Setback in the Offshore Search

Stymied for nearly two years in their attempts to prospect for the huge quantities of oil and gas believed to lie under the Atlantic, U.S. oil companies suffered yet another setback last week. A federal court in Boston stopped the sale of oil leases on Georges Bank, a rich fishing ground 100 miles southeast of Nantucket. It thus put off for months, and possibly years, the day when drilling could begin.

D-day was delayed by environmental worries. Fishermen have long sought assurances that the bank, vital to Massachusetts' $500 million-a-year catch, would be protected from even the slightest risks of pollution. Oilmen, who estimate that there may be 180 million to 650 million bbl. of oil and from 1.2 trillion to 4.2 trillion cu. ft. of natural gas in the region, sought to calm the fishermen's fears by promising to take proper precautions against leaks and spills. The Interior Department tried to counter objections by reducing the size of the proposed sale from 155 tracts to 128 covering 700,000 acres.

Environmentalists and the fishermen were not satisfied. On behalf of the state's 30,000 commercial fishermen and several environmental groups, both the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the broadly based Conservation Law Foundation of New England charged Interior Secretary Cecil Andrus with failing to protect the fisheries and sought to stop the sale. Federal District Judge W. Arthur Garrity Jr. issued a preliminary injunction barring the sale; after an eleventh-hour appeal, Judge Levin H. Campbell upheld it. Said the soft-spoken Campbell: "There may be issues more serious than one involving the future of the oceans of our planet and the life within them, but surely they are few."

The delay was unexpected. Counting on a last-minute reprieve, representatives of 54 U.S. oil companies gathered at the New York Hilton, envelopes containing their bids tucked in locked briefcases. A moment before the bidding was to begin, Frank Basile, manager of the Bureau of Land Management's Outer Continental Shelf Office, told the oilmen that Interior would not appeal and the sale was off.

Last week's cancellation was merely the latest obstacle to offshore oil exploration. In a sale held 18 months ago, 39 oil companies paid $1.13 billion to lease drilling tracts in the Baltimore Canyon, an area east of Atlantic City, N.J., that may contain up to 1.4 billion bbl. of oil and 9.4 trillion cu. ft. of natural gas. But a suit by New York's Suffolk County, which is worried about the impact of oilfield accidents on its $ 1 billion-a-year fishing and recreation businesses, has kept the oilmen ashore. "It's not fair," laments an oil company executive. "The Government is holding a billion dollars of our money, and we've lost a year and a half of the five years the leases give us to begin production."

The U.S. Supreme Court will not decide before late this month whether it will even hear an appeal of the federal court ruling banning Baltimore Canyon drilling. Resolution of the Georges Bank dispute will take longer. Environmentalists and public officials in Massachusetts and on Long Island insist that they are not trying to prevent offshore oil production permanently. But they make it clear that they intend to delay drilling until they are satisfied their coastlines and fisheries are being properly protected.

The Senate has already passed an offshore-oil bill that Suffolk County Executive John V.N. Klein feels is "about as good as we can get legislatively." The bill places strict limits on the amounts of oil drillers could leak into the ocean during routine operations and provides compensation for fishermen whose nets and equipment are damaged.

The House last week adopted an amended and, according to environmentalists, weakened version of the same measure. A compromise could get the legislation to President Carter's desk by April or May. Even after that it would still take the Interior Department months to set up a new Georges Bank lease sale. Meanwhile, sales scheduled for later this year of leases off the Georgia coast and in the Gulf of Mexico may also be delayed.

There is no reason why oilfields and fisheries cannot coexist. Long and extensive oil production in the Gulf of Mexico has not harmed fishing; indeed, oil workers there often catch sizable fish from the drilling platforms. Nor have oil spills at sea hurt fishing. The fishing recovered quickly from the 1967 Torrey Canyon spill off the coast of England; studies by marine biologists reveal that last year's massive Argo Merchant oil spill, which occurred in midwinter when high winds were able to disperse the oil, caused little damage to Georges Bank.

Indisputably, the delays in offshore oil exploration damage U.S. efforts to end dependence on unreliable foreign sources of oil. But the delays will continue. Even if the Supreme Court gives a go ahead and the companies find oil in the Baltimore Canyon this spring, it would still take them up to five years to get wells into production.

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