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Highlands Today

Drilling For Oil

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Jesse E. James

Published: June 26, 2008

Your editorial on offshore drilling was so full of egregious errors of fact and logic one scarcely knows where to begin a reply. But let's start with a summary of your view: Oil exploration in the Gulf is bad because an oil spill will forever scare away 85 million tourists, costing the state economy $65 billion annually, and throw a million people out of work. Besides, the oil companies might export the oil in the same way they have "pipelined" all of our Alaskan oil to Japan.

Taking the last item first; just when did someone build a 3,500 mile pipeline from Prudhoe Bay to Japan; across the wild Bering Sea and the very deep western Pacific? The answer is of course – never; no such pipeline exists. And North Slope oil is not exported to Asia by any other means either.

Any rational debate over offshore drilling should consider risks versus benefits. And the fact is that the risk of a spill is very low. There are already many hundreds of rigs working the Gulf, and to the best of my knowledge there have been no disasters. Katrina knocked out dozens of rigs, but caused no major spills.

Historically, ships present a far greater threat to beaches than do oil rigs. And spills, when and if they occur, cause fairly localized damage. Florida has over 1,300 miles of coastline and over 8,000 miles of tidal shoreline. There is no conceivable reason why a 75-mile oil slick at say, Fish Creek, should scare away tourists, even for a weekend, from Miami, Jacksonville, or Disney. Moreover, spills can be contained and cleaned up. They are not permanent and would not keep tourists away from Fish Creek for more than a year or two. It might be costly for the local community, but hardly catastrophic.

While risks of drilling are mostly theoretical and highly unlikely, the benefits are substantial and nearly certain. Because of the widespread lamenting about our dependence on foreign sources, people tend to forget the U.S. is the world's third largest producer of oil and supplies from the Gulf currently provide around one quarter of our output. We need to continue exploration not to lower gas prices next year, but to ameliorate price pressures a decade from now, and to ensure our dependence doesn't get worse.

And while I support the need for continuing our search for oil, I also believe we need to take measures to reduce our appetite for it. We have a huge transportation infrastructure built on cheap oil. A good place to begin might be to develop policies that encourage the movement of passengers and freight from planes and trucks to rail. And we could power that rail with electricity produced in a new generation of nuclear plants.

Finally, it should be noted that there are cogent arguments against further offshore exploration even though your editorial did not mention them. One is the harm a major spill would have on marine life. This might be more severe and long lasting than any effect on tourism. A second concerns the issue of global warming. By limiting further increases in oil supply, we may force the switch to cleaner energy sources sooner rather than later. This will be expensive but might make a difference in how things turn out.

Jesse E. James
Avon Park

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