A military exercise planned for the NorthWest Territories in April will apparently include a scenario involving threats against an oil refinery. Troops involved in the exercise will come from Western Canada and the Maritimes.
Offshore rig security is not a new issue. In February, a message posted to an al-Queda website called for attacks on energy infrastructure in North America, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia.
Canada's special operations unit, JTF 2, has trained for security incidents involving offshore oil rigs. [Photo: Department of National Defence]Pugliese notes that some of the possible threats globally include attacks on choke points where tankers pass on the way to and from oil storage and refining facilities.
In Newfoundland and Labrador, such a choke point exists in Placentia Bay. Tankers laden with crude from the local offshore and from the Middle East regularly transit the Bay on the way to and from both the Come by Chance refinery and the Whiffen Head oil transshipment facility.
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6 comments:
Ah.
The beauty of wind/solar/wave power. Scattered across the landscape making it the only energy generation that makes terrorist threats useless.
Not exactly.
All energy sources outside of something that generates specifically for a business or residence require some form of transmission facility.
Wave power and wind power have huge infrastructure requirements. damaging or destroying them will have an impact on the economy.
You're right though to the extent that oil has a much larger economic impact since it is also used in other products (plastics etc)
I was thinking like a nuclear reactor which would supply millions of homes whereas wind mills tend to be spread out more so any attacks would require terrorists to blow up a LOT of windmills to cripple us rather than one single attack on a reactor.
Of course if you do a wind "farm" and keep them all in one area it makes for easy attacks. I'd like to see a terrorist try to do anything to tidal power in our climate!
Great blog by the way. I follow it daily.
Cheers
Gotcha.
The tidal power thing is most likely going to look like a dam or similar structure. That makes it a great big conrete bull's eye.
I was picturing in my head some I had seen in Europe that were underwater.
Are they actually doing any work on tidal in NL yet?
There is a conceptual study of a fixed link between Nfld and lab that includes tidal generation.
So far no one is discussing it very much.
Wind seems to be the thing since we have it in abundance. I always thought you could power most of the province by putting a larger generator above the legislature.
Hot air and wind in abundance.
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