News that President Barack Obama is proposing to open Georgia’s coastal waters to oil and gas drilling has taken many people in the state off guard, and opponents are scrambling to resist the plan.
“It’s definitely clear that they woke up,” said Claire Douglass, campaign director for the environmental group Oceana.
Offshore drilling is a “little bit of a newer idea” in Georgia than in the Carolinas and Virginia, the other states Obama is proposing to open to offshore drilling after decades of debate, said Hunter Hopkins, executive director of the Georgia Petroleum Council, who has been hearing concerns about the plan.
“Communities along the coast of Georgia are very aware of it, and I’ve been getting calls from people all up and down the Georgia coast,” Hopkins said. “Some are just simply looking for more information, some are all for it, and other folks don’t want it to happen.”
The federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management at first didn’t even schedule any public meetings in Georgia on its plan to open the Atlantic to drilling, despite putting together meetings in other coastal states that would be affected and even in Florida, which isn’t part of the drilling area.
After pressure from groups in Georgia, BOEM added a meeting in Savannah for March 24.
A pair of small Georgia coastal towns, Tybee Island and St. Mary’s, passed resolutions against planned seismic testing for oil and gas off the Georgia coast. Other actions are being considered, said Oceana campaign director Douglass.
Before Georgians got the news in January that their state would be part of the offshore drilling plan, “it sounds like people there didn’t really think it was a reality, that it didn’t make sense from a financial standpoint,” Douglass said.
There’s long been skepticism about how much oil and gas lies off the Georgia coast, with the coastal advocacy group One Hundred Miles noting in a fact sheet that “test wells bored in the ocean floor off Georgia’s coast between 1950 and 1980 produced no results.” The Brunswick-based group is helping lead opposition to the drilling.
“Despite evidence that only minimal deposits of oil and gas are available off Georgia’s coast, the federal government draft plan could change the face of Georgia’s coast forever,” said Alice Keys, the associate director of the group, in a blog post on the group’s website.
The federal government, though, says that far more advanced seismic technology now exists to find out how much oil and natural gas really lies beneath the Atlantic.
That seismic exploration could begin in the next year or so, with an Atlantic drilling lease sale possible in 2021.
The seismic tests are controversial, with a number of scientists saying they pose a threat to marine mammals, but the Interior Department has deemed them safe. Air guns blast under the sea, and echoes from the intense blasts will be used to produce sub-sea maps.
Hopkins, executive director of the Georgia Petroleum Council, said it’s impossible to know until the surveys are done how much potential lies off Georgia.
“All we’re asking for right now is just the opportunity to go out and see what’s out there,” he said. “Maybe there is nothing out there and maybe there is a huge deposit, we don’t know.”
A dozen Democratic senators from East Coast states sent Interior Secretary Sally Jewell a letter this week laying out the risk of an oil spill and saying drilling would threaten the coastline, fishing and tourism. But senators representing Virginia, North Carolina and Georgia are supportive of drilling off their states’ coasts, saying it would bring jobs and spending.
“I strongly support opening up the Georgia coast to potential offshore drilling that is environmentally sound as long as all stakeholders, including Governor (Nathan) Deal, industry, tourism and economic development are properly consulted and any concerns are appropriately resolved,” Sen. Johnny Isakson, R-Ga., said in an email.
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