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Interior drilling plan takes fire from Republicans, greens
The Obama administration’s proposed offshore oil-and-gas leasing plan is drawing immediate attacks from Republicans who call it too modest and green groups who allege it courts environmental disaster.
The Interior Department’s draft 2012-2017 plan envisions a dozen lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico and includes tracts in Arctic waters off Alaska’s northern coast.
House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Doc Hastings (R-Wash.) said the plan falls short, noting that it does not offer Atlantic or Pacific Coast lease sales even though the formal moratorium covering those areas lapsed in 2008.
“The President’s plan is to simply say ‘no’ to new energy production and ‘no’ to new American jobs created by new offshore drilling,” he said in a statement that was echoed by some other Republicans. “It’s a plan that is sending American jobs overseas, forfeiting new revenue, and denying access to American energy that would lessen our dependence on hostile Middle Eastern oil.”
It’s a retreat from a wider leasing outline the White House floated a month before the BP oil spill began last year that envisioned leasing off some Atlantic states and, if Congress permitted, deeper into the eastern Gulf.
The new proposal also drew the ire of green groups such as the Alaska Wilderness League and the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Alaska Wilderness League Executive Director Cindy Shogan bashed plans for lease sales in Arctic waters in 2015 and 2016, despite Interior pledges to use the intervening years to study environmental and infrastructure issues.
“In the days that followed the Deepwater Horizon disaster, President Obama stood before the American people and promised safer, cleaner offshore drilling and a new way of making decisions about drilling. The headlong rush to drill in America’s Arctic Ocean laid out in today’s draft five-year program fails to meet these promises — and looks a lot like the fast and loose decision making of the past,” Shogan said.
Natural Resources Defense Council President Frances Beinecke, who served on the presidential panel to probed the BP spill, noted the Gulf region is “struggling” to rebuild from the BP disaster.
“This is not the time to put the region at greater risk,” she said, alleging that the oil industry has not invested enough in spill prevention, and that the government “needs additional resources and science in order to effectively police an industry that so desperately needs it.”
She also criticized the planned leasing in Arctic seas, noting the area is home to endangered species and difficult to access for clean-up crews in the event of a spill.
But oil industry groups said the plan does not go far enough.
“This ill-conceived plan leaves us looking in the same areas we have looked for over a generation and would cast our energy reliability and security lot to the whims of other, often unfriendly nations,” said Randall Luthi, president of the National Ocean Industries Association.
Not all the reaction was critical. Alaska’s senators were glad the Beaufort and Chukchi Sea lease sales were included.
The Obama administration has also taken steps recently toward allowing Shell Oil to drill exploratory wells on existing leases as soon as next year, although final approval has not been granted.
“For nearly three years, my message to the Obama Administration is that as America’s energy storehouse, our state can and should responsibly supply a significant portion of our country’s energy needs. I’m pleased they are hearing our message,” said Sen. Mark Begich (D-Alaska).
Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) called the draft plan a “positive sign.”
“While the administration has not opened any new areas to leasing, I’m encouraged that they are moving forward with offering sales in both the Beaufort and Chukchi seas,” said Murkowski, the top Republican on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee.
But she warned that “leasing is only half the story” and that “the permitting process will be the determining factor as to whether these lease sales are ultimately successful or not.”
