Offshore Drilling Archives

The ocean is essential to our lives in Virginia, whether you enjoy gorgeous coastline views and recreation or some of the world’s most sought-after seafood. Most of us love spending weekends enjoying the 3,000 miles of coastline in our state, from our long stretches of sandy beaches to the beautiful estuary habitats the Chesapeake Bay provides. We also love our waterways, which stretch inland but are inherently connected to the ocean. From kayaking and rafting to paddle boarding and surfing, water sports that rely on clean, healthy waters are the foundation of Virginia’s recreation.

Our economy and way of life rely on the health of our oceans. Fishing, tourism and recreation in Virginia support over 86,000 jobs and generate $4.8 billion in GDP. But, this very ocean, and the immense economic benefits it brings us, are at threat from offshore drilling. In January of this year, the Trump administration released the draft Outer Continental Shelf Oil and Gas Leasing Program for 2019-2024. If this program moves forward, it would open the Atlantic Ocean to offshore drilling activities, putting Virginia’s coast, and our economy, in jeopardy.

I’m 100 miles from the coast, and I know how bad offshore drilling would be for our future.

As a small business owner in Richmond who relies on our clean waterways and environment, I know that drilling would spell disaster for our coastal small businesses, which rely on tourists visiting to enjoy the beautiful Virginia coastline. From the first step of offshore exploration to the inevitability of drilling accidents, offshore drilling is a bad deal for Virginia, and for our local businesses.

Before any drilling occurs, companies must explore for potential oil and gas reserves through seismic airgun blasting, a process extremely harmful to marine life. It has been shown to reduce catch rates in important commercial fish, as well as increasing mortality in scallops, one of the largest seafood revenues for our state. The dockside value of sea scallop landings in 2016 alone was more than $51 million, a sum that’s sure to take a blow if seismic airgun blasting occurs off the coast. It’s also bound to impact marine mammals, driving away tourists who flock to our coast hoping to see whales as they migrate up and down the Atlantic.

Once companies blast our seas and identify any potential oil reserves, the drilling begins. This development will undoubtedly change the character of our coast.

The addition of large-scale oil refineries and the associated pipelines required to pump the oil will transform our charismatic beach towns into oil towns.

An industrialized coast will drive tourists away. After all, there’s probably a good reason why people don’t vacation in coastal oil towns.

Virginia cannot risk a catastrophe like the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster, which resulted in more than 200 million gallons of oil spewing into the Gulf of Mexico. The spill impacted the Gulf’s once vibrant fishing and tourism economy; the region lost an estimated 10 million user-days of beach, fishing, and boating activity due to oiled waters. An oil spill will not only impact our coast – it is bound to impact all of our interconnected waterways, including our very own James River. Here’s an exciting new offer: Guided whitewater rafting through an oil-slick fish kill. Sound appealing?

So why am I, a business owner in Richmond, concerned with offshore drilling? Because our legacy in Virginia should be clean waters and thriving natural resources, not an oiled coast. And, the quality of life that draws people to this region, and makes us feel so connected to it, will be obliterated. Whether you own a surf shop steps away from the sand or a business 100 miles from the shoreline, we all depend on the ocean. We cannot risk losing it.

Note: Op-Eds are contributions from guest writers and do not reflect RVA Magazine editorial policy.

Attorney General Mark Herring has joined with attorneys general from eleven other states in calling for a ban on offshore drilling. In a letter addressed to Secretary of the Interior, Ryan Zinke, the lawmakers expressed “opposition” to the Department of Interior’s 2019-2024 National Outer Continental Shelf Oil and Gas Leasing Draft Proposed Program. The letter goes on to state that if the program is not terminated by March the consortium of attorneys general will file formal comments that address, “legal insufficiencies and the many harms that it would inflict on our states.”

As of April 2017, President Trump signed an executive order green-lighting the “energy innovation, exploration, and production” of the outer continental shelf, which would include the Hampton Roads area of Virginia. Trump reiterated his support for domestic energy exploration and exploitation in his State of the Union address this past Tuesday night saying, “We have ended the war on American energy.” The letter to Zinke, however, highlighted the potentially disastrous problems offshore drilling would cause, not only to the environment, but to the “three million jobs across America [that] depend on the ocean and coastal economy, which generated more than $350 billion in gross domestic product in 2014 alone.”

In the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s 2017 report on the US Ocean and Great Lakes Economy, Virginia’s ocean economy “employed 118,760 people and generated $5.1 billion in wages and $8.2 billion in gross domestic product.”

The report went on to find, “The ocean economy accounted for 3.2 percent of Virginia’s employment, 2.6 percent of its wages, and 1.8 percent of its gross domestic product.”

Coastal Virginia is also home to Naval Station Norfolk, one of the largest military installations in the world. The station supports 80,000 active duty service men and women, 112,000 family members, 30,000 civilian employees and accounts for 30 percent of the overall population of Hampton Roads, making it one of the largest economic engines in the Commonwealth. Yet according to a Department of Defense memo from 2010, offshore oil and gas exploration is not compatible with the “operations and training” mission of the Navy in Hampton Roads. Should oil and gas exploration be given the go-ahead, this would put the relationship with the Navy would in serious jeopardy.

None of this even takes into account the safety concerns surrounding offshore oil and gas exploration. Most of which came to light in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon disaster that left eleven people dead and spilled over three-million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. According to the attorneys general letter, the risks from drilling in the Atlantic are even higher than elsewhere given there is minimal “spill response infrastructure or capacity” in the region.

Florida is so far the only state which has been granted an exemption to Trump’s aggressive plans to expand offshore oil and gas exploration. The letter goes so far as to say, “Indeed, the Department has not described in any detail the reasoning for the apparent exemption granted to waters off the coast of Florida, nor for the failure to exempt areas off the coasts of other states.” Interestingly, Trump’s golf club Mar-a-Lago sits off the coast of Eastern Florida.

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Op-Ed: Offshore Drilling Is Bad for Virginia’s Future

Virginia Joins other States in Calling for a Ban on Offshore Drilling