Should California Turn Its Oil Rigs Into Reefs?

Oil has been in the news a lot lately; the war in Ukraine drove a spike in already-high gas prices, prompting calls for increased domestic drilling amid accusations of price gouging. ExxonMobil recently proposed restarting oil production at its California offshore platforms that were shut down after a 2015 oil spill; the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors denied the request.

California is the 7th largest oil producer in the US but environmental advocates are trying to limit oil drilling in the state. The Elly platform oil spill last October off of Huntington Beach injected new momentum into the effort to decommission the 27 oil platforms that currently dot the Southern California coast.

Following the spill, in January 2021, President Biden issued a temporary moratorium on new federal offshore oil and gas leases. Senator Diane Feinstein (CA-D) has introduced the West Coast Ocean Protection Actwhich would make Biden’s executive order permanent for the West Coast but would not phase out existing oil leases. In May, State Senator Dave Min’s legislation to terminate leases at the state’s four offshore oil platforms died in the Budget Appropriations Committee amid concerns that the high costs of buying out leases and decommissioning rigs would fall on taxpayers. Despite the setback, advocates continue to call for an end to offshore drilling.

Decommissioning offshore oil platforms involves capping the wells and safely shutting them down, an arduous, expensive and time-consuming process. Many of the platforms are in deep water, sometimes as deep as 1200 feet, with immense underwater infrastructure, some with 30 wells or more.

All of California’s 27 platforms are at least 30 years old and many are 60 years old, or older, which environmentalists say increases the urgent need to shut them down.

"Offshore oil and gas drilling is inherently dangerous," said Kristen Monsell, Oceans Program Litigation Director for the non-profit Center for Biological Diversity. "That's particularly true for drilling off California because of how old all the infrastructure is. It's well past the expected lifetime for the vast majority of platforms and pipelines, and it’s past the age that scientists say significantly increases the risk of an oil spill."

Rigs as a Haven for Marine Life

Although the environmental community is united around the importance of stopping drilling off the coast, what should happen to the oil platforms after decommissioning remains controversial. Some argue that oil companies should be responsible for fully removing the platforms. But California’s offshore oil rigs have become encrusted from bottom to top with all varieties of sea life and now act as inadvertent reefs. In a state where so much coastal marine habitat has been lost to development and other human activity, some argue that these reefs provide a necessary function in a damaged and depleted marine environment.

Rising from the sea bed up through the water column, oil rig structures are laced with corals, mussels and sea anemones. They also support thriving fish communities, especially for species like rockfish, whose habitats have greatly diminished in recent decades. Fish spawn within the structures, which protect juveniles from predators. And oil platforms are often far enough from shore to be safe from fishing and coastal runoff.

"Decades of scientific research really makes the case that these structures are functioning as essential fish habitat; fish are spawning, breeding and growing to maturity within these ecosystems," said Amber Sparks, Co-President of the non-profit Blue Latitudes Foundation. "They are adding value and compensating for some of the nearshore habitat loss that we see."

Leaving decommissioned oil platforms in the ocean as man-made reefs is not a novel concept. In the Gulf of Mexico, off the shores of Texas and Louisiana, over 500 decommissioned oil rigs now function as artificial reefs.

In 2010 California passed Assembly Bill 2503 which provides a path for "reefing" decommissioned oil platforms. Supporters of the bill hoped it would promote the early decommissioning of oil platforms but to date, no oil companies have taken advantage of the law. With AB 2503, oil companies could theorectically save money on the decommissioning process by getting exempted from full removal of the platform.

Sparks suggested that the state legislation’s ambiguity around who would be responsible for maintaining the reefed oil platforms prevents companies from following the reefing path. The law doesn’t release oil companies from liability for the platforms after the oil wells have been capped, unlike in the Gulf of Mexico, where decommissioned, reefed platforms become the responsibility of individual states. Perhaps the biggest issue, however, is one of public perception.

