TORONTO (miningweekly.com) – The Canadian arm of Royal Dutch Shell has donated about 860 000 ha of offshore exploratory permits in the waters of Baffin Bay, near Lancaster Sound, to nonprofit organisation Nature Conservancy of Canada (NCC), in support of the establishment of a national marine conservation area off the coast of Nunavut.

The NCC had subsequently released the permits to the Canadian federal government, thereby facilitating a marine conservation initiative of global significance.

Lancaster Sound is the eastern entrance to the Northwest Passage, a fabled and treacherous corridor through Canada’s Arctic Archipelago.

Scientists had determined the area to be of critical ecological importance to marine mammals, including seals, narwhal, beluga and bowhead whales, as well as walrus and polar bears. It is also bordered by some of the most important seabird breeding colonies in the Arctic, with populations totalling in the hundreds of thousands.

LEGAL CHALLENGE
The exploration permits are to the east of a federal proposal for a national marine conservation area in Lancaster Sound, which currently included 4.45-million hectares of marine territory comprising most of Lancaster Sound.

The company advised that the contribution of Shell’s permits could clear the way for a larger national marine conservation area.

A government moratorium on oil and gas activity in the Lancaster Sound and Baffin Bay regions had been in place for nearly 40 years, and Shell advised that it had not conducted any exploration activities on these lands since the moratorium.

However, the donation was expected to resolve a legal challenge brought by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) in April that challenged the validity of the exploration permits.

The pro-environment group saw the concessions as remnant oil and gas permits, held by Shell and dating back to the 1970s, that were within the boundary desired by Inuit. According to the WWF, the permits should have expired along with all the other permits issued as part of the 1970s exploration boom, but the government bureaucracy had somehow kept them listed as active.

The WWF believed that these permits, issued in 1971, should have expired in May, 1979. In February this year, it approached the Canadian government to request that the federal registrar update records under the Canadian Petroleum Resources Act to indicate that the Shell oil and gas exploration permits had expired.

However, to date, the federal registrar had not resolved this request, prompting the conservationists to start a legal challenge, represented by lawyers at Ecojustice.

Expanding the proposed conservation area would also positively respond to Inuit aspirations to protect their traditional territory, and support the federal government’s target of protecting at least 10% of Canada’s marine and coastal areas by 2020 – an international target under the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity.

Over the past 30 years, Shell had contributed more than C$6.5-million in financial resources, land and mineral rights to the NCC. It had made similar gifts to Canadians when it contributed rights to the Gwaii Haanas national marine conservation area reserve and Haida heritage site, and the Mount Broadwood heritage conservation area, all located in British Columbia.

Shell had been scaling back its Arctic aspirations and, in September last year, abandoned drilling offshore Alaska indefinitely, where it had spent about $7-billion, after it failed to find enough oil or gas in the Chukchi Sea that extended north of the Arctic Circle. It had relinquished all but one of its US federal offshore leases.