Offshore Dilemma

California apparently has won another reprieve from wholesale oil drilling in waters off the coast. Members of the California congressional delegation have persuaded the House Appropriations Committee to adopt legislation barring the awarding of any new offshore oil and gas exploration and production leases until February, 1989, although pre-leasing activities may proceed.

Congress should concur, given the inability of a congressional group and Interior Secretary Donald P. Hodel to agree on a drilling program. In the last negotiations the House group offered 173 offshore tracts of nine square miles each for leasing, with none closer than nine miles to shore. Interior and the oil companies had insisted on 670 tracts, with many of them abutting the state’s three-mile ownership zone.

The California offer did not seem unreasonable. It was a larger area than the 150 tracts once tentatively agreed to by Hodel in 1985 but quashed by the oil industry as unacceptable.

The industry has taken an all-or-nothing gamble, and, for now, has come up with virtually nothing. This is in spite of the fact that the industry is in such a shambles that the Oil & Gas Journal pleaded editorially this week that the government should do something to rescue it and that “nothing should be ruled out.�

Simple arithmetic will demonstrate that under the Appropriations Committee edict no new leases could be granted until a new President took office. But California coastal interests should not sit on their victory for the coming two years and hope that a future President will protect the coast from any drilling for all time.

The current oil surplus and low prices notwithstanding, the nation faces a serious long-term petroleum problem. When the next oil crisis hits, there will be incredible pressure to drill off the California coast in the cheapest and fastest possible way--in areas closest to shore and among the most environmentally sensitive. Therefore, California must be prepared to take a good-faith negotiating stance that could produce some future oil.

On the other hand, the oil industry needs to be more forthcoming with facts about the oil prospects off the California coast and what can be drilled without causing undue pressure on the environment. The secretary of the Interior must protect the environment as well as provide an orderly offshore oil program. He should help negotiate a balanced program, but avoid being a front man for everything that the oil industry wants.

There must be a reasonable way to resolve this dilemma. The idea of a secretary of the Interior and members of Congress down on their hands and knees going over oil maps arguing this specific lease tract or that one certainly is not the way, especially in an election year.