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Thursday, July 10, 2008
The facts about offshore drilling
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Personally, I’m not sternly opposed to the idea of dropping the federal ban against offshore oil drilling and letting individual states make that decision for themselves, weighing the revenue from drilling against the impact on tourism, the environment and coastal beauty.
However, it’s also important to get some things straight about the cost-benefit analysis behind that decision.
For example, it’s become a right-wing talking point that drilling is now so safe that there were no oil spills in the wake of the 2005 Gulf hurricanes. That is just plain wrong.
A report commissioned by the U.S. Minerals Management Service, which oversees offshore oil leases, found that after Katrina and Rita, “124 spills were reported with a total volume of roughly 17,700 barrels of total petroleum products, of which about 13,200 barrels were crude oil and condensate from platforms, rigs and pipelines, and 4,500 barrels were refined products from platforms and rigs. Pipelines were accountable for 72 spills totaling about 7,300 barrels of crude oil and condensate spilled into the (Gulf of Mexico).”
In that case, “response and recovery efforts kept the impacts to a minimum with no onshore impacts from these spill events.” But the risk of serious problems is still there.
More important, offshore drilling is being sold by many as a way to lower gasoline prices or alter our strategic dependency on foreign energy sources. It will not do that. The international thirst for oil is so vast that it wouldn’t be sated a bit by the quantities of oil we are likely to find off our coasts.
At peak production, it would ease energy prices only at the margins, with an impact measured in pennies at the gallon. You may hear politicians and talk show hosts claim otherwise, but you will not hear that claim from reputable oil experts. As oilman extraordinaire T. Boone Pickens is now acknowledging, “This Is one emergency we can’t drill our way out of.”
Those are the facts: The dangers of drilling offshore have eased, but remain real. And the benefits of drilling offshore, while tangible, aren’t very big.
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