http://www.tampabay.com/news/environment/water/crist-says-oil-spill-proves-drilling-isnt-safe-withdraws-his-support/1090626
TampaBay.com
St. Petersburg Times
Crist says oil spill proves drilling isn’t safe, withdraws his support

By Marc Caputo, Mary Ellen Klas and Craig Pittman, Times/Herald Tallahassee Bureau
In Print: Wednesday, April 28, 2010

The oil spill spreading across the Gulf of Mexico is sending ripples through Florida and national politics, giving Gov. Charlie Crist a reason to withdraw his support for offshore drilling.

After a 90-minute plane flight Tuesday above the spill, which was spreading in an 80-mile by 42-mile blob, Crist said, “Clearly it could be devastating to Florida if something like that were to occur. It’s the last thing in the world I would want to see happen in our beautiful state.”

He said there is no question now that lawmakers should give up on the idea of drilling off Florida’s coast this year and in coming years. He has said previously he would support drilling if it was far enough from shore, safe enough and clean enough. He said the spill is proof that’s not possible.

“Clearly that one isn’t far enough and that’s about 50 to 60 miles out, it’s clearly not clean enough after we saw what we saw today – that’s horrific – and it certainly isn’t safe enough. It’s the opposite of safe,” Crist said.
Earlier in the day the Legislature’s main advocate of drilling, incoming House Speaker Dean Cannon, R-Orlando, said the disaster had him asking questions.

“It causes me to want to examine what happened and how it could have been prevented, and we need to figure that out before we make any further decisions,” said Cannon, who has proposed allowing rigs as close as 3 miles off Florida’s beaches.

Before the spill, Cannon had promised to bring the drilling proposal back up when he becomes speaker next year, touting the millions of dollars in revenue and thousands of jobs that would be created by near-shore drilling.

But Attorney General Bill McCollum, a fellow Republican running for governor, said Cannon should forget passing that bill in 2011 because “he’ll face a veto on my desk if he brings it up the way it is now. I know it’s a revenue producer, but that’s not a good enough reason.”

Meanwhile, in Washington, the spill “is going to have a chilling effect” on a plan by President Barack Obama to open up the eastern gulf to drilling, predicted U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla.: “It’s another reminder of the risks of offshore drilling.”

And the senator welcomed Crist back, after the governor in 2008 said he had become more open to the possibility of drilling off Florida. Nelson said he was “very glad the governor realized the realities of what an oil spill could do to the beaches of the Florida coast.”

The oil, which has been oozing out at a rate estimated at 42,000 gallons a day, is coming from the site of the Deepwater Horizon rig.

Deepwater Horizon exploded about 11 p.m. on April 20 and later sank. Eleven members of the 126-member crew remain missing and are presumed dead. The cause of the explosion at the rig remains under investigation.

Efforts to close off the leak using robot submarines have so far failed. Other options for ending the leak could take longer – up to three months, according to U.S. Coast Guard officials.

The marshes of southern Louisiana and Mississippi appear to face the most immediate risk from the spill because they are closest to it, oceanographers say. However, if the leaking oil drifts far enough east to get caught in the gulf’s powerful loop current, it could wind up coating beaches in the Florida Keys and then be swept north along the state’s Atlantic coast.

New Jersey Democratic Sens. Robert Menendez and Frank Lautenberg said the spill calls into question the credibility of safety claims by the oil industry. In a letter citing government figures, they said that since 2006 there have been 509 fires on rigs in the gulf, causing at least two fatalities and 12 serious injuries – all before Deepwater Horizon.

“Big Oil has perpetuated a dangerous myth that coastline drilling is a completely safe endeavor, but accidents like this are a sober reminder just how far that is from the truth,” the two senators said.
Despite the spill, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said Friday that President Barack Obama is still sticking to his plan to open up part of the eastern gulf and areas of the Atlantic seaboard to oil drilling.

Times researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report, which also includes information from the Associated Press.
_____________________________________________________
http://www.tampabay.com/news/environment/water/oil-spill-in-gulf-could-threaten-florida/1090491
TampaBay.com
Oil spill in gulf could threaten Florida

By Craig Pittman, Times Staff Writer
In Print: Tuesday, April 27, 2010

An image taken from a NASA satellite on Sunday shows the Mississippi Delta on the tip of Louisiana at the center. The oil slick is a silvery swirl to the right.
[Associated Press]
On Monday, weathered oil is seen near the coast of Louisiana from a leaking pipeline caused by last week’s explosion and collapse of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the gulf.
An oil spill from a rig that sank off the coast of Louisiana is threatening marshes and beaches across the Gulf Coast, and unless it’s contained it could wind up tainting the Florida Keys and perhaps the state’s Atlantic coast, oceanography experts said Monday.

