Brent spar

In the 1970s, the awareness of the limited oil resources resulted in a sudden oil price increase by a factor of 4. It became economical to produce crude oil from sea bottoms. One of the first oil platforms in the North Sea was the Brent Spar. In the 1990s, oil production ceased and the platform had to be demolished. In the Brent Spar design, demolition had not been taken into account, and so the demolition appeared to be very difficult. In consultation with the British government it was decided that dumping in a deep trough in the ocean would be the best economical and environmental solution. 

A process (manufacturing) is therefore part of a product recycle. Often the decommissioning phase of the process plant is not taken into account in the LCA. As, for instance, happened in the Brent Spar case and for most nuclear power plants. 

Keywords Brent Spar Chemicals News media Prestige disaster Risk society... 

What is needed is careful empirical analysis of source-media relations which builds upon and tests this macro-level theory (Anderson 1997 Cottle 1998). The aim of this final section of the chapter, therefore, is to examine two case studies of the communication of chemical risks, the Brent Spar in 1995 and the Prestige oil disaster... 

On Brent Spar we were bounced. This matters - we all took great pains to represent Shell s side of the argument. By the time the broadcasters had tried to intervene on the scientific analysis, the story had been spun, far, far into Greenpeace s direction [... ] When we attempted to pull the story back, the pictures provided to us showed plucky helicopters riding a fusillade of water cannons. Try and write the analytical science into that to the advantage of the words. (Cited in Rose 1998 158)... 

Bennie, L. (1998) Brent Spar, Atlantic oil and Greenpeace. Hansard Society Series in Politics and Government 7 89-102. 

De Jong, W. (2005) The power and limits of media-based international oppositional politics - a case study the Brent Spar conflict . In de Jong, W., Shaw, M. and Stammers, N. (eds.) Global Activism, Global Media. Pluto, London. 

Hansen, A. (2000) Claims-making and framing in British newspaper coverage of the Brent Spar controversy. In Allan, S., Adam, B. and Carter, C. (eds.) Environmental Risks and the Media. Routledge, London. 

Jordan, G. (2001) Shell, Greenpeace and Brent Spar. Palgrave, Basingstoke. 

Lofstedt, R.E. and Renn, O. (1997) The Brent Spar controversy an example of risk communication gone wrong. Risk Analysis 17(2) 131-135. 

Other examples abound. A principal cause of Shell s embarrassment over the Brent Spar rig was that they believed they were winning the media campaign, in denial of what was obvious to those outside the company management. Chapter 4 reminds us of the lessons from the accident at Longford, on the outskirts of Melbourne. 

There is growing pressure on companies to adopt codes of conduct or ethical values. The case for ethics goes beyond mere compliance with the law. Speed of communications and developments such as the internet enable pressure groups to mobilise public opinion, as with Shell s controversies over Nigeria and Brent Spar. 

Dickson, L. and McCulloch, A. (1996) Shell, the Brent Spar and Greenpeace a doomed tryst Environmental Politics 24, 122-129. 

See, for example, Shell reverses decision to dump the Brent Spaar , at http //www.greenpeace.org/ international/en/about/history/Victories-timeline/Brent-Spar/... 

Hecker, Silke, 1997, Kommunikation in okologischen Unternehmenskrisen Der Fall Shell und Brent Spar, Wiesbaden DUV. 

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