Offshore oil rigs good for environment

Pacific Standard:

This year, it’s likely more than 100 offshore structures in the Gulf of Mexico will be removed as part of a Department of the Interior plan. There are 650 nonproducing oil and gas platforms, known in the industry as “idle iron,” listed for removal “as soon as possible”—i.e. within five years of the end of production or a year of losing the lease—under Interior’s directive. Historically, companies seldom removed an idle structure until the lease for the area where it was located expired.

Having companies clean up after themselves sounds like a good idea, but many recreational fishermen, scuba divers, scientists, and fishery managers aren’t happy about it. Turns out, some of the 2,500 multileg platforms that pepper the Gulf of Mexico have become de facto artificial reefs. According to Bob Shipp, University of South Alabama’s Department of Marine Sciences, the platforms have transformed the entire ecosystem. Some marine species are attracted to platforms for shelter or food, but others—sea fans, sponges, algae, and reef fish—spend their entire life cycle on these structures. What’s more, some species have increased in number because of the platforms.

Typically, platform removal involves using explosives on each of the support legs. These blasts kill fish and other marine life, says Clint Moore, a vice president for corporate development at ION Geophysical Corporation and former oil and gas representative to the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary Advisory Council. The federal Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement estimates that removing a platform kills 800 fish on average. Fishermen put the number in the tens of thousands.

Brent Casey, a fishing charter boat captain in Port Aransas, Texas, says that even the government’s low figure means a single platform removal kills an entire year’s catch limit of red snapper. “In another three years, there won’t be anywhere to fish off of Port Aransas, no reef habitat,” Casey says.

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There is more.

I have sailed around these idle rigs.  They are also used as offshore marks for sailboat races.  While some might see them as obstacles to navigation, they actually act as mile markers for boats traveling beyond the shoreline.  And, yes, the fish like them as do the fishermen.