MICHAEL R. BLOOD and MATTHEW BROWN / Associated Press
Hoping to find a lost anchor chain, a workboat pulled a grappling hook across the ocean floor near an oil rig off the coast of Southern California. But something else hooked up – a pipeline that carried crude oil from the towering oil rig to the shore.
Once caught, the 197-foot boat dragged the pipeline until it snapped on one of the legs of the drilling platform. The bubbling oil created a slick that stretched for miles along the coast of Ventura County northwest of Los Angeles.
The May 1991 accident provides a snapshot of the environmental hazards and tradeoffs inherent in the network of oil platforms and pipelines off the world-famous southern California coast. The troubled relationship is being retested after a leaky underwater pipeline off Huntington Beach polluted beaches, killing seabirds and fish this month.
In the most recent case, investigators assume that the massive anchor of a cargo ship dragged and dragged the 16-inch pipeline up to a year ago. It is believed that the damage caused the pipeline to crack and about 25,000 gallons of crude oil was spilled.
The incident has once again called for cessation of drilling in coastal waters and comes amid a social reckoning on climate change and continued reliance on fossil fuels. It also raises questions about the soundness of old equipment, the limits of government safety oversight, the willingness of companies to invest in repairs and whether it makes sense to have oil rigs and pipelines near one of the busiest port complexes in the world.
The most recent leak was in a pipeline serving a cluster of three oil rigs several miles off the coast south of Los Angeles. The original owner, Shell Oil, began operating the “Beta Unit” in 1980 and estimated it would take approximately 35 years to operate, “by which time the platform and other offshore facilities will be removed and the wells sealed”.
You are now working in a fourth decade.
The platforms and pipeline are owned by Houston-based Amplify Energy Corp., which emerged from the bankruptcy of previous owner Memorial Production Partners in 2017. Subsidiary Beta Offshore operates the platforms and the pipeline.
In 2011, Beta applied for and received approval to replace two pipelines between its platforms – one for oil previously decommissioned due to corrosion damage and one for water that is classified as “at the end of its useful life” in the documents submitted became federal regulators.
Miyoko Sakashita of the Center for Biological Diversity, which opposes offshore drilling, said the removal of the old pipelines should have been a signal that the failed pipeline was also at risk.
“I am very concerned that they saw the corrosion and the age of the pipes between the platform, but that was ignored,” she said. “California’s offshore oil infrastructure is old and run down and needs to be shut down immediately.”
There are 27 oil and gas platforms off the California coast. Federal officials have jurisdiction over 23 who are between nearly 30 and over 50 years old and in water depths of 95 feet to nearly 1,200 feet, according to a report released last year by the Aquarium of the Pacific, which is co-sponsored by the state of California became Lands Commission, which oversees pipelines in state waters.
About half of the platforms are still producing oil, which, as in the most recent oil spill, is piped from the wells to the platforms at the refineries.
Environmentalists have long complained about poor government oversight of pipeline companies. In April, a damning report from the Government Accountability Office of Congress found fundamental problems with officials’ monitoring of these lines – an issue first recognized in 2007.
The report focused on approximately 8,600 miles of lines in the Gulf of Mexico. The Home Office’s Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement allows companies to use unreliable methods to detect leaks and has not systematically tracked whether pipelines are moving or being exposed due to strong currents or changes in the seabed.
A senior advisor to Home Secretary Deb Haaland recognized the issues, and officials said new rules could be finalized in the next year. This includes significant changes to the requirements for leak detection, inspections, repairs to pipelines and other areas, said Laura Daniel-Davis, the agency’s assistant assistant secretary for land and mineral management, in a letter to GAO released last month.
The fewer pipelines in the Pacific compared to the Gulf mean federal regulators can keep a closer eye on the California coast, said John Smith, who has been with the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management for more than three decades , was spent by its predecessor, Minerals Management Service.
But he added that the Amplify spill will test whether that oversight is enough for something that was predicted decades ago.
In 1991, the Federal Minerals Management Service predicted a 94% chance of a major oil spill off Southern California over 30 years. That estimate wasn’t published long after a tanker spilled the blackened coastline in Huntington Beach and Newport Beach and the pipeline rupture that caused the slick off Ventura County.
The oil industry – the source of 150,000 California jobs and hundreds of millions of government tax dollars over the years – has long been an unpleasant partner to the green state, a national renewable energy leader that will ban the sale of new gasoline. Cars and trucks in 2035.
A moratorium on new oil and gas leases in state waters was imposed after a devastating 1969 oil spill in Santa Barbara that helped fuel the modern environmental movement. Now US Representative Michelle Steel, a Republican from Orange County, wants to temporarily ban cargo ships from anchoring or idling off the county’s coast and calls the backlog of ships waiting to unload “an environmental and health crisis.”
Oil production in federal Pacific waters has declined 90% since 1995, and no new drilling leases have been sold since the early 1980s. With the crude oil reservoirs beneath California’s offshore platforms depleted, it means lower industry profits.
“It is very difficult for them to make large investments in equipment and pipelines,” said Smith.
Officials have identified a narrow crack in the Amplify pipeline as the source of the recent leak. What caused the rupture remains a mystery that may never be solved.
Coast Guard investigators suspect the line was hit by an anchor weighing several tons from one of the thousands of cargo ships that call at the twin ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles each year. The pipe was bent and dragged up to 32 meters, the concrete casing tore and was possibly hit again by other anchors.
Safety inspections in 2015, 2017 and 2019 found anomalies in Amplify’s pipeline, including metal losses and three dents that were previously repaired. However, several experts who checked the reports said the metal loss – which may be a sign that the pipe wall is thinning as it corrodes with age – was relatively small. The dents were not in the same area as the spill.
“It’s one of the cleanest lines I’ve ever seen,” said engineer Chris Fox of the State Lands Commission, which oversees pipelines through state waters.
The inspection reports were obtained from The Associated Press through a public inquiry.
A grappling hook is unlikely in the Amplify case because the pipeline is much larger and heavier than the pipeline that failed after the hook in 1991, said Smith, now a consultant to the oil and gas industry.
“It’s a lot harder to move. You need a much bigger impact to pull it 100 feet, ”he said.
Brown reported from Billings, Montana. Associated Press Writer Brian Melley contributed from Los Angeles.
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