Shell Arctic rig runs aground off Alaska

Tom Fowler in the Wall Street Journal:  Royal Dutch Shell PLC suffered another potential setback in its attempt to drill for oil in U.S. Arctic waters when an offshore rig ran aground after breaking free from tow ships in high seas.

The Kulluk, a drilling rig owned by Shell and operated by Noble Corp., NE +2.58% struck Sitkalidak Island, an uninhabited area about 300 miles southwest of Anchorage late Monday, according to a joint statement by Shell, Switzerland-based Noble and the U.S. Coast Guard, which were coordinating their response to the accident.

A Coast Guard helicopter on Saturday lifts crew members from Shell's Kulluk drilling unit. The rig later broke free from tow ships and ran aground. The rig has about 139,000 gallons of diesel on board, along with about 12,000 gallons of combined lubrication oil and hydraulic fluid. Coast Guard aircraft that flew over the rig Tuesday didn't spot any signs of leaking fuel. Plans were under way to get salvage crews to the rig.

Shell used the Kulluk and another rig to drill exploratory wells in the Arctic Ocean off Alaska's northern coast last year, the first such operations in U.S. Arctic waters in more than two decades.

But the ambitious drilling venture—monitored by rival companies, the U.S. government and environmental groups—has encountered problems from the outset. The drilling season started later than planned because of lingering sea ice. The other drilling rig, the Noble Discoverer, almost ran aground when its anchor slipped in Dutch Harbor, Alaska.

Also, an important piece of spill-response equipment was damaged during testing, leading Shell to scale back plans to drill six wells to just two wells. A Coast Guard inspection of the Noble Discoverer, conducted after the drilling season, discovered problems with the ship's propulsion and safety systems....

The Arctic Challenger with the newly redesigned and repaired Containment Dome move away from the Port of Bellingham, WA where it had been moored since returning in September 2012 after a catastrophic failure of the first iteration of their containment process. This is not the vessel mentioned in the story, apparently. Shot by TJ Guiton, Wikimedia Commons, nder the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license