High-Tech Tools Deter Spills but Not Critics

Three decades later, the memories of the Santa Barbara oil spill still fuel mistrust of offshore drilling. Industry and government watchdogs insist the chances of a similar platform accident are almost nil, but environmentalists remain deeply skeptical.

Officials cite a vigilant army of high-tech gadgets--from submersible cameras to ultrasound scanners to “smart pigs” cruising inside pipelines--that keep watch offshore.

Oil cleanup crews are on constant alert, deployed along the coast like SAC bombers at fail-safe points. Dozens of inspectors patrol California’s 32 offshore platforms and hundreds of miles of underwater pipelines from Huntington Beach to Lompoc.

Decades of relentless pumping, too, have limited the risk of a blowout--draining the fields and reducing the pressure inside oil pools.

So far, the combination has succeeded. Since 1985, 534 platform and pipeline accidents have spilled only 29,881 gallons of oil along the California coast, a fraction of the amount spilled in the Santa Barbara disaster. Eighty-three percent of spills off the coast now involve discharges of 10 gallons or less.

Indeed, natural oil seepage in the Santa Barbara Channel discharges in just one week as much oil as platforms have spilled in the past 14 years, according to the U.S. Minerals Management Service, which oversees most offshore oil production in California.

The only flaw in all this reliance on modern technology is that cleanup methods today are little improved and human error can still defeat the most sophisticated safeguards. Citing major platform accidents around the world, critics believe California has been lucky, as much as good, since 1969.

“We have come a long way. There’s no doubt about it,” said U.S. Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt. “The industry, under the spur of regulatory and public pressure, has pushed technology and procedures and produced a very impressive record. It’s all the more reason to keep the pressure on. It certainly could happen again, yes.”

Well-Regulated

Before the Santa Barbara spill, offshore drilling was an activity that business did “out there” with little public scrutiny. Today, the industry is one of the most heavily regulated in the state.

The state Lands Commission banned all oil drilling in state waters until 1974 and exploration in state and federal waters has since been sharply limited. The California Coastal Commission was created, and it exerts significant power over oil exploration.

But oil industry officials complain that it is unfair to punish them for a 30-year-old disaster. The world has moved on, they say, and modern technology makes offshore oil drilling safe.

“There’s much more automation, sensors and control,” said Rhonda Lindsey, technology manager of the Department of Energy’s National Petroleum Technology Office. “They’ve become better at predicting there’s a problem before it’s a problem.”

Unlike 30 years ago, drilling is now preceded by underwater seismic tests that give a 3-D image of conditions in the Earth’s crust.

During drilling, sensors measure pressure changes in the drill hole and rapidly transmit information to the surface. Computers interpret the data and automatically trigger “blowout preventers” that pour mud, chemicals and water into the hole like a cork to block pressurized petroleum from surging to the surface, Lindsey said.

Platforms increasingly use “extended reach” drilling, which enables a single drill to snake miles underground, making its own wormholes to tap distant oil deposits. The technique allows more oil to be collected by fewer rigs, reducing the chance of a spill, said J. Lisle Reed, Pacific regional manager of the Minerals Management Service.

Aboard the platform, other sensors monitor conditions inside petroleum storage tanks, in the surrounding air and inside pipelines. Platform workers carry backpack-sized “sniffers” with wands sensitive enough to detect a bottle of whiteout, said John Deacon, manager of environmental safety and regulatory compliance for Torch Operating Co., which operates a platform near Vandenberg Air Force Base.

Anti-corrosion chemicals are added and course along with the oil in the pipeline. Divers and robotic submersible cameras inspect the pipes’ exterior. Inside the 20-inch-diameter pipe, a big rubber ball called a “smart pig” crawls from one end to the other in a never-ending search for leaks. Ultrasonic devices aim high-frequency sound waves at the pipe to spot minute cracks.

“We’re light-years beyond where we were back in ’69 in terms of technology,” said Ron Heck, a consultant for Santa Barbara-based Samedan Oil Corp., which owns oil rights off the Central Coast.

Spills Still Occur

But environmentalists say they have heard it all before. In the mid-1960s, when oil companies and government regulators wanted to expand drilling in the coastal waters, they assured the public that offshore petroleum production was safe.

Critics note that in the years since the Santa Barbara spill, three huge spills have occurred at offshore platforms or marine terminals elsewhere in the world.

