Oil, Water Do Mix, Submariner Contends

Retired Navy Capt. Alfred Scott McLaren, 54, has a bee in his bonnet: submarines. He has lived in them for nearly a quarter of a century, prowling around under the North Pole or surveying the scarcely known waters of the Arctic. And always he has felt that there must be other things you could do with these magnificent fish.

A fellow of the Royal Geographical Society of England who grew up in San Diego and was based here from 1955 to 1957, he discussed his ideas at the recent Oceans ’85 conference in San Diego. But much earlier, as he slid between the ceiling of hanging ice-mountains and the mud floor of the Arctic seabed, safe from the raging storms above, he kept asking himself, “What else, what else are these good for?”

It was only after he left nuclear subs, retired from command of a Navy research establishment and decided to become a student again, that the answer came--in the form of someone else’s problem.

How to get oil out of the High Arctic? It was the last of a long line of headaches facing oilmen exploring the Far North as part of the West’s drive toward energy self-sufficiency. They had found the oil and gas; that was the easy part. Originally, they were talking about 60 billion barrels of oil alone--enough to make a second Middle East of the Arctic. They have dropped their estimates, but no one doubts that the Beaufort Sea-Northwest Passage area is bulging with carbon-based fuels. Oil companies had managed to cope with the appalling weather, using new techniques to drill offshore through ice in temperatures that would freeze even oil. But they had not come to terms with transportation.

Oilman’s Nightmare

What was needed was a reliable, year-round means of getting the oil and gas out of the Beaufort Sea-Northwest Passage area to an ice-free port, at least. Pipelines, the usual first choice, are difficult when wells are out at sea. And pipes laid under Arctic seas have hazards all their own.

Huge expense is just the start. In the shallow waters of the Beaufort Sea, ice floes come spinning off from their slow clockwise waltz around the Pole and often scrape ashore, gouging the seabed under force of wind and current. Any pipe underneath is sure to rupture. Nobody yet knows the effects of an oil spill in Arctic conditions. It would be an oilman’s nightmare. Repairing a gushing under-ice pipe would be ghastly, if not impossible. Spilled oil would become trapped under the ice, and in those temperatures would take years longer to break down than in warmer waters.

Surface oil tankers are the obvious solution. But Arctic offshore is different from all others. With its raging weather, ice packs, icebergs, and long winter night, no tanker--not even ice-strengthened--can promise a punctual, reliable year-round service.

All this was surfacing just as McLaren was looking for a thesis subject. He was studying for a master’s degree in 1981 and 1982 at the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge, England.

Perhaps it was the oilmen’s problem that awoke his old preoccupations. At any rate, there, suddenly, was a thesis subject: Giving submarines a commercial role in the Arctic. Fill ‘em with oil! Build an oil tanker that goes underwater--under ice--under all the atrocious storms.

U.S. Navy Adm. L. Galantin had pointed out 25 years ago that fully laden surface tankers are already nine-tenths submarine, constrained to the surface for the sake of the top-hamper on its few remaining feet of freeboard.

“It requires little imagination,” he had said, “and very simple engineering to go all the way in putting the ship underwater and producing a simpler, more efficient hull, one which can escape the stresses of surface operation and which can maintain a high economic speed.”

Nothing New

There’s nothing new about any of these ideas. The notion of an Arctic submarine was espoused almost 350 years ago by one of the British Royal Society’s founders, Bishop John Wikins. Wilkins propounded on “the possibility of framing an ark for sub-marine navigations . . . safe . . . from ice and great frosts, which do so much endanger the passages towards the Poles.”

One of the fathers of the modern submarine was America’s Simon Lake. He designed and built submarines for the Russians that they used under-ice off Vladivostok before World War I. And in 1917, he was seriously planning two types of cargo-carrying submarines of 11,000 and 13,000 tons (larger than the present Polaris ballistic missile subs) to navigate across the Arctic from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

The explorer Sir Hubert Wilkins converted a military submarine and tried under-ice experiments in 1931. His aim was “to demonstrate dramatically the fact that submersible vessels may be used for opening up and development of the Hudson Bay district and other northern areas.”

U-boats and Japanese submarines were used as tankers and cargo-carriers during World War II, and the most serious post-war proposal came from the British Saunders-Roe company. The firm carried out design work for a 50,000-ton nuclear submarine cargo vessel capable of carrying 28,000 tons of iron ore pellets from the region of Diana Bay in northern Quebec to Britain throughout the year, regardless of ice conditions.

Back on this side of the Atlantic in 1958, and again in ’62 and ’70 (after the discovery of oil in Alaska), General Dynamics did feasibility studies on submarine tankers, each time thinking bigger: One plan proposed building a fleet of 16 nuclear-powered super-submarine tankers able to carry 1.25 million barrels of oil each. The firm was convinced that these tankers could transport oil from Alaska to East Coast ports more cheaply than pipelines. But the oil companies refused. They chose the more conservative option of building the Trans-Alaska pipeline--despite the fact that its costs escalated to 10 times its original estimate.

Backing Off

After the first Arab oil embargo, an alarmed Department of Commerce commissioned a study to explore the feasibility of an Arctic submarine transportation system to deliver oil to the East Coast. Plans called for nuclear submarine tankers as large as 1 million tons. Again, the study found that “submarine tanker systems are technically feasible, offer an attractive rate of return, and compare favorably with other delivery systems in terms of transportation costs.” Again, nothing happened.

Why? Why has everybody backed off despite encouraging prognoses?

“I think it’s a fear of what they can’t see,” said McLaren, who has written a soon-to-be-published article for Nature magazine on his theories and is working toward a doctorate in polar studies at the University of Colorado. “It’s like ‘Jaws.’ Once you’ve seen that film, swimming is never the same. A monster from the primeval deep. It applies to submarines, too. Subs first came to public consciousness with Jules Verne’s ‘20,000 Leagues Under the Sea’--and they have never shaken that image--because they go where nobody can see.

