Weather | Sports | Forums | Comics | Classifieds | Calendar | Movies
WASHINGTON - With oil prices nearing $60 a barrel, the good will toward Florida finally ran dry.
After agreeing last week to maintain the existing moratorium on oil and gas drilling off Florida's shores, the U.S. Senate on Tuesday moved forward with conducting an inventory of energy reserves in all U.S. waters, including the eastern Gulf of Mexico.
By a vote of 52-44, the Senate rejected an amendment sponsored by Florida's senators that would have deleted the inventory from the comprehensive energy bill now moving through the Senate.
The energy bill still must pass, and the Senate will have to reconcile its version with the House energy bill, which doesn't include the offshore inventory. But Tuesday's decision to mandate government-sponsored seismic testing for gas and oil reserves marked a historic victory for the petroleum industry and its backers in Congress, who have been pushing for an extensive inventory for at least 20 years.
Environmentalists and the senators who oppose the inventory say it is a thinly-veiled precursor to drilling in waters that are now off limits. They also point to studies showing that seismic testing - blasting the sea floor with sound waves, to find geological formations indicative of pockets of gas and oil - harms marine life.
"Why would we inventory an area where we are never going to drill?" said Sen. Mel Martinez, R-Fla., who with Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., led the opposition. "The inventory is a huge problem for Florida. It tantalizes pro-drilling interests. It's like saying to pro-drilling states, "Come and get it.' "
The emotional debate, which began Monday night, defied party lines and pitted senators from coastal states against senators from oil states. Twenty-seven of the 44 votes against the inventory came from senators whose states are covered by an offshore drilling moratorium until 2012. If it passes, the inventory would begin within six months after the bill is signed into law. It would map all waters within 200 nautical miles of the nation's Atlantic, Pacific and Gulf coasts.
Nelson said the inventory isn't worth the environmental or taxpayer costs, which could approach $1-billion.
Tuesday's vote "tells me there are a lot of senators who don't have a coastal state who aren't listening to the arguments, and don't understand the issue," Nelson said afterward. "They're making this argument at a time that oil is approaching 60 bucks a barrel. Drilling in the gulf isn't going to help."
Nelson and Martinez were joined by senators from North Carolina, California, New Jersey and several other coastal states. But after preserving the moratorium on drilling off Florida's shores last week, other senators were less sympathetic to Nelson's and Martinez's plea.
Nelson also had angered several colleagues by threatening to filibuster the energy bill unless the moratorium was preserved. With rising gas prices and unrest in the Middle East, senators say they're under increased pressure from voters to boost domestic energy production.
"We have a crisis. Jobs are moving oversees. Why do we not want to know how much natural gas we have?" Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., said during debate.
The inventory's primary advocates were Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, and Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., whose state has thousands of drilling rigs off its gulf shores.
If the nation finds itself in a security or economic emergency, "we most certainly would like to know what's there, so we can make good decisions," Landrieu said. "The people of the United States . . . depend on us, us right here, to give them good information about their country, about their land, about their water, about their oceans, about their resources . . . not to hide things from them."
The National Ocean Industries Association, which represents the offshore drilling industry, lauded Tuesday's vote, noting it has been 30 years since any serious attempt to catalog fuel reserves. Although the government conducts assessments every five years, they're not extensive, and new three-dimensional seismic testing could "allow future public policy to be crafted on the basis of accurate scientific data," the association said in a statement.
The association also countered the argument by environmentalists that the testing is harmful to wildlife, citing an Interior Department study that found seismic surveys have "no significant impact."
The International Whaling Commission and other marine research groups have raised concerns about how seismic testing affects fish and marine mammals, especially after whale beachings in the Caribbean and Pacific following such tests.
Andrew Wetzler, who studies the effects of undersea noise for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said several studies have found that testing drives marine life away and disrupts feeding and migration patterns. Commercial fishing catch rates drop temporarily after testing, he said.
"The sounds they produce are incredibly intense," he said. "They're some of the loudest sounds people make. And they're traveling through an environment where almost everything depends on their hearing to live."
Congress has been trying to pass similar legislation since the 1980s, but it always failed because opponents say it's the first step toward drilling in areas that long have been protected.
The eastern gulf is also used for Navy and Air Force training from several Florida bases, and Nelson and Martinez said seismic testing could interfere with that, too.
With a final vote on the energy bill expected late this week, Florida's senators and their allies haven't abandoned all hope. Both are asking the Senate leadership to exempt Florida from the inventory, but they acknowledge that's unlikely. There's also a chance the bill won't pass, because many senators say it doesn't provide enough incentives for developing alternative energy sources and increasing conservation.
If it does pass, they hope to seek a compromise on the inventory when House and Senate negotiators meet to reconcile the differences in their energy bills later this summer.
Sen. George Allen, R-Va., voted for the inventory, but said he supports allowing states like Florida, North Carolina and New Jersey to opt out if they like. Such a compromise may persuade House leaders to include an inventory of waters off willing states, like Virginia's, in the final version of the energy bill, Allen said.
"It's a logical compromise," he said. "No matter what's out there, it doesn't matter since they aren't going to drill" off their coasts.
Nelson was less optimistic. Tuesday morning, just after the vote, he said he heard Domenici, who is driving the energy bill, tell Landrieu that "we will keep this provision in" the final bill.
"When I hear Sen. Domenici say that, I think that pretty well seals the deal," Nelson said.