Offshore Drilling in Texas May Not be a Quick Fix

(Released July 4)

WASHINGTON — In the national debate over offshore oil drilling, the Texas coast can be used to illustrate each side of the argument.

Opponents of expanding drilling point out that oil companies are producing oil and natural gas from only a fraction of the 1,800 leases they already hold off the Texas coast and say that is evidence there is no reason to lift drilling bans in other areas.

Proponents, meanwhile, point out that state officials say drilling for oil off the coast of Texas has inflicted relatively little harm on the environment in recent years.

The question of offshore drilling jumped to the front of the debate over oil and gas prices last month when Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, said he wanted to lift a 27-year-old moratorium on drilling off much of the country's coast in an effort to increase U.S. oil supplies. Lifting the moratorium would not directly affect the Texas coast because drilling is already allowed there.

In the race for a Texas seat in the U.S. Senate, both GOP incumbent John Cornyn and his Democratic challenger, state Rep. Rick Noriega, D-Houston, support lifting the moratorium and letting states decide whether to permit drilling.

Sen. Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, says oil companies should get more from the leases that are already available to them, and congressional Democrats largely agree. House Democrats tried last week to strip oil companies of the leases they are not using, but fell short of the two-thirds vote they needed.

Of about 1,800 leases — areas that producers have obtained from the government to seek oil — in the western Gulf of Mexico, 273 are producing oil and gas, according to the Minerals Management Service.

According to a recent report by the Democratic staff of the House Natural Resources Committee, 10.5 million of the 44 million offshore acres that have been leased to oil and gas companies are now producing oil and gas.

"The oil industry needs to drill what they have now, drill in those areas available to them, and then we will talk about giving them dessert," said committee Chairman Nick Rahall, D-W.V.

Democrats also point to recent comments by the administrator of the federal Energy Information Administration, Guy Caruso. Reuters quoted him as saying that lifting the offshore moratorium would have a "relatively small" effect on gas prices.

But officials with the American Petroleum Institute, which represents the oil and gas industry, say those who talk about idle leases underestimate how long it takes to produce oil from an offshore site.

It's not that oil companies aren't using the leases, they say, but it can take years before they start extracting oil because they first have to obtain permits, conduct environmental and engineering studies, and build platforms for drilling. Also, they don't know whether an area will have oil until they drill there.

"They've paid millions of dollars up front for the rights to explore these leases, and if they find any oil, they're going to want to get it out of the ground to recoup that investment," said Andy Radford, a policy adviser with the institute.

Offshore drilling has taken place in Texas waters since at least the 1940s, according to Sandra Mourton, executive director of the nonprofit Offshore Energy Center.

But for decades, the state has grappled with how to keep the Gulf of Mexico clean.

The state's General Land Office recorded at least 733 oil spills in 2007, resulting in 2,185 barrels of oil spilled in Texas coastal waters. Only two of the spills amounted to more than 100 barrels. Many of the spills had little to do with offshore rigs, which typically pump to shore by pipe, Mourton said.

Some animal welfare groups and biologists say the 2007 spill numbers are not alarming. If one were to take all the threats posed to wildlife along the Gulf, such as habitat destruction, oil pollution would "rank at the lower end of the scale," said Andy Tirpak, a pollution biologist in the Houston area for the state parks and wildlife department.

He said practices and standards are better than they were decades ago, automated safety redundancies have been built into the system to avoid spills, and drilling is done farther offshore than it once was.

Spilled oil can kill birds by coating their feathers and destroying their ability to control their body temperature. But there has not been a notable "oiling" of birds on the Texas portion of the Gulf Coast in at least two years, said Susan Schmalz, executive director of Houston-based Wildlife Rehab and Education.

That incident, in the Corpus Christi area, affected only a handful of birds, she said.

Texas Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson, who oversees the General Land Office, says oil exploration and transportation do not present the environmental threats they did decades ago

"If you spent time on the beach you used to have to clean tar balls off your feet when you went to the car," Patterson said. "That's not the case anymore."

He credited new technology, such as directional drilling and three-dimensional seismic imaging, with cutting down the amount of oil spilled.

But environmental mishaps related to offshore drilling continue to crop up. In December 2006, at least 21,000 gallons of crude oil spilled into the Gulf about 30 miles off the shore of Galveston. The oil was leaking from a pipeline that went from an offshore rig to land.

"Were seeing a new kind of accident that's caused by — rather than prevented by — new technology," said Richard Charter, a government relations consultant for Washington, D.C.-based Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund.

He cited spills from 2004 and 2005 on oil platforms in California and Canada.

"The common thread is that when computerized technology fails, you have no human eyes watching over that computer, and accidental spills have a longer duration because no one catches them."

DRILLING AT A GLANCE

What is a lease? — A lease gives the company that bought it the right to explore, develop and produce oil or gas from that property.

The moratorium — There is a moratorium on drilling in all but about 500,000 acres of the eastern Gulf through 2022.

3,841 — Number of drilling platforms in the Gulf of Mexico

More than 7,500 — Number of leases in the Gulf of Mexico

1.57 to 2.78 billion — Number of barrels of oil the Minerals Management Service has estimated in the eastern Gulf of Mexico

6.95 to 9.2 trillion — Number of cubic feet of natural gas the Minerals Management Service has estimated in the eastern Gulf of Mexico