Dance of the Reptiles (10 page)

According to the Congressional Budget Office, the royalty split could cost the federal government $102 billion during the next decade. Even the Bush White House, which is basically an arm of Big Oil, expressed dismay at the deal. Once that kind of heavy money starts flowing into the moist, eager paws of local legislators, be assured that energy lobbyists will get whatever they want, whenever they want it.

Floridians fear a nightmarish spill like that of the
Exxon Valdez
, the tanker that lost nearly 11 million gallons of oil and fouled 1,300 miles of Alaskan coastline back in 1989.
Such an accident would be devastating both to Florida’s marine environment and to tourism. Vacationers tend to avoid smelly black beaches littered with dead, tar-covered seabirds.

The energy industry, and the politicians who pimp for it, say there’s no reason to worry. The technology of extracting and shipping fuel has improved, they say, and so has the safety record.

Even if the platforms and tankers are better built, the infrastructure required to transport and store billions of gallons of oil is inherently vulnerable to acts of nature. After hurricanes Katrina and Rita hammered the Gulf Coast last summer, authorities responded to at least 595 oil, gas, and chemical spills in the region, according to a study by
The Houston Chronicle
.

The leaks came from offshore platforms, storage tanks along the coast, and even fuel trucks that overturned in the storm surge and high winds. In all, an estimated nine million gallons of oil was released, contaminating homes, farm soil, waterways, and wetlands.

An estimated one million gallons leaked from a Shell Oil facility in Pilottown, Louisiana.

Another 1.4 million gallons spilled from a Murphy Oil plant near Chalmette. Another 991,000 gallons poured from a Chevron terminal near Empire, on the Mississippi River.

The worst spill happened at Cox Bay in Plaquemines Parish, where 3.8 million gallons of sweet crude spewed from two storage tanks owned by Bass Enterprises Production Co. About 450,000 gallons slopped into nearby marshes.

Energy companies said they hadn’t anticipated—or prepared for—the vast spillage caused by the hurricanes. It was not a confidence-inspiring response. Given Florida’s lively history of hurricanes, residents here deserve to know where
all that oil being raised offshore will be stored, and whether those facilities will be able to withstand a storm stronger than Katrina, a Category 3 when it made landfall. Even if oil taken from Florida waters is transported directly to Louisiana or Mississippi, the risk of a catastrophic spill at sea can never be eliminated.

Exploration for natural gas, which is odorless and colorless, poses a lesser threat to waters and beaches. Yet even the feds admit that the drilling operation raises tons of sludge containing potentially harmful heavy metals.

Thanks to a last-ditch push by Florida representatives, the House bill that passed June 29 prohibits drilling closer than 200 miles from the west coast. The 50-mile buffer along the east coast and the Panhandle may be expanded to 100 miles by the Legislature, but it must be renewed every five years.

Some of the GOP lawmakers howling for offshore drilling have scoffed at the resistance in Florida. They say the energy needs of America must come first and that exploiting the Outer Continental Shelf will help free us from dependency on foreign oil.

What a crock. Offshore drilling will provide short-term boosts in supply, but little relief from our perilous reliance on oil producers in the Mideast, South America, and the Eastern Bloc.

Inevitably, rigs will go up somewhere off Florida’s coast, but only a dithering fool would believe that the price of gasoline will come down.

Those same folks who’ve been getting rich from Dick Cheney’s energy policy will get richer, while Floridians are left to hope and pray that these geniuses do a better job of protecting our waters than they did in Louisiana and Mississippi. The odds stink.

July 20, 2008

Drilling Offshore Won’t Help Us Much

Raise your hand if you actually believe that offshore oil drilling will bring down gasoline prices at the pump.

Raise your other hand if you believe in Peter Pan, unicorns, and variable-rate mortgages.

Last week, President Bush strode into the White House Rose Garden and announced that he was nullifying the moratorium on offshore oil drilling that his father initiated 18 years ago following the
Exxon Valdez
disaster in Alaska.

“The time for action is now,” proclaimed the younger Bush, though of course the gesture was largely symbolic. The moratorium stays in place until Congress decides not to renew it. And Congress, declared our fearless leader, is “the only thing standing between the American people and these vast oil resources.”

