Oily Doings Off the Coast

Despite a 20-year-old federal ban on offshore drilling, the Senate passed a bill last month to let energy producers inventory the oil and gas supplies under coastal waters. The legislation’s language is telling as to its goal: The Interior Department is required to report back to Congress on the “impediments” to restarting offshore oil and gas production.

The inventory is far from the worst provision in the Senate version of the energy bill, which now heads to a conference committee. But it is a prime example of the current fixation on resource extraction rather than sounder -- and cheaper -- conservation.

Although House members dropped a similar mandate from the energy bill they passed in April, both versions of the bill are little more than a series of bouquets to energy producers. The nuclear industry would get a $30-billion taxpayer subsidy designed to help start a new generation of nuclear power plants. Farmers stand to win a mandate that gasoline include more ethanol, the corn-based fuel. Coal, gas and oil producers would see generous tax breaks and new fields to explore, encouraging them to dig, drill and pump more.

This federal largess comes as the Environmental Protection Agency reports that the average fuel economy of cars and trucks has fallen to its lowest level in 22 years, largely because of gas-guzzling sport utility vehicles and light trucks. Yet the Bush administration and its allies in Congress beat back efforts this year to force automakers to modestly raise fuel mileage standards.

President Bush has supported the drilling moratorium, yet is silent so far on the proposed inventory, its cost and the environmental concerns it raises. The Interior Department would probably contract the geologic survey to private exploration firms, at a cost of unspecified millions of dollars.

Why spend that money when federal law explicitly bars drilling through 2012 along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, in Alaska’s salmon-rich Bristol Bay and in much of the Gulf of Mexico? Many oceanographers fear that the noise and pressure waves of the compressed air guns used to yield geologic data would harm fish and disrupt their habitat.

Inventory proponents, including Sen. Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.), argue that the country should know its offshore energy reserves in the event of a crisis. However, a crisis is what the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in Texas and Louisiana is intended for. New drilling and production can take years. But with or without a crisis, some places, including the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and coastal waters, are so special as to be off- limits. Proposals to drill in the Arctic appear dead for this year. The ocean inventory should meet the same fate.