Winning Minds by Winning Hearts

More than three decades have passed since the Santa Barbara oil spill, but the accident still haunts this whale-watcher's Eden at Carpinteria, Calif.

Just ask Venoco Inc., which owns and operates three production platforms here, with the associated unique challenges. For example, while producers elsewhere face only tumbleweeds, Venoco must constantly manage diplomatic relations with 100 neighbors living right next to its facilities — a permanent colony of harbor seals.

The sight of marine mammals snug against a service pier and two pipelines is but one of this area's reminders of the intrusion of oil on paradise. Venoco provides public access to view the rookery, just part of its extensive community outreach.

But a lot of people have never liked the industry. They want it out. They always have.

"The average amount of oil spilled from platforms, drilling and pipelines (since the big spill) averages about 28 barrels a year," says Rod Eson, Venoco's CEO and co-founder. "The industry has done an incredible job improving what we do. But the environmentalists still point to the pictures of the spill more than 30 years ago and say, 'This is what you guys are all about.'"

Perhaps the 1969 spill can't fade into history because it created history, giving birth to the local group Get Oil Out, and some say also to Earth Day and the modern environmental movement.

Notable, too, much of the production here includes sour gas, which has always frightened people, one reason for decades of opposition to onshore processing.

The area has numerous natural oil and gas seeps, and the largest emits over 1,000 barrels of oil a week into coastal waters. But that's easier for locals to accept than having 21 production platforms interrupting the area's fantasy sunsets. So even though the 1989 Alaska tanker spill eclipsed the smaller incident here 20 years earlier, this is still ground zero for American anti-oil sentiment.

"There are people here who were involved in the '69 cleanup who had oiled birds die in their arms," said AAPG member Karen Christensen, Venoco's exploration manager.

Soon, a local museum will add a new exhibit on the 1969 spill. That kind of exposure might make some companies cringe, but Venoco is also sponsoring an exhibit on the importance of oil and gas development in the Santa Barbara Channel, and Eson serves on the museum board. Like other corporations, Venoco sees citizenship as a duty and a business necessity.

But unlike many, it acts on those values with a striking mix of enthusiasm and creativity.

'Different Kind of Oil Company'

Founded in 1992, privately-held Venoco happily took on its highly-regulated offshore properties, along with fields on the Beverly Hills High School campus, in a Texas wildlife preserve and in the Sacramento Basin, where neighbors range from concerned duck clubs to delicate rice farms.