Offshore drilling chief touts Gulf of Mexico oil and gas

The Interior Department is touting the potential of Gulf of Mexico regions where oil-and-gas leasing is already authorized at a time when Republicans are bashing President Obama for failing to open new areas off the Atlantic Coast and elsewhere.

Here’s what Bureau of Ocean Energy Management Director Tommy Beaudreau said in remarks Wednesday to the Louisiana Mid-Continental Oil and Gas Association:

[We] cannot lose sight of the fact that the Gulf of Mexico still has the greatest, by a large margin, untapped resource potential in the entire United States [outer continental shelf]. I have heard some people say — including some people who know better — that exploration in the Gulf of Mexico means simply drilling in the same old places. The truth is that the Gulf of Mexico is the crown jewel of the U.S. OCS, and will remain so for the foreseeable future. The Gulf of Mexico, in particular the deepwater, already has several world class producing basins, and just in the past year there have been a number of significant new discoveries. 

According to my agency’s recent Assessment of Undiscovered Technically Recoverable Oil and Gas Resources of the Nation’s Outer Continental Shelf, issued late last year, we estimate that the Central Gulf of Mexico holds more than 30 billion barrels of oil and 133.9 trillion cubic feet of natural gas yet to be discovered. This is nearly double the resource potential of even the Chukchi Sea. The Western Gulf of Mexico is just behind the Chukchi with more than 12 billion barrels of oil and nearly 80 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

His full prepared remarks will be available here.

The Gulf region is already a major source of U.S. oil and gas, and Interior is planning a suite of new lease sales in the 2012-2017 period, a plan that also includes offshore Alaskan lease sales.

Obama touted the plans in his State of the Union address Tuesday.

But Republicans and oil industry groups have called the leasing plans too modest, and want to open other coastal areas. Administration critics are also pushing for faster permitting on existing leases in the Gulf and off Alaska’s northern coast.