Offshore drilling debate won't end with budget accord
Jeff Mitchell
Sacramento Bee
08/02/2009
From the perspective of many California environmentalists, the proposed offshore oil drilling project at Tranquillon Ridge in Santa Barbara County is like a movie monster that fails to die.
After all, the drilling proposal – made a part of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's legislative budget package – was soundly rejected by members of the state Assembly on July 24.
Before that, the plan was given the heave-ho not once but twice by the State Lands Commission.
And 63 state environmental groups have come forward to oppose the proposal.
Even officials with the Environmental Defense Center in Santa Barbara – the group which brokered the unusual deal with Houston-based Plains Exploration and Production Co. (PXP) – say they can no longer support the plan as long as it remains a legislative football.
David Landecker, the center's executive director, defended the arrangement with PXP, but said the EDC could not support the governor's attempts to legislatively override the authority of the State Lands Commission, which has considered oil-drilling lease proposals in California since 1938.
But in the face of all that criticism and political heat, advocates of the PXP plan promise that it will be back.
They say rethinking the 40-year moratorium banning oil drilling off California's petroleum-rich shores makes good sense for an energy-thirsty, deficit-plagued state that continues to teeter on the edge of insolvency.
"I predict this proposal will keep coming back before us as long as California continues to suffer from a structural imbalance in our budget," said state Assemblyman Chuck DeVore, R-Irvine, the author of the defeated bill, AB 23. "If you want to see fewer rigs off our coast, then you should join me in supporting this plan. It's a good deal."
DeVore, who is taking on U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer in 2010, said that the plan might come back before state lawmakers as soon as this December or January, when some observers say the state may find itself facing another multibillion-dollar deficit.
"If not then, it'll be the next time after that," DeVore said.
Joe Sparano, president of the Western States Petroleum Association, an oil industry group, said he was disappointed by the Assembly's action.
"We think this is mostly a public education issue," Sparano said. "Our industry is extremely safety-conscious. Since 1970, an estimated 1 billion barrels of oil have been produced out of California waters. In all that time, only 850 barrels have been spilled. While any spill is unfortunate, we think our industry has an excellent safety record. We hope, going forward, that people will give this proposal a second look."
Of course, in the back of the minds of many opposed to the proposal looms the memory of the 1969 Union Oil Platform A blowout.
The accident caused some 80,000 to 100,000 barrels of oil to be spilled into the Santa Barbara Channel, fouling some 150 miles of coastline in the process.
The disaster prompted officials to declare a moratorium on any new oil drilling in state waters – a ban that's been in effect now for four decades.
The PXP proposal is unusual because it was brokered by the Environmental Defense Center, Get Oil Out and other well-known Santa Barbara-based environmental groups. The groups agreed to lobby and promote the deal through the regulatory process in exchange for agreements from PXP to limit the number of years of drilling at the site (not more than 14 years), eliminate four offshore rigs, scrub greenhouse gas emissions and convey to the state some 4,000 acres of shore processing-facility land.
