US Senator: Offshore oil rigs could be terrorist targets

Up until the Deepwater Horizon oil gusher began more than two months ago, many argued that offshore domestic drilling was a way to protect national security by reducing dependence on foreign oil. (Never mind that oil is a global commodity, so what comes out of the Gulf of Mexico doesn’t necessarily fuel the cities and states along the Gulf of Mexico.)

With tens of thousands of barrels of oil a day still spewing into the waters off the coast of Louisiana, however, some leaders have begun taking a different position: offshore drilling, the way it’s practiced now, poses a risk to national security, they say.

The Virginia-based newspaper The Richmond Times-Dispatch reports this week that US Sen. Jim Webb, a Democrat from Virginia, has sent a letter to Obama administration officials urging stronger safety and security standards for offshore oil rigs. The letter went to US Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano and Interior Secretary Kenneth Salazar.

In his letter, Webb refers to US regulations that require nuclear power plants to be built to withstand an attack by a deliberately crashed plane. That same standard should be applied to offshore drilling installations, he added.

“With dozens of wells operating in the Gulf of Mexico and elsewhere, we must employ policies that mitigate all types of risk,” Webb wrote in the letter.

While Webb is a proponent of oil and gas exploration in the waters off the coast of his home state, he also backed the Obama administration’s moratorium on new projects in the Gulf until the current BP oil disaster could be investigated further. A federal judge in Louisiana ruled against that moratorium, but the US government is taking that decision to an appeals court today.