Hurricanes bolster case for more offshore drilling — Industry group
WASHINGTON: Hurricane season is in full swing - and it’s throwing into the spotlight an ongoing debate between industry and environmental groups over expanding offshore drilling.
The National Ocean Industries Association is pointing to hurricanes as a reason the United States should allow offshore drilling in areas beyond the Gulf of Mexico. Because most of the nation’s offshore drilling is concentrated in such a hurricane-prone region, the lobbying group that represents offshore energy companies warns the country is “rolling the dice” with natural disasters, which can jeopardise the country’s oil supply if bad weather forces companies to shut down oil production and evacuate oil platforms.
The group wants the Interior Department to expand oil production into the southeast Atlantic, the eastern Gulf of Mexico, and off the coast of California and Alaska as part of the Trump administration’s controversial proposal to open most of the nation’s outer continental shelf to potential drilling.
Yet environmental groups are pointing to Florence as the latest evidence this hurricane season that offshore drilling shouldn’t happen anywhere. “As this hurricane is proving, there’s no area off the coast of the US that is immune to hurricanes or storms,” said Athan Manuel, director of the lands protection programme for the Sierra Club. Florence was downgraded on Sunday to a tropical depression. Yet Manuel said the risk of oil spills and the fact that there’s no real way to move oil facilities “out of harm’s way” shows “there’s no safe place to drill.”
For its part, NOIA says that dispersing drilling across a broader geographical area will better ensure the country’s energy security in the event of a natural disaster. By concentrating drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, “what we’ve done is put all of our oil and natural gas eggs into one basket,” NOIA President Randall Luthi said in an interview.
NOIA in part blames energy policy, which makes about 94 per cent of the US continental shelf off limits to drilling. In January, the Trump administration announced its proposed five-year plan to widely expand drilling in US continental waters. But in April, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke told Congress he would scale back that plan, responding to opposition from both Democratic and Republican governors and lawmakers in coastal states.
The storms exacerbate the drilling limitation, Luthi said, since companies start shutting down their units and evacuating their workers. Production pauses, depending on the duration, he said, can have a “significant effect on the amount of oil and gas that’s being produced for a period of time.”
One such production pause occurred this month, when energy companies began shuttering offshore oil production and evacuating workers from platforms in the Gulf of Mexico as Tropical Storm Gordon approached. Gordon never turned into a hurricane, but during the halt, 54 platforms were evacuated and an estimated 411,583 barrels of oil were shut in, according to the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement ( BSEE).
During the catastrophic hurricane season in 2017, BSEE estimated that at one point more than 24 per cent of oil production and nearly 26 per cent of natural gas production in the Gulf of Mexico were temporarily shut off during Hurricane Harvey, and during Hurricane Nate, up to 92 per cent of the oil production and 77 per cent of natural gas production in the region had to be shut off temporarily.
Adding offshore developments in other regions would “certainly lessen the risk of reducing a large amount of oil and gas should a hurricane or two hurricanes come through the Gulf of Mexico,” Luthi said.
Yet Manuel called using hurricane-related risks to urge offshore expansion “preposterous.” “I think they’re really running out of ways to justify oil drilling,” he said.
“From our perspective, extreme weather and hurricanes are going to get worse as climate change impacts the planet,” he added. “And we know what causes climate change: the burning and development of fossil fuels . . . One way to avoid being impacted by extreme weather is to fight climate change, and we’re not doing that if we expand offshore drilling.”
Diane Hoskins, campaign director for conservation and advocacy group Oceana, said that expanding offshore drilling to new areas would add an onerous step to emergency preparedness ahead of storms such as Florence, when those facilities would need to shut down.
“The idea of adding offshore rigs and all of these related infrastructure required to move, process and pump oil is an entirely additional layer of complexity and danger and risk to coastal communities that no one wants,” she said.
She also cited the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, charging that “even without extreme weather and hurricanes, offshore drilling is inherently dirty and dangerous.” — WP-Bloomberg