Ricky Carroll, now a Senior Geophysicist at Hilcorp, provided a remembrance of a crazy workaround regarding oil production from an offshore California oil platform.
This is what I recall from when I worked the offshore fields Hueso and Huesocito as a geologist. My primary job was generating prospects in the Gulf of Mexico, but I was assigned short term projects to work non-ops offshore Santa Barbara. This was in the early to mid 80’s.
As I think back, regarding those CA fields, we were not allowed to run pipelines to shore from the platforms because local communities and the states forbid new pipeline construction after the Santa Barbara spill of 1969.
Yet, CA still had the best refineries for taking this sour crude and it already had an established onshore pipeline network.
Our solution for oil producers was to offload the produced offshore oil to floating (moored) production facilities using flowlines, which are smaller scale pipelines (guessing here: likelly not subject to state restrictions as they were extrajurisdictional or grandfathered.) .
These offshore storage/treatment facilities, called OSTs, were basically large barges that could hold and treat the oil (remove sulfur, etc). and those facilties were where tankers could tie up, hook to the pumps an take on the oil.
California pipeline restriction onshore meant they had no where to take the oil onshore in the state because no pipelines could be built in areas deemed “sensitive”. So oil would flow from the platforms to the OSTs via flowlines, the oil would get some treatment, then tankers would moor to the OST, load up the oil, the tanker would run up the coast to Oregon, where it would be offloaded in port, taken by existing (older established) pipelines to the California refineries. (I think).
This is as I recall it. Like a lot of things I “remember” this is subject to error, but it’s what I remember. I worked those fields when I lived in New Orleans, but i travels to Bakersfield to work with our partners, Chevron and Texaco. When I asked why the heck we used tankers like that, what I posted was what I was told.
My UG degrees were in Marine Science and Biology, so I was a bit sensitive to the risk. I still think it’s silly.
Posted as a comment on social media:
I once worked offshore California fields as a geologist, , way back in the 80’s. If I recall correctly, California officials, using both state and local restrictions, wouldn’t allow us to run pipelines to shore for the oil production. Instead, oil was offloaded to tankers, the tankers ran up the coast to ports out of state, where the oil was then pumped out and sent by existing pipelines back down to refineries in California.
As everyone knows, the biggest causes of marine fossil fuel pollution are runoff from urban and agricultural activities, then as a distant second, marine transportation. Pipelines and drilling operations are way down the list.
Even in the 80’s, Virtue Signaling was a thing and California Coastal Commissions and the State Gov’t were a big part of the disconnect between risk exposure and public relations.