“McCain needs to be loaded up on a helicopter, dragged kicking if need be, and dropped off in the middle of the 2000 sq acres where we need to drill in ANWR. Let him have a town meeting with mosquitoes.”
McCain needs to be loaded up on a helicopter, dragged kicking if need be, and dropped off in the middle of the “pristine” everglades where we already drill but no new permits. This is not a huge amount but could be brought online very fast. Let him have a town meeting with mosquitoes. And maybe some of the critters that live at the drilling site including Gators and man-eating pythons will “git’ em.
Idea of expanded oil drilling in Florida Everglades greeted with furore
13-06-01 Down an 11-mile washboard road, past deer and alligators darting among stands of cypress trees, workers keep tabs on something most people don’t expect to find in the Sunshine State: Ten wells that produce about 3,400 bpd of oil.
For nearly 60 years, oil companies have been extracting oil from underneath the 729,000-acre Big Cypress federal wildlife preserve adjacent to the Everglades National Park ecosystem.
Federal law protects the preserve from commercial development but keeps it open to limited minerals-extraction and recreational use. President Bush’s contemplated opening of federally protected areas including Alaska’s Arctic National Wilderness Refuge to new oil-exploration leases has met with divided opinion. But the idea of expanded oil drilling in federal waters off Florida’s prized beaches along the Gulf of Mexico has been greeted with a furore.
Demonstrators, some dressed as oil barrels, were out in force for President Bush’s visit to the Everglades, during which he managed to avoid discussing the issue. His brother and fellow Republican, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who is running for re-election next year, opposes new oil leases in a portion of the Gulf known as Lease-Sale 181, a 5.9 mm-acre section running from south of Pensacola to west of Tampa.
Oil industry officials are happy to point out that drilling takes place just 30 miles from where the President spoke. “What a great place for the president to go — in the middle of the Everglades where just miles from where they stand we’ve been producing oil for 60 years,” David Mica, executive director of the Florida Petroleum Council, a Tallahassee industry group, says.
Environmentalists opposed to expanded oil drilling acknowledge that production inside the Big Cypress has gone unnoticed because it has been relatively incident-free. But Charles Lee, senior vice president of Audubon of Florida, says oil production in the Big Cypress and the Gulf of Mexico aren’t comparable. “It’s not... like it is in the Gulf, where there’s a chance [the oil] could burst out,” he says. “The oil in the Big Cypress is tar-like, and you pretty much have to pump it out.” Containing a spill in the Everglades is much easier than it would be in the Gulf, he says.
Elizabeth Hirst, a spokeswoman for Gov. Bush, says offshore oil production is risky for Florida’s glittering white beaches. The governor believes that “our tourist-based economy and our beaches are the bread and butter of the state, and any expansion to oil drilling could be potentially harmful and even disastrous to our environment and economy,” she says.
There are 14 offshore oil and gas platforms within 25 miles and some 240 platforms within 100 miles of Florida’s Perdido Key, near Pensacola, without any harm to the beaches, says Mark Rubin, general manager for exploration and production at the American Petroleum Institute, a Washington trade group. No one can guarantee there won’t be an accident, he notes, but says the Big Cypress wells prove something: “We can produce oil and naturalgas in sensitive environments and protect the environmental values that are there.”
Another reason the Big Cypress wells have avoided controversy is that there isn’t much anyone can do about them. The wells predate the preserve, which was created in 1974 when Florida’s prominent Collier family sold the land to the federal government.
Barron Collier, a Tennessee native who made his fortune in New York streetcar advertising, came to Florida in 1928 and bought 1.5 mm acres, which later became Collier County, nearly the entire south-western corner of the state. He and his descendants developed agriculture and carved communities out of the swamps, marketing them to northerners.
Peninsular Oil & Refining, later part of ExxonMobil, discovered oil in southern Florida in 1943. Since then, the Sunniland trend underneath the Big Cypress preserve has yielded about 110 mm barrels of oil, according to Ed Garrett, geologist with the Florida Geologic Survey. The Colliers kept about 400,000 acres of subsurface mineral rights beneath the preserve, leasing portions of their holdings to Calumet Florida, a unit of Plains Resources, of Houston.