The Obama administration cracked the door open for oil and gas drilling off the Georgia coast Tuesday, but don’t expect rigs floating near the state anytime soon — if ever.
The Department of the Interior included one offshore lease between Virginia and Georgia in a draft five-year plan for 2017-2022, subject to public comment and revision. The size and location of the lease would depend on a variety of geologic, economic and political factors.
The move is also likely to face lawsuits, as it was assailed by environmental groups. Republicans and oil industry types were pleased to see a new drilling opportunity, but they grumbled at its limited scope — and a simultaneous move to close off parts of Alaska.
Interior Secretary Sally Jewell said in a conference call with reporters that she did not expect to hand out an Atlantic lease until 2021 at the earliest. Any drilling would occur at least 50 miles offshore.
Jewell said support from local politicians played a role in which Atlantic states were included.
But Georgia’s Republican political leaders reacted with initial caution. A spokesman for Gov. Nathan Deal said that he supports offshore drilling generally but is still reviewing the administration’s proposal.
U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson, a Georgia Republican, said Georgia must weigh a slew of concerns before it jumps into the drilling game — from protecting the coastal environment to minding military installations such as Naval Submarine Base Kings Bay to making sure it does not impede tourism.
“There are a lot of things involved in this,” Isakson said, “and we’ve got to be careful we dot every I and cross every T.”
Environmental groups were unequivocal in their opposition.
“The risks outweigh the potential benefits,” said Bill Sapp, a senior attorney in Atlanta with the Southern Environmental Law Center. “Georgia has one-third of the marsh along the whole Eastern seaboard, and the last thing any of us want to see is that marsh blackened by crude oil washed ashore. We also have a tourism industry and a fishing industry that are dependent on those marshes.”
But the benefits outweigh the risks, said a Wyoming professor who studied the economic impact of South Atlantic drilling for energy-related groups in Washington. Timothy Considine, an energy economist, reported in September that oil and gas drilling off Georgia’s coast could create between 1,175 and 6,539 full-time jobs by 2035. The state ports of Brunswick and Savannah might tally 170 of those jobs.
Tax revenue from drilling could add $250 million annually to state coffers by 2035, Considine estimated.
The professor also reported that Georgia’s potential environmental costs — air pollution and spills — wouldn’t rise above $105 million by 2035.
“The economic benefits of offshore oil and gas development are likely to far exceed the economic value of environmental damages,” Considine concluded.
Environmentalists scoffed at the industry-backed study, noting that the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill — also 50 miles offshore — led to billions of dollars in cleanup and liability costs.
“That oil still made it onto the beaches and into the marshes along the Gulf Coast,” Sapp said. “And any spill that occurred off South Carolina or North Carolina could well follow the coast down to Georgia. Our marshes can’t afford to suffer like what we have seen in the gulf.”
Energy companies might also consider building refineries along Georgia’s relatively undeveloped coast, further muddling economic and environmental impacts. Megan Desrosiers, executive director of One Hundred Miles, a nonprofit coastal advocacy group in Brunswick, doesn’t relish turning Georgia’s coast into another Louisiana.
“Miles and miles of pipeline and refineries along our coast would lead to a really dirty industry and put our coastal communities at risk,” she said. “What kind of economic development do we want? And is it a price we’re willing to pay?”
U.S. Rep. Buddy Carter, a Republican from Pooler whose district includes the entire coastline, supports the idea of drilling there. He even floated the notion that offshore drilling could solve the state's transportation revenue conundrum.
“This could potentially be part of the answer for our transportation issues in the state of Georgia,” Carter said in an interview with Channel 2 Action News. “The benefits that come from this, the royalties that we might derive from this in the state of Georgia. Obviously this is going to create jobs. It will help our economy.”
Any development, or drilling for that matter, is years off. Meantime, the oil companies will deploy seismic air guns — with blasts as loud as a howitzer repeated every 10 seconds or so for weeks — to discover oil and gas deposits below the seabed. Environmentalists worry that endangered right whales, dolphins and other mammals could suffer irreparable hearing loss or other maladies.
“And the crazy thing about seismic testing is that all of the oil companies that want to lease off the Atlantic coast will do their own seismic testing,” Sapp said. “It just doesn’t make sense how it’s done.”
The oil industry wasn’t totally pleased with the interior secretary’s announcement.
“While considering the Atlantic for potential development is a good step, the administration’s proposal represents the bare minimum for potentially opening that area by including only a single lease sale six years from now,” said Erik Milito, an American Petroleum Institute official in Washington.
Some congressional Democrats were at odds with the administration, dredging up the Deepwater Horizon spill to illustrate that offshore drilling does not just affect the closest state.
“It puts our beaches, our fishermen and our environment in the cross hairs for an oil spill that could devastate our shores,” U.S. Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., said at a news conference with other indignant East Coast Democrats.
“A spill off the coast of North Carolina could affect Massachusetts,” he said. “A spill off the coast of Georgia could affect New Jersey.”
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