The UK’s oil and gas regulator is coming under fire from environmental groups for using lawyers to try to prevent the publication of five key documents relating to the environmental impact of Shell’s activities in the North Sea.
At a hearing in December, a legal representative for the North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA) is expected to argue against the publication of documents that contain details about the risk of pollution as a result of decommissioning the Brent oilfield, which was operated by Shell for more than 40 years. It says it opposes publication “on a matter of process basis”.
Shell has applied for an exemption from international rules that require all infrastructure to be removed from the field and the UK government is deciding whether it will allow the oil company to leave the 170-metre high oil platform legs in place for the three platforms known as Bravo, Charlie and Delta.
A total of 64 concrete storage cells are contained in the leg structures, 42 of which have previously been used for oil storage and separation.
Most of the cells are the size of seven Olympic swimming pools, and collectively still contain an estimated 72,000 tonnes of contaminated sediment and 638,000 cubic metres of oily water.
Environmental groups believe the documents held by the NSTA would reveal new information about long-term environmental dangers that is relevant to other North Sea oil developments, including Equinor’s plans to develop Rosebank, the UK’s largest untapped field.
The five documents that the hearing relates to include updated versions of the field decommissioning programme and the field’s environmental appraisal, as well as technical documents relating to radioactive sediment and toxic drill cuttings.
Earlier versions of all five documents were published as part of the consultation process in 2016 and 2017 and, according to a statement published by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the more recent versions have been updated to reflect further consultations that have taken place.
The documents include the decommissioning proposals for the installations, details about the substances contained within the cells, and research relating to the potential environmental impact of these substances over the short and long term.
Lang Banks, the director of the conservation group WWF Scotland, said: “It’s an absolute farce that the regulator is spending public money on lawyers to try and prevent the release of documents that should have been made publicly available a long time ago.
“If they are prepared to use these documents as part of the planning and the licensing process then they should also be prepared to make them public.”
Tessa Khan, an international climate crisis and human rights lawyer and the executive director of the campaign group Uplift, believes the regulator’s efforts to keep the documents out of the public domain are for the benefit of the oil and gas industry and at the expense of the environment and general public.
“The NSTA’s job is to act as an independent regulator but, for as long as it’s been around, it has favoured oil and gas firms, including colluding with the industry on how to best sell new drilling to the public,” she told Sky News.
“Perhaps it’s not surprising given that ex-oil and gas executives sit on the NSTA’s board and some of its members still hold shares in the industry.”
The regulator was first asked to publish the documents by the investigative journalism organisation Point Source in July 2022 in a request made under the Freedom of Information Act and the Environmental Information Regulations.
In September that year, the NSTA said it had consulted Shell and subsequently decided it did not have the authority to release the documents as they were held on behalf of a third party that had not consented to the documents being released.
In May 2023, the ICO issued a decision saying the NSTA’s failure to respond appropriately to the request within legal time limits was “unacceptable” and had violated the Environmental Information Regulations.
The ICO then ordered the regulator to either publish the documents or give a valid legal reason for not supplying them within 35 days. The NSTA has not published the documents and will argue its case to a judge in a hearing in December.
Some campaign groups have said they believe the latest legal appeal launched by the NSTA is a tactic designed to prevent the environmental information from surfacing at a sensitive time for the government.
The case will be heard by the General Regulatory Chamber, which is responsible for handling appeals against decisions made by government regulatory bodies.
Last month, the NSTA sparked outrage from environmental campaigners when it gave the go-ahead to develop the Rosebank oil and gas field, which lies off Shetland.
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The government also recently launched a new licensing round to allow oil and gas companies to explore for fossil fuels in the North Sea.
Robin Wells, the director of the campaign group Fossil Free London, said: “It is crucial that the regulator shares new information that it has about the environmental impact of existingoilfields so that informed decisions can be made about whether to develop more fields.”
The previously published environmental assessment documents said there was a significant degree of uncertainty about the environmental impact of Shell abandoning the remains of the Brent platforms in the North Sea.
They noted that one of the areas of uncertainty was the best way to deal with the contaminated contents of the cells as the levels of radioactivity were “currently unknown”.
The documents said only very limited samples were taken from the contaminated sediments.
Samples were just taken from the top 50cm of sediment in three of the 64 cells and only 6kg of sediment and 10 litres of water were tested from the estimated tens of millions of kilograms of sediment and hundreds of millions of litres of oily water.
The previously published documents said 261kg of mercury could be released and that the toxic substance phenanthrene could chemically affect the seabed over an area of 1.7 sq km as pollutants started to leak from the decaying concrete cells.
The documents also said a significant portion of the oil released with cell water was predicted to reach the sea surface, where it could affect seabirds.
In 2019, the publicly available environmental assessment documents were heavily criticised by Germany and other EU member states who said Shell’s assessment of the potential for environmental damage was too conservative. They said the remaining oil and pollutants were a “ticking timebomb”.
A report commissioned by the German government said the methodology used by Shell in its publicly available environmental impact assessments was “fundamentally flawed” and contained a “high level of mathematical bias”.
A spokesperson for the NSTA said: “The responsibility for the decommissioning decisions and the environmental assessments are not in the NSTA’s remit, but are for the Offshore Petroleum Regulator for Environment and Decommissioning (OPRED). The NSTA is appealing [against] the decision of the ICO to disclose certain information on a matter of process basis.”
In a statement, Shell said: “Our recommendations are the result of 10 years of research, involving more than 300 scientific and technical studies. We established an independent group of scientific experts to review the findings and ensure all feasible decommissioning options were investigated thoroughly.”
The oil company added: “Shell submits documents as part of a process which is tightly controlled by the regulator, in full knowledge that they will be published in due course. The manner and timing of this is a matter for the regulator.”
