PRESS RELEASE
Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: 7 July 2008

Contact Information:

Dave Bitts, PCFFA (707) 498-3512, dbitts [at] suddenlink.net
Zeke Grader, PCFFA: (415) 561-5080, ext. 224 zgrader [at] ifrfish.org

Halt the Drumbeat to Drilling
Fishermen’s Group Says Offshore Drilling Threatens Fish and Oceans,
Won’t Make a Dent in Oil Supplies

San Francisco, July 7 – The West Coast’s largest commercial fishermen’s organization took aim on the Bush Administration proposal to lift the 28-year old moratorium on offshore oil drilling, saying it will put the nation’s seafood resources at risk for a small amount of oil that won’t be available for a decade.

“New offshore drilling, such as the President proposes, won’t make a dent in the price at the pump, but it sure as hell could damage our fisheries,” said Zeke Grader, Executive Director for the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations (PCFFA). “Our members have experienced first hand drilling in the Santa Barbara Channel and this is not something we want expanded into pristine ocean waters and some of our nation’s best fishing grounds.”

PCFFA’s members include the Commercial Fishermen of Santa Barbara, Inc., and the Southern California Trawlers Association. It has worked for thirty years to protect fish and ocean habitats.

“The simple fact is that it will take at least a decade before any oil comes to market from new offshore leasing and that oil will go into a world market,” continued Grader. “Offshore drilling isn’t about helping consumers at the pump, it’s about the President helping his oilmen cronies who have already been making obscene profits off the backs of average citizens; it’s psycho babble from politicians looking for campaign contributions from big oil.”

The fishing group said the oil industry still hasn’t developed all of its existing leases for offshore drilling and said most of the problems that existed 30 years when fishermen fought drilling along the Central and North Coast of California, Oregon and Washington, Bristol Bay (Alaska) and offshore New England’s Geroges Bank still exist. PCFFA acknowledges advances in slant drilling may mean fewer wells, but serious problems remain for fisheries from offshore drilling. Those include:

· Seismic Testing. The sound blasts kill small foraging fish and scare other fish off making fishing difficult, if not impossible, where it occurs;
· Loss of Fishing Grounds. Fishing grounds are lost to the placement of rigs and the “safety zones” placed around rigs where fishing is prohibited. Moreover, debris left on the seafloor from offshore drilling operations can damage or destroy fishing gear;
· Chronic Small Spills. Large major oil spills from rigs (such as what occurred in 1969 in the Santa Barbara Channel) are relatively rare, however, chronic, unreported small spills are frequent that can foul fishing gear or taint the catch;
· Loss of Port Infrastructure. Offshore oil and gas operations often displace commercial fishing facilities (marinas, fish processing plants, ice houses, etc) making fishing operations difficult to conduct;
· Contamination of Fish. Fish found around oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico have high concentrations of mercury and heavy metals, making these fish, many taken by sport fishermen, questionable for consumption. Much of the contamination is associated with the drill muds and their disposal on the seafloor near the rigs,

In addition to the Santa Barbara Channel experience, PCFFA pointed to the massive wetland losses that have been sustained as a result of oil and gas development in the Gulf of Mexico. These wetlands, they say, could have helped to filter many of the nutrients that contribute to a dead zone in the Gulf as large as the State of Massachusetts.

“New drilling technologies won’t help when we’ve got the same old policies guiding offshore oil development; that is, ‘drill as much as you can as cheap as you can, the fisheries and the environment be damned’,” said Grader “Indeed, the new technologies we should be talking about are developing renewable energy sources, not looking for more fossil fuels whose greenhouse gasses are causing floods, droughts and the acidification of our oceans.”

Eureka fisherman and PCFFA President Dave Bitts said there is a disconnect between those wanting to drill for old energy sources with the need to develop renewable energy.

“We know there are bad consequences from drilling for oil and from burning it,” said Bitts.

Some scientists have pointed to the fact that developing solar energy in the California and Nevada desert could be done within the next decade to supply the nation’s total electricity needs. This, in turn, would significantly reduce the nation’s demand for petroleum while new energy sources are sought for vehicles, farm machinery and fishing vessels.

“Why drill when a massive investment now in renewable solar sources could provide the nation with a permanent energy source with risking our fisheries or environment?” asked Bitts. “Spending all this effort to go after oil offshore for a few months supply makes no sense when we could be developing permanent renewable energy in the same time frame.”

A House panel is expected to take up the Federal moratorium on offshore oil drilling as early as Tuesday, the 10th.

“We’ve already marched to the drumbeat of war for oil and that has had disastrous consequences," concluded Grader. “Let’s not march off the cliff now to this hysterical drumbeat to drill.”

