We Need to Know What's Out There

Local legislators right to support thorough state offshore natural gas study

Local legislators no doubt will pay a price for agreeing this week to open the door to future extraction of natural gas off the S.C. coastline. A goodly number of local folks oppose efforts to discover whether gas reserves lie beneath the waves above the S.C. continental shelf and whether it would be feasible to extract it. In their view, policymakers who desire to find out what's out there are enemies of the environment.

That's the theme with which local conservationists hammer U.S. Rep. Henry Brown, the Grand Strand's man in Washington, for his support of a U.S. House bill to lift the federal moratorium on oil and natural gas drilling along the Atlantic coast. That measure would empower the states to allow - or disallow - offshore drilling in their waters.

In anticipation that the federal moratorium could one day be lifted, the S.C. House measure would create a blue-ribbon panel to explore the upsides and downsides of future state authorization of offshore gas drilling. Oil is not part of the House equation.

Panel members, who would report their findings to the 2007 General Assembly, would explore the potential benefits of a cheaper offshore natural gas supply to S.C. manufacturers and residents. Equally important, the panel also would look into the potential harm that offshore gas drilling could cause the state's economically vital tourism industry, as well as any deleterious effects that drilling could exert on the fragile coastal environment.

Voting to advance the offshore-exploration study to S.C. Senate consideration were S.C. Reps. Carl Anderson, D-Georgetown; Vida Miller, D-Pawleys Island; Nelson Hardwick, R-Surfside Beach; Liston Barfield, R-Aynor; Billy Witherspoon, R-Conway; Alan Clemmons, R-Myrtle Beach; Thad Viers, R-Myrtle Beach; and Tracy Edge, R-North Myrtle Beach. If the blistering that Brown is getting over his support of the federal moratorium bill is any indication, some of these legislators - if not all - are in for pointed criticism, second-guessing and name-calling. The don't-even-go-there crowd would just rather not know if hydrocarbons lie off the S.C. coast and what it would cost - economically and environmentally - to recover them.

We understand and - to an extent - sympathize with those feelings. But U.S. energy independence is too important a cause to allow potential sources of relief to go unexplored. Energy conservation alone can't solve this problem.

The geopolitical reality is that nations unfriendly to U.S. interests control much of the nation's oil and natural gas supply. For that reason, willful ignorance about offshore gas and oil reserves that we could control would be irresponsible. That, especially, is why our representatives did the right thing in voting for the study.