Aging equipment, spills test ties between oil, California
Hoping to recover a lost anchor chain, a work boat dragged a grappling hook along the seabed near an oil platform off the Southern California coast. But it hooked something else — a pipeline carrying crude oil from the towering rig to shore.
Once snagged, the 197foot boat dragged the pipeline until it snapped on one of the drilling platform’s legs. The gushing oil created a slick that ran for miles along the Ventura County coast northwest of Los Angeles.
The May 1991 accident provides a snapshot of the environmental dangers and trade-offs that come with the network of oil platforms and pipelines off Southern California’s world-famous coastline. The uneasy relationship is being tested again after a leaking undersea pipeline off Huntington Beach fouled beaches and killed seabirds and fish this month.
In the latest case, investigators believe it’s likely a cargo ship’s massive anchor struck and dragged the 16-inch pipeline up to a year ago. It’s suspected the damage led to the pipeline cracking and spilling about 25,000 gallons of crude.
The incident has renewed calls to end drilling in coastal waters and comes amid a societal reckoning over climate change and continued reliance on fossil fuels. It’s also raising questions about the soundness of old equipment, limits on government safety oversight, how willing companies are to make needed investments in repairs and whether it makes sense to have drilling rigs and pipelines near one of the world’s busiest port complexes.
The latest spill involved a pipeline that serves a cluster of three oil platforms several miles off the coast, south of Los Angeles. Original owner Shell Oil began operating the “Beta Unit” in 1980 and anticipated the operation would last about 35 years, “at which time the platform and other offshore facilities will be removed and the wells sealed.”
They are now operating
into a fourth decade.
The platforms and pipeline are owned by Houston-based Amplify Energy Corp., which emerged after prior owner Memorial Production Partners went bankrupt in 2017. Subsidiary Beta Offshore operates the platforms and the pipeline.
In 2011, Beta sought and received approval to replace two pipelines running between its platforms — one for oil that previously was taken out of service because of corrosion damage, and one for water deemed “at the end of its usable life” in documents submitted to federal regulators.
Miyoko Sakashita of the Center for Biological Diversity, which opposes offshore drilling, said the removal of the old pipelines should have been a signal that the one that failed also was at risk.
“I’m very concerned that they recognized the corrosion and age of the pipes between the platform, yet this one went ignored,” she said. “California’s offshore oil infrastructure is old and decrepit and needs to be decommissioned instantly.”
There are 27 oil and gas platforms off the California coast. Federal officials have jurisdiction over 23, which range from almost 30 years old to more than 50 and are in water depths from 95 feet (29 meters) to almost 1,200 feet (366 meters) according to a report
released last year by the Aquarium of the Pacific cosponsored by the California State Lands Commission, which oversees pipelines in state waters.
About half the platforms are still producing oil, which goes from wells to the platforms to refineries via a network of pipes like the one in the recent spill.
Environmentalists have long complained about poor federal oversight of pipeline companies. In April, a scathing report from the congressional watchdog Government Accountability Office found fundamental problems with how officials monitor those lines — an issue first recognized in 2007.
The report focused on about 8,600 miles (13,840 kilometers) of lines in the Gulf of Mexico. It said the Interior Department’s Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement allows companies to use unreliable methods to detect leaks and has not systematically tracked whether pipelines move or become exposed because of strong currents or changes on the seafloor.
A top aide to Interior Secretary Deb Haaland acknowledged the problems, and officials said new rules could be finalized next year. Those will include significant changes to requirements for detecting leaks, inspections, repairs to pipelines and other areas, Laura
Daniel-Davis, the agency’s principal deputy assistant secretary for land and mineral management, said in a letter to the GAO released last month.
The fewer pipelines present in the Pacific versus the Gulf means federal regulators can keep closer watch off the California coastline, said John Smith, who spent more than three decades with the agency that manages oil and gas production, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, and its predecessor, the Minerals Management Service.
But he added that the Amplify spill will test whether that oversight has been sufficient for something forecast decades ago.
In 1991, the federal Minerals Management Service predicted a 94% chance of a major oil spill off Southern California over 30 years. That estimate was released not long after a tanker spill blackened coastline in Huntington Beach and Newport Beach, and the pipeline break that created the slick off Ventura County.
The oil industry — the source of 150,000 jobs in California and hundreds of millions of state tax dollars over the years — has long been an awkward partner with the environmentally minded state, a national leader in renewable energy that will ban the sale of new gasoline-powered passenger cars and trucks in 2035.