In Louisiana, we predict we invented offshore drilling.
We type of did, though the document books cited by The Wall Avenue Journal give the nod to California. For what? In 1897, almost 4 many years after the primary profitable oil nicely was drilled on land in Pennsylvania, a sequence of rigs off the coast of California had been hooked up to slim, wood, quarter-mile-long piers, designed to drill in water as much as 35 toes deep.
However extra realistically, the primary productive nicely to be drilled past the sight of land was when Kerr-McGee Oil Industries went roughly 10 miles off the Louisiana coast in 1947. These waters had been 18 toes deep.
At this time, oil from miles beneath the ocean’s floor is drilled within the Gulf of Mexico. Large billion-dollar platforms are producing power for the nation and the world — not solely right here, however even offshore in locations like Saudi Arabia, the place many of the oil and gasoline comes from land-based drilling.
Location, location, location: That’s obtained quite a bit to do with Louisiana leaders’ obsession with the place the oil comes from.
No governmental subject comes from nowhere, and our points with offshore oil manufacturing grew round 50 years in the past as that enterprise grew and onshore manufacturing of power lagged.
Outdated turn-of-the-last-century fields from Pine Island in Caddo Parish to newer areas just like the Tuscaloosa Pattern north of Baton Rouge had been depleted, at the least as a lot as Twentieth-century know-how may extract oil and gasoline.
With that shift, Louisiana took a monetary hit.
The historical past of the state over the past 50 years or so is that of a painful strategy of beginning to pay our personal approach because the oil and gasoline revenues that flooded into Baton Rouge both busted flat — the mid-Nineteen Eighties — or declined extra slowly as a result of power manufacturing shifted offshore.
Louisiana has all the time felt it obtained shortchanged because the U.S. Treasury obtained the lion’s share of cash from oil extracted within the Gulf of Mexico. Even our delegation in Congress, highly effective because it was within the Nineteen Seventies, couldn’t get the share of offshore revenues that the state felt it deserved. In any case, oil and different minerals mined in locations like Wyoming on federal lands had a 50% share for the state.
Louisiana, as at this time, continues to service offshore drilling from Port Fourchon and different locations alongside the coast. Whereas that’s economically worthwhile, a lot of the severance taxes and royalties go to Washington, D.C.
That’s the reason the Louisiana delegation is at this time nonetheless combating an uphill battle for extra income sharing. The landmark 2006 legislation pushed by then-U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu and her colleagues from the state, which gave Louisiana and different Gulf states a share of power revenues capped at about $375 million a 12 months, can be revised to the advantage of Louisiana by the Reinvesting in Shoreline Economies and Ecosystems Act, or RISEE.
That invoice was blocked within the last days of the final Congress and began over in January with the brand new session.
RISEE would elevate the offshore income cap and supply extra money to 38 coastal states, together with these lining the Nice Lakes. In Congress, as in kindergarten, sharing is caring, apparently; different states need to get one thing to vote for a fairer division of cash that, in any case, is closely depending on Louisiana’s help of offshore drilling.
Actual offshore drilling, since 1947. Sure, Louisiana benefited, partially. However that’s nonetheless a very long time for the environmental affect and different prices to our state over these many years.
A fairer share of offshore revenues must be accredited by Congress.