Sniffing for oil in the Arctic

The Arctic is a critically important area for regulating our global climate, and it’s been warming twice as fast as any other region on Earth. Warming temperatures are giving way to shrinking sea & land ice, creating new open waters for geopolitical interests to capitalize on. Countries are competing for control over new international shipping routes and there are now opportunities to go after the undiscovered deposits of oil and gas in the region. 

This situation is a bit of a double bind: as the Arctic warms, new opportunities for shipping & oil and gas are opening up, and those very activities will likely accelerate future warming.

With that in mind, the draw for oil is ringing louder than the environmental alarms. The Arctic could hold around 13 percent of the world's oil, according to the United States Geological Survey, that’s about 90 billion barrels of oil. And in August, the US government gave Shell a thumbs up to being drilling an exploratory well off the Chukchi Sea, just 70 miles northwest of Alaska.

If something happens in the Arctic, a major oil spill or an accident on this new shipping highway, the US Coast Guard may be tapped to respond.  

On this week’s TechKnow, host Phil Torres got the chance to journey through the Arctic aboard the US Coast Guard Cutter Healy, one of two polar icebreakers, and the only one operating in the Arctic. The Healy serves as a floating laboratory, where scientists work alongside the Coast Guard to study changes in the Arctic and test new technology that can strengthen US research and rescue capability in the harsh environment. 

Jeff Welker and Eric Klein are two scientists with the Arctic Domain Awareness Center at the University of Alaska Anchorage, conducing research aboard the Healy. TechKnow caught up with them to learn how atmospheric sampling with a unique isotope analyzer can "sniff" for changes in the Arctic. 

TechKnow: In your research you’re constantly sampling the air out here, why is that important?

Jeff Welker: We’re sampling the air in part because we think this is one of the potential new ways we can monitor the environment….We’ve got issues of ship traffic, where we’re going to see hundreds of ships pass through this part of the Arctic as transportation corridors increase, the likelihood that there would be a leakage of some type, there might be spills…it’s really important for us to be able to [detect those changes] over long distances. 

TechKnow: You use a special device that measures those changes, tell us what it is and how it works.

Eric Klein: It’s essentially a big tube. We have a set up where we have tubes running to the front of the ship and we’re pulling in continuous atmospheric air samples. [We then] run them through these analyzers where there are isotopic compositions of hydrogen and oxygen for water and carbon as well. 

Jeff Welker: Both instruments are taking two samples per second…so when there are events that are unusual, for instance, when we start encountering sea ice, we’re able to see that isotopically. If we have situations where there’s a diesel spill, or there’s oil in that environment, we’ll be able to smell that oil. We’ll see that difference in the itotopic properties of the air. 

TechKnow: I’ve heard you call these isotope sniffers.

Jeff Welker: Yes, I think it’s a term we’ve coined. The analogy is someone is walking through a mall and all of the sudden you smell the Cinnabon factory, so there’s all of a sudden a very different smell in the air. We’re trying to understand the background so that when we do encounter an unusual event, even though we may not see it, we will be able to smell the oil on the ocean surface through the vapor that’s carried to the devices. 

TechKnow: So lets say hypothetically there is an oil spill. How could this machine help?

Jeff Welker: Well, one of the ways in which these devices would help is that they may be a very early warning system. We’ve become a little complacent with using satellites to tell us what’s happening in the environment. A satellite takes an image one or two or three seconds; 23.9 hours later it takes another one.  So there’s a pretty big window where we don’t have a lot of information.  We have tides in the arctic, we have changing weather conditions– devices like the isotope analyzer can take continuous measurements and can fill the gap. 

TechKnow: Could you strap one of these onto an oil rig to make sure it’s running clean?

Eric Klein: There’s potential for that. [This device] is a constant awareness. It’s constantly recording data and will give you some sense of when something comes outside of the standards.

Jeff Welker: And here we are right now today within 5 miles of Shell’s platform. One of the responsibilities of the Coast Guard this year, is to assign a smaller vessel than the Healy to be the sheriff of the neighborhood, surrounding the oil platform that will eventually be out here in the next few weeks to maintain awareness. One of the visions we have is if the vessel could be fitted with our devices to give them additional awareness of what’s happening. For instance, if you had a leak from the sea floor – that oil would come to the surface and the wave action mixes it with the air and the wind blows it to the ship and smells it.

TechKnow: Where does this technology take you next?

Eric Klein: We’re just starting to scratch the surface...Essentially you can think of isotopes as [as if] someone found a new ruler, and now we can measure things entirely differently with that ruler. We can see things we couldn’t see before and that’s what we’re trying to do, to see other places we can deploy this new ruler to help understand earth systems and how they’re interconnected.