The fight over offshore drilling is heating up again in South Carolina.

A committee of lawmakers researching the state's prospects meets Aug. 22, the group's first attempt to tackle the contentious issue.

After the Trump administration re-opened the leasing process last spring, S.C. House members introduced warring bills: onerequiring state agencies to approve the onshore infrastructure needed to support oil and natural gas drilling, and the other blocking them.

Faced with those bills, House officials formed a subcommittee last spring the Off-shore Drilling Ad Hoc Committee. Only one of its nine members, though, represents the coast.

The subcommittee's chairman, Rep. Bill Hixon, R-Aiken, called it an exploratory group to advise the House on an issue that few representatives who live away from the coast are aware of.

"We want to see what the benefits or harm to our state would be," Hixon said. "Georgia and North Carolina are looking at the same thing. We don't want to do anything to harm South Carolina but we don't want to be sitting on our hands while North Carolina and Georgia bring in the royalties."

Shortly after the subcommittee was formed, Hixon invited federal Energy Secretary Rick Perry, who strongly supports opening the offshore waters to drilling, to speak at the meeting. Hixon has not heard back.

Not waiting for the meeting, which has two pro-drilling group representatives on the agenda, Coastal Conservation League and Conservation Voters of South Carolina staffers met this week to voice their drilling opposition to Hixon and Rep. David Hiott, R-Pickens, chairman of the Agricultural, Natural Resources and Environmental Affairs committee.

The conservationists' fight is about to get much tougher.

A natural gas pipeline pumping 1.5 billion cubic feet per day is in the works to run from from West Virginia to the North Carolina-South Carolina border near Interstate 95. It's among a web of other gas pipeline expansions plotted through or near the Palmetto State.

After decades of running natural gas out of the Gulf of Mexico to feed the country, fuel companies are now running natural gas and crude oil fracked from shale supplies in the Midwest and Northeast. The surplus is getting exported out of the Gulf of Mexico.

That's partly why groups opposed to offshore drilling are slowly turning their concern from the potential for spills and wildlife harm in the ocean to the possibility of the "green" South Carolina coast becoming industrialized. A fear is the new push to open the Atlantic offshore of South Carolina to oil and natural gas exploration and drilling has less to do with what could be found, and more to do with getting the onshore industry in place to export from those pipelines to Europe.

That means ports such as Charleston and possibly even Georgetown. And that means money for local and state governments.

"The (pipe) lines are all heading our way. There's something afoot," said Peg Howell of Stop Oil Drilling in the Atlantic, a Pawleys Island-based grassroots group. Howell is a former petroleum engineer.

"The real urgent need for this country is to export," she said.

The export factor so far has not been as prevalent in the discussion as the drill-or-don't drill controversy that cuts to the heart of coastal life. But interests already are divided between exploring for the potential economic benefit of fossil fuels to restricting exploration to protect marine life and a billion-dollar tourism economy.

State legislators who were asked including members of the newly formed House subcommittee said they were unaware of the export potential. But a first-ever state energy plan focuses in part on the natural gas pipeline expansion and mentions several times the moves to exporting the supply.

"With the shale gas growth that has occurred over the last several years, natural gas supply sources and traditional pipeline flows across the nation are in the process of changing," reads a draft of the plan. "There are currently multiple projects underway to build out current (natural gas) export capability, especially in the Gulf Coast," it reads at another point.

Drilling proponents argue the country needs to supplement the oil fields already in place. The United States exports more than 5 million barrels per day, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

The country also is poised to become to third largest natural gas supplier in the world by 2020. It's competing with Russia for the European market, according toJ.D. Supra, a business analyst. The ports that move the fuels now are in the Gulf of Mexico a farther, more expensive transport than from the Southeast Coast.

The infrastructure would be the industry needed to ship the product.

State legislators who live along the coast are aware of the concern for the potential impact of an oil industry on the tourism economy.

"Obviously, the state relies on tourism," said Rep. Lee Hewitt, R-Murrells Inlet, who is on the nine member subcommittee."I find it interesting that I'm the only member who represents the coast. My question is, just what is this committee trying to get to?"

Though not on the committee, Sen. Chip Campsen, R-Isle of Palms, has told people in his district of the threats that industrializing the coast would bring to its tourism economic engine. He and U.S. Rep. Mark Sanford, R-S.C., have pointed to the large-scale industrial footprint the industry has on Port Fourchon, Louisiana, a town the size of Sullivan's Island, Campsen said.

"Is this push to drill actually a push to export? I don't know the answer to that," he said. "But I do know it's not about drilling for oil offshore," he said, pointing to the economics of low prices brought by the shale industry making it unprofitable to build or maintain offshore rigs here.

"The notion that you're really going to have offshore oil platforms, I think is pretty remote," he said.

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New fight over drilling offshore South Carolina could be about exports - Charleston Post Courier