This thing played right into his hands. Anyone with good sens would start drilling on land, but not the bama boy. He just stops drilling all together.
Cloward & Piven.
He loves this. The worse it gets tht e better.
Another geologist in the industry I know was anticipating a busy year in Alaska this year (last year was slow), but with the nationwide moratorium on offshore drilling, that may not happen.
Areas of Wyoming and Utah have been shut down, and Federal leases in North Dakota, Montana, and South Dakota have been shut down as well (so the EPA can evlauate greenhouse gas emissions from drilling and production operations--a study to devise and implement a (non)solution to a nonproblem).
Drilling continues on privately held leases at this time.
The Feds have been systematically hobbling the oil industry since this bunch got in office, and the BP disaster is just an excuse for them to get much worse.
Sadly, much of the area open to exploration has been investigated and most of the big domestic onshore plays already found that are technologically available.
The mega-discoveries are either offshore or tied up in the 50+% of the US west of the Mississippi that the Federal GOvernment owns.