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“We’re used to looking at the rigs, but wouldn’t it be nice if they went away? The majority of the town would just prefer that that oil development wasn’t here.”ĭecommissioning, though, will be a gargantuan task. “Oil’s been here for a long, long time,” said Fred Shaw, a Carpinteria councilman who remembers the spill of 1969. Summerland’s Becker Wells gets plugged after a century of leaks. These platforms range in age from 32 (Gail) to 53 years old (Holly). Conception, Habitat off Carpinteria, and Grace and Gail off the Rincon and Ventura County – may be removed around the same time.

And at least six more offshore oil platforms – Harvest, Hidalgo, and Hermoso off Pt. Platform Holly, installed in state waters two miles off Goleta in 1966, is slated to be decommissioned within five to seven years, state reports show no platform of comparable size has ever been removed on the Pacific Coast.

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We’re moving in the direction of a coastline that’s free of our 1930 oil and gas history, into a new era of a natural coastline. “It’s something our entire community is witnessing. “It’s an unusually happy moment to see change,” said Anne Wells, planning manager for the City of Goleta. And off Goleta, ExxonMobil will start plugging two wells in the surf zone at Haskell’s Beach, and 30 offshore wells at Platform Holly, starting in February and April, respectively. will begin plugging wells at platforms Gail and Grace. Off the Rincon this winter, Chevron Corp. This year off Summerland, the State Lands Commission will be working on “legacy” oil wells that were drilled in the late 1890s and are leaking oil onto the beach. The first task at hand is to plug dozens of offshore oil wells with cement, an expensive and time-consuming task At the same time, the state Legislature has been forced to budget tens of millions because former owners have disappeared into history or declared bankruptcy.

The oil companies themselves will bear most of the cost, billions of dollars overall. Seven platforms out of 19 in the Channel have shut down operations and will likely be removed, starting in the 2020s, together with their piers, pipelines and onshore processing plants in Carpinteria, Goleta and Gaviota. 28, 1969 oil spill in the Santa Barbara Channel, the region is on the verge of another upheaval – the wholesale removal of aging oil infrastructure. Paul Wellman (file)įifty years after the Jan. Platform Holly (left) is one of seven offshore oil rigs to be shut down, a decommissioning urged by protesters (top) hoping to close Venoco’s Ellwood facility (middle) and piers (bottom) in Goleta.