Wider Fight Against Coastal Bans Vowed : Leaders of Oil Services Industry Target Threats to Development of Ocean Floor

Buoyed by last week’s defeat of a one-year moratorium on oil exploration off much of California’s coast, oil services industry leaders vowed Monday to redouble efforts to end such bans permanently and to battle other threats to development of the ocean floor.

A moratorium on oil exploration off Massachusett’s Cape Cod and a little-known amendment to a bill giving governors veto power over federal offshore lease sales will be the next targets, said Charles D. Matthews, president of National Ocean Industries Assn., at the trade group’s fall board meeting in Laguna Niguel.

Happy Over Victory

“We hope to do everything we can to keep the California moratorium from being put back in place, and we will do everything we can to get the ‘Miller Amendment’ defeated,” Matthews said.

“We would hope next year to remove the Massachusetts moratorium,” he said. “I think until we put all these pieces to rest, our work is not complete.”

The conference followed Thursday’s narrow defeat of a proposed extension of a 4-year-old ban on leasing tracts off California. Members of the wide-ranging trade group were clearly pleased by the victory.

A coalition of the state’s congressmen had sought the one-year extension. It was an attempt to gain bargaining room in upcoming negotiations with Interior Secretary Donald P. Hodel, after he rejected a controversial agreement to open 2% of the coast to exploration in exchange for protecting the remainder through the year 2000.

The extension was defeated on a 27-26 vote in the House Appropriations Committee after a lobbying blitz by the oil services industry and the Reagan Administration.

“A lot of inland congressmen (previously) thought this was a free environmental vote, where they could help their friends in coastal states,” Matthews said. The defeat was proof, he said, that House members had come to “realize that (the livelihoods of) their own constituents were adversely affected.”

Rep. William E. Dannemeyer (R-Fullerton), one of four pro-drilling legislators addressing the conference, predicted that any effort to revive the proposal on the House floor would be defeated.

Get Time to Plan

Lifting the current moratorium in California will not result in any new lease sales until at least 1987, but Matthews said it will give “companies time for planning a little better, and maybe companies will stop fleeing California because there is no work for them.”

The two-day fall conference is one of three held annually by the 13-year-old trade group, an association of 450 ocean-oriented industries. The industries include fishing tackle manufacturers, shipbuilders, dredge and dock operators, mining and drilling concerns, and even an underwater film company.

Ironically, it was held at the oceanfront Ritz-Carlton hotel, crown jewel of the Monarch Bay development by Laguna Beach developer David Stein, an ardent foe of offshore oil drilling.

Organizers said they had selected the site three years ago, long before a groundswell of opposition to offshore drilling emerged among a coalition of Orange County coastal cities.

For the most part, Monday’s panel discussion on the role of the legislative process in leasing the nation’s Outer Continental Shelf covered familiar and friendly territory.

“It was more like preaching to the choir,” one association staffer said.

But state Assembly Minority Whip Thomas McClintock (R-Thousand Oaks) chided industry officials for continuing to support legislators “unfriendly to OCS (Outer Continental Shelf) development” and allowing “environmental loonies” to control the dialogue on the issue.

Dannemeyer advised the group to focus lobbying efforts on representatives of landlocked congressional districts to let them know that “jobs are at stake.”

“(Now) they sense that the sting of the environmental opposition on that issue is more detrimental to their survival,” said Dannemeyer, a U.S. Senate hopeful and longtime advocate of developing offshore reserves as a means to national energy independence.

Cites Next Fight

The next fight, Dannemeyer said, should be defeat of the so-called Miller Amendment by Rep. George Miller (D-Martinez), which would allow a governor to stop a lease sale unless the Interior secretary could prove that national interests would be significantly impaired.

But Rep. Walter Jones (D-N.C.), chairman of the House Merchant Marine and Fisheries Committee, expressed doubt that the amendment would survive a conference committee to resolve differences between the House and Senate versions of the bill. “With all due respect, I think Mr. Miller has his work cut out for him,” Jones said.

Later, outgoing association chairman R. Nelson Crews said: “We need some billion-barrel oil fields to offset” the nation’s growing international balance-of-payments problem.

“The California Outer Continental Shelf is one of the very few places with that potential,” said Nelson, president and chief operations officer of Raymond International Inc. of Houston.

“It’s a matter of jobs and employment throughout the nation, not just in California,” said incoming chairman W. Herbert Hunt, managing partner of Penrod Drilling Co. of Dallas and a member of the wealthy Hunt family of Texas.

Dismiss Concerns

They dismissed environmentalist concerns about the impact and the safety of offshore drilling as largely unfounded.

“There have been 32,000 holes drilled in the Outer Continental Shelf throughout this nation and there has been one oil spill--and that was 16 years ago,” Matthews said, referring to the disastrous blowout off Santa Barbara in 1969 that is widely credited for spawning the present-day environmental movement.

“We’re better environmentalists than they are,” Matthews said, referring to groups like the Sierra Club and the National Resources Defense Council and other active opponents of offshore drilling.

“We’re not one of those beasts that fouls their own nests,” he said.

They argued, too, that offshore drilling has been a boon to sports fishermen and the commercial fishing industry because the platforms attract smaller organisms on which larger fish thrive.

Hunt added that air pollution generated by offshore drilling operations “is so insignificant . . . it wouldn’t amount to four or five or 10 trucks moving down the highway.”

They also said Santa Barbara’s thriving tourism industry contradicts claims of Orange County coastal leaders that the area’s vital tourist trade would be harmed by offshore drilling.

As for blighting a panoramic seascape, Matthews said he thinks offshore rigs look like “Christmas trees lighting up” at night. “It really does brighten up the horizon.”

But Matthews conceded: “Beauty is really in the eye of the beholder: Some people like Picasso; I don’t.”