Wow. And we thought the gas crisis was more complicated. Apparently, it’s the fault of those merciless fiends on Capitol Hill who continue to persecute the poor energy companies. Those companies, by the way, currently lease more than 90 million acres of public land for exploration. According to a House report, only about one-quarter of that leased acreage is being used.

Naturally, some “obstructionist” Democrats want the oil companies to explain why they aren’t drilling in all these other places before they start drilling off the coasts of Florida, California, and along the eastern seaboard.

It seems like a good question, but the president had nothing to say on the subject.

Listening to Bush and now John McCain, you’d almost forget that the oil companies already do lots of offshore drilling. In fact, they currently have access to more than
71 billion untapped barrels of recoverable oil believed to lie beneath coastal waters. That means four-fifths of all known offshore deposits are available to industry exploration efforts, according to the federal Mineral Management Service.

So why aren’t they concentrating on the oil leases that they already control? Another good question, and one for which the explanations are typically murky.

Politically, what’s happening is simple. The energy companies want to score big before their two guardian angels, Bush and Dick Cheney, leave power. With the public pounded by gas prices surpassing $4 a gallon, industry lobbyists see a golden opportunity to dismantle the offshore moratorium.

Still, even if the restricted zones on both coasts were opened to drilling and the yield were good, it would be years—probably decades—before the pump price of gasoline might be affected.

For seaside communities, the prospect of drilling has always meant weighing the risks against the possible rewards. In both Florida and California, which suffered a horrendous spill at Santa Barbara in 1969, most residents have opposed near-shore oil exploration.

The current moratorium on drilling, which affects the lower 48 states, was imposed to protect not just coastal environments but tourist economies that depend on clean seas and clean beaches. Florida, with its dangerously narrow economic base, can’t afford a major spill. One
Valdez
-type accident in the Gulf of Mexico could foul miles of beachfront with tarry gobs; the news video alone would cost the state millions in hotel bookings.

And then there’s the incalculable long-term damage to the real-estate market and commercial fisheries.

Energy companies say the technology of extraction has improved substantially, making unlikely the chances of a serious mishap. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California is unpersuaded and remains outspokenly opposed to drilling there.

Yet in Florida, fellow green Republican Charlie Crist, a longtime foe of offshore drilling, recently announced that he—like McCain—has had a change of heart. “Floridians are suffering,” Charlie said, as if oil companies will kindheartedly deflate gas prices once their derricks rise off Destin and Tampa.

Ironically, both the industry and the government believe leases within 100 miles of Florida’s coasts hold mostly natural gas, which will do nothing to help lower the cost of crude. Such details are seldom noted by politicians who disingenuously peddle offshore drilling as a cure for high gas prices. The only cure is to radically reduce demand and to develop alternative energy sources.

The United States owns only about 3 percent of the world’s oil reserves, yet it guzzles 25 percent of global production. Every day Americans burn up 20 million barrels of oil, which is what keeps us slaves to OPEC.

Folks filling up their cars are understandably worried and alarmed. That’s a bad combination in an election year because it encourages candidates to offer false hope and sham promises.

Undoubtedly it’s possible to safely extract more oil from beneath our oceans, but there’s not enough down there to free the United States from its crippling dependence on Mideast reserves.

Drilling in the Alaskan wilderness won’t save us; nor will drilling off the beaches of Florida and California. The main
result would be a temporary boost in domestic product, which the oil companies will eagerly sell us at whatever price the market will bear.

Only a sucker would believe otherwise.

May 2, 2010

Gulf Spill Can Kill Our Tourist Season

Oops.

That’s the official position of British Petroleum.

It turns out that oil is gushing from that blown-out rig off the Louisiana coast at a flow of at least 5,000 barrels a day, five times more than BP first estimated. Oh, and if you’re keeping count, by Friday there were three leaks—not two—in the mile-long pipe that connected the platform to the wellhead.

The slick is larger than Rhode Island, and a shift of wind is pushing it into the wetlands of bayou country, imperiling birds, marine life, and commercial fishing. Tourist beaches in Alabama and northwest Florida are also at risk.