In 1979, 140 million gallons spilled at the Ixtoc I platform in Mexican waters. A platform accident dumped 80 million gallons of oil into the Persian Gulf in 1983. The most deadly platform accident occurred when Occidental Petroleum Corp.’s Piper Alpha platform exploded in the North Sea in 1988, killing 167 people.

While accidents involving oil tankers, including the American Trader at Huntington Beach and the Exxon Valdez, grab the headlines, experts say that a platform disaster can cause more damage because the rigs are often closer to shore and have a virtually bottomless tank.

“A tanker can be emptied in a day, but a well could spill oil for months or years,” said Jim Polson, editor of the Oil Spill Intelligence Report.

The very nature of offshore oil production suggests that accidents will happen, according to the critics. Platforms are factories on stilts. The biggest ones tower 10 stories above the water and are a mass of pipes fitted with 10,000 valves and flanges. Each platform pumps up to 30,000 gallons of crude daily.

“All it takes is one spill. How dangerous is it? It’s potentially catastrophic,” said Sierra Club attorney Mark Masarra.

The last line of defense are cleanup crews, kept on 24-hour standby. The oil company-funded Clean Seas program was formed in 1970 and operates three cleanup ships and 30 small boats capable of reaching platforms in the Santa Barbara Channel within three hours. The ships are stationed at Point Arguello, Santa Barbara and Avila Beach.

Darryle Waldron, general manager at Clean Seas, said his team plays war games on the high seas, drawing plans to respond to various kinds of spills. A worst-case scenario? A 193,000-gallon spill from a Point Arguello pipeline that links three big platforms to a processing plant at Gaviota.

High winds and choppy seas could spread oil quickly if the pipeline were ruptured, perhaps by an errant ship anchor, he said. Twice in the 1990s, underwater pipelines were ruptured by ships, according to the Minerals Management Service.

If, despite everything, a spill does occur, the most aggressive cleanup recovers just 25% of the oil, said Pete Bontadelli, administrator of the California Office of Spill Prevention and Response. The rest evaporates into the air, soaks into beaches or sinks to the bottom.

“The one thing that hasn’t changed much is our ability to clean up the oil once it hits the water,” said Ann Notthoff, coastal planner for the Natural Resources Defense Council. “They used straw to mop up beaches in ’69 and diapers in ’89 at Prince William Sound,” site of the Exxon Valdez spill.

Technology to prevent spills comes with limitations too. Nearly one-third of the 186 miles of pipelines connected to platforms on California’s outer continental shelf are too narrow to accommodate the leak-sniffing pigs.

Further, experts say that even “smart pigs” sometimes fail. In an accident that surprised officials, one of the biggest spills since the Santa Barbara blowout occurred in September 1997 at a platform near Lompoc called Irene, one of the most automated platforms on the coast. A battery of inspections in the months preceding the accident showed the underwater pipeline leading from the platform to be sound. The tests failed to detect a faulty weld at a flange, which broke and dumped 6,500 gallons of oil into the water.

And there is no technology that cannot be thwarted by human error.

The Santa Barbara blowout occurred because the federal government granted Union Oil, now Unocal Corp., a waiver to install a well casing--a metal sheath around the bore hole designed to prevent blowouts--to a depth of only 240 feet, 60 feet short of the required limit at the time.

Exxon Co. U.S.A.’s platform Heritage dumped 10,500 gallons off the coast of Gaviota and caught fire in May 1996 after operators failed to close four valves in a pipeline. It was the biggest oil spill from a California platform in the last 14 years.

Human error exacerbated the spill at Torch Operating Co.’s Platform Irene two years ago. When the leak was detected at 10:17 p.m., the platform automatically shut down its wells. Operators thought it was a false alarm and restarted the pumps 30 minutes later, spilling more oil into the sea. Twenty minutes later, operators noticed a massive pressure loss in the pipeline and shut the platform down, according to government records.

“When people say technology is far better, there’s no doubt about it,” said Doug Anthony, energy specialist of the Santa Barbara County Energy Division. “But there are limits to how well they protect. No matter how fail-safe we design it, accidents still occur.”

Times staff writers Deborah Schoch and Ray Herndon contributed to this story.

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Oil Well Rupture

Thirty years ago, an oil well blowout spewed 3.3 million gallons of crude oil into the waters along the Central Coast. Why the accident happened:

(1) A well was being drilled into the ocean floor. It had a protective concrete casing to a depth of 238 feet.

(2) When the drill hit oil, pressure forced it into fissures along the unprotected part of the well wall.

Source: Minerals Management Service