Environmentalists, as well as a local congressman, bemoaned the environmental damage caused by Saturday’s offshore oil spill impacting Huntington Beach, and said the incident underscored the urgency to accelerate closure of the 27 platforms in waters off the California coast.
“It’s undoubtedly going to have an impact on marine life, beaches and the ability to use the beaches,” said Chad Nelsen, CEO of the Surfrider Foundation. “I do think they will do everything they can to minimize the impacts.
“But the reality is oil infrastructure fails, no matter how careful we try to be. The real answer here is to get off fossil fuels if we want to see these impacts go away. It’s an unfortunate reality when we are moving oil around.”
Oil from a platform offshore of Long Beach reached Orange County beaches, the Talbert Marshlands and the Santa Ana River, according to Huntington Beach Mayor Kim Carr. The total spill was estimated at 126,000 gallons on Sunday, with Nelsen comparing the disaster to the 2015 Refugio pipeline leak of 143,000 gallons in Santa Barbara County.
That spill caused tens of millions of dollars in damage and cleanup costs, and coated hundreds of animals in oil, many of which died. It also forced offshore areas to be put off limits to fishing.
“This will be devastating not only to our marine wildlife and ecosystem, but also to the livelihoods of our coastal communities which are built around fishing, tourism and recreation,” said Rep. Alan Lowenthal, D-Long Beach. “As long as these platforms and pipelines remain, our coastal communities remain under threat from potential disasters like we are now seeing.”
The Refugio pipeline was found to be corroded. Miyoko Sakashita, director of the Center for Biological Diversity’s Oceans program, said Southern California’s offshore operations are also suffering from old age.
“I’ve seen the aging oil platforms off Huntington Beach up close, and I know it’s past time to decommission these time bombs,” she said.
After a 2018 criminal trial in which Plains All American Pipeline was found negligent in the Refugio spill, the company “insisted its operations on Line 901 either met or exceeded legal and industry standards and that the verdicts reflected ‘no knowing wrongdoing’ by the company or its employees,” according to the Santa Barbara Independent.
Sakashita said the solution is to decommission all offshore platforms.
“Even after fines and criminal charges, the oil industry is still spilling and leaking into California’s coastal waters because these companies just aren’t capable of operating safely,” she said. “The only solution is to shut this dirty business down.”
There are 27 platforms off the California coast, reaching from Orange County to Santa Barbara. Of those, 12 are not producing and there are no plans to return them to service, said John B. Smith, a decommissioning consultant for TSB Offshore, at a 2020 conference on the future of the wells.
He added that there was little interest by oil companies in opening new wells off the West Coast.
Since the massive 1969 oil spill in Santa Barbara – at the time the largest spill in the United States – it has become increasingly difficult to site new offshore rigs in the state. No leases for new wells in state waters have been signed since the spill and while the newest well in federal waters went online in 1989.
The Trump administration proposed opening virtually all of the country’s coasts to new oil leases in federal waters, but then-Gov. Jerry Brown subsequently signed a 2018 law banning new pipelines and other infrastructure to serve rigs in federal water. That’s further increased the deterrence to drilling as the push to reduce oil operations dovetails with the state’s goal of carbon-free energy by 2045.
Laura Deehan, state director of Environment California, said Saturday’s spill should hasten the move to clean energy.
“This ecological disaster underscores the urgent need for Gov. (Gavin) Newsom to accelerate our transition away from fossil fuels to a 100-percent renewable energy-powered economy,” she said.
Source: Orange County Register
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