Is Offshore Drilling a Legitimate Enterprise?

Offshore oil drilling has, in the last two years, attracted more attention from the general United States public than it has had at any point in its history. Even before the April 20, 2010 disaster that destroyed the Deepwater Horizon drill rig and unleashed a torrent of crude oil into the waters and beaches of the Gulf of Mexico, offshore drilling had developed into a significant battleground issue with economic, cultural, and political dimension.


Depending on one’s point of view, offshore drilling is a necessary evil, a legitimate exploitation of natural resources, a second-best option forced on the oil and gas industry by excessive regulation of possible onshore oilfields, or a dangerous process justified only by profit and the US’s dependence on petroleum.


The dispute over drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve in Alaska has recurred in Congress every few years since drilling was first proposed in 1977, and was a major rallying point for liberals after the Bush administration endorsed the idea in 2005. The chant of “Drill, baby, drill,” first heard at the 2008 Republican National Convention, likewise served as a rallying cry for conservatives during the latter part of the 2008 election and on through the first years of the Obama administration, right up until the news of the Deepwater Horizon disaster hit the world news on the morning of April 21, 2010.


This public tumult comes at a time when offshore drilling has, for all its hazards, become a vital part of the United States’ energy economy. A steadily increasing percentage of domestically-produced oil and natural gas comes from offshore sources: in 2009, 31% of the nation’s domestically-produced crude oil and 11% of its domestically-produced natural gas came from offshore wells in the Gulf of Mexico alone. Data gathered by NOAA and MMS accounts for 3,858 oil platforms in just two of the “planning areas” in US waters in the Gulf of Mexico. According to a 2009 Minerals Management Service report, “proved reserves in the Gulf of Mexico Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) are estimated to be 20.30 billion barrels of oil and 183.7 trillion cubic feet of gas from 1,229 proved fields,” or roughly twice as much oil and seven times as much natural gas as the Prudhoe Bay cornucopia on the northern shores of Alaska was estimated to contain when that oilfield was first developed in the 1960s.


The complexity of offshore drilling has also grown immensely in the last several decades. In 1983, the deepest offshore well in the world was drilled in 760 feet of water, 13 miles off the coast of San Pedro, CA. A quarter century later, dozens of new wells are being installed each year in deep-sea locations (1 to 1.5 miles deep) and much further offshore; depths that were once extraordinary are now perforce normal. In 2009 alone, over three hundred new production wells were drilled in US waters in the Gulf, and nearly two-thirds of the active oil leases in the Gulf are in water more than 1,000 feet deep.


These deepwater locations are comparable to the one that blew out in April 2010 –designated MC 252-- during the Deepwater Horizon disaster, since most of them are being installed in the same oil and gas bearing geological formations. The deeper the water and the deeper the drilling, the more complex, expensive, and dangerous the operation becomes. Somewhat ironically, the last well the Horizon had completed prior to beginning the fateful one was the deepest well yet drilled at the time, a whopping 30,918 feet into the seabed under 4,132 feet of water.


The reason drilling in such difficult or sensitive areas has increased so dramatically is simple. The global oil economy is rapidly approaching “Hubbert’s peak,” a phenomenon first predicted by the scientist M. King Hubbert in 1956 and commonly known as “peak oil.” While new oil and gas resources can still be found, much of the accessible oil – the “reserves” or “proven reserves” in industry and governmental language-- has been consumed or is currently being extracted. In order to expand production or to replace wellfields that have ceased producing worthwhile quantities of oil and gas, the petroleum industry has to look to other sources, and what is left is more difficult and expensive to get. The days when a wildcatter in Texas or Wyoming could find vast new oilfields simply by looking for oil sheens on creeks are long gone. In many cases ‘new’ sources such as those in ANWR or the tar sands of western Canada have been known about for decades, but the cost/benefit balance that would render them profitable didn’t work out until oil became more scarce, driving up the worth of a resource that in earlier decades was of negligible value and making it cost-effective to exploit the resource.


On June 4, Sarah Palin complained on her Facebook page that “Extreme deep water drilling is not the preferred choice to meet our country's energy needs, but your [referring to ‘radical environmentalists’] protests and lawsuits and lies about onshore and shallow water drilling have locked up safer areas. It's catching up with you. The tragic, unprecedented deep water Gulf oil spill proves it." This allegation is simply not true. What is true, though, is that most of the allegedly “safer” areas are already producing, already exhausted, or are too inaccessible, small, or difficult to be worthwhile. Most of them aren’t actually any safer, when all things considered.


