Miles of undeveloped coastline runs along the Central Coast creating a desirable place to live and recreate, but what isn’t immediately apparent is an ongoing struggle between preserving what we see and tapping what lies beneath that land. At the heart of the struggle is Tranquillon Ridge, an area that sits off the coast of Vandenberg Air Force Base teeming with protected wildlife, but also holding millions of barrels’ worth of oil.
Just months after a large spill at Refugio State Beach, Sen. Hannah-Beth Jackson, (D-Santa Barbara), seized the opportunity to reintroduce a bill, SB 788, that would ban new drilling in the state waters of Tranquillon Ridge. Despite the ongoing cleanup and the lingering images of thick, oil-filled waves slapping the beach, the bill died in committee during the last week of August, effectively killing it for the year.
Jackson said she remains passionate about the issue. She even hinted at reintroducing the bill—it would be the third introduction—next year. She expressed her disappointment that even with the Refugio spill fresh on the minds of policymakers, she wasn’t able to muster the support to get it passed.
“Frankly, when it comes to something that powerfully impacts the oil industry, I’m disappointed but not surprised,” Jackson said.
Tranquillon Ridge is treasured by environmentalists because its location, where the cold waters of the north meet the warm waters of the south, allows the area to play host to a variety of marine life unique to the area. Oil companies covet the area for the—by some estimates—nearly 200 million barrels of oil that lay untapped in its waters.
Tranquillon Ridge’s unique ecosystem has earned it the designation of a national Marine Protected Area. It’s also unique, however, in that it’s the only place left in the state where oil companies can drill, that is, if they are given the lease.
The story of oil and Tranquillon Ridge is a complicated one and goes back decades. It sits partially in state waters, which is the area up to 3 miles from shore, and partially in federal waters, anything past the 3-mile mark.
California doesn’t allow any more new drilling in state waters and hasn’t since 1969. That is in part because the California Sanctuary Act bans new offshore oil and gas leases in state waters unless it is already being drained from a platform in federal waters.
There is only one place that occurs and it’s Tranquillon Ridge. Platform Irene sits at Tranquillon Ridge, and oil companies use the platform to drill into the federal side. This leaves the state side up for grabs, and a multitude of oil companies, proposals in hand, have been courting Vandenberg (VAFB) for permission to drill from land or the existing platform.
The closest anyone came to a project was in 2009 when PXP proposed to donate acres of land and to shut down all drilling operations in exchange for a finite period of drilling into the Tranquillon Ridge sweet spot. That proposal, because of its mitigation offer and sunset clause, earned the support of environmentalists, including Jackson.
Jackson was working as a consultant for the Environmental Defense Council and pushing for the PXP proposal. “The PXP proposal was very different than anything we had seen before or will ever see again,” she said.
Specifically, it was an attractive proposal because government can’t force a company to stop drilling, but with the PXP proposal the company was offering to dismantle their own drilling operations after a 10-year period.
“We had this company that came forward and said, ‘We will end oil drilling off the coast.’ That was the hook for many of us,” she said.
The State Lands Commission denied that proposal 2-1.
Most recently, Sunset Exploration along with ExxonMobile proposed to drill, not from Platform Irene but from the shore using a slant-drilling method. Though VAFB officials haven’t implicitly expressed interest, last year the Air Force Civil Engineer Center released an assessment of the area, which gave many on both sides the impression that VAFB may be open to the possibility of drilling. That move led to Jackson’s first attempt to ban drilling there.
Jackson and other supporters of such a ban call the legality of drilling in state waters that are already being drilled on the federal side a “loophole” that needs to be closed. Drilling proponents point out that it was legislation that was purposefully added so that the state could be assured its cut of money from any drilling. Either way, drilling opponents like Linda Krop, senior counsel for the EDC, say the results of allowing drilling in state waters could be potentially disastrous.
“We believe the environmental effects of a new drilling project will create a new risk for spills,” Krop said.
Ben Oakley is environmental coordinator for ERG, which conducts onshore operations in Santa Barbara County’s Cat Canyon. His job is to ensure that the company stays in compliance with environmental, saefty, and other regulations.
He said oil companies in the state follow strict procedures, but with any industry there is still associated risk. “In every industry where you produce a good, there’s no way to completely eliminate the risk associated with that activity,” he said.
Oakley said in the larger picture of both onshore and offshore drilling, the argument of whether or not to ban drilling isn’t a fair one. “Really what you’re choosing is not producing those resources here and instead importing them from somewhere else.” He said it’s better to produce those resources in California where the regulations are stricter than other areas.
Spills
Refugio State Beach is the type of beach the rest of the country thinks of when they think of California; tall, skinny palm trees swaying in the breeze, mellow waves lapping at the shore, and sunny skies overhead. However, in May that picture became a lot messier after a pipeline from Plains All American Pipeline spilled 142,800 gallons of oil—21,000 gallons of which eventually overflowed into the ocean.
The result forced beach closures during the busy summer months, hurting the fishing industry, damaging wildlife, and halting recreation and tourism. Though cleanup is still underway, the beach looks as inviting as before. Final damage assessments can take up to a year or two, according to Doug Helton, West Coast supervisor for NOAA’s emergency response team.
“The general process is to look at what is injured by the spill and what it will take for restoration,” Helton said.
That includes looking at fish, sea grasses, kelp, and food-web type issues, along with other impacts like how many people couldn’t visit the beach because of the closures. The process includes giving the public the opportunity to comment on what type of restoration projects will be needed to mitigate the damage. Once a formal plan is in place, Plains All American Pipeline will be responsible for paying for it.
