27-06-01 Over its lifetime, this enormous drilling platform has produced enough natural gas to supply 250,000 American homes for a decade. But now its wells are petering out, leaving owner Texaco, like other energy companies, with a growing problem: What to do with their platforms' hulking carcasses, some nearly as tall as the Empire State Building?
The recent debate over opening up more of Alaska and the nation's coastlines to drilling has mostly focused on the environmental impact of finding and producing oil and gas. But as the Gulf of Mexico shows, when the work is done, an enormous mass of metal remains to be cleaned up.
Federal lease agreements require oil and gas companies drilling in US waters to leave the ocean floor as they found it. But tearing down the multimillion dollar platforms and hauling them to shore to sell for scrap can cost as much as tens of millions of dollars. So oil companies are eager to find other options. Ideas have ranged from turning platforms into prisons to creating a marine resort where people could holiday. The leading alternative is converting rigs into artificial reefs.
Indeed, the platforms act like reefs from the day they go in the water, with coral and colourful sponges clinging to the "jacket," or frame, that sits underwater. Shrimp and crab follow, and fish aren't far behind, all congregating around the structures for shelter and a bite to eat. Oil companies with permits to reef their platforms generally get a waiver on their lease agreement.

Reefing is just what Texaco plans to do with the 21-year-old High Island platform, which is almost as tall as the Statue of Liberty. Later this summer, it will haul to shore the platform's 150-foot-by-70-foot deck, with its bunks, mess hall and heliport, plus the production area underneath, with its corroded pipes and valves. Then, the 3,000-ton orange "jacket" that remains below the water line -- a habitat for everything from coral to snapper to sea turtles -- will be cut in two, with the top half placed beside the bottom half on the ocean floor as an artificial reef standing 85 feet tall.
More than 160 platforms have been reefed in the Gulf, though, unlike High Island, many of them are blown from beneath the ocean floor and towed to state-sanctioned sites. Although federal rules seek to protect marine mammals by having the area around platforms inspected before a blast, the explosions obliterate most of what has gathered around the platform's legs over the years. A kill of 7,000 fish isn't unusual.
In time, though, colourful sponges, corals and other marine life return. "It's like a McDonald's for fish," says Jan Culbertson, Texas' artificial reef coordinator, who on a recent dive beneath High Island identified 21 species of fish, from barracuda and Bermuda chub to blue runners.

The Gulf is home to 3,687 oil and gas platforms. With energy reserves in the shallower waters dwindling, the number of platforms along the shelf is expected to decline 30 % over the next 25 years, according to a survey by Louisiana State University's Centre for Energy Studies. The study predicts that companies operating in these waters will install 142 platforms a year through 2023, but 186 a year will be decommissioned.
States have supported the rigs-to-reefs effort in large part because the oil companies split the money they save with the state. Louisiana started the trend in 1986, and Texas and Mississippi followed.
In California, where 27 huge platforms will need to come down, the legislature is debating a rigs-to-reefs measure. San Francisco-based Chevron predicts the legislation could save the industry $ 260 mm in California, with $ 400 mm more going to a proposed non-profit environmental endowment and the state.
Texaco, based in White Plains, NY, expects to save more than $ 500,000 reefing High Island -- an amount it will divide evenly with the Texas artificial-reef program. "In some regards, it's a no-brainer," says Larry Anderson, Texaco's vice president for safety, health and environment.

But environmentalists are wary. One group in 1995 forced Shell Group to abandon its plans to sink the Brent Spar, a floating oil-storage container, to the bottom of the North Sea. "Why let the oil industry walk away from part of the social cost?" says Richard Charter, a marine analyst for New York-based Environmental Defence.
"Cut it up and take it away," he advises oil companies. "The ocean's not a big garbage disposal. You could end up with a real undersea junkyard."
Other suggestions for what to do with defunct oil platforms have surfaced. Last year, when the federal Bureau of Prisons floated the idea of expanding its Lompoc, California, prison, Chevron quickly proposed converting some of its California platforms into penitentiaries that could house 1,000 prisoners each.
"We told [prison officials], 'If you want to avoid the onshore impacts, perhaps you could go offshore,' " says George Steinbach, Chevron's decommissioning project manager. But prison officials in Washington, D.C., weren't impressed. "It wouldn't be practical for us," says Traci Billingsly, a spokeswoman for the Bureau of Prisons.