Oil industry slams Interior over expanded environmental reviews for offshore drilling

The oil industry’s most powerful trade group quickly attacked the Interior Department’s new decision to greatly restrict waivers from detailed environmental review for offshore oil-and-gas projects, alleging the new requirements will delay drilling.

“We’re concerned the change could add significantly to the department’s workload, stretching the timeline for approval of important energy development projects with no clear return in environmental protection,” said Erik Milito, upstream director of the American Petroleum Institute, in a statement Monday.

Interior announced Monday that it is ending the use of “categorical exclusions” from environmental analyses under the National Environmental Policy Act for deepwater projects, and imposing new limits on their use for shallow-water operations.

But the industry group alleges this will just add unneeded burdens because other phases in the offshore drilling process are already subject to more detailed environmental scrutiny, including Interior’s drafting of its broad five-year offshore drilling plans and specific lease sales.

“Environmental review of offshore operations under existing rules is extensive, and decisions on categorical exclusions, which are intended to avoid repetitive analysis, require review,” Milito said.

But others are calling for even tougher new controls. Offshore safety legislation — called the CLEAR Act — that the House narrowly approved in late July would end the exclusions for exploration plans.

“I applaud [Interior] Secretary [Ken] Salazar for the steps he is taking, but permanent reform requires passage of my CLEAR Act, which would put the last nail in the coffin to the practice of allowing Big Oil to jam through offshore drilling projects with minimal review,” said House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Nick Rahall (D-W.Va.), the bill’s sponsor.

The Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental group, said it was glad the Obama administration has “rhetorically committed to ending the use of regulatory shortcuts,” but argued Interior’s announcement doesn’t go far enough.

Interior’s new controls “do not address the reality that non-deepwater offshore oil drilling is as dangerous as deepwater drilling and full environmental review must be done for these other oil drilling operations,” the group said.

The group also said that Interior’s plan could have a big loophole.

“Existing deepwater wells and rigs already approved under the now admittedly faulty environmental review process will not necessarily have to seek full National Environmental Policy Act or Endangered Species Act compliance.  This potential loophole includes failure to mandate a full environmental impact statement on the type of bypass drilling operations that precipitated the BP explosion,” the group said.