| In response to safety and environmental concerns raised by the Gulf of Mexico oil spill disaster, on May 27, President Obama announced Secretary Salazar's decision to cancel Virginia's Lease Sale 220, otherwise headed for the auction block in 2012.
Other reasons weighed heavily into the decision to cancel Virginia Lease Sale 220.
Sec. Salazar has often repeated that information on the possible effects of Atlantic drilling "is 30 years out of date".
Revealed at a Department of Interior workshop in Williamsburg hosted by VIMS in December 2008, large data gaps exist when it comes to endangered and protected species, fish and fisheries, the biology of the ocean floor, the ecosystems found in Virginia's offshore ocean canyons and coral reefs, as well as the physical and geological oceanography.
Off Virginia's coast, there have been sightings of sea turtles, right whales, humpback whales, and sperm whales - all of which are classified as endangered under the Endangered Species Act. Dolphins, porpoises, pilot whales and beaked whales which are all protected under the Marine Mammal Protection Act have also been sighted in what is Virginia's lease sale area. Due to a lack of consistent survey effort throughout the region, seasonal distribution patterns and abundance patterns for all these species are not well known. Also, no surveys for birds have been conducted in the region.
There is limited information regarding the ecosystems of the Norfolk and Washington Canyons, two deep water canyons within the Virginia lease sale area, as they tend to be spatially diverse, complex and difficult to study.
Especially for oil spill risk analysis, current and wind information has been deemed a high priority data gap. There is limited understanding of the effect of internal tides and waves and their mixing with currents at the shelf break and canyon heads.
Unknown is also the amounts of oil and natural gas off our Atlantic coast. Sec. Salazar has only recently proposed seismic studies to be done in the Atlantic. Nonetheless he indicated that Virginia's Lease Sale 220 would have proceeded without benefit of the newer seismic studies with our potential 2012 lease sale made reliant on 30 year old studies.
Seismic study involves multiple companies using huge arrays of high-intensity airguns to repeatedly comb and overlap over hundreds of thousands of acres of ocean, blasting into the water every few seconds for months on end.
These seismic air guns have been proven to have very detrimental impacts on marine mammals (including endangered whales like the Right whale) and fish. Strandings of whales on beaches and reduce commercial fish catches are one of the more obvious results of seismic exploration.
Seismic study only tells us where carbon deposits exist. It takes exploratory drilling to actually determine the amounts that may be present. Such exploratory drilling is done at a point in the process past the lease sale. In other words, it is done by whichever oil company (i.e., BP, Shell, and ExxonMobil) has bought the lease area.
This is past the point where any of our local and state officials can consider and weigh in on the benefits versus the risks and have any say whatsoever. It'll be completely up to the oil companies that own the leases to make the decision whether or not to drill off our coast.
Enough about the unknowns, let's look at what we do know.
It is unfortunate that it took a disaster as is currently occurring in the Gulf Coast for us to wake up to the realities that are offshore drilling.
The Gulf oil spill is not a unique, one-of-a-kind, once in a millennium event that will never occur again. According to congressional testimony by the oil industry, there is no guarantee that what occurred in the Gulf Coast couldn't occur again tomorrow.
And despite claims made by the oil industry, blowouts and other disasters causing large spills have occurred many times over the years.
I could probably occupy a lot of time listing out all the large oil spills that have occurred within the last 30 years. I've highlighted a few of them here.
The "new technology" that the oil industry touts was also responsible for a 2005 oil spill off Ventura County California's coast. Platform operators failed to keep control of the wellhead by removing a "lockdown pin". Removal of the pin circumvented the well's safety system to prevent blowouts.
In July 2008, human error caused a disastrous spill of 450,000 gallons of heavy fuel oil, which closed over 100 miles of the Mississippi River, caused billions in economic activity to be lost, stranding over 200 vessels.
In December 2007, over 24,000 barrels of oil spilled in the North Sea as it was being piped from an offshore platform to a loading buoy.
In March 2006, up to 267,000 gallons of oil were spilled over a 1.9 acre area of the pristine Prudhoe Bay. The spill originated from a 0.25-inch hole in a 34-inch diameter pipeline.
In June 2008, a rupture in an underwater Shell Oil pipeline caused a 58,800-gallon spill in the Gulf of Mexico off the shores of South Padre Island, Texas. The resultant oil slick covered an area of 80 square miles. Crude oil washed ashore and affected about one mile of beach near the mouth of the Rio Grande River, causing beach closings and expensive clean-up - all during the height of tourist season.
