A historic offshore oil platform has been scheduled for decommissioning. Legend has it that Platform Holly inspired Jim Morrison to write “The Crystal Ship.” Nearly 50 years later, the future of the structure is in question.
Thirty wells originate from Platform Holly. Some extend from the platform as far as 10,000 feet and as deep as 3,500 feet.
Bautista started working on Holly in 1998. The platform had just been purchased from Mobil for $15 million by Tim Marquez, co-founder of Venoco and a young oil executive with an eye for underperforming properties. Dave Bautista wanders a narrow path through Platform Holly’s dense infrastructure of storage tanks, manifolds and pipes. Drilling operations on land can take up hundreds of acres; Holly occupies less than 1 acre.“We had just received an attaboy,” Bautista says. One of the company’s executives for production and safety had come aboard to praise the crew.
The state hired Beacon West, which included former employees of Venoco, to maintain Holly and began negotiating the cost of decommissioning with Exxon Mobil Corp., the developer of the wells.of multiple charges related to the spill. They worked 12-hour shifts, seven days on, seven days off. During breaks they hung on the railing, 40 feet above the water, watching whales breach, the sun rise and fall, never imagining that it would come to an end.
“If you totally remove a platform, you kill not just the fish but hundreds of millions of invertebrates.”Four options are being considered, says Jeff Planck of the State Lands Commission: sever the platform at the seafloor and remove it entirely, convert the platform into a marine biology laboratory, reconfigure the platform for alternative energy production, or remove half of the platform and create an artificial reef for the marine life drawn to the protection of the platform.
“There are people who make no bones about it: Anything artificial in the ocean is bad,” he says. “They want the platforms removed. That is not a biological perspective. It is a philosophical perspective that society needs to debate.”
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