When I served at the Department of the Interior, I was amazed to learn that much of the shellfish and fish on the tables of Los Angeles restaurants came from around the oil rigs off Santa Barbara, so I was quite interested in this article.
Oil spills don't come from producing wells, but from the transportation of oIl and gas.
For fear of oil spills, as of 2008, the U.S. Federal government and various states ban drilling in thousands upon thousands of square miles off the U.S. Coast. These areas, primarily on the Outer Continental Shelf, hold an estimated 115 billion barrels of oil and 633 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.
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Of the roughly 3,700 offshore oil productions platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, roughly 3,200 lie off the Louisiana coast. Yet Louisiana produces one-third of America's commercial fisheries and no major oil spill has ever soiled its coast.
On the other hand, Florida, which zealously prohibits from offshore oil drilling, had its gorgeous “Emerald Coast” panhandle beaches soiled by an ugly oil spill in 1976. This spill, as almost all oil spills, resulted from the transportation of oil—not from the extraction of oil.
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Recall the Valdez, the Cadiz, the Argo Merchant. These were all tanker spills. The production of oil is relatively clean and safe. Again, it's the transportation that presents the greatest risk
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More birds get fried by landing on power lines and smashed to pulp against picture windows in one week than perished from three decades of oil spills.
But forget cheaper oil and less pollution for a second. All fishermen and scuba divers out there should plead with their states to open up offshore oil drilling posthaste. I refer to the fabulous fishing – the EXPLOSION of marine life that accompanies the erection of offshore oil platforms.
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Every "environmental" superstition against these structures was turned on its head. Marine life had EXPLODED around these huge artificial reefs: A study by LSU's Sea Grant college shows that 85 percent of Louisiana fishing trips involve fishing around these platforms. The same study shows that there's 50 times more marine life around an oil production platform than in the surrounding mud bottoms.