Oil platforms good for fish, scientist says

AP via dailybreeze.com ^ | Mar 12, 2006 | Tim Molloy

[proud_yank]

SANTA BARBARA -- Marine biologist Milton Love drives a hybrid car, displays a banner of leftist icon Che Guevara on his laboratory wall -- and has backing from big oil.

The reason is his finding that long-maligned oil platforms off California's Central Coast may be a haven for overfished stocks of groundfish.

The research is good news to oil executives, who are looking for reasons not to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to remove the platforms once the oil stops flowing.

Environmentalists say oil companies are hiding behind fish to escape their obligation to remove the rigs.

"Just because fish are there doesn't mean the platform constitutes habitat," said Linda Krop, an attorney for the Santa Barbara-based Environmental Defense Center. "That's like taking a picture of birds on a telephone wire and saying it's essential habitat."

The 27 platforms -- skeletal-looking structures that house dormitories, offices and massive pumps -- were installed over the past four decades and now produce 72,000 barrels of oil daily.

Environmentalists and coastal residents despise them for disrupting the ocean's natural ecology and otherwise flawless coastal views.

Federal law requires oil companies to remove the platforms when operations are complete, though no one knows whether it will be years or decades before deposits under the sea floor run out.

Oil companies already are pressing state and federal officials to keep the rigs in place, citing Love's finding that platforms provide homes for bocaccio, cowcod and other fish. Love said many fish adopt platforms because they can't reach decimated natural reefs where they once thrived.

[proud_yank]

LOL!

[P-40]

This has been obvious for decades.


I remember seeing Liberty Ships stripped and ready for sinking in the Gulf for fishing reefs.

[GreenFreeper]

Thanks for heads up... interesting indeed

ECO-PING

FReepmail me to be added or removed to the ECO-PING list!

[Marine_Uncle]

"Environmentalists and coastal residents despise them for disrupting the ocean's natural ecology and otherwise flawless coastal views."
We live in an era of lose/lose situations.