As of Monday, the slick was about 48 miles by 39 miles, lying some 30 miles off the coast of Louisiana. So far high winds have kept the spill away from land. It’s about 80 miles from the nearest Florida beaches in Pensacola.

But the owner of the rig has been unable to shut off the oil flowing from 5,000 feet below the surface, so the slick continues to grow.

The marshes of southern Louisiana and Mississippi appear to face the most immediate risk from the spill because they are closest to it, said George Crozier, director of the Dauphin Island Sea Laboratory in Mobile, Ala.

What happens after that depends on how quickly the owners of the rig can shut off the flow of oil. On Sunday they began using robot submarines to try to shut off a valve called a blowout preventer on a leaking pipe deep underwater. If that fails, then they will drill new wells on either side of the leak to relieve the pressure there – a process that could take months.
“If it goes on for four months, then yeah, we’ve got a problem,” Crozier said.
 ”But if they’re able to shut it down after a day or two, then the risk is minimal.”

“We can only hope that they can make that sucker stop very soon,” said Wilton “Tony” Sturges , a retired Florida State University oceanographer. The winds that would push the spill toward Tampa Bay’s beaches do not normally start until midsummer, he noted.

Officials with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are predicting that by today the slick will be pushed more toward the east, away from the Panhandle but pointed more toward Florida’s peninsula.

Robert Weisberg, a University of South Florida oceanographer who specializes in studying the gulf, said that while the Panhandle may be safe, he is concerned that if the winds push it far enough to the east, the oil slick could be caught in the gulf’s powerful loop current. The loop current flows north from Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula but then makes a clockwise turn and flows south.

If that happens, Weisberg warned, then the oil could be carried “toward the Keys and points up the east coast.”

Florida Department of Environmental Protection officials are monitoring the spill, said DEP spokeswoman Dee Ann Miller, but “at this time there is not believed to be an immediate threat to Florida’s waters.”

Federal officials say they are doing their best to keep the growing oil slick from damaging any of the state’s beaches or marshes. “Our goal is to continue to fight this spill as far offshore as possible,” U.S. Coast Guard Rear Adm. Mary Landry said at a news conference Monday.

One idea: Put a dome over the leaks to catch oil and route it to the surface, where it could be contained. That has worked before with shallow wells. No one knows if it would work 5,000 feet below the surface.

A pod of sperm whales was spotted near the slick on Sunday. At this point no one knows what effect the spill may have on them, although there is a risk of respiratory and eye irritation, or stomach and kidney problems if they ingest the oil, said Teri Rowles, coordinator of NOAA’s marine mammal stranding program.

Planes that were dropping chemicals that break down the oil were told to steer clear of the whales. The chemicals, known as dispersants, can be as toxic to mammals as the oil itself, marine biologist Jackie Savitz told the New York Times. So far there are no reports of any dead or injured animals in or near the slick.

The oil, which has been leaking at a rate estimated at 42,000 gallons a day, is coming from the site of the Deepwater Horizon rig, which exploded about 11 p.m. on April 20 and later sank. Eleven members of the 126-member crew remain missing and are presumed dead. The cause of the explosion at the rig, which was under contract to BP, remains under investigation.

Initially Coast Guard officials said there appeared to be no leak from the sunken rig. But on Sunday they discovered oil was in fact leaking from pipes deep beneath the surface.
The rig’s owner, Transocean Inc., noted in a news release Monday that the rig – now on the sea floor about 1,500 feet northwest of the well center – was fully insured for $560 million. Transocean is the world’s largest offshore drilling contractor.

Information from the New York Times and the New Orleans Times-Picayune was used in this report.

As you can see, it’s spread out quite a bit east/west-wise from their previous map.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://www.deepwaterhorizonresponse.com/go/doc/2931/533387/

IMAGERY RELEASE: Unified command releases overflight map and NOAA forecast maps

http://tinyurl.com/25xlerr

Detail from SkyTruth image showing response vessels and Gulf oil slick on April 25.
We just got a detailed ALI satellite image from NASA that was shot two days ago, on April 25, when the oil slick was about 817 square miles in size (it has since more than doubled to at least 1,800 square miles). You can see several response vessels working at the periphery of the slick. The magnitude of the job they have to do is plain to see.

