Great Lakes May Harbor Lots of Oil
Posted on: Friday, 18 July 2008, 12:00 CDT
LANSING -- There is one underground location in Michigan that virtually everyone in the know believes contains a measurable amount of oil and gas available for extraction.
But, almost certainly, no drilling rigs are headed there because the deposits lie below a resource Michiganders cherish even more than cheap petrol -- the Great Lakes.
Even as onshore drilling activity heats up in Michigan and President George W. Bush and congressional Republicans call for more domestic drilling at every opportunity, Great Lakes bottomlands remain more or less untouchable -- off-limits by both state and federal law.
Frank Mortl of the Michigan Oil and Gas Association finds the situation frustrating and incongruous. Canada, he notes, is extracting natural gas from deposits beneath Lake Erie with 600 offshore wells.
"They're pulling in Ohio's natural gas, and then selling it back to them," he said.
But drilling under the Great Lakes off Michigan, even using land-based directional drilling techniques, has been a political nonstarter since an attempt to permit it by the administration of former Gov. John Engler in the late 1990s ran aground. In 2002, Engler's lieutenant governor, then running to succeed him, disowned the idea. And polls conducted at that time showed that nearly two-thirds of the voting public said no to drilling.
More current public opinion data are unavailable. A Rasmussen Reports poll conducted earlier this month asked Michigan voters whether they supported drilling offshore, "off the coasts of California, Florida and other states?" By a 2-1 margin, respondents supported drilling.
But when it comes to Michigan, it's another matter. Earlier this week, most of the state's Republican members of Congress issued statements urging Democrats to approve legislation to increase domestic oil drilling in places from North Dakota to Alaska and the coasts of California and Florida. None supports drilling in the Great Lakes bottomlands.
Ditto for Gov. Jennifer Granholm.
Mortl said: "I just don't think it's going to happen. It's really not on the table."
Source: Detroit Free Press
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