Cuba offshore drilling may hit oil reservoir soon

Orlando Sentinel (blog)

By William E. Gibson, Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — A Spanish company drilling an exploratory well north of Havana is within a week of reaching its target: an oil reservoir believed to lie under Cuban waters roughly 60 miles from Florida.

That’s the word from energy and environmental experts who met in Washington on Thursday to discuss plans to prevent or respond to a potential oil spill and protect South Florida’s delicate coastline.

The experts, who are in touch with Cuban officials and the Spanish company Repsol, say the drilling has been done in a slow and safe manner. But they warned that plans to respond to a potential oil spill are still hampered by the U.S. embargo of Cuba, which restricts the equipment and personnel that can be sent to prepare in case of a blowout.

“In every way, I think the Cuban approach to this is responsible and appropriate to the risk they are undertaking,” said William K Reilly, former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency under former President George H.W. Bush.

But the U.S. government, he said, “has not interpreted its sanctions policy in a way that would clearly make available in advance the kind of technologies that would be required.”

That includes capping equipment needed to stop a major leak, he said. “That includes even the spare parts to a blowout preventer.”

He and several oil industry and environmental experts urged President Barack Obama to grant a general license for American companies to rush into Cuban waters without restriction to help stop a spill at its source.

The staging area for needed equipment should be in Cuba for a fast response, they said, but instead it is being assembled by Helix Energy Systems near Tampa. Some equipment will also be housed in South Florida.

The Coast Guard cannot enter Cuban-controlled waters without permission from the Cuban government. But Coast Guard officials say they are increasingly confident that the Cubans would allow them to help cap and contain a spill at the source.

The initial drilling is within a week of reaching the depth needed to tap an expected reservoir beneath Cuban waters, said Lee Hunt, past president of the International Association of Drilling Contractors.

“The desirability for a command center in a Cuban port for spill-response staging is very high,” Hunt said. “The likelihood of it happening? Nil.”