Tuesday, July 3, 2012

Oil and gas industry slams Obama administration’s offshore drilling plan

The Obama administration’s recently released five-year plan for offshore drilling leases has been met with sharp criticism from the oil and gas industry and Republicans, who say it continues a crippling moratorium on potential energy reserves on the West and East Coasts.
The administration’s 2012-2017 offshore lease plan, released June 28, expands available leasing areas for drilling slightly in the Gulf of Mexico and opens new areas in the Arctic Ocean, but also keeps both the West and East Coasts completely off-limits for offshore oil exploration.
Three of the fifteen lease auctions will be held in the Arctic seas—in Alaska’s Cook Inlet in 2016, in Chukchi Sea in 2016, and in the Beaufort Sea in 2017. The administration lauded its plan, saying the Arctic regions hold more than 75 percent of total undiscovered and recoverable oil.
However, Republicans and industry officials disagreed.
“It’s a very disappointing backtracking of the administration’s supposed ‘all of the above approach,’” said Jim Noe, the senior vice president, general counsel, and chief compliance officer of Hercules Offshore Inc., the largest shallow-water drilling company in the Gulf of Mexico. “It takes both coasts and leaves us the same areas we’ve been drilling in since the ’40s.”
Rep. Doc Hastings (R., Wash.), the chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, said the plan keeps 85 percent of America’s outer continental shelf off limits for energy production.
“The Obama Administration has neglected their duty to provide a roadmap for America’s offshore energy future by tossing aside a plan to expand production and failing to produce a plan of their own for three and a half years,” Hastings said in a Thursday statement. “Today, the Obama Administration has announced a bleak future for American energy production by keeping 85 percent of America’s offshore areas under lock and key and refusing to open any new areas to drilling. This plan re-imposes the drilling moratoria lifted in 2008, hurts job creation, and keeps new areas of American energy production sidelined.”

Read more: http://freebeacon.com/dont-drill-baby-dont/

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