Anyone
who has ever lived in the Ventura County area and walked barefoot on
the beach has probably at some point felt something sticky on his or
her foot and found a black substance commonly kno wn as “tar” on his or
her sole.

This “tar” is actually a globule of crude oil,
probably emitted from the Coal Oil Point area north of Santa Barbara
near UCSB, which according to peer-reviewed geographical surveys, is
one of the most active oil seeps on the planet.

Since the Coal
Oil Point oil seep in the Santa Barbara Channel emits over 4,000
gallons of crude oil a day, and has been doing so for at least half a
million years, one would think these seeps would be uncontroversial.

Not
so. Both sides of the environmental debate over oil in our area point
fingers at the other over what these seeps mean for California’s
central coast.

Paul Jenkin, of Surfrider and the Matilija
Coalition, an environmentalist, admitted that, “There are a lot of
natural oil seeps in the Santa Barbara channel, but still, a certain
percentage of the oil that ends up on our beaches could be from leaks
from the oil platforms. I wouldn’t put it past the oil companies to use
the natural seeps as a cover.”
A 2003 study by the U.S. Geological
Survey, funded by a California state agency, used biochemical
“fingerprinting” techniques to trace the tar balls found on California
beaches. Most came from the Coal Oil Point area, but the survey noted
that some of the oil on the beaches could not be distinguished from the
oil being pumped out of geological reservoirs at two oil rig platforms,
one of which was the notorious Platform A, the source of a massive oil
spill off Southern California in l969.

On the other side of the
debate over oil drilling, Bob Poole, who represents oil companies for a
coalition called the Western States Petroleum Association, refers
questions to a Web site called Stop Oil Seeps California, which
publicizes the extent of the natural oil seeps, and as a solution calls
for lifting the moratorium on oil drilling offshore.

According
to a plan being proposed by SOS California, “New California offshore
oil and gas revenues can pay for California’s conversion to solar and
renewable electricity and electric/plug-in vehicles and reductions in
taxes for all Californians.”
For pro-industry partisans, the
existence of natural oil seeps can justify big claims. Last September
15, during the “drill baby drill” brouhaha over offshore oil drilling,
a Fox News broadcaster named Trace Gallagher declared on national
television that “more oil seeps through the ground off the coast of
California than is ever spilled out there.”

According to Ira
Leifer, who runs an institute at UC Santa Barbara called Bubbleology
that publishes scientific studies on the seeps, this is partly true,
but only if you ignore the element of time.

“The Coal Oil Point
seeps produce the equivalent of one Exxon Valdez every three years,” he
said. “But there’s a vast difference between drinking a glass of vodka
every night and drinking a year’s worth of vodka in one night.”

The
infamous 1969 oil disaster at Platform A off the Santa Barbara coast
released about 100,000 barrels of oil — roughly 4 million gallons — in
just 12 days. The oil came ashore in a thick layer along our central
coast, fouling beaches from Rincon Point to Goleta, and killing seals,
birds, otters, whales and other forms of sea life by the thousands. The
disaster inspired national revulsion and resulted in legislative action
that led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency in
Washington, and the Coastal Commission in California, which in turn led
to much tighter regulation of the oil industry.

THE DISASTER of PLATFORM A: COULD IT HAPPEN AGAIN?

Could such an offshore drilling accident happen again on our coast?

Both environmental advocates and industry experts doubt it, although they differ on what that means.

Ike
Ikerd, who leads a small fleet of vessels charged with cleaning up any
oil spills, said in an interview in his Carpinteria office that “The
people I talk to who work on the rigs tell me that because the
reservoirs have been drawn down and aren’t under a lot of pressure
today, if something goes wrong, water rushes in and closes the well.
The problem is not oil getting out, but water getting in.”

Rishi Tyagi, chief inspector for the Pacific Region of the federal government’s Minerals Management Service, agreed.

 “Pressures
have been depleted,” he said. “Today, the remaining reserves in the
Channel require gas lifts or other secondary measures just to be
pumped. The operations are also designed to fail inward, if they do
fail, and they are inspected by our office frequently, at the platform
level and undersea.”

“There is still risk,” said Linda Krop, lead
counsel at the Environmental Defense Center. “I would agree that in
terms of potential volume of spilled oil, there is a greater risk from
a tanker accident than from an industrial well accident, but there is
still risk across the board.”

“There have been technological
advances in undersea drilling since l969,” said Kira Redmond, who works
for the Santa Barbara Channelkeeper environmental group. “But
technology cannot prevent human error, and the industry uses new
technology as an excuse to argue for new installations, such as a
massive liquid natural gas facility off our coast. The Santa Barbara
Channel is incredibly diverse biologically, part of a national marine
sanctuary, and a whale migration route. I don’t think most people want
to put that at risk.”

OFFSHORE DRILLING : EVEN ENVIRONMENTALISTS DISAGREE ABOUT IT

For
decades, Ventura County welcomed oil production on shore, as documented
in a l996 study for the Department of the Interior by UCSB graduate
student Krista Pearson and three co-authors. But since the 1969
disaster, fierce local and state opposition to offshore oil drilling
has prevented any new offshore construction off the California coast.

Even
an attempt by the Environmental Defense Center to broker a compromise
to allow an oil rig to slant-drill deeper into the Tranquillon Ridge
area near Goleta ran afoul of opposition, not from local
environmentalists, but from elected officials at the state level.

