Offshore drilling may not be such a gusher.

• Position: Eastern

Offshore drilling has created a $70 billion-a-year industry and more than 300,000 jobs in Louisiana It also has fueled a heated debate over tapping oil and natural-gas deposits off the North Carolina coast, though few have asked what kind of impact it would have on the Tar Heel economy. "Nobody knows," says Jim Smith, an economist at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee. "That's the only answer." UNC Greensboro economist Andrew Brod agrees. Though it would be a drop in the bucket compared with Louisiana, there might be some surprises.

"I can't come up with a scenario in which, even if they found the biggest oil field in history, you'd build a refinery in North Carolina," says Smith, a professor at Western Carolina's Institute for the Economy and the Future. "You've got refineries in Philly and New Jersey already. Besides, no new refineries have been built in the U.S. since 1973." Brod, director of UNCG's Office of Business and Economic Research, says the state probably would miss another economic plum--construction of drilling rigs. They're built ashore in segments and assembled at sea, but the platforms--$500 million to $1 billion each--wouldn't come from North Carolina. Foreign shipbuilders furnish most, and if a domestic rig-building and -service industry did develop, it likely would be near the deep-water ports of Norfolk, Va., or Charleston, S.C. It's not clear whether the state would collect lucrative licensing and other fees. Drilling would be in U.S. territorial waters, far beyond North Carolina's three-mile limit. Two coastal counties--Hyde and Dare--have ordinances that prohibit pipelines across their portions of the Outer...