Mobil Kills Plan for Onshore Drilling
Faced with opposition from environmentalists and the community and the prospect of lengthy delays, Mobil Corp. said Thursday that it was pulling the plug on a novel proposal to drill for offshore oil from dry land in Santa Barbara.
Mobil said it will abandon the Clearview project, first put forward three years ago, to drill into an underwater deposit of 155 million barrels of oil from a site onshore.
“It was a business decision,” said Shauna Clarke, a spokeswoman for Mobil’s U.S. exploration and production company in Santa Barbara. “We looked at the opportunities we had here . . . and we figured we had better opportunities elsewhere.”
From the start, the proposal ran into stiff opposition from environmentalists, who said the project would set a dangerous precedent for onshore drilling and pose a threat of pollution.
It was also opposed by homeowners and by UC Santa Barbara, which owns the principal site Mobil was considering for its drilling operations.
The crippling blow to the project occurred in June, when UC Santa Barbara announced that it would not modify Mobil’s lease to allow Clearview drilling, in part because the university is planning to develop faculty and student housing adjacent to the site.
“We thought the Clearview project was incompatible with surrounding land uses, current and proposed, both residential and recreational,” said Robert Kuntz, UCSB’s assistant chancellor for budget and planning.
On Thursday, opponents claimed victory.
“We’re obviously very thrilled,” said Linda Krop, senior staff attorney with the Environmental Defense Center in Santa Barbara. “We’ve been working with a broad range of community groups for the last three years trying to convince Mobil that this is the wrong place for the project.”
Clearview was proposed in 1993 by Charles Warren, then executive director of the California State Lands Commission.
The project would have used advanced drilling technology from an onshore site in Santa Barbara County to reach reserves in the South Ellwood Offshore oil field, which is now being tapped from the offshore Platform Holly. Mobil said by drilling “sideways,” it could recover oil that Platform Holly couldn’t.
The project would have meant the construction of a 175-foot drilling tower on university land and piping the crude to Mobil’s refinery in Torrance.
To mollify opponents, Mobil had offered to remove Platform Holly if the project went forward.
But opponents had worried about the project’s effects on the site, which is near schools, residential neighborhoods, beaches and a nature preserve.
After UC Santa Barbara turned Mobil down, the company considered alternatives, but decided that other sites would reduce the amount of recoverable oil.
“In addition to the reduced reserves, we realized just from managing our current Holly operation that getting Clearview approved was going to take longer and require more human and financial resources than we had originally anticipated,” said Terry Laudick, Mobil’s area manager.
Mobil says ending the project means the loss of up to $900 million in royalties to the state of California and $225 million to the county if pending legislation passed, in addition to $184 million in taxes and fees over the 25-year life of the project.