See more in our growing image gallery for this incident (click below).

–
John Amos
John@skytruth.org
P.O. Box 3283
Shepherdstown, WV 25443-3283
phone: 304-260-8886
skype: skytruth.amos
*****************************************************************
SkyTruth:  Satellite images and digital mapping for
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A 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization – http://www.skytruth.org
Learn more at the SkyTruth Blog – http://blog.skytruth.org
Browse our image galleries at Flickr – http://tinyurl.com/yd576ep
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http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/business/energy/6976990.html

By BRETT CLANTON and MONICA HATCHER HOUSTON CHRONICLE
April 26, 2010, 8:27PM
As a major oil spill in waters off Louisiana tripled in area, a growing task force led by BP kept trying and failing today to plug a leaking well one mile below, damaged when a massive drilling rig sank last week into the Gulf of Mexico.

Efforts remained focused on the quickest fix – using robot submarines to close valves sitting atop the well. BP also said it has made progress with back-up plans to build a dome-like device to collect seeping oil at the sea floor, which could be installed in as little as two weeks, and with a worst-case plan – possibly taking months – to drill relief wells into the damaged one to stop the bleeding.

“We don’t know which technique will ultimately be successful,” said Doug Suttles, BP’s chief operating officer of exploration and production, in a news conference. “Just like everyone, we want to bring this to conclusion absolutely as fast as possible.”
The leaking well was discovered Saturday after the Deepwater Horizon sank Thursday morning about 40 miles off the coast of Louisiana.

The rig, owned and operated by Swiss-based Transocean and under lease to BP, went down after an apparent blowout sent the hulking structure up in flames the night of April 20. Eleven of the 126 aboard at the time of the blast remain missing and are presumed dead.

The situation has cast a glaring light on the physical and environmental risks of offshore oil drilling at a time when the industry is pushing for greater access to domestic oil and gas resources and after the Obama administration recently called for opening more federal waters for energy exploration. And some political opponents of offshore drilling have seen an opening for attack.

“The explosion, ensuing fire, and continuing spill raise serious concerns about the industry’s claims that their operations and technology are safe enough to put rigs in areas that are environmentally sensitive or are critical to tourism or fishing industries,” Senate Democrats Robert Menendez and Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey and Bill Nelson of Florida wrote in a letter today to leaders of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee and the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.
They requested a hearing on the Deepwater Horizon incident. “This may be the worst disaster in recent years, but it’s certainly not an isolated incident,” they wrote.

Aware perhaps of what could be at stake for the industry, BP has gone to great lengths to ensure the cleanup goes smoothly and quickly.

As of today, the British oil giant had tapped an army of more than 1,000 people to brainstorm fixes for plugging the well, and had marshaled a small armada of boats, planes and other resources to fight the spill as far from the shore as possible. Under a 1990 U.S. oil pollution law, BP is required to foot the bill for the clean-up.

The Deepwater Horizon spill now covers an estimated 1,800 square miles, the Coast Guard said today, dramatically increasing its estimate of 600 square miles on Sunday. But it noted that the slick was not continuous over that entire area, and that 97 percent of it is a thin sheen that dissipates easily, while the rest is thicker oil.

Government forecasters said the spill posed no immediate threat of making landfall, based on three-day weather models.

“Our biggest concern is that it continues to spill,” said Doug Helton, incident operations coordinator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “We’re not expecting any landfall at this point, but at some point we’ll start to see some of the shoreline impacts.”
The Coast Guard has been working on contingency plans with state governments in Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Florida, which would have ample time to respond if the spill came ashore, said Rear Adm. Mary Landry, commander of Coast Guard District 8.

But Chuck Kennicutt, professor of oceanography at Texas A&M University, doubts it will come to that. “This is far enough offshore that at least for the time being the likelihood of it washing up into the sensitive areas on the shore is probably fairly low,” he said.

As a precautionary measure, Houston-based Diamond Offshore Drilling said it evacuated more than 100 employees from its Ocean Endeavor drilling rig because the oil sheen had moved within a few miles of a well it is drilling for Exxon Mobil.

BP and Coast Guard officials said they remain hopeful of sealing off the well, which is leaking up to 1,000 barrels or 42,000 gallons a day, in two places – from a section of drill pipe near the wellhead and from the end of the long riser column that had connected the rig to the well and broke when the rig sank.

