NC's Offshore Energy: Is it Worth the Pursuit?

The debate over offshore drilling is primed to heat up again. The summer driving season is just around the corner, and that could push gas prices higher.

On Monday night we told you that experts believe there probably is not a vast supply of oil off North Carolina’s coast.

But there could be trillions of cubic feet of natural gas. So how much would it cost to drill for that natural gas?

As Nine On Your Side's Philip Jones reports -- in terms of cash, it would cost hundreds of millions of dollars. And in terms of culture? Some say it would cost everything that makes our coast a special place:

Bill Weatherspoon says there's just no getting around it.

“We need to be honest with each other about the long timeline that this is going to take,” he says.

Exploring, drilling, harvesting and producing any oil or natural gas found off North Carolina’s outer continental shelf will take time and a whole lot of money, Weatherspoon says.

He’s the executive director of the North Carolina Petroleum Council -- an industry trade association that represents major petroleum suppliers -- and says from now until the time the first exploratory well is drilled and any newfound fossil fuels later enter the supply chain would take at least eight or ten years.

It would also take hundreds of millions of dollars to buy leases from the government and to construct the infrastructure needed to drill.

“The long timeline has good news in it,” Weatherspoon contends. “If there is a discovery made before production kicks in and before pipelines are located, we're going have time to plan for the right location, for the right place to bring things ashore, for the right place to create a shorebase, for the right way to plan for schools, water, sewer, highways -- all the things that would go with a positive growth generator like homegrown energy.”

But despite Weatherspoon’s enthusiasm, not everyone considers that potential growth positive.

“There's no question that there is a threat,” says UNC-CH researcher Pete Peterson. “Quantifying that threat is always difficult. But that threat exists. And the real point is that, the heavy industrial development associated with landing the oil and gas product is simply incompatible with the existing uses of North Carolina’s coast.

“[It’s incompatible with its parks, with its tourism, retirement and fishing industries -- commercial and recreational both.”

That's about as plain as Peterson can put it.

He has spent decades studying offshore drilling and its effects on the environment. Peterson is a renowned researcher and professor at UNC-Chapel Hill's Institute of Marine Sciences in Morehead City.

And he's right -- according to Frank Tursi with the North Carolina Coastal Federation – that opening up North Carolina’s coast for drilling offshore would dramatically alter the quality of life onshore.

Both of them say it's as much of a socioeconomic issue as it is an environmental issue.

“US oil companies have a very good record as far as spills at the platform and in US waters,” Tursi said. “We're concerned about what do you do with the oil and/or natural gas that you find. You have to bring it ashore somewhere. It has to be processed, it has to be stored, it has to be shipped.”

Tursi says that would not only put the hundreds of species of plants and animals along North Carolina’s coast at risk -- but he asserts the heavy industry all that requires would mean a fundamental change to coastal culture.

Peterson -- the longtime researcher -- agrees.

“There's smokestack, there's product that's spilled, there's odor that goes along with it,” Peterson says. “And there's heavy industrial development of factories and other things, which simply is not consistent with what we have done in North Carolina -- and would change things to look more like northern New Jersey.”

Tursi echoes those concerns.

“Our waters will get more polluted,” Tursi says. “We won't be able to eat the speckled trout in the wintertime. Our coastline will get more intensely developed. Is it worth that?”

Weatherspoon says it is -- mainly because he says the fabric of coastal culture won't change if offshore drilling is given the go-ahead.

“I don't think it'll alter the magic of the North Carolina coast,” Weatherspoon says. “We have beautiful beaches, we have wildlife, we have golf. All of those things are still going to be in place. What we're going to add to that, is we're going to add some wealth through job creation and by keeping US dollars in this country and not shipping them to the Middle East.”

And Weatherspoon is right about the revenue. North Carolina stands to make major bank through revenue sharing -- if federal laws change.

In the Gulf of Mexico, state governments and the federal government share in 37.5 percent of the revenue generated by offshore drilling. Current federal law doesn't provide for Atlantic states like ours to share in that revenue.

But that law might change if North Carolina greenlights offshore exploration. The question that would still remain for everyone -- is it worth it?

Now, it's hard to cover every aspect of what offshore drilling might mean for North Carolina and its coast.

In fact, to give you some perspective, the subcommittee of experts created by the state Legislature to examine the merits of offshore energy exploration is asking for a year-long extension to continue researching the issue through next May.