CHARLESTON, S.C. - While national momentum grows to lift a ban on offshore oil drilling, geologists say it’s unlikely there will be rigs off South Carolina anytime soon because there’s simply little oil to be had.
President Bush says the nation should lift the long-standing ban on drilling off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts.
And Citizens for Sound Conservation, a group based in Charleston, announced this week they will push Congress to eliminate the ban in next year’s federal budget — a ban which has been included in the appropriations bill each year since 1981.
State Sen. Robert Ford, D-Charleston, said this week he will propose a measure in the state legislature to allow drilling off the South Carolina coast.
But geologists say there is little to drill for.
“We just don’t have the great kind of geology and the shallow enough water,” said Cassandra Runyon, a geologist at The College of Charleston.
Oil companies would have to travel 60 miles from shore to reach the outer continental shelf. But even there, conditions weren’t right to form oil, Runyon said.
“It was active several million years ago but it didn’t have the right geologic conditions like the Gulf shore did where there were swamps and the conditions were just right for the peat and everything to convert itself to the carbons and eventually to the oil,” she said.
“There’s no petroleum” off South Carolina, agreed Mitchell Colgan, who 20 years ago worked for Shell Oil and who now also teaches geology at the College of Charleston.
“There was a little bit of exploration that took place many years ago but there was nothing that showed there was any value. It wasn’t economically feasible,” he said.
Even if oil prices continued to rise, there would still be little incentive, he said. “The recoverables were very low. It wasn’t on the radar screen. There is no reservoir quality.”
Oil drilling could mean spills that would spoil the beaches which draw tourists, warned Hamilton Davis, a project manager for the South Carolina Coastal Conservation League, which opposes lifting the ban.
South Carolina’s $16 billion tourism industry is the largest in the state.
He said if oil was found, tourists probably wouldn’t see oil derricks because they would be well out at sea. But if drilling did start, refineries and other energy infrastructure would come to coastal communities, he said.
Lewis Gossett of Citizens for Sound Conservation said exploratory drilling off South Carolina could be done in a way in which “the habitat is protected and our economic interests are promoted.”