Posted on 10/12/2009 5:36:27 PM PDT by Kaslin
Environment: With much of the world still feeling the sting from last year's oil shock, a group of federal scientists is encouraging Washington to limit offshore drilling. Its counsel would best be ignored.
Citing harmful effects on marine life and oil spills in the Arctic, scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are asking the Interior Department to "drastically reduce plans to open the coast to offshore oil and gas drilling," the Los Angeles Times is reporting.
Their concerns are justified. Marine life is affected by offshore oil production, and spills do happen. The issue is how and to what degree. If the NOAA scientists would step back, they would notice a couple of points that are germane to the debate.
First, the impact of offshore drilling on marine life has hardly brought on a fish and fowl holocaust. Earlier in this decade, a Florida oceanographer working for the Interior Department studied the impact of relatively new offshore oil drilling in the Arctic off of Alaska. He did not discover what he expected he would.
"We found early in the process that impacts to the environment from offshore drilling were minimal," said John Trefry, a marine and environmental systems professor at the Florida Institute of Technology. "In fact, the entire offshore area was near-pristine."
Follow-up monitoring by Trefry's group found "no evidence of significant impacts."
Other research has found that offshore oil rigs bring not disaster for marine life but health. Four years ago, the Washington Post reported that Paul Sammarco, a marine biologist at the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium, surveyed abandoned drilling rigs and discovered that they had "spawned lush marine habitats that are home to a profusion of rare corals and 10,000 to 30,000 fish each."
(Excerpt) Read more at investors.com ...
I don’t know about the arctic but in the Gulf and off California the oil seeps up through the ocean floor naturally. So whatever harm you think an oil spill will do, its been happening for ten thousand years.
Darwinists would have to concede that all this marvelous stuff evolved in the midst of naturally leaky submarine oil fields, and that small man made oil leaks should hardly be expected to faze them.
And non-Darwinists have seen it empirically. It’s naychur!
The Gaia crowd really does not get it that our economy runs on oil.
OIL AND GAS SEEPAGE FROM OCEAN FLOOR REDUCED BY OIL PRODUCTION November 18, 1999 (Santa Barbara, Calif.) Next time you step on a glob of tar on a beach in Santa Barbara County, you can thank the oil companies that it isn’t a bigger glob.
The same is true around the world, on other beaches where off-shore oil drilling occurs, say scientists, although Santa Barbara’s oil seeps are thought to be among the leakiest.
Natural seepage of hydrocarbons from the ocean floor in the northern Santa Barbara Channel has been significantly reduced by oil production, according to two recently published peer-reviewed articles, one in November’s Geology Magazine, the other in the Journal of Geophysical Research - Oceans.
The Santa Barbara Channel provides an excellent natural laboratory, as it is among the areas with the highest levels of seepage in the world, said co-author Bruce P. Luyendyk, professor and chair of the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The studies were not funded by oil companies, but rather by the University of California Energy Institute and the U.S. Minerals Management Service, states Luyendyk, responding to the fact that the results favor off-shore oil production and are opposed by some environmentalists.
“We’ve done a good piece of science,” said Luyendyk. “We’ve developed a good understanding of a natural process. It’s all public data; it’s all straightforward. If I thought the study was compromised I wouldn’t be involved in it.”
Most of the seepage is methane, a potent greenhouse gas which escapes into the atmosphere, said Luyendyk. About 10 percent of the seepage is composed of “higher hydrocarbons,” or reactive organic gases which interact with tailpipe emissions and sunlight, creating air pollution. The researchers state that the production rate of these naturally-occurring reactive organic gases is equal to twice the emission rate from all the on-road vehicle traffic in Santa Barbara County in 1990.
According to the articles, studies of the area around Platform Holly showed a 50 percent decrease in natural seepage over 22 years.
The researchers show that as the oil was pumped out the reservoir, pressure that drives the seepage dropped. “If the decrease in natural seepage found near Platform Holly is representative of the effect of oil production on seepage worldwide, then this has the potential to significantly alter global oil and gas seepage in the future,” state the researchers in the article “The World’s Most Spectacular Marine Hydrocarbon Seeps: Quantification of Emissions “ in the Sept. 14 issue of the Journal of Geological Research - Oceans.