Workers were using up to four remotely operated vehicles  in an effort to activate shut-off valves on a giant piece of equipment called a blowout preventer that rests on top of the well at the sea floor. None of the multiple attempts to activate the 50-foot stack of valves had been successful yet, BP’s Suttles said.
Separately, the company has begun constructing three of the dome-like oil-collection devices that could be deployed in two to four weeks, he said. Also, BP was expecting the arrival of a rig tonight night to drill relief wells should they be needed, Suttles said.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://www.blogallovertheworld.com/2010/04/oil-rig-deepwater-horizon-leaking-into-gulf-of-mexico/
BlogAllOverTheWorld.com

NEW ORLEANS – The Coast Guard discovered Saturday that oil is leaking from the damaged well that fed a massive rig that exploded this week off Louisiana’s coast, while bad weather halted efforts to clean up the mess that threatens the area’s fragile marine ecosystem.

For days, the Coast Guard has said no oil appeared to be escaping from the well head on the ocean floor. Rear Adm. Mary Landry said the leak was a new discovery but could have begun when the rig sank on Thursday, two days after the initial explosion.

“We thought what we were dealing with as of yesterday was a surface residual (oil) from the mobile offshore drilling unit,” Landry said. “In addition to that is oil emanating from the well. It is a big change from yesterday … This is a very serious spill, absolutely.”

Coast Guard and company officials estimate that as much as 1,000 barrels – or 42,000 gallons – of oil is leaking each day after studying information from remotely operated vehicles and the size of the oil slick surrounding the blast site. The rainbow-colored sheen of oil stretched 20 miles by 20 miles on Saturday – about 25 times larger than it appeared to be a day earlier, Landry said.

By comparison, Exxon Valdez spilled 11 million gallons in Alaska’s Prince William Sound in 1989 – the worst oil spill in U.S. history.

BP PLC, which leased the rig and is taking the lead in the cleanup, and the government have been using the remotely operated vehicles to try to stop the leak by closing valves on the well deep underwater. If that doesn’t work, the company could drill what’s called an intervention well to control the oil flow. But the intervention drilling could take months.

“Over the next several days, we should determine which method is the best one to follow,” said Doug Suttles, chief operating officer for BP Exploration and Production. “A huge number of engineers from ourselves, working with (the government) and across the industry are putting together the best technology and know-how to solve this problem.”
Complicating efforts to stop the leak is well head’s depth at 5,000 feet underwater, said Lars Herbst, the regional director for the Minerals Management Service. Leaks have been fixed at similar depths before, but the process is difficult, he said.

The bad weather rolled in Friday, bringing with it strong wind, clouds and rain that interrupted efforts to contain the oil spill. Coast Guard Petty Officer John Edwards said he was uncertain when weather conditions would improve enough for the cleanup to resume. So far, crews have retrieved about 1,052 barrels of oily water, he said.

The sunken rig may have as much as 700,000 gallons of diesel on board, and an undetermined amount of oil has spilled from the rig itself. Suttles said the rig was “intact and secure” on the seabed about 1,300 feet from the well site.

BP said it has activated an extensive oil spill response, including the remotely operated vehicles, 700 workers, four airplanes and 32 vessels to mop up the spill. The Marine Spill Response Corp., an energy industry cleanup consortium, also brought equipment.
The 11 missing workers came from Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi. Neither the Coast Guard nor their employers have released their names, though several of their families have come forward.

Karl Kleppinger Sr., whose 38-year-old son, Karl, was one of the missing workers, said he doesn’t blame the Coast Guard for calling off the search.

“Given the magnitude of the explosion and the fire, I don’t see where you would be able to find anything,” said Kleppinger, of Zachary, La.

The other 115 crew members made it off the platform; several were hurt but only one remained hospitalized. The most seriously injured worker was expected to be released within about 10 days.

Federal officials had already been working on new safety rules for offshore drilling before Tuesday’s blast.

The U.S. Minerals and Management Service is developing regulations aimed at preventing human error, which it identified as a factor in many of the more than 1,400 offshore oil drilling accidents between 2001 and 2007. An MMS review published last year found 41 deaths and 302 injuries during that period.

The cause of Tuesday’s blast hasn’t been determined.

The Deepwater Horizon was the site of a 2005 fire found to have been caused by human error. An MMS investigation determined that a crane operator on the rig had become distracted while refueling the crane, allowing diesel fuel to overflow. Records show the fire was quickly contained, but caused $60,000 in damage to the crane.

Environmentalists said the rig explosion and oil spill should push the nation to develop new energy sources.