The dilemma of whether to drill in ANWR or the ocean is a complex one. In either case, there is the potential for irreversible destruction of the environment—neither area is truly ‘safer’ than the other. Each area is home to numerous rare species of animal and plant life, who would be trampled and poisoned.


Other concerns include possible incompatibilities with other uses of the areas. The Gulf of Mexico, for example, is both a major commercial fishing area and crosshatched with scores of shipping lanes, and freighter captains enjoy navigating hundred-thousand-ton cargo ships through an obstacle course of oil platforms about as much as fishermen enjoy pulling up nets full of oil-poisoned shrimp.


Drilling in the ANWR or other remote areas is also not much simpler or cheaper than drilling in mile-deep water tens or hundreds of miles out to sea, or for that matter, not much easier than drilling at the South Pole. Consider the Prudhoe Bay oilfields, where a massive infrastructure of roads, pipelines, well complexes, oil storage facilities, supertankers, and company towns had to be constructed in a bitterly hostile arctic environment in order to extract the oil and get it to market. The 800-mile Trans-Alaskan Pipeline System alone cost $8 billion. All of this infrastructure is extremely expensive to operate and maintain. There is even a television show about the truck drivers who regularly ferry supplies north across the ice and tundra. The truth is that as profitable as it has proven, Prudhoe Bay wasn’t considered economically worthwhile until the gasoline shortages of the early 1970s drove petroleum prices up sharply.


The oil industry routinely weighs the costs of a offshore drilling against on-shore drilling, based on the amount and quality of oil and gas that could be extracted, and the cost to get it out of the ground and onto the market. A fifth-generation mobile drill rig such as the Deepwater Horizon—built at the cost of half a billion dollars, and with a billing rate of nearly half a million dollars a day for the rig, her crew, and all the support ships and other necessities—is a major item on any budget sheet. Add to that against the costs of having to fit out another arctic oilfield on the scale of Prudhoe Bay. BP is, in fact, contemplating exactly such a project, involving constructing an artificial island in the Beaufort Sea off the northern coast of Alaska.


Offshore drilling is an intrinsically dangerous and environmentally risky process. It can be done safely, if the proper safeguards are in place to prevent spills or to clean up pollution before it does too much damage. The problem is that the equipment and infrastructure to cope with oil pollution on the scale of the Deepwater Horizon’s simply does not exist. While a great deal of thought and effort has been put into devices such as blowout preventers and “Christmas trees,” which are intended to prevent spills, it is surprising to see how little the art and science of cleaning a spill up has advanced since the late 1960s, when the primary source of spills were leaks from ships in harbors rather than the relatively few and comparatively small offshore drilling and production rigs in use at the time. Despite the media attention given to “magic boxes,” “top hats,” and similar devices used in attempts to shut off the flow of oil and gas from the well, the primary tools for cleaning up spilled oil are still containment booms, skimmers, pumps, and brute manpower, and they are wholly inadequate for combating spills of the current magnitude.


Congressman John Culbertson of Texas described the Deepwater Horizon disaster as a ‘statistical anomaly’ in a June 18 open letter to President Obama, in which he protested the federal government reinstating its off-again, on-again moratorium on new offshore drilling. In one sense he is correct—only one of the thousands of wells in the Gulf blew out. On the other hand, consider the amount of damage this one well has done, the inability of BP and the federal government to cope with the disaster, and the amount of destruction that even three or four more blowouts of the same size could wreak.


In the long run, however, the choice between wildlife preserve and ocean will ultimately disappear, once scarcity and the inevitable depletion of existing oilfields has driven the cost of oil up and availability down. The situation will change from an either/or decision to a both/and situation, in which the US is forced by economic necessity to drill everywhere there is oil, regardless of the increasing costs to extract it.


Prudhoe Bay is estimated to be four-fifths depleted. Unless the US can reduce its dependence on petroleum, it will ultimately face the need to drill in both areas regardless of cost and consequences, simply because it cannot do without the oil. Bearing that sad truth in mind, the nation should seriously attempt on a large scale what has been often talked about over the last twenty years, but towards which nothing has been done—developing renewable energy sources and reducing the need for fossil fuels.

Governor Palin Vs. The Spanish Inquisition

If you haven't seen the recent interviews of Governor Palin by Katie Couric, you're missing some hilarious footage. They're funnier than the Tina Fey skits on SNL, the "I can see Russia from my house" line nonwithstanding. I'm still laughing about her description of the evil head of Vladimir Putin floating into US airspace.

The September 25 one was one step up from the Monty Python skit featuring the Spanish Inquisition.

