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Green lawyer: Interior policy might not free drillers from environmental review
An attorney with a major environmental group believes oil companies might not be able to take advantage of the Obama administration’s plan to allow some deepwater drilling projects to resume without new federal environmental studies.
The Interior Department made waves Monday when it laid out a path for 13 companies’ projects halted by the freeze on deepwater drilling to resume without new National Environmental Policy Act reviews as long as they’re complying with beefed-up federal safety mandates.
But the NEPA waiver offer from Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement only stands if the recalculated “worst case” spill estimate from a project is less than what the companies had estimated in their oil-spill response plans.
David Pettit, a senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, argues the revised numbers will mean at least some of the projects will need new NEPA studies after all. The wonky details, in a nutshell, mean a resumption of drilling isn’t around the corner for some projects, he writes on the group’s blog.
Here’s how Pettit puts it:
“If the new [spill] number is higher – which, in my view, it is likely to be – then the companies must revise their pre-spill cleanup and contingency plans. Those revisions would be subject to review under the National Environmental Policy Act (“NEPA”). If the new number is lower, the companies can continue to rely on the cleanup and contingency plans that they submitted to MMS, without additional NEPA review,” he writes.
Pettit adds: “We don’t know yet how the comparison of the recalculated and old numbers will turn out. It seems clear to me that oil companies who lowballed their worst-case estimates to MMS, as was a common practice, will come off badly under the new rule and that, for them, resumption of drilling is many months away. So my takeaway message is that there is no reason to get worked up about BOEMRE’s new rule until they have done the math.”