“This should be a wake-up call,” said David Helvarg, the president of the Blue Frontier Campaign, a marine conservation group, and author of “Rescue Warriors: The U.S. Coast Guard, America’s Forgotten Heroes.”
“I would rather risk a ‘wind spill’ than an oil spill offshore,” he said, ruefully pointing out that the source of wind-powered energy can’t sully the environment.

___
Associated Press Writer Noaki Schwartz reported from Los Angeles. Associated Press Writers Jason Dearen in San Francisco, Mike Kunzelman, Kevin McGill and Alan Sayre in Louisiana contributed to this report.
_________________
BBC NEWS
Published: 2010/04/25 09:18:09 GMT

‘Serious spill’ from US oil rig

Oil is leaking from a damaged well feeding a rig that sank off Louisiana on Thursday, in what US officials are calling “a very serious spill”.

The well is estimated to be leaking at a rate of about 1,000 barrels (42,000 gallons) of oil per day.

Although the US coastguard said on Friday that no leak was detected, the latest evidence suggests a spill. Bad weather has hampered efforts to fix it.

Eleven workers are still missing after an explosion and fire on Tuesday.

The Deepwater Horizon had been burning for 36 hours when it sank on Thursday in 5,000 ft (1,500m) of water, despite efforts to control the flames.

It was carrying out exploratory drilling 84km (52 miles) south-east of the Louisiana port of Venice when the blast occurred.

BP has deployed a number of ships and equipment to contain the leak by closing valves on the sunken well.

“A huge number of engineers from ourselves, working with [the government] and across the industry are putting together the best technology and know-how to solve this problem,” BP Exploration and Production Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles was quoted by the Associated Press news agency as saying.

Oil sheen

The US Coastguard said it had thought it was dealing only with a surface residual oil spill from the rig.

“In addition to that, is oil emanating from the well. It is a big change from yesterday… This is a very serious spill, absolutely, ” said Rear Adm Mary Landry.

A sheen of oil covering an area of about 20 square miles was visible on the ocean’s surface after the explosion and subsequent blaze.

In 2009, BP PLC was fined a record $87m for failing to improve safety conditions following a massive explosion that killed 15 people at its Texas City refinery.

But the US Mineral Management Services found no violations on the Deepwater Horizon rig when it carried out routine inspections in February, March and April this year.

President Barack Obama said on Thursday that the government was providing “all assistance needed” for both the rescue and clean up efforts in the troubled area.

He described the crisis on the BP-leased rig as his administration’s “number one priority”.

No cause for the blast has yet been identified.

Story from BBC NEWS: http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/americas/8642518.stm

Published: 2010/04/25 09:18:09 GMT

http://www.fieldandstream.com/blogs/where-fish/2010/04/bob-marshall-what-coastal-drilling-means-sportsmen
 April 23, 2010

Editor’s Note: Welcome to The Conservationist, a new blog on
FieldandStream.com, where at least three times per week we’ll be posting
conservation news, analysis, and commentary from Conservation Columnist Bob
Marshall, Contributing Editor Hal Herring, and Deputy Editor Jay Cassell.
—————————————————————————
So what does President Obama’s decision to open once-protected areas of our
coasts to energy drilling mean for fish, wildlife and sportsmen?

It could be terrible. It could be bad. Or it might not matter much at all.

The Terrible: If this derails the push for meaningful carbon reduction
legislation, it will be a black mark on his presidency, and a disaster for
fish and wildlife and sportsmen.

There is no greater threat to our outdoor pursuits than global warming, and
the major cause of that problem is the accumulation of carbon in the
atmosphere, primarily from fossil fuels. There are alternative fuels, but
the only way to encourage development and use of those fuels is to place a
penalty on the production of carbon. That’s what cap and trade is all about.

Even the energy industry agrees the known untapped sources in these offshore
areas can’t make a serious dent in our needs. During the Bush
Administration, the federal Energy Information Agency said the impact on
prices would be “negligible”- and even that wouldn’t happen for 30 years.
But the longer the nation believes we have a ready supply of cheap
carbon-emitting fuels, the longer it will resist converting to cleaner
technologies. No pain, no gain.

There is also fear this could lead us on a slippery slope. By opening these
previously protected areas off the coasts, the administration will be faced
with this question: If the energy emergency means those pristine oceans off
the east coast must be sacrificed, why should the Rocky Mountain front be
any different?

Throwing our petrol patriots a bone has never slated their thirst in the
past.

