Chevron says that it would not be able to clean up if its proposed deep sea rig off the coast of Newfoundland had a similar disaster to that currently happening in the Gulf of Mexico. They estimate extremely small possibilities of any major spills, but there are valid concerns about the sheer scale of what they are proposing. The Orphan Basin project involves a rig placed in an extremely deep area of the ocean, making any proposed disaster recovery techniques extremely costly and difficult to deploy. The rig project had been streamlined to some extent through the regulatory procedures by the 2005 relaxation of Canadian Federal guidelines for offshore projects.
It appears that in light of recent events, greater regulation will be placed upon Chevron’s Orphan Basin project. Environmentalists hope that regulation of this sort will reduce the possibility of a Canadian disaster similar to BP’s in the Gulf of Mexico.
For more on the Orphan Basin rig, see the Vancouver Sun here. UPDATE May 26th, 2011: This article has been removed from both the Vancouver Sun page and Canada.com page. It is no longer available directly. UPDATE August 27th, 2011: This article has now also been moved from the Google Cache.
For recent regulation on the Orphan Basin project, see CBC news here.
