“I need an Education on Offshore Oil Drilling” For you, myself, and for other surfers. Can any one post facts on why it is bad and good. It is a big issue thats beginning to get lots more attention. Plus I want to do an essay on the issue. Please post pictures, web links, of why offshore oil drilling is good, and bad. I think some pictures would help to persuade opinions. Thanks Gerry
Luckily, we haven’t had a bad blowout from offshore driling, this is the major probem with it.
The rigs themselves become havens for sealife, one of the Texaco or BP rigs in the north sea above Scotland lost its footing and collapsed years ago, there was a heavy loss of life from that disaster.
The Santa Barbara channel has a lot of rigs operating, there are tar blobs on the beaches, but this comes from natural oil seeps on the bottom in that area.
The chumash used this tar to seal their canoes, so it has been going on since the begining of creation.
No I don’t have a financial interest in any oil companies, like nuclear, except if it f’s up, want more solar and wind.
An engineering friend of mine was in the shaping room with me yesterday and we were discussing Bush and the 300 billion he has pumped into Iraq, he said for 300 billion the entire country could be on solar and selling surplus to Canada and Mexico.
Good topic…wrong forum
I can’t think of a single reason why it would be ‘good’
Of course sea life is attracted to the structure but who in the oil industry gives a damn about that, surely not a reason to drill for more oil. Maybe a reason to dump the oil rig in the sea when they’re done. They sunk lot’s of military equipment in Dubai to make a ‘divers paradise’.
in short - oil is bad and we certainly shouldn’t be drilling in pristine environments like the Arctic and Antarctic.
GREAT topic - wrong forum…
I hear the ‘oilyness’ makes surfboards more slippery, causing unecessary wipeouts.
I think I can speak for everyone that more wipeouts are bad.
Hey wait a minute! What’s that senile old fart McCain doing here?
Where should this forum be? Maybe there should be a Politics forum. “Ah politics…” But really- lets work this.
I as a surfer and boardbuilder really want to learn as much as I can about offshore oil drilling, because right now I do not know much about the issue. It is really important to me how can I defend the topic to my friends and co-workers who never see the ocean from the shore line, all they see is television and internet. They are leaning to offshore oil drilling as a major solution, but in reality its not. I need to tell them, “We need to start using solar panels and catching the wind”.
having worked on an offshore rig back in the day i can tell you they are very strict and diligent about making sure things don’t go wrong and that nothing gets spilled or toss overboard into the ocean as the fines ,etc. are heavy.i do agree we need to look to other sources of cleaner energy for sure…
Just remember that thermoplastics and foam are oil based products, the two major ingredients in a surfboard. So is the case of your computer and the keyboard that you type with. Just about everything in your day to day life is completely dependent on oil. Ive never seen a solar panel or a wind farm produce the raw materials to make thermoplastics and foam.
apparently you watched the Saddleback discussion last night.
I love it when television gets my blood pressure up.
we send billions of dollars to “countries that don’t like us very much” because we don’t
have the means, no matter the pipe dream du jour, to support a 90m barrel a day
habit via domestic production (and that’s not even considering the limitations in
refinement we face).
you’ve got…MAYBE…90b of oil available offshore by some counts, this is a little
shy of 3 years’ worth of oil…not quite the panacea some would claim it is.
plus, it’s a global commodity, Exxon doesn’t sell oil cheaper to Americans than it
would to an Indian or a Chinese buyer…so we’re ultimately at the mercy of the
global supply and demand curve for oil…which doesn’t appear to be getting
any better.
Quote:
apparently you watched the Saddleback discussion last night.I love it when television gets my blood pressure up.
we send billions of dollars to “countries that don’t like us very much” because we don’t
have the means, no matter the pipe dream du jour, to support a 90m barrel a day
habit via domestic production (and that’s not even considering the limitations in
refinement we face).
you’ve got…MAYBE…90b of oil available offshore by some counts, this is a little
shy of 3 years’ worth of oil…not quite the panacea some would claim it is.
plus, it’s a global commodity, Exxon doesn’t sell oil cheaper to Americans than it
would to an Indian or a Chinese buyer…so we’re ultimately at the mercy of the
global supply and demand curve for oil…which doesn’t appear to be getting
any better.
those figures are way off, having an off day?
your confusing world oil consumption with US consumption,
and I stopped checking there.
Anyhow this topic is very political and I dont help people write essays and/or who look for help in innapropriate places. Research and produce your own essay. This has nothing to do with Swaylocks.
you are correct.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/basics/quickoil.html
20m barrels of oil a day.
it still stands that there’s a tremendous amount of lead time before any
of that new product hits the market affecting prices and it’s still a drop
in the bucket overall.
So to answer some peoples question on why I posted today on Swaylocks:
Its because I care. Surfers are the first people to notice dramatic changes in the environment. Not everyone is a scientist; yet in simple terms-, we surfers know good water and bad water. Surfers are always testing the water, and we see change. I would hate to go out and see my beach flooded with oil-, “Wait is that normal?” Then it is not about writing an Essay- (Otis), its about us learning from one another- and moving forward and helping one another. I feel Swaylocks helps me build surfboards and through Swaylocks we can also help educate one another.
Being a surfer does not stop once I get out of the water. I want to be able to share what I know, and if its good I want others to know. So far I like what I see … good and bad.
So please post-, help educate.
Wisdom is nothing if it is not shared.
