted to go scout the
landing conditions, Matthews said. It was too risky. The call came from
Shell at 8 p.m. on New Year’s Eve: Cut it loose.
Matthews
didn’t want to do it. “I felt this attachment to succeeding,” he said.
He wondered about the emotion. “We’re trying keep this chunk of metal
off a beach, where a chunk of metal shouldn’t be. But otherwise it’s
just a chunk of metal that belongs to a rich oil company. It’s bottom
line to them. Why does it matter to me? Is this important?” But somehow
it was. “I felt tears welling up in my eyes when I had to let go of the
Kulluk.”
The
shore was only a few miles away, and now Matthews had to figure out how
to untie his knot. His bosses called and suggested that he cut the
thick cable with an acetylene torch tied to a broomstick. When he peered
out the back window at the tow winch, three feet of water was surging
over the tug’s weather deck. He put on foul-weather gear and tried to
time the waves. The first one came over his chest and filled his boots
and pants. But he got an idea: If he let the winch unspool all the way,
all that would connect the Alert and the Kulluk would be a metal plate
and two bolts. They wouldn’t hold.
The control room filled with smoke and bits of rust as Matthews let the winch spin.
“Is it gone yet?” the captain asked. Matthews had three wraps left. He was trying not to rats-nest the cable.
“Is it gone yet?” the captain asked again. “Is it gone? Let it go!”
There
was a loud boom and a shower of sparks. It was gone. Matthews turned to
see why the captain was so anxious. He found himself staring at a wall
of water — a 50-foot wave, the biggest they had seen. The Alert went
straight up its face. “There was this feeling of up and up and up and up
and up and up,” he said. He put his hands against the back window to
stabilize himself. White water was running over the front window. They
couldn’t see anything. “When is this going to stop?” the captain asked.
At
the top of the monster wave, they could suddenly see for miles. “This
incredible moon was out,” Matthews said. “There was this oceanscape.
These mountains of water. Storm clouds. It was a thing of awesome
beauty.” It lasted for only a second or two. Then the Alert tipped down
the other side, and the whole tug shuddered as it dived into the trough.
The window filled with the view below the waterline, a Pacific green.
It looked like an aquarium.
He
watched the Kulluk on the radar. It started out slow, but let loose
from its tether, it accelerated. It hit the gravelly shore 45 minutes
later. Waves crashed over its hull, the wind kicked up a spray and the
shoreline was soon littered with the Kulluk’s lifeboats and life jackets
and hundreds of little silver packets of drinking water meant for men
lost at sea. There was no spill. In the early hours of New Year’s Day,
the Coast Guard flew over the wreck. In aerial photos published around
the world, the rig was dwarfed by the auburn, grass-covered hills of the
uninhabited island where it had finally come to a rest.
Eight weeks later,
Shell announced a “pause” in its Arctic exploration. It wanted to
“prepare equipment and plans for a resumption of activity at a later
stage.” The company declared the rig a total loss and hauled it atop a
larger ship by way of Singapore to China, where it was dismantled in a
shipyard south of Shanghai.
Shell
accepted the resignation of the executive in Houston overseeing
exploration in Alaska and the rest of North America, a 29-year veteran
of the company. It became the subject of multiple reviews and
investigations by the Coast Guard, the Interior Department and the
Environmental Protection Agency. One investigation resulted in felony
charges for Noble, one of the subcontractors. And instead of adding to
its reserves, it was burning through them. In early 2014, Shell issued a
surprise profit warning, the first since the reserves scandal a decade
earlier.
Little
about the increasingly extreme hunt for energy had changed. Shell still
needed oil. The Chukchi and Beaufort Seas had oil. Shell still had its
leases, and in August, and as oil hovered around $100 a barrel, the
company announced its intention to return to the Arctic. Its new
exploration plan called for placing two rigs in the Chukchi, to maximize
the exploration time between the ice’s retreat and its return. One rig
was a replacement for the Kulluk: equally massive and also lacking
propulsion, but not round. It would have to be towed. The other was the
Noble Discoverer, which had been refurbished yet again — deemed unable
to leave Alaska on its own power in 2013, it had been hauled to South
Korea on a larger ship — and was now 49 years old. The company also
announced that it would improve safety measures and more closely manage
its contractors. “All to say we’ve taken a critical look at the
experiences we’ve had in Alaska over the last several years,” Curtis
Smith, a Shell spokesman, told The Times in August, “and this
exploration plan takes those learnings into account.”
Pete
Slaiby, still on the job in Alaska even after his boss in Houston was
replaced, set out to fix a new problem: If oil production doesn’t soon
begin on Shell’s Arctic leases, they will expire, the first ones in
2017. Slaiby petitioned for an unprecedented five-year extension in the
Beaufort and Chukchi Seas, laying out the logic in a 10-page letter to
the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement. “Despite Shell’s
best efforts and demonstrated diligence,” he wrote, “circumstances
beyond Shell’s control have prevented, and are continuing to prevent,
Shell from completing even the first exploration well in either area.”
The
oil giant lurched forward, seeming to regain power with every step: a
joint venture in July with Inupiat villages, a September meeting about
the Arctic at the White House, progress in November in a legal fight
over drilling the Chukchi. The future looked promising but for one
thing. In September, almost as soon as Shell had submitted its
exploration plan, oil began a free fall. The price dropped from $90 a
barrel that month to $80 in October and to $70 in November — the point
at which unconventional oil tends to become uneconomical. Last month,
the price went as low as $55 a barrel, the lowest in five years. On the
two-year anniversary of the wreck of the Kulluk, the Arctic, at least
for now, had stopped making any sense.
McKenzie Funk is a founding member of Deca and the author of “Windfall.” This article is adapted from “Of Ice and Men,” to be published this month by Deca.
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