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Oil: Virginia's offshore dilemma
Oil: Virginia's offshore dilemmaIt is called Chesapeake Light. It is a big platform structure with a powerful beacon on top that signals ship helmsmen that they are entering the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay.
It also is a fruitful place to fish — amberjack in summer, king mackerel in early fall, striped bass during the colder months. Sometimes an eddy of warm, blue water will break free from the Gulf Stream and bring a white marlin or the gold-and-blue dolphin to the tower.
As much as a place to fish, the tower is a front-row seat to ships entering and leaving the Chesapeake Bay.
In a day’s time, it is possible to see almost every kind of ocean-going craft the Navy operates, from huge aircraft carriers to cutters and patrol boats. Look closely and you might spot the conning tower of a submarine gliding silently toward port.
There are passenger cruise ships, tankers, container ships, ocean tugs, a variety of offshore fishing boats, freighters loaded with everything from coal to scrap metal. There are schooners and every other kind of sailing craft that can handle the big swells.
The light essentially marks the border between Virginia's three-mile territorial jurisdiction and federal waters that stretch from three to 200 miles offshore.
East of the light, some 40 miles offshore, are the shipwreck sites that have become destination points for recreational fishermen. Sites that have names like Tiger Wreck and Triangle Wreck. Each site has its story. Each left a list of what and who was lost.
Beyond the wrecks are the seamounts, underwater hilltops that highlight the Virginia coast. During World War II, the Coast Guard and the Navy hired fishermen to locate and map the seamounts. Thus the colorful names — Hambone, Bluefish Alley, Lumps. Forty-Mile Hill.
Marshall Smith was the most famous of these fishermen. His boat was named the Petunia. The old diesel engine ran so hot he would bake a tray of biscuits on it while making the offshore run.
Using little more than dead reckoning, he took Navy personnel to several of the seamounts off Virginia Beach.
East of the seamounts, where the ocean floor falls away to the Norfolk Canyon and Baltimore Canyon, some 60 miles from shore, is the area that so many people want opened to oil and natural gas exploration.
President Bush makes easy. The oil companies set up shop at Baltimore Canyon, drill some wells, and within no time the country is awash in surplus oil. The price of gasoline will drop to affordable, home heating oil will be cheap, we can thumb our noses at OPEC.
Unfortunately it doesn’t work that way.
If there is enough oil out there to make drilling for it a worthwhile venture, its impact on the country’s oil supply would be years away. Some say 10 years. Others say decades. Still others, including Rep. Bobby Scott (R-Hampton) say whatever is there isn't worth the potential disaster of pumping it.
Norfolk is the largest and busiest naval base in the world. Every one of the hundreds of ships docked there uses the Chesapeake Bay as an entrance ramp to the Atlantic Ocean. The Norfolk newspaper has a daily listing of arriving and departing ships. Once they clear the Chesapeake Light, those ships fan out as they turn toward their destinations.
Who would want to conduct oil exploration so close to some of the busiest shipping lanes in the world? What happens to that exploration when the Navy loses something, which it often does?
Then there are the jets, the fighter planes from the carriers and from the Hampton Roads land bases. Some of their radar-dodging exercises bring them close to the surface of the water. Very close.
The prevailing winds in the Virginia coastal region blow from the northeast in winter, the southwest in summer.
That means any oil spill will be blown toward the Eastern Shore in the warm months, Virginia Beach’s resort strip in the cold months. The Eastern Shore barrier islands are a rookery and stopover for more than 250 species of birds. The Virginia Beach resort strip is a multi-billion dollar investment and the city’s economic lifeline. Between the two is the Chesapeake Bay, the most biologically diverse estuary in the country.
An oil spill washing up on either would be catastrophic. It would have deep impact on the spawning grounds of fish that are economically important to the state — flounder, spot and croaker — as well as fish that migrate into the Chesapeake Bay, fish such as striped bass, shad, bluefish, mackerel, and gray trout.
Virginia ranks No. 4 in seafood landings, behind Alaska, Washington, and Louisiana. In 2006, the last year such figures were available, Virginia landed more than 426 million pounds of seafood that was worth $109.1 million.
The seafood industry accounts for 11,000 full-time jobs in the state.
Still, the oil deposits experts think are somewhere beneath Baltimore Canyon has become a golden fleece to those who want to end the country's dependence on foreign oil, and see cheap oil as a way to straighten out the country's current economic mess. And they will not tolerate any discussion of oil spills. They claim that's worrying about something that current technology wouldn't let happen.
A tanker collided with a barge July 23, spilling more than 250,000 gallons of oil into the Mississippi River. More than 100 miles of the river was affected. It is too early to calculate the environmental damage. The most likely impact will be to Louisiana's waterfowl population.
Hurricanes Katrina and Rita devastated the Gulf of Mexico offshore oil business. The storms destroyed more than 100 oil platforms and caused combined oil spills of more than 700,000 gallons.
Then there is Alaska's North Slope. Operations there have a yearly average of 500 oil spills. Some are a few thousand gallons. One was the BP pipeline corrosion that dumped 267,000 gallons.
There is no such thing as a safe offshore oil operation.
That leads us to a question we must ask and honestly answer: Is our oil need so intense we are willing to gamble all of this? Or should we use our money and ingenuity and need to germinate energy alternatives.
Miller is managing editor of Culpeper Times.
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