BRACK: Recovering oil or gas would have dirty onshore price

By Andy Brack | State Sen. Chip Campsen is changing the debate on the intelligence of recovering oil or gas off the South Carolina coast.

First, the Isle of Palms Republican says, there’s been a huge paradigm shift in the last few years about the way oil and gas are extracted through groundbreaking technologies like fracking or converting oil sands. Regardless of what you think about these new methods, they’re keeping prices down and steering the nation toward energy independence.

“There’s been a huge technological transformation in the production of oil so that it’s really questionable in the near term about whether it renders new offshore exploration moot,” Campsen told Statehouse Report. “We have more stored oil than we ever have had in history.”

But a second consideration lost on most in the debate about whether South Carolina should even get into the oil and gas business may be even bigger here at home.

Most people, he said, think about the risk of an offshore well to be ocean pollution, damage to the environment and the potential to wreck the state’s $4 billion tourism economy. They don’t seem to realize just how much ugly land-based infrastructure would be needed to convert any oil or gas recovered offshore.

But all you have to do is travel to Texas or Louisiana to see acres of refinery equipment, pipe upon pipe looped like a crazy economist’s flow chart.

“I’ve been there and I’ve seen it,” Campsen says of the bulky onshore infrastructure. “It’s a reality and something that, again, people just don’t think about.”

In a recent op-ed, Campsen wondered where South Carolinians would want to put this heavily-industrialized spaghetti along the state’s coastline:

“Which portions of South Carolina’s coast would we industrialize? Little River in the tourism mecca of Myrtle Beach; Murrells Inlet; pristine Winyah Bay, surrounded by tens of thousands of acres of protected wildlife refuges; McClellanville, next to Cape Romain National Wildlife Refuge; Daniel Island or James Island in Charleston Harbor; the North or South Edisto Rivers near Seabrook Island or Edisto Beach; St. Helena Sound and the protected ACE Basin ecosystem; Factory Creek in Beaufort, lined by beautiful homes; the Ports Authority property in Port Royal that is finally on the path to redevelopment; Calibogue Sound on the shores of Hilton Head and Daufuskie Island?”

Campsen says he’s gotten a lot of positive reactions from people about how the state can’t afford to be home to countless acres of industrialized fossil fuel infrastructure. But he hasn’t heard much about his observations recently among Statehouse colleagues.

His fellow Republicans, many of whom are pushing for the state to conduct oil and gas exploration and use seismic testing in sensitive areas off the South Carolina coast, should listen and stop being blinded by business.

These state lawmakers should hear coastal communities which have been voting, one after another, to oppose oil and gas exploration, and seismic testing. From Hilton Head Island, Port Royal and Beaufort Folly Beach, James Island, Charleston and Isle of Palms, coastal leaders just say no.

“Current estimates for reserves off the South Carolina coast equate to a 6-day supply of oil and gas at current U.S. consumption rates,” the S.C. Coastal Conservation League’s Hamilton Davis in a recent issue of Statehouse Report. “If all economically recoverable fossil fuel reserves were extracted for the entire East Coast, you could only meet current oil demand for 132 days and current gas demand for 283 days.”

Is it worth the risk to have tar balls floating into estuaries and killing shrimp and fish? Is it worth scaring away tourists when oil-laced trash washes up on beaches? Is it worth causing the local economy to nosedive just to get six days of fossil fuel? Two words: Hell no.

Instead of continuing to push oil and gas recovery and boost South Carolina’s risk, why not focus on passing outstanding legislation to encourage more investment by businesses and individuals in solar energy and other renewable resources?

Hold your state legislators accountable, particularly those who don’t live along the coast, and make sure they don’t ruin South Carolina’s coastal treasures.