Pouring Oil on Troubled Waters

By Frederic Golden

The new Interior chief launches a policy of compromise

When the ugly tide of black oil fouled the white beaches around Santa Barbara, Calif., in 1969, killing untold numbers of birds, seals and fish, few people were more appalled than William Clark. A top aide to then California Governor Ronald Reagan, Clark closely watched the progress of the multimillion-dollar cleanup that followed the oil-rig blowout, one of the worst environmental disasters in U.S. history. Today, as successor to the divisive James Watt in the post of Secretary of the Interior, Clark likes to recall that calamitous experience to let environmentalists know that he shares their concerns about the dangers of drilling for oil off America's shores.

Such reassurances, however cosmetic, are all the more welcome after a Supreme Court decision this month that sent jitters through the ranks of state and environmental officials in coastal areas. By a 5-to-4 vote, the tribunal ruled that the Federal Government can ignore the objections of affected states at the time the Interior Department offers oil-or gas-drilling leases on the continental shelf, the sloping underwater strip of land at a continent's edge. The Federal Government has traditionally controlled all drilling on the shelf beyond three miles, except off Texas and Florida, which maintain a ten-mile jurisdiction.--The decision, written by Associate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, involves 29 tracts, totaling 165,000 acres, in the Santa Maria basin off the California coast between Morro Bay and Point Conception, northwest of Santa Barbara. Geologists have estimated there may be as much as 1 billion bbl. of oil in the entire basin. The sections had initially been freed up for lease by the Interior Department in 1981. But California managed to block the proposed arrangement on the ground that the Interior Department had refused to determine whether the leasing met the state's stringent environmental standards. In the new ruling, the court, overturning lower-court decisions, held that an environmental review is not required before an actual sale under the Coastal Zone Management Act of 1972, a congressional law that gives states a voice in offshore oil development by the Federal Government.

The decision was a victory for the Reagan Administration and oil interests. Both have been seeking quicker access to the vast wealth of the continental shelf, an estimated 44 billion bbl. of oil, nearly half again as much as all proven reserves. (The U.S. gets about 10% of its domestic production from offshore wells.) However, Clark immediately moved to reassure the coastal states and environmentalists. Under his stewardship, he said, the Interior Department will seek to avoid the battling that characterized the offshore-leasing program in the past, even while it continues to pursue essentially the same pro-development policies as those of his predecessor. Said Clark: "We can work as partners."

That will not be easy. Although no major offshore-well blowouts have occurred in U.S. waters since the Santa Barbara accident, and the technology for plugging an out-of-control well has vastly improved, environmentalists are worried that chronic, low-level oil pollution could be devastating to such rich fishing grounds as the Georges Bank off New England. They also fear that drill rigs off Alaska, a site of suspected major reserves, could be wrecked by errant ice floes, spreading crude oil over the fragile Arctic terrain.

Under Watt, many of these concerns were either ignored or minimized. Interior officials liked to point out that natural underwater seeps off California's Coal Oil Point, near Santa Barbara, alone released at least four times as much oil as the 5,700 bbl. spilled annually in offshore production within U.S. waters. In July 1981, as a matter of highest national priority, Watt announced a program to lease nearly all of the outer shelf, a total of a billion acres, in five years. He offered up huge tracts (as much as 40 million acres at a time) and cut the period between announcement of a lease to actual sale from 42 months to 22 months. Reacting to this steamroller, the states fought back with delaying tactics and a gusher of lawsuits. The result: a stalemate that held off some drilling and, not incidentally, hurt the Treasury (offshore leasing is its biggest source of revenue after taxes). As Elizabeth Raisbeck, an offshore oil specialist for the Friends of the Earth, saw it, "It was a leasing program out of control."

When he succeeded Watt last November, the more judicious Clark, who in fact was a California Supreme Court justice from 1973 to 1981, promptly removed the two Interior officials most closely identified with Watt's leasing policies. He postponed indefinitely two bitterly fought sales: one in Southern California, scheduled for April, the other in the Georges Bank, to have been held in May.

Environmental concerns, he added in a speech following the Supreme Court decision, would be addressed as early as possible in the leasing process. He also promised that offshore tracts of little interest to the oil industry but of great environmental value would not be nominated for leasing. The Clark view, said an Interior official, is "Why buy an unnecessary fight?"

One of Reagan's most trusted political advisers, Clark is eager to repair the President's image in an election year. Indeed, he has already sent a number of small fence-mending signals to the environmental community. Reversing a Watt policy, he offered the National Wildlife Federation hitherto-refused federal data on the amount of poisonous lead shot that duck hunters inadvertently scatter into lakes and ponds. With that gesture, he buried the hatchet with the largest conservation group in the U.S. Clark also promised that he would end the moratorium imposed by Watt on acquiring new land for the national parks and wildlife refuges, a major irritant to outdoor groups, to say nothing of Congress, which had voted $157 million for the purchases. Finally, he has been passing the peace pipe at private meetings with key environmental leaders like the Wildlife Federation's Jay D. Hair and William Turnage, head of the Wilderness Society. As Clark has made plain, however, in the matter of offshore leasing as well as other conservation issues, the fundamental tenets of Reagan's controlled leasing program will remain unchanged.

Still, as the conciliatory Clark put it in summing up his policy, "There should be no winners or losers." --By Frederic Golden.

Reported by Jay Branegan/Washington and William R. Doerner/San Francisco

--Citing as precedent their history as former Spanish territories that exerted control to a distance of three leagues, or about ten miles.

With reporting by Jay Branegan, William R. Doerner