Choice is more oil or more risk to coast

Pumped by consumer shock at gasoline prices flowing hard toward $5 a gallon, pressure is mounting to end the 1981 moratorium on offshore drilling, which was adopted to protect the environmental and tourism value of the nation's beaches.

President Bush says offshore restrictions have become "outdated and counterproductive" since Congress first banned new leases on the outer continental shelf.Other drilling proponents, including presumptive GOP presidential nominee Sen. John McCain and Republican Florida Gov. Charlie Crist, say technological advances have significantly reduced the risks of offshore rig spills. McCain pointed to oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico that weathered Hurricane Katrina as proof offshore drilling is safe.

But even if newer offshore drill technologies reduce the risk of environmental degradation, energy experts question if the amount of recoverable oil is worth the risk. Environmental groups charge oil companies with opportunistically using recent gas-pump increases to try to stockpile federally owned land and offshore drilling acreage before developing all the areas that they already have under lease.

Only 10 million acres of the 44 million acres already leased, mostly in the western Gulf of Mexico, are producing oil or gas, although oil companies say some of the other acreage is in development.

Oil producers say that they are not pumping more because drilling equipment is in short supply and that offshore drilling remains expensive.

Guy Cantwell, a spokesman for Transocean Inc., the world's largest ocean drilling company, said environmental safety has improved even as drilling is occurring in deeper and deeper water.

In the years since the moratorium began, drilling technology has advanced.

According to the U.S. Department of the Interior's Minerals Management Service, spills and "blowouts" have declined significantly in recent years. Blowouts occur when drillers lose control of a drilling operation and oil gushes out of the well and into the sea.

From 1985 through 2001, outer continental shelf wells produced more than 7 billion barrels of oil while spilling only about 68,500 barrels. In that period, well-drilling blowouts caused only two spills of more than five barrels -- an 11 barrel blowout in 1992 and a 200 barrel blowout in 2000.

But offshore drilling accidents can be devastating. The 10 worst drill-rig accidents dating to 1962 killed more than 770 workers. The five worst well "blowouts" occurred between 1969 and 1980, spilling more than 4 million barrels of oil.

Two of those blowouts blackened beaches in the United States. In 1969, a blowout at Union Oil's Alpha Well A-21 operating in the channel off Santa Barbara, Calif., lasted 11 days and spilled 80,000 barrels of oil, soiling California beaches.

The biggest oil spill in history -- 14 times bigger than the 11 million-gallon Exxon Valdez spill -- occurred in 1979 after a blowout on a drill platform operated by Petroleos Mexicanos in the Gulf of Mexico. More than 3.5 million barrels of oil -- 147 million gallons -- poured into the gulf for nine months and caused extensive damage along the Texas coast.

Rep. Jason Altmire, D-Pa., joined most Democrats in Congress in rejecting President Bush's call to open up the seas for drilling earlier this month. He said oil companies should fully explore their existing leases before additional areas are opened.

The world consumes about 86 million barrels a day. The U.S. share of that is about 20.6 million barrels, 60 percent of it from foreign sources. Current estimates are that the offshore areas covered by the moratorium contain a total of 19 billion barrels, enough to provide about 920 days, or about 2.5 years, of current U.S. consumption.

Rep. John Peterson, R-Pa., is a longtime supporter of extractive industries and leader of House efforts to open offshore drilling. He said there is likely much more oil and gas than we know about offshore.

(E-mail Don Hopey at dhopey(at) post-gazette.com)

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)