Oil Drilling Foes Board Arctic Barge

Greenpeace activists boarded and occupied a BP Amoco barge in the Arctic Ocean on Monday to protest the company’s development of the Northstar oil field off the Alaska coast.

The environmental group said six activists on a raft reached the 420-foot unmanned barge--being towed to the oil field to serve as living quarters for workers--shortly after midnight and set up a campaign and communications center.

The protesters oppose plans to develop the 176-million-barrel Northstar field, where BP intends to start pumping crude oil in late 2001.

“We’re hoping that they take that money and put it into funding the solar revolution,” said one of the six activists on the barge, Melanie Duchin. “There’s a lot of things that BP could be doing with that money other than to contribute to more global climate change.”

Greenpeace said that the offshore field was a threat to the Arctic ecosystem and that BP should not expand oil production there.

BP officials said the tug towing the barge had been diverted to Barrow, a small town in the northernmost tip of Alaska, where local police would remove the activists.

Ronnie Chappell, spokesman for BP Exploration Alaska Inc., said the barge would then continue to its intended destination, the main dock at Prudhoe Bay, Alaska’s largest oil field.

“Our goal is to have the barge underway and headed back to Prudhoe as soon as the activists can be safely removed,” he said, adding that BP had told the activists they were trespassing.

Bob King, spokesman for Alaska Gov. Tony Knowles, said the state administration would help local police deal with the case. “The borough has requested state assistance, and we’re cooperating with them.”

The barge-boarding was the latest in a series of high-profile Greenpeace events in Arctic Alaska. This spring, activists spent about eight weeks camped out on the ice near Northstar as part of the protest campaign.

In the summer of 1998, Greenpeace activists used a vessel to interrupt seismic testing in the area.

Northstar extends up to six miles offshore and includes a combination of state and federal tracts. It is slated to become Alaska’s first producing field on the federally controlled outer continental shelf.

Greenpeace, other environmental groups and some North Slope residents have raised concerns about the underwater pipeline that BP would use to transport Northstar oil to onshore facilities.

Greenpeace also mobilized activists to vote in April on a shareholder resolution demanding that BP drop its Northstar plans. In addition, the group has participated in legal action challenging the development.