Posted on 03/31/2015 4:58:56 AM PDT by thackney
As the Obama administration weighs where to sell offshore drilling leases from 2017 to 2022, the oil industry has a single plea: Stop ruling out potential prospects.
Eight industry trade groups are delivering that message in comments set to be filed with the administration on Monday, ahead of a midnight deadline for the public to weigh in on the Interior Department’s draft proposed offshore leasing program for 2017 to 2022.
“Considerable acreage has already been excluded at this early stage of the planning process, especially in the Atlantic, eastern Gulf of Mexico and Alaska outer continental shelf,” said the groups, including the American Petroleum Institute, National Ocean Industries Association and the Independent Petroleum Association of America. “The decisions made regarding what areas are available for leasing will have long-term implications for our nation’s energy security, prospects for job creation and government revenue generation.”
Although most of the United States’ outer continental shelf is technically open for oil and gas development, that activity can only take place on leases, sold periodically through government auctions. If the Interior Department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management does not sell leases in a certain area, no new development will happen in that territory.
That’s the fate expected for waters off the West Coast, where the ocean energy bureau is not planning any offshore lease sales. But the agency has penciled in 14 sales in other areas, including 10 in the Gulf of Mexico, three off the coast of Alaska and one in Atlantic waters near Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia.
None of those are guaranteed to stay on the books, and any of them may be scaled back. According to the ocean energy bureau, any areas left out of the draft proposal are out for good: “No sale or area can be added to the program without restarting the program preparation process.”
But that isn’t stopping the oil industry associations for making a plea for more. The groups are asking the Interior Department to move up the tentatively planned Atlantic sale for 2021 so it takes place earlier and to put another on the books.
Andy Radford, API’s senior policy adviser, said that would show “they are serious about continued leasing and development in the Atlantic.”
The industry groups say the government made the wrong decision in ruling out lease sales along the coasts of Maryland, Delaware and Florida. The bureau’s decision not to plan a lease sale off the Maryland coast was based on the views of former Democratic Gov. Martin O’Malley, and may not mesh with the outlook of his successor, Republican Gov. Larry Hogan, they argue.
While Florida officials have adopted a cautious tone in their advice to the ocean energy bureau, the state did not clearly oppose offshore drilling near its shoreline.
Even scaled down to waters off four East Coast states — and with a 50-mile buffer zone — the proposed Atlantic drilling has drawn fierce opposition from environmentalists, some coastal communities and dozens of lawmakers representing the northeast in Congress.
Even if new Atlantic sales aren’t an option, the oil industry implores administration officials to preserve the current proposal — not whittle it down further. The overall leasing program is already too small, Radford stressed.
“The map can’t shrink anymore,” he said in an interview. “This would have been a nice place to end, perhaps, but certainly starting here isn’t.”
The groups criticize the ocean energy’s decision not to tentatively schedule a sale of oil and gas leases in the eastern Gulf of Mexico — an area that is barred for leasing until 2022 under a federal law.
“The eastern Gulf of Mexico has significant known reserves that feature promising geological conditions, and it is close to existing infrastructure that could be enhanced relatively quickly if the area were opened for leasing and development,” the industry associations say.
In Alaska, the associations worry that an already planned early 2017 auction of leases in the Beaufort Sea could be canceled if the proposed 2017-2022 offshore leasing program (with a Beaufort sale penciled in for 2020) replaces it before that auction takes place.
Interior Department officials have already stressed that their goal is to publish a final offshore lease program by the end of 2016 — well before the current lease plan expires in August 2017.
That would put the Obama administration’s framework in place before a new president takes office.
If I were Obama, I’d consult with geologists and offer leases in the areas least likely to yield oil. I bet someone in the administration has thought of that.
Why would Hussein listen to Big Oil? His goal is to shut down the energy producing industry in North America, not enhance it. Cheap energy makes a bounty of consumer goods available to everyone and is the main material component of general prosperity. It distracts the minds of the people fro the necessity to live in the Righteous path of Mohammed. Hussein is doing what he can to rectify that situation so that all Americans might live righteously and the few who survive on the land will tend goats and camels and fruit trees as Mohammed’s tribe did.
It is done to inform the public who is stopping the US production of energy and the jobs that go with it.
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