Gulf of Mexico Offshore Oil Drilling

Special thanks to Richard Charter

Naples News
Michael Peltier: Drilling, gaming debate heats up chilly Capitol
TALLAHASSEE – Following a bitterly cold weekend – by Florida standards, that is – things will heat up considerably this week as lawmakers return to Tallahassee for the first of two committee weeks in January.

As lawmakers begin the 2010 push leading up to the Legislative session in March, committees this week will take separate looks at Seminole Indian gambling and the future of offshore oil drilling off Florida’s Gulf coast.

The two controversial issues are mixed in among scores of items – some important, some not-so-much – working their way through committees to prepare for possible passage later this spring.

The House Select Policy Council on Strategic & Economic Planning is scheduled to meet Thursday for a workshop on energy exploration, oil drilling technology and regulatory requirements for drilling as it related to offshore waters in the Gulf.

The Senate has thrown some cold water on the oil drilling issue. Senate President Jeff Atwater, R-North Palm Beach, has made it clear he’s not in any hurry to determine if it’s a good idea to lift a decades’ long moratorium on exploration and extraction of oil in the eastern Gulf.

Instead, Atwater (who is running for the statewide office of Chief Financial Officer in November) has asked for a “thorough review” by the Century Commission for a Sustainable Florida. The panel, however, said last week it won’t have its report completed until early March, which in only the rarest of cases is too late for lawmakers to address in a mere 60-day session that ends the first week in May.

Signs of such a timetable are evident. Florida Energy Associates, a coalition formed to promote drilling efforts, last week said it was reducing its lobbying ranks for the current session. The time, apparently, may not be ripe to justify the cost of a Dream Team lobby corps.

The House panel reviewing the Seminole gambling compact with the state is also not expected to come to closure anytime soon but will forge ahead this week. Led by Rep. Bill Galvano, R-Bradenton, the House Select Committee on Seminole Indian Compact Review meets Thursday to consider a proposed council bill dealing with Seminole Indian Compact ratification and another addressing non-Indian pari-mutuel permit holders.

The gambling deal has already stalled on a few occasions as lawmakers, the Seminole Tribe, the governor’s office and non-Indian pari-mutuel owners come to the table with dramatically different desires. Such differences have proven difficult to overcome as negotiators try to forge an agreement acceptable to all.

House Speaker Larry Cretul, R-Ocala, recently asked federal regulators to shut down banked card games at Seminole casinos including Immokalee after early revenue sharing agreements fell through. The tribe wants to expand to facilities statewide while House leaders favor a far more conservative expansion.

For his part, Gov. Charlie Crist just wants some kind of agreement that locks in revenue for the state.

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E-mail Michael Peltier at mpeltier1234@comcast.net.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

Opinion: DIRTY BUSINESS

Fran Gibson
January 10, 2010 6:54 AM
This is re: the recent column by Ron Meyer Jr. on the effect of offshore oil drilling on natural oil seeps. The author’s premise is that offshore drilling alleviates the pressure of natural oil seeps in the Santa Barbara coast region. We disagree.

The column says the amount of natural seepage is from 150 to 250 barrels per day off Coal Oil Point (over 5,000 barrels per year or 210,000 gallons) to 86,000 barrels per year in the Santa Barbara area; 86,000 barrels equates to 3.6 million gallons.

The 1969 Santa Barbara blowout was 200,000 gallons (what he contends is seeping daily from Coal Oil Point annualized) and the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska was 10.8 million gallons. That means every three years, the natural seepage would be equal to an Exxon Valdez spill. If that were the case, the ocean all along our coast, not just Santa Barbara, would be one big gooey oil mess, our beaches would be black and unusable, and there would not be any living thing off our shores.

Could it be that the numbers are just more statistics the oil industry fabricates?

No one really knows how much oil is seeping naturally. The Interior Department’s MMS division is presently conducting a five-year study to look at offshore Southern California within the area between Point Arguello and Ventura to document the locations, determine a geochemical footprint to distinguish natural tar residues and to “measure the rate of natural seepage of individual seeps and attempt to access the regional natural oil and gas seepage rates.” We do not currently have this scientific information confirmed conclusively.

Mr. Meyer’s column claims that drilling will relieve the pressure and reduce the natural seeps. Another fabrication by the oil industry. There is not, to our knowledge, any scientific study to support this contention. The one study done on this was in 1999 and published in the Journal of Geophysical Research. One of the lead authors of the study, Bruce Luyendyk, said the group SOS (which is perpetrating the myth that drilling reduces natural oil seeps) is “extrapolating these results in ways that are not justified.”

Mr. Meyer’s column also says the single biggest source of air pollution is the natural seeps. But no one knows how much pollution actually seeps.

Each offshore oil platform — there are 24 — generates some 214,000 pounds of air pollutants each year (National Oceanographic & Atmospheric Administration). An average exploration well for oil or natural gas generates some 50 tons of nitrogen oxides (NOx), 13 tons of carbon monoxide, 6 tons of sulfur dioxide and 5 tons of volatile organic hydrocarbons. These pollutants are the precursors to smog, acid rain, and contribute to global warming.

Our guess is the single biggest producer of air pollution in this area are the ships that ply the Santa Barbara Channel, with cars or the oil platforms coming in second and third.

