Tilting At Windmills: Balearics' oil exploration

When, a couple of years ago, I wrote an April Fool about oil exploration in the bay of Alcúdia, I hadn't foreseen that foolish fiction could so quickly come to imitate life. The bay itself may not become dotted with oil rigs operated by my make-believe oil-exploration company, Tonto S.A., but the waters around the Balearics could be the location for rigs and a battle over whether they should be there or not.

On the face of it, oil exploration anywhere near the coasts of the Balearics sounds insane. In terms of a visible blight, assuming they were to be that visible, they aren't much of an advert. Blots on the seascape are one thing, though; the environmental impact of exploration is another. Posidonia, for example, would be harmed, and I've recently written about the damage that is being caused to the sea grass by different man-made interventions. Posidonia is not, though, the only marine species that would be affected.

A couple of weeks ago, the Balearic Environment Commission, which is a part of the regional government's environment ministry, issued a report which identified 19 environmental dangers from exploration. These included the effects of noise and drilling on the likes of turtles and giant squid.

What is interesting is that the Commission, within the ambit of a Partido Popular regional government that one might think would be inclined to wish to pursue exploration with some vigour, speaks with almost total unanimity on behalf of its various constituents - other government departments, the Council of Mallorca and town halls - in being dead against exploration. Tempting though it may be to nuance this as a snub to an initiative driven by a socialist central government, the fact that virtually no one in officialdom supports exploration, and not therefore just the usual suspects of the environmental lobby, suggests that Madrid has got it badly wrong.

The PP is being consistent. Its then deputies from the Balearics, one of them the now president of the Council of Mallorca, Maria Salom, brought a motion before Congress in February this year to have authorisation for prospecting revoked. The parliament's upper house, the Senate, did in fact attempt to revoke the authorisation the following month, only for Congress to reject this.

Oil prospecting between the Balearics and the mainland isn't in fact anything new. There are already well over 100 borings and wells that date back almost 40 years. None of them in the vicinity of Mallorca, at a 150 to 200 kilometre distance, are really that close, but the very prospect of closer prospecting plus the potential shipping of oil in large tankers concern politicians and conservationists alike, especially as the memory of the oil spill from the Don Pedro in Ibiza is still very much alive.

How different attitudes might be, though, were there genuine guarantees of oil riches in the seas near the Balearics, who can tell. It is the lack of such guarantees that makes it easy to reject exploration. But what if there were oil? And lots of it. An economy such as that of the Balearics, indeed that of Spain, with its over-reliance on tourism and construction, cannot afford to just dismiss the possibility. As has been said, and not least by the economics expert Douglas McWilliams at the ABTA Convention in Palma in October, nations that are commodity rich (and this primarily means oil and gas) are the economic winners of the future. The mere fact also that the Spanish Government prepared for a "shock" in terms of oil supply earlier this year by reducing the motorway speed limit should make those who are anti-oil think a bit harder.

The ambitions of the green lobby in Mallorca are that the island should come to depend more greatly on renewables. But the use of renewables remains only a tiny portion of the Balearics' energy provision. A plan to erect attractive windmills along the sea front in Playa de Palma is a nice idea, but it won't create huge amounts of energy. The piecemeal approach to renewables, though, is indicative of an almost total failure of central governmental policy in respect of energy. The drive to a "green economy" has, as a leaked government document suggested, been an economic nightmare, causing energy prices to rocket and jobs to be lost rather than created.

Oil is the antithesis of the green economy and the antithesis of sound marine conservation and, possibly, tourism. But oil might just be an economic saviour. And in the absence of a realistic energy policy, simply tilting at the windmills of oil exploration is no answer.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.