While Virginia is not prone to the same scale of hurricanes as hit the Gulf Coast, it should be noted that the U.S. Coast Guard reported that during Hurricanes Katrina and Rita roughly 9 million gallons of oil were spilled from 6 major spills and 5 medium spills, and not counting the oil released from over 5,000 minor spills. (As a point of comparison, 11 million gallons of oil were spilled by the Exxon Valdez.)
MMS reported that as a result of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, 113 platforms were destroyed and 457 pipelines were damaged. One of the bigger spills caused by the hurricane was a pipeline burst that spilled more than 53,000 gallons of crude oil into the surrounding marshes.
The largest warning signs alerting us to the false claims by the oil industry contending that new technology makes drilling environmentally safe occurred last August when a blowout occurred on a rig, the Montara, operating in the Timor Sea off Australia's coast. It took three months to bring the spill under control by eventually drilling two relief wells.
The resultant spill grew to a size larger than New Jersey and impacted some of the world's most iconic and threatened species in the ocean. It devastated the Indonesian coastal economy largely dependent on sustenance fishing and virtually wiped out its foothold in the world's competitive seaweed market. The Montara was built in 2007 and utilized every state-of-the-art new technology allowing the oil industry to sell drilling as "environmentally safe."
The Deepwater Horizon was built in 2001 and also utilized the same "environmentally safe" drilling technology. What the Gulf Coast spill so clearly illustrates is that this new drilling technology has only allowed drilling at deeper depths in the ocean, not greater safety. As the Montara and Deepwater Horizon disasters show, very little has changed since the 1979 Ixtoc I drilling platform blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, which continued to spill for nine months before relief wells allowed the spill to be capped. Today we are attempting and again failing at using all the same methods and technologies (miles of booms, "top kill", throwing garbage at it) as was employed over 30 years ago.
The lessons learned from the Deepwater Horizon disaster are three-fold. We learned one that oil and gas drilling platforms are inherently vulnerable and volatile, and that offshore drilling is inherently dangerous. We also learned that we are in no way capable of fixing what stands a strong possibility of getting broken. The response plans to the Gulf spill have been revealed as grossly inadequate and in some instances may have caused more harm than good.
Perhaps most impactful for us in Virginia are revelations of the all too cozy relationship between the Federal regulatory body, Mineral Management Service, and the oil industry. For years, the oil industry has successfully lobbied for loopholes, and wrote its own safety regulations.
Secretary Salazar has now divided MMS into three agencies, attempting to erect firewalls between the conflicting interests of this all too powerful and easily co-opted agency. Total reform of MMS, however is what is warranted.
The Santa Barbara spill of 1969 had resulted in both a presidential and congressional moratorium on drilling in the Atlantic. It was almost 30 years later in 2008 that both those moratoriums were removed. Today there are no protections standing to prevent drilling in Federal waters which starts 3 miles off our coast.
Today, Virginia stands enrolled in a current drilling program (2012-2017) that indeed puts drilling just 3 miles off our Chesapeake Bay. We stand in that drilling program with absolutely no confidence in the oil industry's claims that drilling can be done in an "environmentally sound" way, with no confidence that the oil industry operates remotely cognizant to the fact that spills occur and occur often, and with no confidence that even a mediocre response plan can be rolled out in the event of an accident. We stand shaken in our confidence in the Federal government to apply and institute adequate environmental regulations governing the drilling process and to adequately and safely assess the environmental risks posed by drilling off our shores.
Our beloved clean Atlantic coast is the backbone of our coastal economies, generating billions of dollars in revenues from tourism, recreation and commercial fishing. It is worth dotting every "i" and crossing every "t" in ensuring its protection for generations to come. At a minimum, the Commonwealth of Virginia must resolve to the position that exploration for offshore oil and natural gas only be considered after Federal regulatory policies, drilling and production technology, and oil spill response capabilities have been upgraded to ensure that there is no possibility either a major spill or recurring small spills having a negative impact on our critically important tourism, outdoor recreation, and commercial and sport fishing industries. |
The following (below the fold) is a transcript from the presentation I gave before Senator Mary Margaret Whipple's Virginia Commission on Energy and the Environment on Thursday, July 8.