“Submarines, let alone submarines traveling under ice, go beyond most people’s understanding of reasonable, straightforward and safe transportation,” McLaren said. “Yet if you look at the record of submarine Arctic travel since the last war, you’ll see there has not been one single accident. It is spotless. Compare that with surface ships in the same area. Even recent experimental icebreaker surface tankers have had to be hauled out by other icebreakers or have collided with icebergs.

“People don’t realize that with modern sounding equipment, Arctic subs can actually ‘see’ better than surface ships up top battling the worst of the elements--the half-solid seas of an Arctic night. But . . . putting Jules Verne to bed . . . that’s the problem.”

Thinking Small

So how is McLaren going to succeed where so many others have failed?

“Well, first, I’m by no means alone. And second, I’m running counter to the grandiose plans of old--I’m thinking small.”

Was McLaren eating a string of sausages one breakfast when the idea hit him? Was his son Johnny hauling his own sausages round his plate like a tugboat . . .? “Johnny! Stop . . . Tugboat! Why not?”

Use a standard size submarine, not as a tanker but as a tugboat hauling sausages of oil behind: neutral-density Kevlar shapes like the Australians use to haul water around their coasts. Use submarines of existing technology, same pressure hulls, simple diesel motive power.

Research and development take half the time, and you eliminate the risks associated with huge untried pressure hulls. You’re more accessible to shallow-water wells in the Beaufort Sea, and you have access to all normal-size polynyas, the regular but shifting gaps in the polar sea-ice. And you still leave room to expand to super-subs when the technology is ready, and when the oil companies have their technology for deeper wells in the High Arctic.

The environmental lobby, a powerful factor especially with pipeline planners, should approve of submarines, too, McLaren thinks. For a start, they don’t smash up ice floes with all their animal and bird life--and Inuit Eskimo hunters.

And the quietness built into military submarines could be used to avoid one of the biggest objections to surface icebreaker supertankers--engine noise. It is widely held that the roar and propeller thresh of a 43,000-horsepower engine (the size of those on the experimental icebreaker tanker Manhattan) severely disrupt the lives of whales and other sea mammals who use sound generation and detection in their daily lives. And in the Beaufort Sea, known as “the whale pastures,” such things count.

Similar Thoughts

McLaren’s “think small” approach is echoed in the offices of IKL (Ingenieur Kontor Lubeck), a German design company that has been doing its own feasibility studies: submarine barge systems, for instance, in which barges would clamp on to a “mother” sub or winch up into the mother’s belly. IKL is also working on fuel cell power, the unmechanical conversion of hydrogen and oxygen into electricity--an ideal alternative to nuclear power, duplicating nuclear’s great benefit of allowing extended stays underwater.

Micoperi Spa of Milan, Italy, is also working on a new commercial submarine and new non-nuclear power that would give a submarine longer stays underwater than diesel allows: “closed circuit” diesel--an engine that feeds on compressed oxygen. A planned 2,000-ton model would be capable of traveling some 127,000 nautical miles, or 126 days at 9 knots. At last, it seems, there is an alternative to nuclear power for long-range submarines. But the enthusiasm and missionary zeal of visionaries like McLaren means nothing without the active participation of the oil companies. What’s their reaction to all this ferment?

“Pipe. That’s my reaction,” said British Petroleum’s Geoff Larminie. “Any oilman will say the same. We know it. We trust it. We don’t know subs. But I’ve heard Captain McLaren talking before, at a Stockholm conference, and I’ll tell you I’m impressed. Subs aren’t dead. Put it this way: I’d choose them before icebreaker surface tankers. If pipes were definitely out, I’d go for subs.”

Lead Time

“Subs? No, sir. When we’re out of reach of pipes in the High Arctic,” said David Annesley of Canada’s Dome Petroleum, one of the biggest explorers of the Far North, “we’ll go for icebreakers--surface tankers. That’s what we’re looking to. We’re testing them now and not having a bad feedback. In winter the swath you cut through the ice pack closes in two hours. There are not great complaints from the hunters, anyway. And the whole problem’s so far away--we’re eight years from real offshore production yet.”

Others would dispute those claims, and, as to the timing, IKL’s Dr. Fritz Abels thinks eight years is none too much.

“That’s part of the problem. Everybody always underestimates the lead time for any developing,” Abels said. “Even Captain McLaren was astonished at our projections.

“We need to know what people’s actual requirements are, so we can move smoothly through development to a demonstration model and on to production. We have the technology. Our studies show that submarines compare favorably on a cost basis with icebreaker surface tankers, and with pipelines. But now designers, builders and oil companies should come together in a spirit of cooperation to pool risks and knowledge, because the project is too big for any one of us. And, at the least, we need seven years.”

Of course one reason why oil companies are not rushing to embrace this or any other new idea is that there is just no rush for oil at High Arctic cost. The current oil glut has taken the edge off the desperate struggles of the ‘70s to reach self-sufficiency at any price.

On the other hand, the fact that such troubled oil companies as Dome (this year stretching bankers’ faith with a $6-billion overdraft) are proceeding with exploration must indicate some faith that prices will climb in the next decade.

Where does this leave the good visionary Capt. Alfred Scott McLaren? Plugging away, that’s where.

“The trouble is vision,” he said. “In the early days, technological capability didn’t keep pace with vision. Today, vision hasn’t kept pace with technological capability. In other words, today, when we have the means, we lack the guts.”

So the next step?

“The next step is to bury Jules Verne . . . about 20,000 leagues under the sea would do just fine.”