At the OC Fair, the newest 'ride' is a virtual dive underneath SoCal's offshore oil platforms

At this year's OC Fair, one of the most unique rides isn't a ride at all. It's a virtual plunge 100 ft. below the surface of the Pacific Ocean.

The free, virtual reality experience is hosted by the environmental group Orange County Coastkeeper as a way to educate the public about the thriving sea life underneath Southern California's offshore oil platforms.

The future of the coast's 27 aging oil platforms — all of them off of Southern California — is TBD. Removing them completely, especially the ones that rival, in depth, some of the world's tallest buildings, is a herculean task.

But some see a potential for preserving them as habitat for fish and other sea life.

"An unintended consequence that nobody really planned on was that these oil platforms would become reefs and basically be the habitats to literally hundreds of species of fish in different levels of the platform," said Garry Brown, founder and president of Orange County Coastkeeper.

Orange County Coastkeeper's Matt Sylvester, left, helps visitors at the OC Fair take a virtual dive underneath an offshore oil platform.

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Jill Replogle

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LAist

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Tell me about the virtual dive

At the fair exhibit, visitors are invited to sit in a row of plastic chairs while a Coastkeeper staffer fits a VR set around your head. The video starts and we're headed toward an oil platform that the narrator says is eight miles off the coast of Long Beach. Soon, we plunge below the dark blue surface next to a massive steel structure that looks like a spaceship, known as the "jacket" of the oil rig.

Now underwater, sea lions dive and dart away. Schools of fish — halfmoon and blacksmith — swirl around the steel legs of the oil rig.

A box in a corner of the screen records our virtual depth, 15 ft., then 60 ft., then 100 ft. down. Natural light fades but lights held by divers illuminate steel beams covered in pink, orange, and white clusters of sea life — anemone and corynactis, another invertebrate.

Rudderfish swimming near an offshore oil platform.

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Courtesy: Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Bob Wohlers

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On our way back up to the surface, a cormorant propels itself underneath one of the beams, on a deep dive for fish.

"It was so cool," said 11-year-old Leyla, from Lake Arrowhead, after taking off her VR set, "like I was actually there."

What is happening with California's offshore platforms?

The future of these hybrid natural-artificial ecosystems is unclear at this point. Production has slowed to a trickle at many of the oil and gas platforms off the coast of California, and they'll soon need to be decommissioned, in other words, taken out of production.

The private companies that own the platforms are responsible for capping wells, cleaning up, and completely removing all of the infrastructure used for offshore drilling. But the cost of doing this, especially for the deepest platforms, are "astronomical," Coastkeeper's Brown said. The process of decommissioning has only recently begun on several platforms off the California coast.

Some of the platforms are taller than the Eiffel Tower and the Empire State Building — stretching more than 1,000 ft. to the ocean floor. Taking them out would require cutting them into pieces and hauling them on barges across the ocean for cleaning and recycling.

"You would have to have an armada of work boats and ships, and what is the carbon footprint of that?" Brown asked.

The Platform Eureka, located off the coast of Long Beach.

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Courtesy: Bureau of Ocean Energy Management

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So can these retired rigs work as reefs?

Marine biologist Amber Sparks studied the fish and other species that accumulate around oil platforms as a graduate student researcher at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. "What we found is the platforms in California are these incredibly productive ecosystems, some of the most productive ecosystems on the planet," she said. "It just totally blew our minds."

Sparks later co-founded a company, Blue Latitudes, to help oil firms and other clients assess the potential for "reefing" their platforms. (There's also a nonprofit research and education wing, Blue Latitudes Foundation.)

Some research has found that leaving at least some portion of oil rigs in the water would be much more cost effective than trying to remove them completely. A 2020 study co-authored by a former U.S. Department of the Interior official found that removing just the top sections of the 23 platforms in federal waters off California (the other four are in state waters), and leaving the bottom sections as artificial reefs, could save up to $2 billion. Under California law, much of that cost saving would be given to the state.

But Sparks said the idea of letting the remnants of offshore oil pumping remain in the ocean, indefinitely, can be a touchy subject, especially in environmentally minded California. "It's not the typical 'save the whales' situation," she said. "How do I sit down with my grandmother and explain this could really be a good thing for the state?"

Some environmental groups, like Greenpeace, have taken the position that converting rigs to reefs lets oil companies off the hook for cleaning up.

Why 'rigs to reefs' is stalled in California

California has a law in place, AB 2503, passed in 2010, that would authorize the state Department of Fish and Game (now the Department of Fish and Wildlife) to take over offshore platforms once they stop operating and convert them to artificial reefs. But it's never been implemented, in part, Sparks said, because it fails to clearly delineate responsibilities and liabilities between the oil companies and government agencies.

In the meantime, according to Brown from O.C. Coastkeeper, some of the companies that own or lease the platforms are "slow pumping" oil in order to avoid the cost of decommissioning.

State Sen. Dave Min has sought to force the issue, at least for the three platforms in state waters, by introducing legislation that would terminate the remaining leases for offshore drilling.

Min said the smaller oil companies that now drill off the California coast have little incentive to invest in safety or other infrastructure because there's not much left to drill. He said his legislation was inspired by the 2021 oil spill off Huntington Beach.

"They really are ticking time bombs at this point," he said of California's offshore oil platforms. Min said mandating the decommissioning of oil platforms would give the state leverage in discussions with the operating companies about how to clean up the rigs and, if possible, convert them to reefs.

"I think they'd be more likely to do rigs to reef if they felt like they would be on the hook for the full cost of cleanup," Min said of oil companies.

But Min's legislation didn't get far. Now he's running for Congress in November.

Brown said the VR experience at the OC Fair is an effort to educate the public about the uncertain future of California's offshore oil rigs, and what's at stake for the underwater ecosystems that have grown up around them.

"Any way we can stimulate the conversation to keep moving forward with this," Brown said. "If we do nothing, then someday we're going to open up the newspaper and there's going to be a big major oil spill and major damage done."