A fisherman's daughter plays on the shore in Barangay Kanluran, Rosario Town, Cavite Province, amidst oil sheen brought about by the diesel oil spill occurred on August 8th
Oceans could in future be protected using crowd sourcing technology which draws data from satellites and drones to spot spills and other pollution.
The move could help fill a gap left by current ocean regulations which mean that discharges of oil and other hazardous substances can be ignored – if they are part of ongoing operations.
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On 3 Sept SkyTruth – a non-profit organisation based in West Virginia that tracks oil spills and other events using satellite images – reported an oil spill in the Mediterranean off the coast of Corsica caused by bilge-dumping.
Bilge-dumping is a “definite no-no” in the Mediterranean but without a friendly tip-off and satellite imagery the precise size of the two slicks (measuring 90km and 41km long respectively) may not have been captured.
The NGO hopes to harness the power of the crowd in order to keep the world’s eyes on the seas, working to increase monitoring capabilities and minimise environmental damage.
The non-profit has already had some success with engaging the public in monitoring efforts with their research into hydraulic fracturing in Pennsylvania.
“We’ve demonstrated that the public is interested in these issues and if you show them satellite images [and say] take a look at it and let us know what you see, it works,” said SkyTruth communications director, David Manthos.
Activists monitoring fracking in the UK have expressed an interest in similar ideas.
In addition to accessing satellite images to be captured by Sentinel 1 – a new radar satellite to be launched next year by the European Space Agency – Manthos hopes oceanic monitoring can move beyond relying entirely on government efforts to what he calls ‘SkyTruthing the oceans’.
However, it begs the question, what is going wrong if we have to ask the public to help monitor the seas?
Current regulations
Under international marine conventions some potentially hazardous waste discharged by offshore oil and gas companies during ‘business as usual’ operations are not classified as illegal.
According to the London Convention and Protocol– one of the first global conventions to protect the marine environment from human activities – the disposal into the sea of waste "or other matter incidental to, or derived from, the normal operations of vessels, aircraft, platforms or other man-made structures at sea and their equipment,” is not classified as ‘dumping’.
Professor of international law at the University of Dundee, Robin Churchill, explained that under the Convention, “incidental discharges of, say, oil from an oil platform are not covered, whereas the deliberate disposal of waste that was not incidental to the normal operation of a platform would be covered”.
Other examples of exempt materials highlighted by Churchill include drilling muds and cuttings, oil from platform drainage systems, and production water.
This allows a lot of wiggle room for energy companies to dispose of toxic waste into the ocean argues Greenpeace senior scientist, David Santillo.
“There are clear double standards here, as although the dumping at sea of industrial wastes has been prohibited under the London Convention since 1996, the operational discharge of what can be equivalent or even more contaminated wastes by the offshore oil and gas industry is still very much permitted in most parts of the world,” he said.
Regional and national regulations
Countries can also be exempt under their own national regulations.
In the United States, for example, the chemical fluids used in offshore fracking (such as off the coast of California) are exempt from the nation's clean water laws, allowing companies to release fracking fluid into the sea without filing a separate environmental impact report or statement looking at the possible effects.
“There is remarkably little oversight of this legalised pollution,” said Santillo.
“There is no global Convention or other instrument with responsibility for harmonising and tightening regulations in [the energy] field,” he said, “so offshore operators can get away with whatever they can legally do under local regulations.”
Manthos of SkyTruth emphasised that the issue of self-monitoring must be addressed - it’s up to the company to report any accidents that occur and the approximate size of spills.
“What goes overboard which is legally allowed is as much a concern as whether it’s really an amount within the parameters they’re allowed [to dump],” he said.
This self-monitoring raises the issue of under-reporting spills. For example, this past January, satellite images examined by Florida State University along with SkyTruth found that small oil spills in the heavily drilled northern Gulf of Mexico were often much larger than reported.
What this means, is that “just keeping an eye on what happens when you’re out at sea when you think no one’s looking is as much an issue as [the question of] what’s a reasonably permissible amount to go overboard,” said Manthos.
Monitoring the pollution
There have been some attempts to oversee the situation, such as under the Bonn Agreement which arranges flights over the North Sea to monitor oil pollution and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration which has an office that occasionally submits reports on spills based on satellite observations.
However, speaking on attempts to estimate the scale of legal marine energy pollution, Santillo said: “It seems clear that routine legal discharges from offshore oil and gas platforms may introduce far more contamination into the marine environment than illegal or accidental spills, as locally catastrophic as the latter can be.”
“One of the main reasons why the sea has traditionally been seen as a convenient place to dispose of wastes is the regrettable human condition that things that are out of sight are out of mind,” he added.
Manthos agreed: “When there’s no observation and no pressure to perform well, it can very easily get out of hand.”
Yet, people behave very differently when they know that there are “eyes in the sky watching,” Manthos said.
Pointing to successful monitoring efforts in the North Sea, he said: “As soon as the operators became aware that there was routine monitoring going on, the number of spills and number of slicks quickly tightened up.”