They continue, “For example if the 50 percent reduction in natural seepage rate that occurred around Platform Holly also occurred due to future oil production from the oil field beneath the La Goleta seep, this would result in a reduction in nonmethane hydrocarbon emission rates equivalent to removing half of the on-road vehicle traffic from Santa Barbara County. In addition, a 50 percent reduction in seepage from the La Goleta seep would remove about 25 barrels of oil per day from the sea surface, which in turn would result in a 15 percent reduction in the amount of tar found on Santa Barbara beaches.” They conclude by saying that the rate of increase of global methane atmospheric concentrations has been declining for the past 20 years, and that a “worldwide decrease in natural hydrocarbon seepage related to onshore and offshore oil production may be causing a global reduction in natural methane emission rates.”
...not to mention, it’s organic, it comes right out of the ground?
The issue is not one of protecting the environment, it is and has been one of crippling western industry and the western economy with it.
Drilling relieves the pressure of the oil and actually reduces natural leaks of oil.
So drilling is natural, it’s what mother earth would want us to do?
Most of California’s natural oil and gas seeps are in the area circled in white on this shaded relief map. The state’s major underground oil and gas fields (known from drilled wells) are in the three areas outlined in yellow. Note that the seeps occur near the oil and gas oil fields. This is no coincidence.
The reason seeps are found close to major oil and gas fields is that most seeps are fed by these natural underground reservoirs. Just as springs are fed by underground reservoirs of water, oil and gas seeps are fed by underground reservoirs of oil and gas.
Shaded Relief Map
http://geomaps.wr.usgs.gov/seeps/where.html
They understand perfectly that our economy runs on oil. They just don't want it to run for you or me only them. We should be relegated eating seeds and tubers and living in a cave or govt. housing blocks so as to better serve our duly appointed masters./s
While oil spills from ships are the most well-known source of oil in ocean water, more oil actually gets into water from natural oil seeps coming from the ocean floor.
Leaks also happen when we use petroleum products on land. For example, gasoline sometimes drips onto the ground when people are filling their gas tanks, when motor oil gets thrown away after an oil change, or when fuel escapes from a leaky storage tank. When it rains, the spilled products get washed into the gutter and eventually flow to rivers and into the ocean. Another way that oil sometimes gets into water is when fuel is leaked from motorboats and jet skis.
I would like to see that chart from say 1935 to 1945. According to the enviros that should have destroyed all sea life.
Of course they do, and all of what you describe has already happened.
The Gaia crowd's goal is to first destroy this economy, then this nation.
Kook.
Got to talk with the Gaiists where they’re at.
Gaiaists do get it. They hate man’s economically powered hustle-bustle on Gaia’s face. They have no such malice towards the “natural” hustle-bustle of monkeys or elephants.
I wonder if there is a breakdown on the spills per country. If the envirowackos really cared about Mother Earth, they would want more drilling in the U.S. and offshore where our rules are strict.
Always wondered if it was possible to sue the oil industry to drill more in order to prevent these seeps. Obviously they aren’t drilling enough and should be sued to drill more where these seeps are occurring.
The Federal government should assist the Drillers in complying with Court Orders to expedite the removal of this toxic substance from the sea bed.
Back in the Exxon Valdez days I read an article about scientists that studied the impact of all the oil spilled off the French coastline during WWII. Hundreds of ships and subs were sunk off the coast during the war, spilling the contents of their fuel tanks in the process--oil, diesel, etc. They found that the coastline habitats were intact and had only suffered minimally after the initial spills.
Oil seeps on the surface are common in the Arctic.
Gee, I wonder what happened to all that oil and gas spilled into the oceans during WW2. Nobody seem to care and the oceans cleaned themselves up....
Doesn't work that way. If we suffer, they will suffer. They are just too dense to comprehend just what shape the world will be in if they DO get what they want. These people live in the world of "ought-to-be" not reality.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.