“Rigs to Reefs” Lets Fish Stay After the Oil Stops Pumping

Posted by Michael Hoven on July 18, 2010 at 7:05 am

Offshore oil platforms are home to flourishing marine communities. (image: dmr.state.ms.us)

“The first thing anyone—trained scientist or casual recreational diver—notices around a rig is the big fish, lots of them,” says Dr. Milton Love, a scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Love has spent 10 years studying the thriving marine life that turns offshore oil platforms into artificial reefs. California’s offshore rigs boast fish populations that are larger than the populations at the state’s natural reefs, and 20–50 times larger than in the waters that surround the rigs.

But if offshore oil platforms have proved to be an attractive environment for fish, what happens to them when production slows and the rig’s owners decide to shut down the operation? An abandoned offshore rig must go through “platform decommissioning,” a costly process of removing all or part of the rig that could also disrupt the marine ecosystem that has developed on the rig.

In an effort to preserve these underwater ecosystems, Love and others champion the “rigs to reefs” concept that accepts the offshore oil platforms as artificial reefs and leaves them largely intact after drilling has shut down. As the news site Miller-McCune reports:

Rigs to Reefs is becoming an increasingly popular alternative to total removal of a platform because it maintains what is de facto marine reserve and at the same time saves oil companies money on their decommissioning obligations.

Decommissioning a rig can cost up to a billion dollars. In Louisiana, a rig operator who saves money by leaving all or part of the platform as a reef splits the savings with the state government, a plan that some in California want to duplicate.

Turning offshore oil platforms into permanent reefs has its opponents, who protest that rigs have toxic chemicals and that nothing artificial should be left in the ocean.

The fish, for their part, like their rigs. When researchers relocated fish from oil platforms to a natural reef 11 miles away, 25 percent found their way back home.