"One of the big reasons that reefing is so successful in the Gulf of Mexico is there are hundreds of offshore platforms in the Gulf so there's a lot of familiarity with this program," said Emily Hazelwood, Co-President at Blue Latitudes. "People know what great fishery habitat reefed oil platforms provide and more often than not fishermen get upset when they're removed, rather than the opposite."

Hazelwood noted that by contrast California has only 27 platforms and few people outside of divers or marine scientists are aware of how extensive the reef structures are.

Remove Old Oil Rigs or Keep Them in Place?

There are three possible outcomes when it comes to the final disposition of decommissioned oil platforms.

Complete removal means that oil companies remove the structure in its entirety.

Partial removal typically involves taking out the top 85 feet of a platform to eliminate any obstacle to navigation and satisfy Coastguard regulations. This leaves the majority of the rig’s marine ecosystem in place, but some advocate for leaving the entire platform since shellfish, like mussels, attach to the tops of the rigs, and birds and marine mammals, like sea lions, use platforms for rest or nesting. Keeping the rigs intact also allows fishermen and divers to easily find them and helps others spot potential navigation hazards.

Those in favor of preserving the platforms as reefs argue that destroying these marine habitats would hurt an already stressed marine environment. There’s also concern that dismantling and disposing of these massive structures, possibly in landfills overseas, would be a carbon-intensive process with additional pollution impacts. However, other environmental groups feel that the oil companies should be forced to remove oil platforms in their entirety and return the ocean floor to its previous state.

"We certainly don't think that the oil platforms should be left in place," said Pete Stauffer, Ocean Protection Manager for the non-profit Surfrider Foundation. "They are a hazard that needs to be dealt with and our default position would probably be to support full removal."

Environmental groups who oppose reefing see it as a way for oil companies to skip out on their full contractual responsibilities.

"Leaving oil infrastructure in place is just another way for the oil industry to get out of their duty to clean up the mess that they made," said Monsell. "We have to do what's best for the environment. We're in the climate emergency because we've allowed the oil industry to dictate policies, regulations and the status quo for far too long."

The Future for Rigs

California has a troubled history with offshore oil drilling that started with the disastrous Santa Barbara oil spill of 1969. Despite a history of oil spills, a poll taken after the recent Huntington Beach spill showed that public opinion is currently split, with only 45% of Californians believing that offshore drilling should be banned.

Of the four offshore oil platforms in California State waters only one, Platform Holly, is currently being decommissioned. The process will provide a test case for the timeline and cost of decommissioning other oil platforms. The California State Lands Commission is overseeing the multi-year process and conducting the feasibility study as well as the California Environmental Quality Act analysis. These studies will evaluate different plans ranging from full platform removal to leaving the entire structure in place. Once the analyses are finished the different options, which will compare costs as well as environmental impacts, will be presented to the public for input.

"Virtually our whole strategy and approach for the feasibility study and the CEQA analysis is founded on community engagement and stakeholder input," said Jennifer Lucchesi, Executive Officer of the California State Lands Commission. "So, we're really hungry for the public to tell us what they want to see out there and what concerns them, and what factors they think should be prioritized in any decision making."

If Platform Holly is left in place, either partially or in its entirety, it could serve as a proof of concept for reefing oil platforms and could help inform decisions about what to do with California’s other platforms. However, California supporters of rigs-to-reefs point out that to truly actualize the idea, the 2010 legislation AB 2503 would need to be revised and more state funding would need to be made available. In 1985, the California legislature created an artificial reefing program through the Department of Fish and Wildlife to address the decline of marine species; while that program still exists it no longer receives funding.

"Right now, in my opinion, the only path forward would be to revise AB 2503, to assign liability for the platform to the state, and provide the Department of Fish and Wildlife with the funding to reenact their artificial reefing program, as well as develop a rigs-to-reef specific arm that would house these kinds of projects," said Sparks. "Either that needs to happen, or the platforms need to be removed."