We all have our cares and passions…
This discussion forum is simple, a Surfboard Design Forum…
Expanding that very specific scope of topics could be a slippery slope of what makes Swaylock’s as unique as it is…
Mike Paler (Swaylock) has the ability to create dozens of different specific topic forums, but has made a deliberate decision not to expand those existing forums to be anything other than Surfboard Design related…Perhaps if you want to change that, e-mail Mike…
I agree there should be a forum for these topics and there are…Some wide open discussion forums even have the words “surf” in their names where anything goes…Lot’s of the fine folks who post here, post there…
Perhaps you could Google “Education on Offshore Oil Drilling” and you’d have more than enough info to do an essay…
Again, Swaylock’s is a Surfboard Design Forum…
Hi there - this subject makes me and a lot of us bubble!
Without Oil: no wetsuit, board, traction pad, wax, fins, god you name it everything, even my kayak to get to the surf.
Without gas: I wouldn’t be typing on this forum…
That’s why I decided to join the dark side…and do something about it!
As a kid I grew up surfing shitty polluted waves in Holland. Traveling to France, Spain, Portugal and Maroc for some proper waves, I was always confronted with tar between my toes and on my deck, so I decided to become an Environmental Engineer in the oil and gas industry. Since 1996 I’ve been working for both oil companies as well as drilling and construction contractors to make sure they clean up their act.
Yes, I had to lie along the way, but overall awareness is growing and the environment is seriously considered in business decisions. Currently I work on oil and gas developments here in Western Australia. Another pristine canvas going down the drain…in a lot of ways not just oil and gas related…
The main thing that prevents oil companies from doing better is government not quickly making up their mind about the big issues such as greenhouse gas and the status of protected areas/species. Time and time again the oil companies seem to get away on the big issues, while there is only focus on marginal issues.
I have been involved in development projects all over the world and on all of them the level of impact is/was heavily validated. The final result for the environment lies in the hands of the local community and government. If we as users and owners of the environment not speak out nothing will change. So as a group of environment and product users I think this is a good forum for this subject. Maybe worth a separate heading, cause I can’t stop typing…
If you want to see an industry presentation on oil drilling have a look at this site: http://iadc.org/presentation/Offshore%20drilling.html
A great example of where the operator is pushed to the limit of environmental performance is the Shell Corrib project in the NW of Ireland. I was involved on the project over 6 years ago and still construction is under heavy fire of the local community.
For the environment user opinion see the stakeholder site: http://www.corribsos.com/
For the operator opinion see http://www.shell.com
Cheers,
Martijn
Reguarding surf board design and related topics often talked about here on swaylocks we might ask the board builder/riders in the oil drilling areas like Santa Barbara, the Gulf Coast, parts of Los Angeles what they think about the beach/water conditions around the oil drilling zones, I don’t like it, tar all over the place, spills every so often, oily smell to the region sometimes. Any one else?
The word when I lived in sb was a) that the tar was “all natural” and therefore “all good”, or b) the evil oil companies are killing us in the name of profit…Having had a friend who worked on a rig (and who’s dad was a big Chevron exec) tell me that they spill all the time and don’t report and also having flown over and seen the big rainbow sheen emanating from the rigs, my guess is that yes, they spill all the time. The question is, do we care if it is more environmentally (on the macro scale) “correct” to do it in our backyard, as opposed to in the middle east until we get off our dino-goo habit and get some new energy sources…The quote above about investment in Iraq vs. investment in alternative energy is a good one, but (unfortunately) 20/20 hindsight at this point. This needs to be taken up on another website, though the questions about energy/enviro cost/benefits and new materials here on Sways, as they regard surfboards, are great!
I used to work on support vessels for offshore oil and natural gas rigs doing resupply and towing. Personally I’m a big proponent of weening ourselves off of our oil dependance due to the extreamly negative effects on the environment at all levels of its production and use cycle.
That being said, I was surprised at how little actual spillage occured around the rigs, I did some birds that had been covered in oil but very few, I think i witnessed more glycol being spilled than anything. the water around the rigs was always surprisingly clean. I think it has far less noticable environmental impact than land based extraction, especially from projects like the Alberta tar sands. Seismic research for potential sites however is probably hugely damaging to marine life, particularly marine mammals, as it uses very powerful sonar to map the bottom.
from a safety perspective look up the ocean ranger disaster, happened in the early 80’s off of Newfoundland, large loss of human life. I believe there was a rig off Brazil which went down about 10-15 years ago as well. far more people died in these incidents than at the 3 mile island? nuclear accident.
cheers
From 7/29/2008 Web page- http://www.gov.ca.gov/index.php?/videoblog/10316/ West Coast Ocean Action Plan
Brian Baird
Assistant Secretary
California Resources Agency
Today Governor Schwarzenegger joined governors Kulongoski from Oregon and Gregoire from Washington State to release an Action Plan for the entire West Coast of the states of California, Oregon and Washington. Today they started looking at what's happening off this entire area, which is covered by the California current. They looked at how they're going to work together on dealing with water quality, opposing offshore oil and gas development, dealing with invasive species that have invaded our estuaries and affected our economy, and a number of other very important aspects. This is very exciting, and this has been hailed by the U.S. Joint Ocean Commission, which is chaired by Leon Panetta and Admiral James Watkins in Washington D.C. Also, environmental groups throughout the three states have lauded the agreement, as well as our partners with the federal government. So this is a very, very important, historic day for the state of California in bringing three governors together to try to deal with saving California's, Oregon's and Washington's coastlines.
And a little more:
August 11, 2008
By Jerry Brown California’s Attorney General
http://online.wsj.com/article_print/SB121841566182528579.html