A Houston oil company has agreed to shut down its offshore oil production off Santa Barbara County decades early in exchange for approval this year to drill into untapped undersea reserves and cash in on the nation's record oil prices.
To sweeten the deal, Plains Exploration & Production Co. -- known as PXP -- also has agreed to donate about 200 acres of oceanview property along the sparsely populated Gaviota coast and an additional 3,700 acres in Santa Barbara's premier wine-growing region for public parkland. It would withdraw a proposed housing development on that land and pay millions to fund projects that offset carbon dioxide emissions, such as low-emission public buses.
The unprecedented deal, announced Thursday by PXP and its fiercest environmental opponents, was designed to make a long-stalled drilling proposal more palatable to county and state officials in an area where a 1969 oil spill helped launch the modern environmental movement in California.
"It's hard for me to imagine that they won't approve this," said Linda Krop, chief counsel of the Santa Barbara-based Environmental Defense Center. Negotiations among these adversaries, she said, resulted in more concessions from PXP than any state or local agency could ever muster.
Steve Rusch, a PXP vice president, said the company was willing to make concessions because it wanted to do more than simply neutralize offshore oil's traditional opponents -- it wanted to enlist their support. Since the 1980s, most offshore oil development in California has been met with fierce opposition, including protracted litigation, congressional moratoriums and bureaucratic delays.
So beginning later this month, Krop and her clients will support PXP in its petition to use "slant drilling" from one of its four offshore platforms to tap into an undersea oil field, the Tranquillon Ridge, that could yield as much as 200 million barrels of oil and 50 billion cubic feet of natural gas.
It will be the first time in 39 years that one group, Get Oil Out, or GOO, has supported oil drilling. The group was formed by Santa Barbara County residents horrified by the gooey crude that coated their beaches after the 1969 offshore platform blowout.
Abe Powell, president of GOO, said it took "blood, sweat and tears" for his board members to abandon their historic role.
"Once we realized that we had put together a good deal for the community, we got it together," he said.
