If oil and gas drilling ever occurs off the US East Coast, the risk that a well will blow out catastrophically and spill oil, as tragically happened in the Gulf of Mexico 4 years ago, will be remarkably low. But it will not be zero. Analysis must begin there. The next consideration must be that East Coast drilling remains a distant prospect.
Because the US Bureau of Ocean Energy Management has defined standards for geologic and geophysical (G&G) surveys in federal waters of the Atlantic, however, alarms have sounded. "Feds approve oil exploration off US Eastern Coast," warned the headline over an Associated Press story in the Charlotte (NC) Observer that began, "The Obama administration has sided with energy developers over environmentalists, approving the use of underwater blasts of sound to pinpoint oil and gas deposits in federal Atlantic Ocean waters." That few East Coast observers appreciate differences between seismic surveying and drilling helps explain why the latter will begin in the Atlantic no time soon.
What BOEM did
The BOEM did not approve exploration on the Atlantic Outer Continental Shelf. It issued a "record of decision" listing "mitigation measures" that might be employed, subject to later decisions, when and if it does grant survey permits in its Mid-Atlantic and South Atlantic planning areas. The move simply enables it to accept applications for permits.
The mitigation measures are stern. They include seasonal area closures, monitoring requirements, and distance limits and timing controls to protect marine animals from vessel strikes and disturbance from air-gun bursts. The BOEM chose the stricter of two sets of standards it had identified for G&G operations. A third option was to permit no studies at all.
While welcoming the bureau's refusal to foreclose surveys, industry groups said the mitigation measures go too far. Robert Hobbs, chairman of the International Association of Geophysical Contractors, called many of them "arbitrary and unnecessary." He said they "threaten the prospect of obtaining the necessary seismic data to inform future policies regarding exploration in the Atlantic OCS." BOEM, he said, presumed "an unrealistic worst-case scenario in which geophysical activities are projected to result in thousands of incidental takes of marine mammals that BOEM admits will not actually occur." The bureau said it based estimates of damage to marine-mammal populations on acoustic and impact models designed to be conservative. This approach, it acknowledged, "results in an over-estimate of take."
Restrictive as it is, BOEM's decision at least represents movement toward the acquisition of modern geophysical data off the East Coast. At a time of automatic resistance by pressure groups against anything that might increase supplies and use of oil and natural gas, every such step is important.
Predictably, this step met opposition. BOEM said it received 67,518 comments on the environmental study to which its decision attached. Of those, 48,358 comments opposed G&G activities. "Many commenters who opposed oil and gas-related G&G activities were also opposed to any future oil and gas development activities," BOEM said. The people who sent those comments of course will want the bureau to deny any applications it receives for Atlantic G&G survey permits. BOEM's strict mitigation requirements will help them make the proposed activity sound more menacing than it really is.
Modernizing G&G data
If surveys happen anyway, opponents of oil and gas work will fight leasing. If leasing occurs they'll fight drilling. They'll stoke memories of the Macondo tragedy and insist that no risk be tolerated. And their exaggerations and impossible standards will influence large parts of East Coast populations with little reason to know much about oil and gas drilling and production.
Hopeful nevertheless, at this early stage in a process fraught with political hazard, is BOEM's acknowledgement that modernization of 40-year-old G&G information is essential to decision-making. If nothing else, an updated resource assessment will tell Americans with improved precision what they surrender while development of oil and gas resources remains impossible off the East Coast.