Florida Offshore Drilling

There has been an ongoing debate concerning how the United States can meet its own energy demands without overrelying on foreign sources, especially with respect to petroleum and natural gas. By becoming more independent, America could use its foreign policy more as a benevolent worldwide force for peace, prosperity and human rights instead of having to make strategic decisions that sometimes involve supporting repressive governments and even going to war. As far as domestic petroleum exploration and production is concerned, one of the areas considered promising is the offshore area in the Gulf of Mexico. Already, exploration and production is occurring off the Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama coast. Florida, though, has refused to allow any drilling in the wide area of the east Gulf, drawing a line in it straight down from the western border on the state’s panhandle and going eastward to its gulf coast. Both Republicans and Democrats in Florida have been united in this effort to bar oil exploration in “its” area, both in the state government and in the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate (although more Republicans tend to support drilling than Democrats). Former Republican Governor Jeb Bush was strongly for the moratorium on drilling. Democratic Senator Bill Nelson has started filibusters in the Senate just to avoid having any provision inserted into a bill that would authorize drilling off Florida’s coast. The rationale is environmental and economic: Florida depends on the quality of its environment, not only for its seafood industry, but also for its tourism industry. Opponents of off-shore drilling maintain that accidents have happened in the past, while the area is dangerous because many hurricanes go through it. Proponents of using the eastern Gulf for oil exploration hold that the technology for preventing accidents and containing their effects has dramatically improved over the years. Also, the other gulf states depend on their tourism and seafood industries as well, so why should Florida be so selfish?

Most Florida residents oppose off-shore exploration, which explains why this issue is a no-brainer for its politicians. But there is one issue that they cannot answer to: U.S. territorial waters only go so far offshore and then they become international waters. Most of the eastern Gulf of Mexico that is under the drilling moratorium is international, which means any country may drill there. Already, it’s been reported that Cuba and China are interested in what lies beneath the sea floor there. It would be a big mistake, in my opinion, if we were to refuse to exploit this area, when we could regulate and control our own drilling and production, while placidly watching other nations fill in the void with their probably less safe drilling. And then we’d have to buy from them! Would that make any sense? Short of the United States doing something drastic and declaring ALL of the Gulf of Mexico as its territorial waters, I see no other option than to support tightly regulated oil exploration in the eastern Gulf.

Late last year, both the U.S. Senate and the House finally overwhelmingly passed legislation doing essentially that, opening up vast areas originally under the Florida moratorium to oil and natural gas exploration and drilling. President Bush signed it, a reasonable act if I do say so. This year there are more efforts being made to further increase the permitted area. Hopefully, this will end happily for all concerned parties, although it appears that with most people in my home state, that result has already passed by the wayside.