Most offshore leases producing no oil, gas
By JASON EMBRY, ASHER PRICE
Tuesday, July 08, 2008
WASHINGTON — Drilling for oil off the coast of Texas has inflicted relatively little harm on the environment in recent years, state officials say. But it has also shown that expanded drilling won't be a quick fix for an oil supply that is far outpaced by domestic and global demand.
Of about 1,800 leases, or areas that producers have obtained from the government to seek oil, off the coast of Texas, 273 are producing oil and gas, according to the U.S. Minerals Management Service.
Those numbers and others have led congressional Democrats to charge that oil producers aren't taking advantage of existing resources. But the oil industry and its defenders say non-producing leases are common because areas that appear to have oil often don't, and that even if they do, preparing to drill can take several years.
And while there is debate over the environmental impact of offshore drilling, government officials in Texas say it's as clean as it has been in decades.
Such drilling jumped to the front of the debate over oil and gas prices last month when Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, said he wanted to lift a 27-year moratorium on drilling off of much of the country's coast in an effort to increase U.S. oil supplies. Lifting the moratorium would not directly affect the Texas coast because drilling is already allowed there.
In the race for a Texas seat in the U.S. Senate, both Republican incumbent John Cornyn and Democratic challenger Rick Noriega support lifting the moratorium and allowing states to decide whether to permit drilling.
Sen. Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, says oil companies should get more from the leases that are already available to them, and congressional Democrats largely agree. House Democrats tried last week to strip oil companies of the leases they are not using, but fell short of the two-thirds vote they needed.
According to a recent report by the Democratic staff of the House Natural Resources Committee, just 10.5 million of the 44 million offshore acres that have been leased out to oil and gas companies are currently producing oil and gas.
"The oil industry needs to drill what they have now, drill in those areas available to them, and then we will talk about giving them dessert," said Committee Chairman Nick Rahall, D-W.V.
Democrats also point to recent comments from the administrator of the federal Energy Information Agency, Guy Caruso, whom Reuters quoted as saying lifting the offshore moratorium would have a "relatively small" effect on gas prices.
But officials with the American Petroleum Institute, which represents the oil and gas industry, say those who talk about idle leases underestimate how long it takes to produce oil from an offshore site. It's not that oil companies aren't using the leases, they say, but it can take years before they start extracting oil because they first have to obtain permits, conduct environmental and engineering studies and build platforms for drilling. Also, they don't know whether an area will contain oil until they drill there.
"They've paid millions of dollars up front for the rights to explore these leases, and if they find any oil, they're going to want to get it out of the ground to recoup that investment," said Andy Radford, a policy adviser with the institute.
Offshore drilling has taken place in Texas waters since at least the 1940s, according to Sandra Mourton, the executive director of the nonprofit Offshore Energy Center.
But for decades, the state has grappled with how to keep the Gulf clean.
The state's General Land Office recorded at least 733 oil spills in 2007, resulting in 2,185 barrels of oil spilled in Texas coastal waters. Only two of the spills amounted to more than 100 barrels.
Many of the spills had little to do with the offshore rigs, which typically pump to shore by pipe, according to Mourton.
And, in any case, some animal welfare groups and biologists say the 2007 spill numbers are not alarming.
If one were to take all the threats posed to wildlife along the Gulf, such as habitat destruction, oil pollution would "rank at the lower end of the scale," says Andy Tirpak, a pollution biologist in the Houston area for the state parks and wildlife department.
He said practices and standards are better than they were decades ago, automated safety redundancies have been built into the system to avoid spills, and drilling is done farther offshore than it once was.
Spilled oil can kill birds by coating their feathers and destroying their ability to control their body temperature. But there has not been a notable "oiling" of birds on the Texas portion of the Gulf Coast in at least two years, said Susan Schmalz , the executive director of Houston-based Wildlife Rehab and Education. That incident, in the Corpus Christi area, affected only a handful of birds.
Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson, who oversees the General Land Office, insists that oil exploration and transportation do not present the environmental threats they did decades ago.
"If you spent time on the beach you used to have to clean tarballs off your feet when you went to the car," Patterson said. "That's not the case anymore."
He credited new technology, like directional drilling and three-dimensional seismic imaging, with cutting down the amount of oil spilled. Patterson said the main challenge for Texas is making sure enough equipment is available for the construction and operation of rigs, should the moratorium be lifted.
But environmental mishaps related to offshore drilling continue to crop up. In December 2006, at least 21,000 gallons of crude oil spilled into the Gulf of Mexico about 30 miles off the shore of Galveston. The oil was leaking from a pipeline that went from an offshore rig to land.
"Were seeing a new kind of accident that's caused by — rather than prevented by — new technology," said Richard Charter, a government relations consultant for Washington D.C.-based Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund.
He cited spills from 2004 and 2005 on oil platforms in California and Canada.
"The common thread is that when computerized technology fails, you have no human eyes watching over that computer, and accidental spills have a longer duration because no one catches them." |
