Drilling Dangers

Now that gasoline has reached the astronomical cost of less than half of what Europeans pay, the mantra is “drill, drill, drill” for oil offshore. The argument is that this would cut gasoline costs and not threaten the environment, the latter because of major improvements in equipment and oversight of offshore rigs. Hurricane Ike’s assault on the Gulf coast last Friday and Saturday has intensified interest in this matter, though not in ways hoped for by the oil industry.

The arguments for offshore drilling, embraced wholeheartedly now (albeit in a major, poll-driven reversal) by John McCain, are mostly wrong. Barack Obama, for his part, has followed the trail of public- opinion polls and has also joined the offshore-drilling club, though less enthusiastically than has Mr. McCain.

Oil is an internationally traded commodity. The petroleum pumped from offshore rigs would go right into the world market — that is, unless the government decides to nationalize the oil industry, a highly unlikely event. Oil produced from opening up drilling off the East and West coasts (it has long been allowed in parts of the Gulf of Mexico) would have minimal effects on our gasoline prices, aside from a possible temporary reaction by speculators, and even the long- term effects would come years in the future.

(As for climate change, an attention-deficit-disordered citizenry seems to have decided, “oh well, never mind . . .”)

Damage from offshore rigs has been minimized by some of the media and a lot of the oil business. But, in truth, offshore oil drilling still makes a big mess.

Offshore natural-gas production is far less damaging and we’d go along with that in some carefully delimited areas off the West and East coasts. (Meanwhile, we should expand wind, solar and nuclear power.)

While it is true that offshore oil operations have gotten safer, drilling and pumping still release large quantities of such toxins as benzene, arsenic, mercury and lead, killing much sea life, indeed pretty much eliminating it around some rigs.

One can imagine what drilling on, say, the Georges Bank could do to Northeast fisheries after a hurricane or other big storm.

There’s a myth that the fearsome 2005 duo of hurricanes Katrina and Rita inflicted little pollution damage in their assault on the Gulf of Mexico’s oil operations because of the much hardier rigs and other equipment these days. Sorry, not quite true. The Week magazine says the Minerals Management Service reported that storms “destroyed 113 drilling platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, damaged 457 pipelines, and caused more than 740,000 gallons of crude oil and petroleum distillates to wash into the gulf.” The Houston Chronicle, for its part, reported that the storms caused 595 spills, one as big as 3.7 million gallons. This doesn’t count storm-caused pollution from onshore oil facilities.

Offshore oil drilling is not a good solution for our self- inflicted energy woes.

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