 “This
was a project for Santa Barbara County where a company called PXP was
going to slant-drill from existing facilities deeper into the
Tranquillon Ridge Field,” said Linda Krop, lead attorney with the
Environmental Defense Center.

“Originally, we objected because
that would extend the life of the platform. But PXP came back to us and
asked: What if we agreed to shut down this platform early, and three
other platforms as well, in return for the right to drill deeper?”

After
years of highly detailed negotiations, Santa Barbara authorities
approved the deal between the environmental group and the oil company.
The agreement was vetted and endorsed by Democratic Congresswoman Lois
Capps, but killed in a 2-to-1 vote last month by the State Lands
Commission, with Democrat John Garamendi casting the deciding vote.

“A
concern that I have is the possibility that those who want to see
drilling off the coast of California would use this lease as a signal
that California is interested and willing to accept more drilling in
federal waters and more leases in federal waters,” he said at the
time..

 “We’re disappointed,” said Krop. “This was an
incredible opportunity to shut down existing platforms, which has never
been done in this region. We had support from business, labor and
environmental groups, but sometimes people from outside the area just
don’t understand that these platforms aren’t going to go away on their
own.”

 “Whenever we talk about offshore oil drilling it becomes
a contentious issue,” said John Romero of the Minerals Management
Service (MMS) of the Department of the Interior. “The l969 oil spill is
still with us emotionally.”

THE OIL ONSHORE

The
emotional scars from the l969 spill remain in the collective memory of
Ventura County residents, but the county has had a much longer history
with onshore oil production, which has also left physical scars on the
land, many of which have not healed.

The two oil basins under
the Ventura Avenue area became the nation’s 12th most productive oil
field in its heyday in the l950s, according to an MMS study, producing
up to 20 million barrels of oil annually. The field still holds over a
billion barrels of oil, according to a 1991 state estimate. Today,
hundreds of wells in the Ventura Avenue area operated by Aera Energy (a
consortium formed by Shell and Exxon) pump about 4.4 million barrels of
oil a year.

“It’s an active field,” said Susan Hersberger, a
spokeswoman for Aera. “We are the largest onshore oil producer in
Ventura County, and we are pursuing new technologies that will continue
to allow us to continue to extract oil from the area.”

According
to Pat Richards, who handles permits for the oil industry filed with
the County of Ventura, Aera and other producers have found in recent
years that it makes more sense to redrill on existing properties than
it does to retrofit old wells, or to search for new oil deposits.

 “You
know how, when you get down to the bottom of a cereal bowl, you want to
tip the bowl to get the last part of your milk out?” he asked. “That’s
what these guys are doing, except they’re doing it with waterflooding
technology, where they take underground water and inject it on one side
of the field to raise the level and force the hydrocarbons up to a
level where they can get at it on the other side.”

Jim Monahan, a
Ventura city councilman, and a man with long experience in the oil
industry as a pipeline contractor, said in a phone interview that Aera
has redrilled six wells in the last couple of years in the Ventura
Avenue area. Richards believes the number is higher, but he stresses
that even though the wells are being drilled under existing permits,
they are regulated.

 “You need a permit for everything these
days,” he said. “But I find that with the newer oil companies, they’re
much more environmentally conscious, much more willing to provide
reports and evidence of their activities than the older companies were.
I think they recognize that there have to be checks and balances on
what they do.”

Not all oil producers have been so responsive.
Ben Pitterle, who monitors local watersheds for the ChannelKeeper
environmental group, was driving past Soilmar Beach a couple of years
ago and saw a huge discharge into the ocean from a nearby canyon. He
documented the damage from a nearby oil site with pictures, which he
sent to the State Water Quality Control Board. In October 2007 they
found Vintage Petroleum of Oxnard in violation of its permit, and asked
the company to submit a new plan for pollution prevention. Vintage did
ultimately file a new plan, said Alix Alimohammadi of the state agency,
and agreed to institute “best management practices” changes to reduce
pollutants from the site, thus avoiding a $10,000 a day fine.

Although
Pitterle remains skeptical that the oil industry has changed, in the
early days of the oil industry in Ventura County, no provision was made
for decommissioning inactive oil wells. In recent years, the County
deferred to a state office, the Department of Oil, Gas and Geothermal
Resources, which didn’t always assume responsibility for cleanup
efforts. Steve Fields at the local office says that in the last couple
of years, the state has worked with local producers to remove nearly
150 old tanks in the Ventura Avenue area.

PETROCHEM : Will It Ever Be Cleaned Up?

A
sore spot with many observers of the Ventura County oil industry is the
shuttered Petrochem site not far from the Ventura River. Petrochem was
once a small oil refinery, but it’s been out of business for decades,
and an eyesore to boot.

Jenkin of Surfrider, who has been monitoring water quality in the Ventura River for years, describes it as “a horror.”

The
County collects a fee from oil firms to fund cleanup efforts, but the
figure has been fixed at a total of $10,000 for decades, according to
Nancy Settle, who runs the Planning Department. The Tax Collector
reports that the largest parcel on the Petrochem site is valued at
$711,000, and its property taxes are being paid, but no one at the
County expects changes any time soon.

 “It’s been for sale for
as long as I can remember,” said Richards. “And anyone who bought it
would have to bring it up to code.”

The city hopes in time to
turn the Ventura River into a parkway. Perhaps someday the Petrochem
site will be green and verdant instead of old and rusting. But until
that day, like the oil industry in Ventura County, it’s likely to
remain a powerful reminder of the county’s industrial past and the vast
pool of oil that remains more than 12,000 feet below Ventura Avenue.