FOCUS: ENERGY
U.S. and Canada split over Lake Erie drilling
Drilling ban for oil, gas likely to remain in effect for portions within U. S. border
WASHINGTON — Offshore drilling has become one of the hot political issues in a new era of $4-a-gallon gasoline.
But no one is pushing for drilling off the north shore of the United States — except the Canadians.
As it has for many years, a Canadian oil and gas company is pumping natural gas out of 480 wells in Lake Erie, most of them toward the eastern end of the lake.
Congress, meanwhile, has not undertaken any serious discussion of lifting the long-standing ban on oil and gas drilling in the U. S. waters of the Great Lakes.
“I don’t think the Great Lakes has ever even been a discussion item,” said Rep. John Peterson, who is preparing a bipartisan bill to reopen U. S. ocean waters to more drilling.
A ban on drilling in the lakes “makes no public policy sense,” given that the Canadians are already doing it, said Peterson, a Republican from Pennsylvania.
But Peterson is leaving the idea out of his bipartisan energy bill because proposing oil and gas drilling in the lakes makes no political sense.
Fears of potential environmental damage — particularly involving oil leaks — and about preserving the Great Lakes ecosystem keep the idea of lifting the drilling ban far from the political mainstream.
“Opposition on the American side is a lot broader,” said Derek Stack, executive director of Buffalo-based Great Lakes United. “It’s not quite the same on the Canadian side because it’s grandfathered in there. It’s already happening.”
Drilling on the Canadian side of the Great Lakes actually is older than most grandfathers. The first Canadian gas well in Lake Erie was drilled in 1913, and more than 2,000 have followed.
Today’s wells are hidden from view because, after they are drilled, the gas generally is pumped from the lake bed to processing facilities, onshore or on platforms. The wells themselves are noticeable only while being drilled or serviced by a team of divers that arrives by boat.
While natural gas output from the lake has declined slightly in recent years, Talisman Energy Corp. still extracts enough gas from the lake in a year to supply a city of 40,000.
Canada does not permit any oil drilling in the Great Lakes, although Lake Erie and especially Lake Michigan are believed to have reserves.
The only remaining U. S. production from the Great Lakes comes from a handful of wells on Lake Michigan that preceded bans imposed by Congress and the state legislature.
Those bans are likely to remain. While Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the presumptive Republican candidate for president, recently called for reopening ocean drilling, he never mentioned the Great Lakes.
“There is a separate ban on drilling in the Great Lakes, and Sen. McCain has only discussed his support for lifting the ban on outer continental shelf drilling,” said Peter Feldman, a McCain spokesman.
The outer continental shelf receives more attention because it has far more oil and gas. According to the U. S. Geological Survey, 17.84 billion barrels of oil and 76.47 trillion cubic feet of natural gas could be found beneath currently off-limits waters in the Atlantic, Pacific and Gulf of Mexico.
In contrast, federal geologists estimate 430 million barrels of oil and 5.23 trillion cubic feet of gas lie under the U. S. waters of the Great Lakes.
American energy companies still say they wish they had the opportunity to tap into those resources.
“We would love to do it,” said Brad Gill, executive director of the Lake View-based Independent Oil and Gas Association of New York.
But Gill predicted that the ban on Great Lakes drilling — last formalized by Congress in 2005 — never will be lifted. Americans are too worried about the possibility of oil or gas spills.
He called such fears unfounded.
“You’ve had the Canadians doing this for several decades, and we don’t necessarily see oil washing up on our shores,” he said.
A 2005 study by the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers reported only one major oil spill in the Great Lakes basin, resulting from the explosion of a tanker carrying 20,000 gallons of gasoline in the Saginaw River in 1990.
But smaller spills are more common. In 2002, the Public Interest Research Group of Michigan reported 83 oil spills from 1990 to 1995 and 51 natural gas leaks from 1997 to 2001.
That, environmentalists say, proves that larger and far more devastating accidents are possible.
Companies drilling for gas inadvertently could hit oil, said Andy Buchsbaum, director of the National Wildlife Federation’s Great Lakes Office. That has happened, prompting workers to promptly seal up the oil lest it spill into the lake.
“If there were a serious drilling accident in one of the Great Lakes, the results could be devastating and permanent,” Buchsbaum said. “These are closed fresh-water lakes. A major spill could likely permanently kill one of the Great Lakes.”
But nothing even remotely close to that has occurred while the Canadians have been drilling in Lake Erie.
“There’s been nothing to speak of,” Rudy Rybansky, chief engineer for the Petroleum Resources Centre of the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources, said when asked about accidents.
Talisman Energy, which is extensively involved in drilling in New York and Pennsylvania, has not drilled new wells in Lake Erie in two years simply because the company is investing elsewhere, said Scott Tompkins, superintendent for Ontario operations.
And as a result, natural gas production from Lake Erie totaled 7.74 billion cubic feet in 2006, down from a recent peak of 10.18 billion in 1997, the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources said.
Some of Talisman’s Lake Erie wells have been producing gas for decades and are are running out — but plenty remains, Tompkins said.
“I would think we’d still be producing 20 years out,” he said.
When asked how much gas could be produced from the U. S. side of the lake, he said: “It’s hard to say, but we know our wells go up to within a kilometer or so of the U. S. border. And there’s no reason to believe the gas stops at the American border.”
