“Repurposing” has become a big trend for many people concerned about the environment: whatever you were about to throw away may not be trash destined for a landfill after all, but might serve some other useful function. On a small scale this sometimes means people turning egg cartons into drawer organizers or simply reusing their shipping boxes; on a large scale, it involves things as large as oil rigs.
Once they’re no longer in use, oil rigs are to the ocean something like defunct satellites are to space: they don’t really belong there anymore but they’re tough to remove. Oil companies once paid to dismantle and haul away decommissioned rigs, but in 1987, supported by the National Wildlife Foundation and other groups, Louisiana started the United States’ first “rigs to reefs” program. The idea is to leave the rigs in place and, with them, the ecosystems that have come to depend on them; remove the rig, proponents argue, and you destroy a thriving ecosystem along with it. Under Louisiana’s program, the oil companies donated to the state a portion of the money they would have spent to remove the rigs, and the state uses that money to support the program and monitor the undersea environment.
The rigs can serve as artificial coral reefs, and with as many as three-quarters of the world’s reefs in trouble because of environmental disruption, ocean warming, and even noise pollution, leaving the rigs in place is starting to look to many people like a better idea. Other hard artificial structures, too, have become a home for coral, and this relationship is now acknowledged to the point that, when the structure is disturbed for some reason, we make temporary housing provisions for the species that depend on it.
This is happening right now in Florida, where a sewage outflow pipeline was damaged by dredging. The pipeline cover must be repaired, but scientists have found more than 200 coral colonies living on it. Broward County has commissioned a team of divers to transplant the coral to an artificial reef. Once repairs are completed, the coral will be returned to their exact positions on the pipeline.
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