Couldn't help but post on this one.
Posted by
alligatorob on 4/24/2010, 9:12 pm
I think there are lots of misconceptions concerning offshore oil development and oil spills. Here are a few facts that may help:
About half of all oil released into the marine environment is the result of natural seeps, not man made releases (http://www.epa.gov/ttn/chief/conference/ei10/intemissions/marse.pdf).
In reality oil well drilling and pumping of oil relieves the pressure on oil reservoirs reducing, not increasing oil releases (http://www.manhattan-institute.org/energymyths/myth8.htm)
Petroleum contamination from oil seeps in North American waters is about 60 times greater than the amount released through oil exploration and production (http://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/ocs/)
The reason the NOAA site says there are more spills in the Gulf of Mexico is that these statics come from reported spills from vessels (not oil drilling by the way) and the US has the most stringent reporting requirements. There is no way that there are fewer actual releases in the Persian Gulf for example, but countries like Iran, Saudi and the other Gulf States don't report much. This statistic is misleading. But it does make a good point, most oil releases are from vessels and in transportation, not from drilling and oil production. In the past 25 years the US offshore oil production industry has had an excellent record, which is why this one relatively small (compared to say the Exxon Valdez) release is making news. It's a rare event.
My business is oil spill clean up and I have seen a lot of these, I worked on the 91 Iraqi war spill clean up and that was (and still is) a real mess and on the Valdez spill (note this was a tanker release, not from an oil rig). I have seen up close offshore oil operations in much of the world, including the Gulf of Mexico. Add to that I live right on a Gulf beach, and I have no problem with offshore drilling in Florida. It will not ruin our beaches, in fact it will likely have no impact on our beaches at all. I have seen tarballs on our beach and other Florida beaches, some of these are from natural seeps, some from releases from vessels, but not much from oil rigs. What does come from rigs is more likely from Mexico than from US waters.
Right now much of Florida's oil is delivered by barge, and barges have a much poorer record of oil releases than does the oil drilling and production business.
There would be some impacts of the drilling. The most noticeable is where the rigs are visible from shore you can see structures and lights at night that are not naturally there. The onshore support industries are also sometimes a problem, but I suspect most of that would come out of the existing Louisiana and vicinity businesses. In Louisiana the worst impacts have come from onshore canaling and pipeline construction, not oil spills. Even back 30 years ago when operations were a lot sloppier than today the beaches in Louisiana were more impacted by the garbage thrown off the rigs (something that has stopped) than by oil releases.
I suspect Florida will continue to block offshore drilling, which I think is unfortunate and will mostly be based on the knee jerk anti-oil reaction rather than reasoned debate. It is true that even if significant reserves are found they will only make up a small part of the US supply and not a whole lot of jobs will be created. But a similar argument could be made about must of our businesses, it takes a lot of small parts to make the whole. And the jobs that are created will be US jobs and the money will stay here, not flow to some place like Nigeria, Yemen, Venezuela or Iran.
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Beachlover,
4/23/2010, 2:56 am Post A Reply
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