This Palin interview is like listening to a high school student try to bullshit her way through a class discussion without having done any of the assigned reading for the last year. It's irritatingly obvious that she has no idea what she's talking about, and is just regurgitating talking points. It's painful to listen to, and worse to read. Oh, she also flat-out lied about the trade missions she claimed were part of her foreign policy credentials. The last one of those was in 1997, and was conducted by then-governor Tony Knowles.

Katie Couric: Why isn't it better, Gov. Palin, to spend $700 billion helping middle-class families who are struggling with health care, housing, gas and groceries; allow them to spend more and put more money into the economy instead of helping these big financial institutions that played a role in creating this mess?

Gov. Sarah Palin: That's why I say I, like every American I'm speaking with, we're ill about this position that we have been put in where it is the taxpayers looking to bail out. But ultimately, what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the health-care reform that is needed to help shore up our economy, helping the -- it's got to be all about job creation, too, shoring up our economy and putting it back on the right track. So health-care reform and reducing taxes and reining in spending has got to accompany tax reductions and tax relief for Americans. And trade, we've got to see trade as opportunity, not as a competitive, scary thing. But one in five jobs being created in the trade sector today, we've got to look at that as more opportunity. All those things under the umbrella of job creation. This bailout is a part of that.

It just resonates--the confusion, the cadence-- with the part of the Python skit where Michael Palin, dressed up as a Cardinal, barges in through the door and blasts off the following:

NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition! Our chief weapon is surprise...surprise and fear...fear and surprise.... Our two weapons are fear and surprise...and ruthless efficiency.... Our *three* weapons are fear, surprise, and ruthless efficiency...and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope.... Our *four*...no... *Amongst* our weapons.... Amongst our weaponry...are such elements as fear, surprise.... I'll come in again.

I was just waiting for Palin to say ".... amongst our talking points are such diverse things as....."


I bet she'd like some nice red uniforms, too.

Sarah Palin

Sarah Palin. I’m pretty amazed at the amount of sheer vitriol that’s come out about this woman in the last week.

Seriously, John McCain announced her as his running mate barely a week ago, and already the scandals and skeletons in the closet have been piling up like there’s no tomorrow. A surprising number of these scandals have emerged from Alaskan sources, among Palin’s own constituents and particularly the residents of the town of Wasilla, of which she was mayor for six years. Despite her 80% approval rating among Alaskans, there appear to be some there who are definitely in a torch-and-pitchfork mood.

It’s not just angry people on the internet, either—Time Magazine, ABC, the Washington Post, and the New York Times have all written her off as a disaster.

Let’s call it as it is— she’s the governor of a state with fewer people than most large cities (670,000 people, about as many as the city of Baltimore, Maryland). She was mayor of Wasilla, a town with a population (2000 census) of fewer than 5,500 people from 1996 until 2002. [By contrast, my hometown had 14,000 in the same census year, and is still considered a Podunk by Massachusetts standards.] These really do not add up to the sort of qualifications I look for in a presidential or vice-presidential candidate. She has no foreign policy experience and no legislative experience.

On top of that, we have the following:

Her claim to be a small government reformer and corruption fighter is blatant hogwash. She publicly and vocally supported (in her official capacity as governor) the infamous ‘Bridge to Nowhere,’ a $329 million dollar lump of particularly shameless pork (a bridge between two islands, paid for my the federal government) snared by Senator Ted Stevens, who is currently indicted for corruption. Palin has since contradicted herself by claiming to have opposed the bridge project all along. When public outcry killed the bridge project, Palin diverted the money to other pet projects, and then claimed the credit for stopping the boondoggle she had helped push.

The Republican culture of corruption extends even here, no surprise; Senator Ted Stevens is one of the world champs in bringing home the pig products; for all the image of the hardy frontier, Alaska receives far more in federal subsidies than any other state in the country. The entire Republican apparatus is reeling under the brunt of investigations, indictments, and revelations of gross corruption. Given the size of the Alaskan political community and Palin’s involvement in it, it is virtually impossible that she wasn’t involved in this personally, and indeed she accepted $4,500 in campaign contributions in the same VECO fundraising affair that led to Stevens’ indictments.

She’s a glutton for pork; Wasilla collected over $27 million in federal subsidies and public works funding during her second term as mayor, and had its own lobbying firm on retainer.

While mayor of Wasilla, she blew $15,000,000 in public funds (more than twice the town’s entire annual operating budget) on a multi-use sports arena and convention center that still hasn’t broken even, and receives hundreds of thousands of dollars in state subsidies. She raised the sales tax on groceries 2% to pay for it all. Why in the world does a town of a few thousand people need something like this?

