The reason you can’t find much about oil spills from offshore rigs is because there aren’t many – and none of any size. Since we started the current tracking system in 1980 there has been a grand total of 58,000 barrels of oil spilled due to offshore drilling in the entire continental US and territories with the largest single spill being in the neighborhood of 1,000 barrels. That includes any spills that may have occurred during Katrina or Rita and all the other hurricanes since 1980, and that number is padded with many ancillary spills such as a transport ship supporting a rig that might have a bilge spill.
To put that 58K barrels in perspective, we’re currently monitoring one small area of the Gulf off the coast of Louisiana where environmentalists have been trying to claim the oil industry is responsible for oil washing ashore and we’ve discovered more than 120,000 barrels of oil naturally seep into the Gulf every year in an area where no drilling is allowed or taking place. Over 2/3 of all the oil in the ocean comes from underwater seepage, and a major portion of the remaining third is from natural ground seepage in coastal areas. The other major sources of oil in the oceans is from ground run off of streets and from tanker operations outside the US or non-US ships.
This is a major step forward to improving our environment on many levels. Industry is most excited about the chance to tap into the vast (>1 trillion cf) natural gas reserves off shore and oil is a secondary consideration at this time. Tapping in to this gas reserve will not only allow us to convert many oil fired facilities to gas reducing both the air pollution of burning oil and the risk of oil spills by the hundreds of oil barges moving around our SE costal areas – but some studies are indicating that by removing some of this high pressure gas in the areas of deeper oil pockets we might reduce the amount of underwater natural oil seepage and actually clean up the water in some coastal areas.
The chances of oil spills is 5 times greater during transport than any other phase of oil production, and a majority of our oil, and the rest of the world’s, is shipped to us from foreign countries on foreign ships that do not meet environmental or safety standards that is required of American operators. This legislation will allow companies to do more extensive exploration for oil on our own continental shelf where conservative estimates indicate there may be as much as 10 times as much oil as current proven reserves indicates. Just our known reserves in off limit offshore locations right now is equal to 60 years of Persian Gulf imports. By opening these areas up for exploration we’ll probably see those reserve figures climb dramatically given the recent discoveries at the 30,000’ level, and we’ll have that oil production 100% under American environmental and safety controls reducing the chances of foreign ships polluting the ocean bringing oil to us from around the world.
We currently spend millions of dollars a year sinking ships and other objects as artificial reefs, yet one drilling rig provides more marine habitat shelter than 5 major ship reefs – without costing the taxpayers one cent. While most artificial reefs have less than 50’ of vertical relief, it’s not uncommon to have rigs with over 1,000’ of water column relief making them more similar to the great diving walls of Cozumel or Grand Turk than traditional coastal reefs. This vertical relief is what brings the highest concentration of marine diversity to the sites as you’ll have deep-water pelagics existing closely with the shallow corals near the top of the rig – just like seeing big sharks near the top of many wall dives.
Personally I campaigned to have the drilling limits set at 50 miles rather than 125 miles to make the rigs more practical and accessible for dive and fishing operators, but I guess I’ll have to settle for what we got this time around. We also got pretty good state royalty deals that will not only fully fund any land based infrastructure needed to support the rigs, but will also feed some general budget issues including environmental projects.
