Seismic surveys are used to explore for oil and gas. They involve repeated build up and discharge, every ten seconds, of sub-sea, high pressure air "explosions," 24 hours a day, over a period of months.These discharges cause vibrations which penetrate the sea bed and propagate great distances through the ocean. Marine life close to the seismic bombs can be damaged. It is lethal to spawning fish. Consequently, hydrocarbon exploration impacts heavily on commercial fisheries and the lives and well-being of fisher folk.The Environmental Management Authority (EMA) chooses not to regulate the seismic surveys and in doing so, violates the Environmental Act. This means that companies are not required to collect and submit basic data on the social and environmental impacts of the surveys.
The Ministry of Energy supports the EMA as the energy sector in their view, should remain unregulated–unfettered by such concerns. Their focus is petro-dollar based economic activity and not integrated natural resource management.Foreign oil/gas companies are indeed pleased because back home they would be obligated to assess risks and impacts when conducting seismic surveys. Maximising profit is the bottom line mantra.Petrotrin's oil spill demonstrates clearly the unregulated nature of the energy sector. There are no real contingency plans in place to respond immediately to serious spills. There is no in-house technical or management capacity, or infrastructure on-island, to cope with what has happened in La Brea and environs. The highest response level of government's existing contingency plan is to call for outside help!
The Guardian Newspaper broke the story of Petrotrin's ageing and ailing infrastructure ripe for leaks and blow outs–the result of 17 years of negligence. This means a systemic failure at routine infrastructure maintenance. A past Minister of Energy (PNM) claims to have been aware of the problem and chose to focus on refinery upgrades. This extraordinary admission makes clear that negligence and the preference for unregulated resource extraction, crosses party lines! The Ministry of Energy (MOE) is responsible for granting mining licences to quarry operators. Here too, the MOE prefers unregulated licencing. Little interest is paid to social and environmental concerns. At the beginning of 2013, the MOE hired a foreign company to carry out a Strategic Environmental Impact Assessment Report (SEIA) which recommended expansion and designation of mining zones (quarry areas). Only quarry owners were consulted. No information on social impacts that would have been gathered through community engagement was considered "strategic" enough to inform the report. The SEIA process was carried out in secret and presented to the public after it was complete.
Interestingly, the Terms of Reference for the SEIA were developed under the PNM. The requirement for community consultations was removed when the contract was awarded by the PP to the UK consultant. Unregulated quarrying is disastrous for the Northern range where 80 per cent of our naturally occurring drinking water originates.So the connection is that resource extraction, whether it is oil or gas or aggregate, on-land or off-shore, is unregulated. This demonstrates an absence of meaningful social and environmental values in the market place. In the face of global breakdown of climate and ecological systems, and the urgent need resource security across the board, we in T&T are taking a "casually catastrophic" approach to our own development.
Cathal Healy-Singh,
Environmental Engineer