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Offshore Drilling Damage Backgrounder
Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) Exploration and Development Impacts
The adverse impacts of offshore drilling begin with disruptive seismic survey airgun operations and continue with routine day-to-day toxic discharges of heavy metals and mutagenic hydrocarbon compounds into the ocean, even during normal operations. In spite of the much-touted “new technology” on the Outer Continental Shelf, chronic damage to the marine environment is still very much a part of every step of offshore drilling activities:

(1) Seismic airgun survey impacts on marine life:

The initial exploratory phase of offshore oil and gas activities involves the discharge of thousands of high-intensity blasts from powerful “airguns”, creating a strong shockwave through the ocean that pounds into the seabed. Because water is an excellent medium for the transmission of sound, seismic airgun exploration has been directly associated with mass strandings and resulting mortality of whales and other marine mammals, with decreased fish catch in the impacted region, and with permanent damage to the acoustic receptors of various fish species, and the hearing capacity of fish enables them to avoid predators, locate mates, and find prey, i.e., to survive.

(2) Routine discharges of offshore drilling wastes:

During normal drilling operations for oil or gas, drilling muds are used to cool and lubricate the drill bit. Once the useful properties of drill muds are exhausted, large volumes of spent drill muds are allowed to be discharged over the side of the drill rig directly into the ocean. Each well drilled produces, on average, 180,000 gallons of drilling mud and cuttings. Dumping of spent drill muds spreads plumes of turbidity as the “fine” particles spread throughout the water column, and the heavier components of the discharge accumulate on the seafloor to smother benthic organisms and other marine life. These discharges customarily contain toxic materials known to bioaccumulate in the ocean food chain leading to man. Of primary concern are heavy metals like mercury, chromium, barium, arsenic, cadmium, and “Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbon” compounds, or PAH’s, found to cause life-cycle mutagenic damage to eggs of Pink salmon in the years following the Exxon Valdez oil spill at levels of only two parts per billion. In addition, what are known as “produced waters”, which originate from subsea aquifers, are brought up with the oil or gas, and hundreds of thousands of gallons of produced waters are subsequently dumped into the ocean. In many geologic settings in the Gulf of Mexico and elsewhere, produced waters contain radium, and the resulting discharge is the source of a radioactive plume trailing from the rig on the ocean currents. Radium is readily taken up by marine life and bioconcentrates in the marine food web.

(3) Accidental oil spills from rigs:

In recent years, oil spills from offshore exploratory and production rigs have often resulted from equipment failure or human error, or a combination of both. Computerized equipment, not subject to constant monitoring and human oversight, has resulted in uncontrolled discharges of oil at many operations in various locations. After Hurricane Katrina, remote sensing equipment using Synthetic Aperture Radar on the “Radarsat” Canadian satellite detected extensive slicks of highly-toxic liquid natural gas consensate, a light oil, spreading throughout the Gulf of Mexico from damaged offshore natural gas drilling infrastructure at the Apache Field. Routine discharges of pollutants to ocean waters and the atmosphere are virtually identical for oil or for natural gas operations, except that every phase of gas production also releases fugitive emissions to the atmosphere from leakage from wellheads, compressors, and pipeline and processing components, and natural gas is a powerful accelerant to global climate warming. The worst case oil spill from an offshore rig was the Ixtoc I blowout incident on June 3, 1979, when a US rig operating 600 miles south of Texas lost drilling mud circulation, ran into high pressure gas, and suffered a blowout in which the oil caught fire and the platform collapsed. In the next few months, approximately 10,000 to 30,000 barrels of oil per day were discharged into the Gulf of Mexico until the blowout was finally capped the following year, on March 23, 1980. At one time during this blowout, ten percent of the surface of the Gulf of Mexico was covered with slick or sheen, and tar balls washed ashore on the beaches of Padre Island in Texas.

(4) Oil spills from pipelines and tankers transporting offshore oil:

California’s “Torch” pipeline oil spill, and Alaska’s Cook Inlet “Cross-Timbers” oil spill, represent recent examples of highly-automated subsea oil pipelines that have leaked for extensive periods of time without the source of the leaks being detected. Since any oil produced from offshore drilling operations that lie beyond existing pipeline infrastructure is inevitably transported by barge or tanker to refining centers, there is a constant risk of a tanker spill that can originate from any point in transit. In addition, massive floating offshore oil storage facilities, now being expanded in the Gulf of Mexico and planned for other regions, represent the risk of very large spills.

(5) Air pollution from offshore drilling operations:

Oil and natural gas drilling and production operations offshore generate a suite of air pollutants, including ozone, oxides of Nitrogen, and sulfur compounds. Each gas well releases 50 tons of nitrogen oxides (NOx), 13 tons of carbon monoxide, 6 tons of sulfur dioxide, and 5 tons of volatile organic carbons (VOC’s). The platforms themselves annually generate another 50 tons of NOx, 11 tons of carbon monoxide, 8 tons of sulfur dioxide, and 38 tons of VOC’s. Because drilling rigs offshore lie outside of the regulatory jurisdiction of onshore air quality management districts, coastal states generally have little authority over air emissions from the rigs. Tankering and barging also generate emissions from the transportation of produced crude oil, both as a result of the burning of vessel fuel and from fugitive hydrocarbon emissions from the loading and offloading of tankships.
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