Texas lawmaker to introduce bill lifting drilling 'pause'

Freshman Texas Rep. Pete Olson plans to introduce a bill to lift the Obama administration's six-month moratorium on deepwater drilling, Texas TV station KPRC Local 2 reports.

Olson, a Republican, said the moratorium could cost the Gulf Coast upward of 100,000 jobs if its 33 rigs remain idle.

"What that's doing is turning this tragedy into an unmitigated disaster for our nation," Olson said. "We're going to lose thousands of jobs."

Separately, Rep. Charles Boustany Jr. (R-La.) wrote to President Barack Obama and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar on Thursday to warn them that the moratorium could cause Louisiana to lose thousands of jobs. Boustany was one of 58 bipartisan House members who signed a letter urging the administration to lift the earlier ban on shallow-water operations.

"While recent decisions allow some shallow-water oil and gas production, the administration's inconsistency furthers the uncertainty for thousands of Louisiana workers," Boustany wrote in an editorial published Sunday by the Daily Advertiser in Lafayette, La. "The knee-jerk reaction to stop all permitting demonstrates a lack of informed decision-making from the federal authorities."

Boustany adds that the moratorium threatens more than 26,000 jobs that normally exist aboard platforms, according to the Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association.

"Thousands of additional jobs servicing these rigs also hang in the balance," he writes, "including welders, suppliers, caterers and dockworkers."

Olson said he planned to introduce his bill lifting the moratorium early this coming week.

"We're going to be affected here in the greater Houston area," he said, "because this is where the manufacturing that supports those operations is."

The Obama administration announced the deepwater moratorium on May 14 in the wake of the April 20 explosion aboard the Deepwater Horizon. Salazar testified before the Senate energy panel Wednesday that the moratorium is "not the stop button, it's the pause button" and that BP will have to pay the salaries of oil industry workers who lose their jobs because of ramifications from the oil spill.