I am seeing growing discussions online about how the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf would have been prevented if only energy companies focused on natural gas. It has been frustrating to me as I closely watched the drilling debate in the last couple years within the Florida Legislature, and everyone at all close to the debate was aware natural gas deposits were a big part of why people wanted submerged lands open for drilling.
As background, the Florida House in 2009 actually passed a bill which would have allowed to Cabinet to issue drilling permits within three to 10 miles of Florida's coastline. The Florida Senate refused to take the issue up without further research. At the request of Senate President Jeff Atwater, the Collins Center did an outstanding and thorough study of the matter which extended into this year's session. Lawmakers this Spring decided the drilling debate should wait until at least 2011, but the issue is pretty much off the table now for obvious reasons. I must take a moment to commend Atwater, a Republican, for single-handedly saving our coastlines from this greedy wager of our environment and economy.
Everyone should read this report if they have the time. The Collins report was issued well before the Deepwater Horizon explosion, so parts that describe the low probability of an accident can make you wince a bit. But it reveals a great deal about how the search for natural gas was truly at the heart of the drilling debate. And it also shows how that "cleaner" resource bears many of the same flaws and inherent dangers that oil drilling presents.
I have a longer exploration of this at my blog Rantings From Florida, and would love if every one of you went and read it. But I wanted to draw attention to some important figures. An excerpt of the report:
Government assessments suggest that estimates of oil and gas reserves in the Eastern Gulf of Mexico are moderate. Estimates for this region are much larger than those for Florida’s state waters, but much smaller than those for the Western and Central regions of the Gulf of Mexico. The mean estimate of 7.71 billion barrels of oil equivalents (oil plus natural gas converted into an "equivalent” amount of oil) includes 3.88 billion barrels of oil and 21.51 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.
Elsewhere in the report is shows that the process for drilling for gas is similar to that of drilling for oil, and has the same associated local risks. That includes drilling lubricants, rock cuttings and human waste being generated at the rigs. All of this is associated with natural gas as well, and there is roughly the same amount of gas in the gulf as oil. So the answer isn't to drill for gas instead. It is to use genuinely cleaner energy sources such as solar, wind and biomass.