While mayor, she investigated the possibility of removing books she deemed to be offensive from the public library, going so far as to attempt to fire the librarian when the librarian objected.

She was nearly recalled as mayor after sacking most of the town government and replacing them with cronies. After a public outcry over abuse of power, the mayor’s office was subsequently stripped of most of it’s power, which was turned over to a town manager (yet another Palin crony). Sound familiar?

She’s the nexus of ‘Troopergate,’ in which she sacked the public safety commissioner who refused to fire her sister’s ex-husband, in a glaring example of her abuse of power.

She’s already under investigation by the Alaska state legislature over Troopergate, among other things, including her involvement in a business that was shut down by state order for failure to obey the law.

She sacked the entire state Board of Agriculture and Conservation in a feud with the state Creamery Board over a failing state-run business that she wanted to keep open, then replaced them with cronies.

Her husband works in the oil and gas industry—an employee of British Petroleum, specifically-- which accounts for nearly half of the Alaskan state economy. Pretty much anything she did as governor or would do in the White House as far as energy policy would fail any reasonable conflict-of-interest test.

She’s a fan (and longtime supporter) of Pat Buchanan, whose statements such as 1990’s “Capitol Hill is Israeli-occupied territory” earned him his own page on the Anti-Defamation League’s website, as well as a supporter of Jews for Jesus, a controversial group that attempts to convert Jews to evangelical Christianity.

She has repeatedly made public statements about how US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan are 'are on a mission from God.’ Fine words from Jake Blues, but not for this.

She turned the town’s healthy budget surplus into a crippling deficit in just a few years (sound familiar?).

She campaigned for both mayor and governor as an outspoken Christian, a fiscal conservative, and an advocate of small government; public records are silent on the former, but government size and spending bloated enormously (Wasilla’s expenditures jumped 49%) whenever and wherever she was in charge (sound familiar?).

A governor, she eviscerated social services, including programs that supported single mothers and pregnant teenagers.

She has over the past twelve years earned a reputation for fighting dirty, vindictiveness (see Troopergate and the dairy board matter) and cronyism. After eight years of George Bush and Dick Cheney, we need a break.

She has hired an attorney on a $95,000 retainer (payable out of government funds, as he represents her both as a private individual and as governor) to defend her against accusations of abuse of power.

She has requested that her church fellows pray in favor of a $30 billion natural gas pipeline project (yet more federal money) that she has been trying to push through as governor. (Really, this is just crass to the point of being laughable).

I’ll skip all the stuff about how she has a Down’s Syndrome baby (having hid the pregnancy from the public and most of her family for seven months), is supposedly a rabid hunter, her atrocious people skills, and her lack of anything like public dignity (e.g. she giggled when a right-wing talk radio host on whose show she was appearing referred to an opponent of hers as a cancer, knowing that said opponent actually had cancer). That’s beside the point. George Bush has already lowered the dignity bar quite a ways.


The 500-pound troll in the room, however, is this. The vice-president of the United States is literally a heartbeat away from being president. Serious business. They can also wield significant power and influence on their own, depending on the climate and personalities in the administration; case in point, Dick Cheney.

McCain apparently picked her after meeting her just once, for fifteen minutes, the day before she was announced as the pick, and with little or no preliminary vetting. McCain’s staff even wrote her acceptance speech for her.

The fact that McCain would pick someone who is not only grossly underqualified to be president, but who has so many skeletons in their personal and official closets that they can humiliate the Republican party’s ticket this badly in the space of just a week, raises serious questions about McCain’s own judgment on the matter.

It’s also rather laughable that McCain shot himself in the foot in this fashion—he juxtaposes age and experience, but picked someone who has neither, and who by his own alleged standards wouldn’t be suited to take over in the event that McCain’s age catches up with him.




On a more personal level, there are also a few more strikes against her.

She is a creationist, and advocated the teaching of creationism in Alaskan public schools. For me, this is a big disqualifier. You can be a devout Christian without being a creationist, but you can’t be a creationist (particularly a biblical literalist) without essentially writing off most of the scientific knowledge gathered over the last century and a half, at least. In my opinion, people who embrace these ideas are not sufficiently grounded in empiricism and reality to be good leaders.

She is an evangelical Pentecostal who can’t seem to keep her public duties and private beliefs separate. With all respect, I think we have had quite enough right-wing holy rollers in the White House lately, and that we do not need any more.

She cannot correctly pronounce ‘nuclear.’ This is just a failing grade right from the start.

Her 17-year-old daughter is pregnant. Palin cut funding for sex education (like Bush, she advocates teaching abstinence only) and social services for teenage and unwed mothers. This is nothing short of elemental irony.