Barely a month ago, President Obama announced plans to expand offshore oil operations in the eastern Gulf of Mexico and along the Atlantic coast as far south as central Florida. Fabulous idea! It won’t bring down the price of gasoline one penny at the pump, and it won’t yield enough crude oil to light up America for even a year—but, hey, what harm could it do?

Oops.

The oil companies know how to find oil, and they sure know how to drill. The only part of the underwater operation that they haven’t really nailed down is how to clean up their spills.

Soon after the Deepwater Horizon rig caught fire and
sank, killing 11 workers, BP sent remote-controlled submarines to shut a master valve near the source of the outflow. It didn’t work.

Plan B is to dig a relief well in the hope of intercepting the oil before it reaches the fractured pipe. Plan C is to plug up the spewing hole with mud, concrete, or a heavy liquid. At a depth of 5,000 feet, either project will take weeks or months, during which time the oil would continue leaking.

Meanwhile, as this column is being written, BP is lighting parts of the Gulf of Mexico on fire, to burn off some of the slick. So much for high-tech. The company is also assembling an extremely large dome—I swear—that engineers could lower to the ocean floor and place over the leak in an attempt to capture the oil. Maybe when they’re done, they can give it to Wile E. Coyote so he can use it to trap the Road Runner.

BP says everything possible is being done to stop the leak and contain the spill. That’s probably true, which is sobering. Despite all the assurances from Big Oil and the politicians who are in its pocket, the technology of undersea drilling is dangerously lagging when it comes to protecting the coastal communities whose economies depend on clean water, clean beaches, and healthy fisheries.

Last week, BP’s chief executive, Tony Hayward, tried to ease the fears of Gulf residents by saying that the approaching layer of oil was as light as “iced tea.” Good luck trying to sell that line: “Hey, folks, that brown stuff all over the beach? Don’t think of it as tar. Think of it as Snapple.”

On Friday, with the spill blooming into a disaster, the White House announced that no new offshore drilling will be authorized until the Louisiana incident is fully investigated. Under the plan announced in March by Obama, drilling in Florida’s eastern Gulf would expand but remain at least 125
miles offshore. On the Atlantic side, rigs could be erected within sight of the coast.

In Tallahassee, where Big Oil’s lobbyists have been spreading gobs of money, several geniuses in the Legislature will next year continue their push to permit drilling within five miles of some prime Florida beaches. Perfectly safe, they say. Y’all just relax.

Two days after exploding, the Deepwater Horizon went down on April 22 about 50 miles from mainland Louisiana. It took only a week after that for the first streaks of oil to reach the shore.

Miles of protective booms have been laid along the marshes. Officials are considering cannon fire to scare away birds, so they don’t land in the goo. Another idea is to recruit local shrimp boats as oil skimmers.

Because BP hasn’t been able to cap the leak, the Obama administration is sending U.S. military assistance. In other words, the Louisiana spill is an official emergency. If it had happened near Jacksonville or Daytona Beach, Naples, Sarasota, Key West …

Oops.

By all means, let’s surround Florida—a virtual hurricane magnet—with drill rigs. According to the U.S. Minerals Management Service, hurricanes Rita and Katrina destroyed 113 Gulf platforms, damaged 457 pipelines, and caused 146 spills that dumped 17,652 barrels of petroleum. One medium-sized blowout could trash miles of shoreline and kill a tourist season. Nothing sells seaside hotel rooms like YouTube videos of gunk-covered turtles and dead pelicans.

This is a no-brainer. Florida can’t afford offshore drilling. The risk to the economy is ludicrous, compared to the relatively small amounts of oil to be found.

With the crud from the Louisiana accident slopping ashore, Obama should fly down to experience the scene firsthand. I’m sure someone will help scrape the “iced tea” off his flip-flops.

May 16, 2010

BP: And a Child Shall Lead Them

An absolutely true news item: British Petroleum says it is considering a plan to plug the main leak on the sunken Deepwater Horizon oil rig by shooting it full of shredded car tires, old golf balls, and knotted ropes
.