Offshore oil drilling will not reduce pollution; it will contribute to it.

Let’s face it: Drilling for oil is a dirty business from start to finish — from the sounds produced by seismic surveys to locate oil that deafens and kills fish and marine mammals, to the tons of waste discarded into the water from drilling operations.

Debris from offshore operations includes drill cuttings and drilling mud brought up during the drilling process. This mud contains toxic metals such as lead, cadmium and mercury. Other pollutants produced from a rig’s daily operations include benzene, arsenic and other known carcinogens.

 The author is president of the board of Coastwalk California.

EDITORIAL:

Facts sink new drilling technology

Saturday, December 26, 2009 1:51 AM (Source: Tampa Tribune) By Tampa Tribune, Fla.

Dec. 26–It is becoming increasingly evident that the shadowy group promoting oil drilling immediately off Florida’s shores is playing fast and loose with the facts.

Florida Energy Associates, an independent group of oil producers that won’t identify its members, claims in its literature, “New technology allows for safe, sub-sea energy exploration without creating a visual blight. No visible, permanent structures need be seen from the shoreline.”

Rep. Dean Cannon, the Winter Park Republican who is the Legislature’s leading champion of drilling, continually claims there will be no unsightly rigs.

Not so.

As the Sarasota Herald-Tribune found, the new technology is a deep-sea system that operates in thousands of feet of water. The American Petroleum Institute told a Herald-Tribune reporter the system is intended for water more than 5,000 feet deep. In contrast, the oil group wants to drill between three and 10 miles off Florida’s beaches, where the water is no deeper than 100 feet.

Moreover, a subsea system would be possible in Florida waters only if a traditional drilling platform were nearby and could pipe oil to an onshore refinery, which would require the industrialization of Florida’s coast. This would diminish the state’s appeal to tourists and residents alike.

As an oil official told the Herald-Tribune, “There is no such thing as an invisible rig.” Florida Energy Associates officials, of course, brush off such details, claiming the technology they promise could be developed if only Florida would give drilling the go ahead.

In other words, trust us. Florida lawmakers would be foolish if they do.

Consider other claims.

The drilling proponents said as much as 3 billion barrels of oil lie beneath Florida’s waters. But the 3-billion-barrel figure is based on a U.S. Geological Survey report that included not just Florida’s waters but much of the Gulf of Mexico and land deposits under most of the South.

Another assertion is that Florida would realize $2.25 billion a year in royalties. But that is based on the assumption Florida waters would produce 150 million barrels of oil a year — more than Alaska, Texas, Louisiana and California combined produced in their peak year. And remember, almost all the exploratory wells that were drilled before Florida’s coastline was protected came up dry.

Of course, the oil crowd’s mantra is that the rigs pose no risk to the environment. But just last August, a blowout occurred on a new “jack-up” rig like what is proposed for Florida, and it spilled 300 to 400 barrels of oil a day for weeks in the Timor Sea off Australia.

Such an accident would ruin our white sandy beaches, considered among the best in the nation, and demolish Florida’s $65 billion-a-year tourism industry. And small oil spills remain routine in Gulf of Mexico operations.

It is encouraging that Florida Senate President Jeff Atwater, unlike Cannon, is in no hurry to do the bidding of a group of secretive oil interests.

Atwater wants to determine the truth about drilling. He, like the people of Florida, will find that can’t be done by relying on proponents’ oily sales pitch.

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To see more of the Tampa Tribune or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.tampatrib.com

Copyright (c) 2009, Tampa Tribune, Fla.

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

Tampa Bay Newspapers: Join the fight against oil drilling

Dec. 30. 2009

Florida’s coast-related revenues generate 85 percent of our state’s total tourist related revenues. The $7 billion tourists spend each year in Florida is the engine that drives our economy.

Nearly 1 million Floridians are employed by the state’s tourism industry. Just a 1 percent decrease in Florida’s tourism results in a $39 million loss for we, the Florida tax-paying residents.

The 1993 tanker devastation off Florida’s coast alone cost Pinellas County a 45 percent decrease in state revenue for the following two years. It was income that each and every Florida resident made up for with increased taxes and fees during that time.

Visitors don’t come to Florida to tour our museums. They don’t come to Florida to visit our cathedrals, skyscrapers, historical monuments. And they certainly don’t come to Florida to visit our ski slopes.

According to the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Natural Resources, 85 percent of Florida’s visitors come to the state just to visit our beaches. They come to play in the gulf, which is Florida’s primary industry. How do we put a price on it?

To jeopardize this with visible and contaminating oil rigs just 50 miles off our coast is completely unacceptable, especially since the oil cartels already have hundreds of viable leases 300 miles out in the gulf, which they choose not to use.

Having this omni-present oil catastrophe at bay is no less different than risking the oil contamination of precious cathedrals, historical monuments, national parks and ski slopes throughout the rest of our country. Remember this. As goes Florida’s beaches, so goes Florida’s economy.

If you agree, write or e-mail Gov. Charlie Crist, State Sen. Dennis Jones, R-Treasure Island; State Rep. Jim Frishe, R-Belleair Bluffs; or Florida Senate president Jeff Atwater with your thoughts on this issue.

Phil Collins

Vice Mayor Treasure Island