offshore drilling — VOICES for REASON

As Americans ponder how to react to the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, with many calling for massive restrictions on oil drilling, it’s important to know the story of the Santa Barbara oil spill of 1969–and the disastrous American reaction to it.

Daniel Yergin summarizes the spill and the ensuing outcry in The Prize:

in January 1969, the drilling of an offshore well in the Santa Barbara channel encountered an unexpected geological anomaly, and as a result, an estimated six thousand barrels of oil seeped out of an uncharted fissure and bubbled to the surface. A gooey slick of heavy crude oil flowed unchecked into the coastal waters and washed up on thirty miles of beaches. The public outcry was nationwide and reached right across the political spectrum. The Nixon Administration imposed a moratorium on California offshore development, in effect shutting it down.

The Santa Barbara outcry and ensuing restrictions on drilling started right before the 1970s…which turned out to be one of the most traumatic decades energy-wise in recent history. The decade was notable for scarce energy, the OPEC oil embargo of 1973, gasoline shortages, and the belief that energy would never again become abundant and affordable. But underlying all that were the post-Santa Barbara domestic restrictions on energy development, particularly offshore drilling. American companies had had plans to develop plentiful oil reserves in Alaska and off the coast of California, reserves that would greatly increase our flexibility in a then-volatile international oil market, but an oil spill in Santa Barbara changed all that.

Yergin writes:

However great the need for oil, the leak increased opposition to energy development in other environmentally sensitive areas, including the most promising area in all of North America, the one most likely to stem the decline in American production….Alaska.

Today, we face a similar situation. An offshore oil spill–a very unfortunate, very rare, but still inevitable part of offshore drilling–is empowering the forces who are against offshore drilling, period, even though such drilling is a means to a resource indispensable to our standard of living.

And to learn the story of the 1970s in detail, I refer you to Part 3 of my course on the history of oil, “The Triumph and Tragedy of the Oil Industry,” available here. (The story begins around the 14 minute mark and ends just after the 29 minute mark.)

Image: Wikimedia Commons