The Brent Spar Incident

The Brent Spar Incident

The Brent Spar was an oil storage buoy built and owned by Royal Dutch Shell (Shell Oil) in 1976. The spar (or large cylindrical storage buoy), 147 meters tall, was used in the North Sea to temporarily store crude oil. A new pipeline made the spar unnecessary and over time Shell Oil chose to dispose of the spar by sinking it in deep water off the west coast of Great Britain. During the mid-1990s this proposal became a major environmental issue in Europe.

Disposal Options

Sinking was the cheapest (approximately $18 million) and safest option for the workers who would be performing the task. Other options, however, existed. At a greater expense, the spar could have been refurbished to perform other functions. At two to four times the cost of sinking it, the spar could have been cleaned and dismantled, with the steel then recycled. Dismantling operations, however, posed up to six times more risks to workers and the immediate coastal environment where the dismantling would be performed.

Shell Oil chose to dispose of the spar in more than 2 kilometers of water and received permission to do so from the British government in 1994. Both Shell Oil and the British government agreed that the potential damage to the local environment from oils, waxes, and other materials still inside the spar would be limited to the immediate area and that the impact would be short lived.

In April of 1995, Shell Oil began towing the Brent Spar to its deep-water burial at which time protesters associated with Greenpeace boarded the platform. The protesters demanded that Shell Oil cease its dumping plan in favor of what they contended were more environmentally benign choices and argued that disposal at sea was wrong on principle. Greenpeace and other environmental groups called for the boycott of Shell Oil gas stations across Europe and in some places sales at those stations fell by half. Two such stations in Germany were attacked with fire bombs.

On June 20,...