Should California's offshore oil platforms become reefs? Many say yes, but state law lags.

Usually bitter rivals, the oil industry and conservationists have found rare agreement on the practice of converting old, offshore oil platforms into reefs that support marine life. But this common ground has yet to produce results in California, where the state has failed to build a regulatory system supportive of "reefing."

Rising like aging monoliths off California’s coast, 27 oil platforms and five man-made islands covered in oil and gas wells will soon need to be plugged and dismantled; already, many no longer produce. Several decades since its peak, the state’s fossil fuel industry has seen its output steadily decline for years, and much of its infrastructure is in need of cleanup.

But if the state pushes too hard to shut them down, oil companies have shown they're willing to walk away and leave taxpayers on the hook for costly remediation programs.

“We view decommissioning as part of the oil and gas cycle,” said Betty Yee, California's controller and the chair of the State Lands Commission. “The commission faces a tremendous challenge legally and safely plugging and abandoning the oil and gas wells.”

Rigs to Reefs

Reefing has support from oil and gas companies, some government officials, sport fishermen and conservation groups. It works like this: Instead of removing the rig, the company plugs the wells and chops off the above-water platform and top 85 feet or so of its legs. The remaining hundreds of feet of metal are left on the seafloor, where shellfish and other marine life colonize the hard structure.

“If you wanted to, you could probably use them as a fisheries conservation tool,” said Ann Scarborough Bull, a researcher at the Marine Science Institute at UC Santa Barbara. In a nearly 20-year study that included numerous dives around two dozen oil platforms, her team identified more than 100 fish species gathering at these sites. Much of the associated biomass is anchored to the structure, though, and disappears if a rig is fully removed.

The American Petroleum Institute, a powerful industry trade group, called reefing “an innovative approach to dismantling out-of-service offshore oil and natural gas production platforms.”

A federal law passed in 1984 allowed for the creation of a program called Rigs to Reefs, which supports the conversion of old platforms. To participate, there must be a complementary state program. While programs exist in states around the Gulf of Mexico, attempts in California have failed to gain enough political support to make it through the legislature.

More than 500 platforms in American waters have been reefed, according to the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, a key player in the program. All are in the Gulf of Mexico.

If California could pull off reefing, it would be a Herculean achievement, as many of the platforms off the West Coast would set world records for depth, adding complexity and cost to the equation.

California's impending cleanup jobs

John Smith has spent decades on the topic, formerly working with the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and the Interagency Decommissioning Working Group. He characterized California’s offshore platforms as nearing the end of their productive lives.

Those in federal waters off the California coast are all between 28 and 50 years old, he said, and their oil and gas output peaked 20 to 25 years ago. Production is paused at about half these facilities.

“This just reflects the depletion of the reserves and the life of the fields,” Smith said.

With the conversation around reefing in California picking up, the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach hosted a three-day forum this week to bring together experts and affected parties from around the world.

Central to conversations at the conference was the state’s most infamous oil and gas liability: Platform Holly, off the coast of Santa Barbara County. In 2017, a company called Venoco filed for bankruptcy protection and forfeited the platform. Because it's near enough to shore to be in state waters, California is now liable.

The state has already spent $70 million to plug and abandon wells attached to the rig, and the final price tag will easily reach hundreds of millions of dollars, according to Seth Blackmon, chief counsel for the State Lands Commission.

Proponents say that reefing could help the state avoid this scenario in the future by providing the oil industry a cheaper, and therefore more attractive, cleanup option. Even some groups representing fisheries, an industry opposed to partial decommissioning elsewhere in the world (due to fears of submerged infrastructure snagging trawl nets) are tentatively supportive in California.

Kim Selkoe, executive director of Commercial Fishermen of Santa Barbara, said the marine life present on oil rigs can help clean coastal waters. “We need all the filter-feeding we can get. Our water is polluted by runoff, and the powers of bivalves filtering our water is very well established,” she said, adding that oil platforms might also be useful for other creative businesses, like aquaculture.

Roadblocks remain

Decommissioning offshore platforms in any manner, whether through reefing or full removal, costs millions of dollars and requires highly specialized equipment. One of the world’s main platform vessels built for this work, for example, can hold a crew of 736 people and has two 30-story cranes on its deck.

Win Thornton is the vice president of decommissioning at oil giant British Petroleum, and he’s overseen successful projects in the North Sea, located between the United Kingdom and Scandinavia. But unlike California, Europe still has a large offshore oil industry, meaning the equipment and know-how abound.

“Having that vibrant supply chain provides the opportunities to manage the decommissioning,” he said, pointing out associated cost savings. This means that if California is going to clean up its offshore platforms, this needs to happen soon while there’s still an industry around to pay the bills.

And that’s where California’s Legislature got in the way, industry representatives and experts say. While the state has yet to create a reefing program, the state did pass a law in 2010 that set some parameters for how partial removal of oil rigs might be allowed.

Reefing a large platform can save the operator millions of dollars. To incentivize this cleanup while also benefiting taxpayers, states generally apply a 50/50 savings-sharing program. This means that for every dollar the company saved that it would’ve spent to fully remove a rig, the company gets to pocket half, while the other half goes to the state to fund more artificial reef work or other conservation efforts.

In California, though, that savings-sharing would send 80% percent back to the state. Industry representatives have said this takes away their incentive to engage in reefing.

The issue is further complicated because the government has difficulty getting accurate estimates of the companies’ cleanup liabilities. “It is a little bit like pulling teeth to get this disclosure done because a lot of these companies do see a healthy horizon” and anticipate many more years of production, Yee, the state controller, said.

Leaving 'their trash on the ocean floor'?

Even with parties on all sides of the table voicing some degree of support for reefing, that doesn’t mean it’s unanimous. “Many believe the oil industry should not leave their trash on the ocean floor to save on decommissioning costs,” Yee said.

California passed a law to ban new oil and gas leases in state waters in 1994, and the federal government has slowed efforts to expand offshore drilling in areas under its purview.

But concerns remain about unforeseen environmental impacts where rigs already stand.

“We know that there are some nonnative, invertebrate species on the platforms,” said Linda Krop, chief counsel at the Environmental Defense Center in Santa Barbara. “The concern is that they can potentially out-compete native species.”

Without a state program that allows reefing, though, the entire idea remains dead in the water until the Legislature acts. State Sen. Bob Hertzberg, a Democrat from the San Fernando Valley, introduced a bill related to decommissioning oil platforms in 2015 that failed.

He sponsored a new bill in 2017 that directly tackled the creation of a reefing program. “Turning old oil rigs into artificial reefs is a creative solution to an old problem,” he said at the time.

That passed the Senate, but it, too, ultimately died the following year.

The movement toward finally decommissioning these platforms has given some new hope. Angela Mooney D’Arcy, executive director of the Sacred Places Institute for Indigenous Peoples, said the dialogue among so many groups, from the oil industry to environmentalists, means there exists “an opportunity to address this violence to the land and to the people.”

Mark Olalde reports on the environment for The Desert Sun. Email him at molalde@gannett.com and follow him on Twitter at @MarkOlalde.