Posted on 09/01/2011 7:23:22 PM PDT by hout8475
If that's so, then I don't see any meaningful environmental objections.
But it's difficult to see how that could be done without some kind of channeling effect -- unless all the roads were built on piers.
My dear friend some words of wisdom. There exists oil wells allready in the Everglades they have been pumping oil there from pre WW2 days...Go to Penn insular Oil Co and read. They are pumping over a million barrels a year from it. An they just applied to the county to drill 4 more wells close by. These wells are located in a US Forest Site an the feds and the county government are raking it in. The estimate is 14 million barrels:
Today, one oil well in Sunniland, which is leased by BreitBurn Energy Partners, is still producing 30 barrels per day. Since the first discovery, 117 million barrels from commercial oil fields in the area have been filled, more than 18.5 million from Sunniland.
They’ve been glued to FoxNews, a favorite in this Panhandle Republican stronghold, but their interest is different from that of most Floridians because they’ve had a far more intimate relationship with the “black gold” now threatening the state’s coastal eco-systems.
The folks in Jay are sitting on top of one of the state’s most oil-rich areas, a place where not that long ago tens of millions of barrels a year flowed out of the ground and where more than a dozen active wells are still producing within the town’s 1.5 square miles.
“It was like Christmas time once a month,” Linda Carden, Jay’s city clerk for 34 years, said of the late ‘70s boom years when local landowners received as much as $100,000 a month in royalties from the wells on their land.
“There was so much money being made that it was kind of a joke that people that owned cemetery plots were getting paid” lucrative royalties for their 5-by-7 foot grave sites, retired oil worker Fred Sasser recalled.
Sasser, born and raised in Jay, worked for Exxon for more than three decades after the oil giant first set up shop in the bucolic town of 575, which today shows few outward signs of its former income.
Likewise, with the focus on drilling for oil off Florida’s coast, many people are unaware that Florida has had active onshore oil production for nearly 70 years.
The Northwest Florida oil tract, including the Jay field, as it’s known, and a few other Panhandle locales in Santa Rosa and neighboring Okaloosa counties, is one of two main regions in the state where oil is still being produced.
The other is in southwest Florida, where the Sunniland field in Collier County opened the door to oil production in the Sunshine State in the early 1940s.
In 1943, the Humble Oil and Refining Co., which later became Exxon, won a $50,000 bounty offered by the Florida Cabinet for the first entity to discover oil. The company split the prize between the Florida College for Women, which later became Florida State University, and the University of Florida.
Since then, Florida has produced nearly 600 million barrels of oil. And without a mishap so far.
The bulk of it has come from the Jay field, although the Sunniland field, with more than three dozen wells, is still producing.
Just last week, Breitburn Florida, which operates the wells for the Collier family that owns the Sunniland mineral rights, asked the state to expand four of its Raccoon Point field wells on the federally-owned land in the Big Cypress National Preserve.
Despite its proximity to the environmentally sensitive Everglades National Park and the Big Cypress swamp, no one seems concerned.
“We can’t find any specific significant environmental damage to it,” said Audubon of Florida lobbyist Eric Draper. “I don’t think anybody’s going to go after an onshore ban on oil activity in Florida, either in Jay or in the Everglades. There’s no documented environmental reason why anybody would object to those things.”
Drop into the “Farmer’s Country Market and Cookin” in the back of the Shell station on Highway 4 in Jay for some down-home fried catfish and okra or, on Tuesdays, chicken and dumplings, and you’ll find many local farmers and their workers discussing the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, but none in favor of banning oil drilling offshore either as lawmakers prepare for a possible special session on the issue.
“We need to be drilling instead of buying it overseas. It’s been good for Santa Rosa County, better schools, better roads,” said Max Ray Smith, who’s been servicing vehicles for the oil companies and contractors at the Big M Tire Center he’s owned for more than 40 years.
There would be some temporary changes during construction, but I would think an elevated pipe line would be used and a series of box culverts used to maintain drainage under the roads. Perhaps an actual bridge design would end up being easier.
We’re not talking a major highway system of multi-lane roads. I’m envisioning somthing similar I-10 through Louisiana but with limited access, probably one way in and one way out with turn around points every so often.
Even with minimal changes to drainage patterns environmentalists would scream bloody murder; the shade impact from the road alone would make their heads explode. And yes, environmental review through the water management districts does take into account the shade impact of an elevated bridge, dock, pier, etc. and that is required to be mitigated for.
Since the vast majority of the Everglades is either National Park, National Preserve, Water Conservation Area, or Indian Reservation, the prospect of massive oil drilling there seems quite low. And if the Indians allow it, I'm sure it will be in an environmentally conscious way.
So, it's basically a non-issue. The production will ultimately occur on private land and where it makes the most economic sense.
So I say "drill, baby, drill" and we Floridians will be able to properly balance the associated risks and rewards.
At any rate, it's a legitimate environmental concern.
And there are probably fifty less environmentally sensitive areas (including ANWR) that deserve drilling before the Everglades.
Box vs. corrugated metal pipe culverts are completely different from each other. They would have to be sized appropriately to reduce scour, etc and prevent stacking of water on one side or the other. In the case of the glades a bridge design would probably be more appropriate than a series of box culverts, depending on the water level in certain areas.
I believe I earlier suggested that piers would be the optimal solution. Which, of course, raises the cost of the road network significantly.
As long as we use oil at the rate we do, no place should be “off limits” as West has said.
That is the same NIMBYism as Feinstin regarding drilling off the coasts of California, or any Dems who don’t want to drill here but want to still use oil drilled in other countries.
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