By Dennis Quick
Senior Staff Writer

We Lowcountry residents complain about all the folks who keep moving here, clogging up our roadways, creating urban sprawl.

One thing that would stop the migration is a nice little oil spill.

We’ll risk having one if Congress passes House Bill 4761, which would permit offshore oil drilling in coastal waters from Virginia to Florida and Alaska to California. South Carolina Republican Reps. Henry Brown and Joe Wilson are among the 71 Congressmen sponsoring the bill.

To make our region less appealing to outsiders, we wouldn’t need a huge oil spill like the 200,000-gallon, 35-mile gusher that hit Santa Barbara, Calif., in 1969. That catastrophe led to the moratorium on U.S. offshore oil drilling enacted in 1981.

Nor would we need a spill as big as the 111,000-gallon oily mess that contaminated southern Maryland’s Patuxent River in 2000.

We wouldn’t even need anything like the 90,000-gallon oil spill that dirtied southeast Louisiana in 2002. In that one, four-foot waves made the cleanup difficult. Only 6,720 gallons of crude were recovered.

And, of course, a 100,000-gallon spill, like the one at Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge in 2003, would be much too big for us. (Midway Atoll is way out in the Pacific Ocean near the International Dateline. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service operates the wildlife refuge. In 1942, the U.S. armed forces whipped the Japanese at Midway. Sixty-one years later, crude oil from a corroded underground pipeline threatened seabirds, sea turtles and Hawaiian monk seals.)

For our purposes, a tiny 1,000-gallon spill, like the one Commencement Bay in Tacoma, Wash., experienced in 2004, would be enough to stain Folly Beach or Sullivan’s Island or Isle of Palms or Kiawah or Seabrook or Wild Dunes.

Once word got out that the Lowcountry had suffered an oil spill—even a mini one—folks would think twice about coming here.

That includes tourists. Rest assured, a small oil spill would hamper our tourism industry. A big spill would kill it.

Commercial and recreational fishing would be damaged.

Property values along the coast would take a nose dive.

Economic developers would have quite a challenge selling our oil-stained quality of life to prospective companies considering relocating or expanding here.

Oil industry representatives point out that advanced technology has made oil drilling much safer today than it was during the 1969 Santa Barbara tragedy.

I’m sure today’s oil rigs are safer. But all it takes is one mishap, and even the highest technology can’t prevent that.

You would expect oil reps to push for coastal drilling. Oil, after all, is their lifeblood.

But their lifeblood is our addiction—an addiction even President George W. Bush said we need to break. Which makes even more curious Reps. Brown and Wilson’s enthusiasm for coastal oil drilling.

You don’t cure an oil addiction by drilling for more oil.

I remember the long lines at gasoline stations during the oil crisis of 1973 when oil prices skyrocketed and gasoline was rationed. The crisis was a slap upside our collective head, telling us it was time we pursue other fuel sources.

But we were hardheaded.

To a large extent, we still are. How else do you explain House Bill 4761?

Fortunately, the South Carolina Commerce Department is exploring hydrogen as a possible replacement for gasoline and diesel fuels. In April, the department sent a delegation to the Hydrogen Fuel and Cell exhibition in Hannover, Germany, where hydrogen-fueled products were displayed.

Aside from Commerce Department personnel, our state’s delegation included representatives from the S.C. Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Alliance, the S.C. Center for Hydrogen Research and the Savannah River National Laboratory.

The University of South Carolina’s National Science Foundation Fuel Cell Center for Excellence exhibited at the event for the first time.

This is the kind of endeavor that would benefit our state’s economy.

Let offshore oil drilling sink into history—as it should have more than 30 years ago.

Dennis Quick is senior staff writer for the Business Journal. E-mail him at dquick@charlestonbusiness.com.

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