But other long-term effects are hard to determine.
“A dead bird covered in oil is obvious. A redirection in an invertebrate population is harder to detect,” Helton said.
The May spill at Refugio State Beach isn’t the first of its kind in the area. In 1997 a rupture in a 20-inch pipe running from Platform Irene to an onshore processing facility north of Lompoc released 163 barrels of petroleum product, including oil and production water and diesel and anti-corrosion chemical compounds that were contained in the pipeline, into the ocean (163 barrels is equivalent to roughly 6,850 gallons). The spill affected 17 miles of coastline with Surf Beach at VAFB suffering most of the damage.
Prior to that there was a disastrous spill in Santa Barbara in 1969. The result of a well blowout 6 miles from the coast, that spill is considered the third largest in the country, having spilled 3 million gallons of oil into the ocean.
When spills occur they get a lot of attention, but natural oil seepage occurs all the time. Helton said that there isn’t much difference between oil from a spill and that of a seep because they come from the same place.
He said that in general, oil from seeps is a little more degraded, or “weathered,” biologically, while oil coming directly from an underground formation may be a little more pristine because it hasn’t had any degradation. However, when that oil spills, it also begins to degrade and change just as with a natural seep. In the Refugio spill instance, that spill began on land and spilled into the ocean so it degraded a lot, Helton said.
In short, Helton said, “You’ll never get a tar-free beach.”
Oil vs. environment
While there are many environmental concerns about the effects of oil, the economic effects of the oil industry are also debated. The EDC’s Krop said that oil ranks fairly low on the list of the state’s economic contributors.
She said the state and county both rely more on other industries, like tourism and agriculture—industries potentially hurt by spills. “Tourism and recreation is top of the list and oil is way down. It really is a conflict,” Krop said. “And environmentally and economically it makes more sense to support the clean industry.”
Jackson echoed that sentiment saying that there should be a bigger push for alternative energy.
“For many of us, we see the end to oil and fossil fuels as imperative to the future of the planet,” Jackson said.
However, oil industry representatives argue that oil is actually a big money maker for the state and county.
Bob Poole, vice president of Western States Petroleum Association, said the county and state get direct, indirect, and induced benefits from the oil industry. That is, oil workers get paychecks, spend that money at local businesses, and those businesses in turn make profits and put those profits back into the community.
According to a report by the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation’s Institute for Applied Economics (LAEDC), in 2013 that amounted to 455,940 direct, indirect, and induced jobs and $38 billion in total labor income statewide.
Poole also said the oil industry pays a lot of property taxes, with ExxonMobile being the largest taxpayer in Santa Barbara County. Oil in the ground is taxed until it comes out of the ground, he said, but the county also taxes all the infrastructure including tanks, wells, and the processing facility. According to a report by the LAEDC, the oil and gas industry contributed $21.2 billion in state and local tax revenues. Those property taxes are split with some of it going toward education and the rest going to the county’s general fund.
Perhaps the place oil makes the biggest difference, however, is in the checkbook of the average Santa Barbara County household, Poole suggested. Workers employed by the oil industry earn what is considered head of household income, with the average entry level worker earning between $50,000 and $70,000 a year. “That’s a little different than what you make in the tourism or ag industry,” Poole said.
Jackson said that that wouldn’t change if there were more alternative energy industry projects.
“There is great opportunity, maybe even greater opportunity, in the alternative energy business,” Jackson said.
Poole doesn’t agree.
“It is just simply not true—and they can’t substantiate it with facts—that there are these other jobs out there in alternative energy,” Poole said.
He pointed to billionaire Tom Steyer’s 2012 Clean Energy Jobs Act, Proposition 39, which promised 11,000 jobs a year. Three years after it passed only 1,700 had been created, according to an Aug. 20 Associated Press article.
“Not that we pooh-pooh alternative energy,” Poole added, citing Chevron, which says it’s the largest producer of geothermal energy; ExxonMobile, which has funded algae-based biofuel research; and Shell Global, which has solar and wind projects.
Who will get the prize?
With the bill to prevent drilling at Tranquillon Ridge dead on the Assembly appropriations committee floor, there’s a slim possibility of reviving it next year, Jackson said, but there’s always the opportunity to reintroduce the bill.
That’s important because the threat of new drilling at Tranquillon Ridge remains, Jackson said. “For decades Vandenberg Air Force Base said, ‘We are not interested.’ Suddenly, they haven’t said yes, but they are saying, ‘Maybe we should review and revisit it,'” Jackson said referring to last year’s assessment.
U.S. Rep. Lois Capps (D-Santa Barbara) said she is in sync with Jackson in banning new drilling at Tranquillon Ridge, especially on the heels of the Refugio spill. “This was a huge wake-up call for our area. The worst thing would be to continue business as usual,” Capps said.
Capps said there needs to be less talk and more action. To that end she suggested tougher regulations on oil companies and subsidies for clean energy projects.
“So now we have to balance, but we also have many more ways of getting our energy other than oil and gas, and some of these need to be supported with subsidies,” she said.
Krop said that drilling opponents have come up with a variety of recourses to prevent future spills.
She said they’re supporting proposed legislation that would encourage better prevention, improved spill response, annual pipeline inspections, and even auto shut-off systems.
“All told, we’re looking at state regulations and trying to tighten them up and looking at federal regulations and trying to tighten them up,” Krop said.
Jackson said doing so is essential to the environment.
“Our coastline is very precious,” Jackson said.
Editor Shelly Cone can be reached at scone@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Sep 10-17, 2015.