Shutting Down Old Oil Rigs Is Harder —and More Expensive—Than it Sounds

As workers continue to comb beaches for tar balls in California’s Orange County after an underwater pipeline ruptured on Oct. 2, another massive fossil fuel cleanup operation is just getting underway on a 55-year-old rig anchored 120 miles up the coast. It’s a taxpayer-funded, $60 million debacle that reveals just how difficult and costly it may be to shut down aging oil rigs in the Pacific Ocean and decarbonize the country’s energy supply. Anchored two miles off Santa Barbara, the rig in question, known as Platform Holly, was built by ARCO in 1966, sold to Mobil in 1993, then sold again to a small Colorado-based oil company called Venoco in 1997. In 2015, a corroded onshore pipeline carrying crude oil from Holly and other nearby platforms burst, hemorrhaging oil onto the beach and into the Pacific Ocean. With the pipeline shuttered, Venoco declared bankruptcy in 2017, abruptly notifying California authorities that it would be abandoning its lease and letting its rig workers walk off the job. Faced with the risk of another leak from the abandoned rig, the California State Lands Commission had no choice but to take over the platform. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] The situation turned out to be even worse than it seemed. A $22 million bond Venoco previously put up—essentially a security deposit intended to cover the costs of exactly this situation—was only enough to fund just 6% of the approximately $360 million needed to plug Holly&...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized climate change TIME 2030 Source Type: news