The Obama administration Wednesday approved Royal Dutch Shell’s permit to drill for oil in 140-foot-deep water off Alaska’s northwest coast. But there’s a catch.
The company can’t drill into “oil-bearing zones” yet because a key piece of safety equipment is headed on an icebreaker to Portland. The piece, called a capping stack, can stop oil from flowing if a well blows out and other measures fail.
In the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, a capping stack ultimately quelled oil pouring into the sea. As Scientific American reports, the measure provided enough time for engineers to kill the well, but not before more than five million barrels of oil leaked into the Gulf of Mexico.