Now that the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is contained, offshore drilling on the Carolina Coast is again up for debate.
Now that the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is contained, offshore drilling on the Carolina Coast is again up for debate.
Experts talked it over Friday at Coastal Carolina University, trying to figure out whether drilling off our coast would be worth the risk.
There were no easy answers, in part because no one knows how much oil is out there. But the experts agreed there is an opportunity for South Carolina to tap another offshore energy source: the wind.
The academics from CCU and the University of North Carolina Wilmington studied the impact of the Gulf oil spill and decided an event like that could have the same kind of devastating economic and environmental cost, if it happened off coast of the Carolinas.
"There's no reason to expect it not to," said Paul Gayes of CCU's Center for Marine and Wetland Studies.
But Gayes says South Carolina has a natural advantage that Louisiana doesn't: the Gulf Stream.
"Which is good in the sense of the Grand Strand because there's a mechanism to take it away."
But Gayes and the other experts say, no one really knows if there's any oil off the Carolina Coast, since the only studies are decades old.
"There's two issues. There's what's assumed to be out there and there's what's proven and it's not really going to be proven until you drill it in all honesty."
But is drilling worth the risk? SC Rep. Alan Clemmons of Myrtle Beach, who heard the discussion, says there will likely never be an oil well constructed off the coast of South Carolina.
"I don't think there's any interest in the possibility of ruining the crown jewels of South Carolina, being the Grand Strand, with a possible oil spill," Clemmons said.
He says natural gas is a different story, if it's there.
Clemmons says the state also has to consider green technology, like the wind.
Gayes says South Carolina should use the Gulf oil spill as an opportunity to take the lead in wind development, since the first states in will win.
"The worry is if you wait too long and someone else makes that initial effort, they take that risk and they benefit from it, that you basically watch from the sidelines," Gayes said.
Gayes says the North Myrtle Beach community is enthusiastic about wind energy and it's not the environmentalists who are taking the lead. He said it's the business community and he believes we'll see more of that in the future.
