Gov. Bob McDonnell may be dancing for joy, if not perhaps for feeling a little upstaged, by President Barack Obama’s reversal of a stand against drilling for oil offshore of Virginia.
Exploration could begin in 2012 for a Delaware-sized area of 2.9 million acres about 50 miles off of Cape Charles. The plan is for seismographic studies of possible reserves of oil and natural gas that so far have eluded the oil patch and who, surprisingly, did not dance the McDonnell jig when they heard Obama’s news.
Of course, Obama is playing politics. By feigning to the GOP, he is trying to get their support for some new version of global warming legislation that very well could see the controversial cap and trade market system dumped. McDonnell gets to crow about Virginia as the “Energy Capital of the East Coast” — whatever that is supposed to mean.
But there are very real concerns about drilling off of Virginia and they all don’t have to with some limp-wristed tree or whale-hugger. They very well could force Virginia (and maybe McDonnell) into some hard choices about what kind of economic development the state really wants.
One of the key industry that would be negatively impacted is Virginia’s fledgling space sector. NASA, the Navy and Air Force use the Wallops Flight Facility on the Eastern shore industry for basic science and military research. Plans are to develop Wallops into a commercial space port that could serve as an alternate to Cape Kennedy or Edwards Air Force Base.
McDonnell out to know this because his party is pushing the space industry hard. Fellow Republican Terry Kilgore pushed legislation in this General Assembly to change insurance requirements at Wallops Island to make it easier for commercial launches.
NASA Is not happy with the idea of oil rigs popping up off the coast. “That area is right in the middle of our launch range,” a Wallops spokesman was quoted as say in a Newport News Daily Press article.
The Navy is another issue. The Norfolk-based Atlantic Fleet uses a part of the offshore area for live-fire exercises since it is close to home. Joe Bouchard, former commanding office of the Norfolk Naval Station, has testified that drilling “would have a serious negative impact on U.S.national security” and that the economic benefits appear exaggerated.
Reaction a little further up the coast (the Obama drill zone stops off Delaware) is likewise sour. New Jersey politicians are skittish because an oil spill could hurt the state’s fishing industry famous for scallops not to mention beach resorts.
Let’s just say there is significant oil off the coast and the Old Dominion becomes an “Energy Capital” as McDonnell says. Well, that’s no piece of cake because you are talking about putting in piers, pipelines, transfer units, oil liter transshipment barges and perhaps new refineries around the Chesapeake Bay which is already largely dead thanks to pollution. The state still has a sizable watermen’s industry for crabs and fish which would be highly sensitive to the new industrial activity. Oysters are only beginning to make a comeback after decades of abuse. How would they fare in a new oily world?
But the big unanswered question is “Where is the oil industry?” Part of my work involves tracking it and believe me, if there’s oil, they are not exactly shy. I recently dealt with Chevron which has been busy developing on of the world’s Top 10 fields in Kazakhstan and is expanding both its work and its pipelines there at a cost of billions.
They and other firms are very active in ultra-deep water in the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska remains a huge interest. So why are they willing to pump in billions after billions in water more than a mile deep when the Continental Shelf off Virginia is relatively shallow and would present much less cost.
Could it be that there’s isn’t all that much oil there? If there were, wouldn’t Big Oil have nabbed it already. Meanwhile, Virginia had better think about what it might be giving up to follow one ambitious governor’s dream.
Peter Galuszka
