Mr. Chairman and distinguished members of the committee, my name is Michael Peacock, and I am a geologist by training. I hold the position or title of Canadian exploration manager for Imperial Oil. I am a registered professional geoscientist with APEGGA. APEGGA is the Association of Petroleum Engineers, Geologists and Geophysicists of Alberta.
My colleagues and I are here today in response to the motion from Mr. Blais adopted on November 25, 2010. The motion asked for details about the lease of the Canadian Coast Guard ship Amundsen. The lease was supposedly for petroleum exploration activities in the Beaufort Sea.
Unfortunately, the mistaken understanding that Imperial Oil or Esso and BP leased the Amundsen to explore for petroleum stemmed from incorrect media or news reports. While this record has since been corrected, I hope that our testimony today will result in a better appreciation for the significant benefits of scientific cooperation and collaboration between industry, academia, government, and all of society.
For background similar to what Anita shared with you, Imperial Oil picked up EL 446. EL stands for Exploration Licence 446, also termed Ajurak. It was awarded to Imperial and Exxon Mobile Canada in July 2007 for a work program commitment bid of $585 million. Each company was assigned a 50% working interest in the block.
The Ajurak licence is located approximately 180 kilometres offshore from the town of Tuktoyaktuk. The exploration licence is valid for nine years. When you consider the duration of an exploration licence, it takes at least three to four years to plan and prepare just the regulatory application required to be submitted to the regulatory agency. In this case, the regulatory agency is the National Energy Board, the NEB.
This is a long and thorough process, and it includes the submission of an EIA or environmental impact assessment. A scientific program began in 2008 to collect the necessary data for this submission. This was for the planning of the first exploration, which specifically included the following: one, metocean and geotechnical data to complete and verify the engineering design required for any exploration well; two, development of safe and environmentally responsible drilling operations and support practices; and three, provision of the necessary environmental data to support the environmental impact assessment for the potential drilling of any well.
The requirement to submit an environmental impact assessment is the reason that on May 6, 2009, Imperial Oil executed a service order with the Université Laval in Quebec City to collaborate with ArcticNet in their 2009 research program.
The scope of the work is described in the service order as follows. I will quote the service order:
This service order covers the Imperial Oil share of a research collaboration to understand the environmental and biophysical aspects of the Beaufort Sea in the vicinity of the Ajurak exploration license No. 446. The research collaboration involves a number of scientific disciplines, including sediment, air and water quality, marine birds and marine mammals. It covers fish, plankton, benthic organisms, and geo-technical properties of the seabed. It is also used for hazard identification and for metocean design criteria and to understand the ice conditions of this particular part of the Beaufort Sea. The principal platform will be the Canadian Coast Guard ship Amundsen. The scope of the collaboration includes mobilization to the Beaufort Sea in early July via Point Barrow and the conduct of investigations through to October of the same year. Demobilization costs via the Northwest Passage were not included within the scope of work. Results of this work will be used for the design of the Ajurak exploration well and the preparing of the environmental input assessment required for the drilling operation.
As stated previously, the purpose of the research was to better understand the ecology, the geology, and the ocean environment of the Arctic. Imperial is proud of its contribution to advancing the scientific understanding of the physical and biological environment of the Beaufort Sea through the ArcticNet research collaboration. All of the research is shared with the Canadian public, and it is shared at the annual ArcticNet science meetings, through their publication, and through other public forums.
I ask the members of the committee to consider this: we conducted pure physical, scientific research in the Arctic to better understand the environment; the knowledge we obtained is peer-reviewed, and it is publicly available; we engaged in an undertaking to gain a better understanding of the Arctic environment, in the hope that one day a permit to drill is submitted and the environmental data that forms the basis of the submission is then publicly available for everyone to study and to verify.
Joint research is valuable and beneficial to all Canadians. Imperial agrees with a comment made by the fisheries minister, Gail Shea:
We all benefit from the science that happens, and in this case, what was happening was an examination of the environment to better understand impacts associated with industrial activities.
We hope that this presentation and the exchange we are about to engage in will address the concerns of the committee.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman and honourable members.