Norway to halt oil leaks, urges UK nuke closure
Date: 18-Mar-02
Country: NORWAY
Author: Alister Doyle
In a drive to safeguard fisheries by cleaning up the seas, the centre-right government said it also wanted a moratorium on new oil and gas projects in the Arctic Barents Sea and would consider extending Norway's territorial waters.
"We want a policy that will ensure that future generations can also harvest the wealth of the seas," Prime Minister Kjell Magne Bondevik said a week before Norway hosts a meeting of environmental ministers from states around the North Sea.
But environmental group Greenpeace handed Bondevik a dead cod just before he held a news conference aboard a ship in Oslo harbour, saying the proposals failed to address over-fishing by Norwegian trawlers.
Norway, which is not a member of the European Union, denies that it hands fishermen over-generous quotas that are undermining stocks.
The government plan calls for oil and gas platforms to cut pollution into the sea to zero from 2005. Currently some spill oil and chemicals or traces of heavy metals like mercury, along with water from drilling.
The government said a main measure could be to re-inject the polluted water into subsea reservoirs. It did not outline any possible penalties for non-compliance in the documents, which will go to parliament for debate and approval in coming months.
"Our main goal is that one multi-billion industry should not kill off another," Environment Minister Boerge Brende said, referring to the threat to fisheries from oil and gas.
BIG FISHERIES EXPORTS
Norway earned 30 billion crowns ($3.40 billion) from seafood exports in 2001, its second largest earner behind oil and gas which brought in 300 billion crowns.
Norway pumps 3.0 million barrels of oil per day and is the third largest exporter behind Saudi Arabia and Russia.
The government said it would put "considerable pressure" on London to halt emissions of radioactive technetium from its Sellafield nuclear power plant, saying Sellafield was the main source of new atomic pollution off Norway.
Brende said Britain opposed storing technetium on land, due to safety fears, while assuring other states it was safe to dump it in the sea. "The British reasoning is full of holes," he said.
He added that levels of technetium off Norway were low and "no direct danger for health or the environment" but that the long-term impact was unknown.
The proposal also urged creation of an independent panel to assess the environmental impact of oil and gas drilling in the Arctic Barents Sea, one of the world's richest fishing grounds, before giving the go-ahead to any new projects.
The moratorium, however, would not apply to the 46 billion crowns development of the Snoehvit or Snow White field in the Barents Sea, which got a green light from parliament last week despite howls of protest from environmentalists.
The government said it would consider extending its territorial waters to 12 nautical miles from four, matching limits in place in other European coastal states except Greece.
It would also crack down on ships flushing ballast water into the sea. Norway blamed ballast water for spreading algae that suffocated thousands of salmon at fish farms last year.
