Dxper•s ask Congress for more offshore oil oversigh• as California cleanup con•inues

WASHINGTON — Nearly two weeks after a pipeline ruptured and leaked tens of thousands of gallons of crude oil into the Pacific Ocean, environmental policy experts testified before Congress on Thursday, urging lawmakers to require more federal oversight of aging and abandoned offshore oil platforms and pipelines.

The recent spill off the Orange County, California, coast has put the nation’s oil and gas infrastructure under new scrutiny. Some California lawmakers and environmental advocates have called for a prohibition on all future offshore drilling, while others want to extend a ban to companies already operating in state and federal waters.

In testimony before the House subcommittee on energy and mineral resources, offshore drilling experts painted a bleak picture of the federal government’s ability to ensure that oil and gas companies plug their old wells and dismantle existing platforms and pipelines. They warned that if Congress does not create financial incentives for industry to pay the full cost of decommissioning its equipment, taxpayers will be stuck with the bill.

The cost could be astronomical. The federal government’s own estimates suggest that between $35 billion and $50 billion would be needed to plug offshore oil and gas wells that are no longer producing — or are no longer profitable. Meanwhile, companies have committed to financing only about $3.7 billion, less than a tenth of the expected cost.

Private industry would never accept the level of risk the federal government has taken on, said Rob Schuwerk, executive director of the Carbon Tracker Initiative, a nonprofit think tank that studies clean energy and greenhouse gas emissions from the fossil fuel industry.

“There are tens of billions of dollars in offshore decommissioning liabilities,” he said. “Operators are neither incentivized to save for these liabilities nor to plan for decommissioning. So they don’t.”

This arrangement is a “bargain deal” for the oil and gas companies, said Rep. Katie Porter, D-calif. Once these companies have extracted as much profit from federal waters as possible, “we’re saying that if at the end, you want to hand back the mess to us, we’ll accept it.”

Of the 23 platforms that were installed between the late 1960s and early 1990s in federal waters off Southern California, the Interior Department has scheduled eight to be decommissioned in the coming years. But there are no plans to address the remainder, including Elly, the decades-old platform linked to the recent spill and operated by Long Beach-based Beta Operating Co.

Advocates and lawmakers fear that if this fossil fuel infrastructure is left for years, larger oil companies will continue to sell their aging assets to smaller ones that don’t have the money or inclination to either invest in upgrades or pay for the removal of platforms and pipelines. Some companies have already filed for bankruptcy. The owner of the ruptured pipeline, Memorial Production Partners, filed for bankruptcy under Chapter 11 in early 2017. It emerged several months later as Amplify Energy.

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