Down Under : Pyramid Scheme

Dive down 220 feet to the blue-and-black twilight off Coal Oil Point, just north of Santa Barbara, and you’ll wonder if nitrogen narcosis is numbing your reason. Or if you’ve discovered the remains of an antediluvian civilization. For there before you are two enormous pyramids standing on the ocean floor.

Far from being a lost city of California, the two steel pyramids--100 feet wide at the base, each weighing 350 tons--were placed there by ARCO in 1982, at a cost of $8 million, to capture natural gas bubbling out of the ocean floor. “It looked like millions of bottles of champagne bubbles on the water,” says ARCO spokesman Al Greenstein. “When you sat on the water it made you lightheaded, and the smell was pretty rotten.”

There has been natural gas, tar and oil seepage in the Santa Barbara vicinity for at least 7,000 years. The Chumash Indians used tar that washed up on the beaches to waterproof their baskets and canoes. But the seepage the pyramids cover was also sullying the air, accounting for roughly a fourth of Santa Barbara’s hydrocarbon air pollution by the late ‘70s.

Built to withstand earthquakes, 45-foot tidal waves and 100-year storms, the pyramids collected between three and seven tons of oil and gas per day during their first 10 years. The amount has dropped to less than two tons a day. The geologists at Mobil Oil Corp., which currently holds the oil rights in the area, link the decline to platform drilling activity. The platforms are taking oil out that would normally seep out or push gas out.

“We’re pretty certain the decrease in the seepage is due to a decrease in reservoir pressure from oil production from platform Holly,” says Mobil Oil Corp. geologist Scott Hornafius. “The seeps within a mile of the platform have been almost completely eliminated and the pyramid is a mile from the platform.” At that rate of decline, the seepage should disappear by the year 2000.