Oil rigs could become coral farms

Decommissioned oil rigs off Australia's coastline could become hubs for marine-based businesses such as coral harvesting for aquariums, a fish expert says.Professor David Booth, of the Sydney Institute of Marine Science and University of Technology, Sydney, says there are up to 60 oil rigs in Australian waters that are due to be decommissioned in the next decade.Most are in the Bass Strait between Tasmania and mainland Australia.Booth was last year involved in Federal Department of Industry, Tourism and Resources (DITR) talks on the decommissioning of oil rigs.The future of Australia's ageing oil rigs is due to be on the agenda again with the DITR to release a discussion paper in the next two months.Booth says the options for decommissioning oil rigs include: leaving them intact and in place; towing them away for dismantling; removing the platform and using explosives to topple the remaining shell; and removing the platform and leaving the remaining shell in place.In the last two cases, the shell of the oil rig forms an artificial reef.Booth says in some cases keeping part of the rig in place could benefit the marine environment.

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Florida Raises Ill-Fated Artificial Reefs

When people began dumping used tires in the ocean 40 years ago to create artificial reefs, they gave little thought to the potential environmental cost, or to how difficult it would be to pick them up.

"It was one of those ideas that seemed good at the time," said Jack Sobel, a senior scientist at The Ocean Conservancy, a Washington-based environmental group. "Now I think it's pretty clear it was a bad idea."

Now, local authorities are going after some 700,000 tires dumped off the coast of Fort Lauderdale, up the coast from Miami. A team of 40 divers from the U.S. Army, Navy and Coast Guard spent three weeks in June pulling up 10,373 sand-filled and slime-coated tires from the ocean floor.

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