SPECIAL REPORT: Oil on the Beach : State’s Thirst for Oil Makes Accidents Inevitable

It may be said that Californians love only one thing more than their beaches.

Their cars.

Those two seldom seem incompatible: nothing seems more felicitous and Californian than a dune buggy with a surfboard in the back.

But the latest beach images of oil-slicked birds, brown foam and black sand remind us that cars and coastlines don’t always coexist peacefully.

“If you’re going to consume oil in California or in the United States, you’ll face the occasional tanker accident,” said Philip K. Verleger Jr., an economist and fellow at the Institute for International Economics in Washington.

The fact is California uses more oil than any other state in the country: 600 million barrels of petroleum products annually, about half in the form of gasoline, according to Stan Devereux of the Western States Petroleum Assn., a trade group.

That’s more than 10% of the total gasoline used in the United States, he said. If California were an independent nation, its oil consumption would rank third in the world, trailing only the Soviet Union and the United States as a whole, Devereux said.

But because much of the oil and gas used in the state is produced far from where it is used--about 42% to 44% is imported from remote areas of Alaska--it must be transported long distances, by tanker, pipeline, rail or truck.

California’s dependence on out-of-state supplies isn’t likely to end any time soon. So energy industry officials and environmentalists agree that some accidents are inevitable in the state no matter which form of transportation is used. The only question is when, where, how much and how fast it’s cleaned up.

Despite the industry’s history of accidents--and various calls for safety and regulatory reforms in their wake--seldom are basic assumptions of our reliance on oil and its movements called into question. Is there an acceptable level of spills to keep ourselves in our cars and on the road?

“There’s no real way to put a number on that,” said Christopher Flavin, an energy specialist at the Worldwatch Institute, an environmental research firm in Washington. “But I don’t think going to a zero level of risk is a practical option in the reasonable future.”

The entire country continues to rely heavily on oil, despite gains in recent years for alternative energy sources such as wind, solar and geothermal.

In 1988, about 42% of the country’s total energy needs were met by oil, said Henry Schuler, director of energy programs for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank in Washington.

“The problem is that oil and products derived from oil provide 99% of our transportation fuel,” he said. “No matter what we can do for power generation, at present we consume about 10 million barrels a day of product just in the transportation sector, and that’s not only autos, but jet fuel, diesel fuel for trucks and trains and even pleasure boats, of which there are something like 10 million in the U.S.”

By contrast, non-oil fuels such as methanol, ethanol and compressed natural gas accounted for only 20 million barrels of transportation fuel in 1988--enough for just two days out of 365, he said.

Oil also goes into the production of everything from synthetic fabrics to plastic bags, and the demand for petroleum products remains strong despite some signs that Americans are learning to conserve.

U.S. demand for oil products will increase in 1990 by about 1.1% to 17.5 million barrels per day, reported the industry trade publication Oil & Gas Journal. That followed a year in which demand remained relatively flat at about 17.3 million barrels per day, due in part to increased use of non-oil fuels by industrial users and utilities, the trade journal said.

Even as demand remains strong, U.S. production of oil is falling. In 1989, the industry suffered its most dramatic single-year drop in U.S. production in 1989, down 6.8% to about 7.6 million barrels per day.

Overall, domestic oil production has fallen a total of about 1.3 million barrels per day since 1985, just before world oil prices collapsed, according to Oil & Gas Journal. In 1990, production will continue to fall by about 3.6%, the journal predicted.

As a result, imports will continue to grow. And that means more tanker shipments.

Imports totaled 7.9 million barrels per day in 1989, the highest level in more than 10 years and roughly 46% of total U.S. supplies, according to the American Petroleum Institute, the industry’s main trade group.

In July last year, foreign imports accounted for more than half the oil used in the United States. “Several projections show that Americans could be breaking that barrier every month sometime in the early 1990s and may regularly break the 60% mark by the late 1990s,” the API added in a report late last year.

With more imports and more tanker traffic likely, “unless there is a dramatic improvement in tanker safety, the number of these accidents is likely to increase in the 1990s,” the Worldwatch Institute’s Flavin said.

Not everyone agrees that more tanker shipments means more spills, and there is much that can be done to minimize such accidents, critics argue.

Crews could be screened more carefully for drug and alcohol problems. Joseph Hazelwood, captain of the Exxon Valdez, is now on trial on charges he was drunk below decks when the tanker ran aground in Prince William Sound.

Tankers could be required to have double hulls. Some critics believe a double hull would have prevented the Huntington Beach spill. Industry officials have argued that double hulls could increase the risks from an accident. Alternatively, tankers could be loaded to leave outer tanks empty, Flavin said.

Industry officials have argued for better traffic control in hazardous straits.

More important, environmentalists argue for less reliance on oil and stricter policies to encourage conservation--some of which have been resisted in the past by both the auto and oil industries.

But most observers agree that at least some oil transportation accidents are an inevitable consequence of oil use, just as plane crashes are an unfortunate consequence of air travel.

“The only way to deal with the problem realistically if you want to cut way back is to find a way to cut gasoline consumption,” Verleger said. But, he added: “Every weekday morning and evening, you see consumers cast their votes on the freeways.”

USING MORE FOREIGN OIL

Oil from foreign suppliers, as a percentage of all oil used in the United States each year. 1977: 47.7% 1979: 45.3% 1989: 46%

Source: American Petroleum Institute