The Bad: As a lifelong resident of coastal Louisiana, which supports 4,000
oil and gas platforms – the largest such concentration in the world – I
think I can speak with some authority on the impacts of offshore drilling.

The first thing to understand is that the most obvious risk is not the most
serious.

While the nation this week has been gripped by photos of a rig that
exploded,  likely killing at least 11 workers and now pumping untold gallons
of crude into the Gulf, such disasters are the rare exception to the rule in
offshore drilling. Certainly the risks are great in any such event; we’ll
have to wait to see how much damage this does to the coastal estuaries and
beaches, if any. But if tightly regulated, constantly watched and slapped
with crippling fines when it breaks the rules, the offshore energy industry
can be safe and have very little impact on  fish and wildlife.

However, when allowed to bully a state, this industry can do horrendous
damage, most of which takes place onshore. This includes a deep and lasting
disruption to both natural and social infrastructure by the on-shore
component of development such as transmission pipelines, canal dredging,
refineries, and port facilities.

Since permitting was required in the 1970s, as much as 10,000 miles of
pipelines were dredged for oil and gas work through our coastal marshes. No
one has an accurate count of how many miles were dredged before that, but
some experts think it was at least as many.

Louisiana’s coastal estuaries – the largest and most productive in the lower
48, an ecosystem that 90 percent of all Gulf marine species depend on and
that is important to 70 percent of the continent’s migratory waterfowl -
has been reduced by 2,000 square miles in 70 years, and experts believe
almost 40 percent of that loss can be attributed to oil and gas industry
impacts.

Did that have to happen?

No. But efforts to force the energy industry to be more environmentally
sensitive  were defeated under heavy industry lobbying.

There are much greener ways to develop offshore energy than what happened in
Louisiana. But sportsmen in states now facing this challenge should be
prepared to hear from the petro-patriots that all those environmental
safeguards are just too expensive. Let them win that argument, and your fish
and wildlife habitat and quality of life will suffer greatly.
**

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7105649.ece

Timesonline UK

From The Times  April 23, 2010

(AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

An aerial photo taken in the Gulf of Mexico shows the burning oilrig Deepwater Horizon, which collapsed and sank after an explosion caused by an oil ‘blowout’

Robin Pagnamenta, Energy Editor, and Jacqui Goddard in Miami

A team of engineers using an underwater robot was struggling last night to control one of the world’s most challenging oil spills after an explosion ripped apart and sank a rig leased by BP in the Gulf of Mexico.

As fears grew for the safety of 11 workers still missing, BP and US officials were tackling what could be a major pollution incident using booms and dispersant chemicals.

The spill is being fed by an estimated 13,000 gallons of oil and gas that were pumping every hour from a pipe running up from an oil reservoir more than 2 miles (3km) beneath the seabed.

Deepwater Horizon rig, which had been drilling for oil at the time of the explosion on Tuesday night, collapsed and sank yesterday after being engulfed by a fire that had blazed for more than 36 hours.

Guy Cantwell, a spokesman for Transocean, the Swiss company that owned the rig, said that engineers were trying to cut off the uncontrolled flow of oil using a subsea robot. He said that the robot, equipped with cameras and remote-controlled arms, was being used to try to activate a device on the seafloor, 5,000ft (1,500m) below the surface, that is designed automatically to clamp shut over the base of a pipe that connects the rig with the seabed.

The robot was being deployed remotely from a ship close to the site of the disaster, 50 miles off the coast off Louisiana. If the effort fails the only alternative is to drill a “relief well” intersecting the original well. Mud and cement could then be injected inside to cap it. Such an operation, however, could take weeks or even months.

BP, Transocean and the US Coast Guard were planning to use booms, skimmers and chemicals to control what threatens to be a huge oil spill.

US regulators pledged to begin an investigation into the accident, which appears to have been caused by a “blowout” – an uncontrolled release of gas or oil that forced its way up the well pipe and caught fire, destroying the rig.

The majority of the 126 workers on board escaped unharmed but 17 were injured and 11 remain missing. BP said that all six of its staff, who had been overseeing the operation, were safe.

Last night survivors told of their desperate attempts to escape the fire. Chad Murray, 34, the rig’s chief electrician, said that they had less than five minutes to leap from their stations or bunks and evacuate before the rig was enveloped by the fireball.

Jim Ingram said that he was getting ready for bed when everything suddenly went dark. He heard a thud that “kind of sounded like a crane operator that would have landed a load. On the second one, we knew something was wrong”.

Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 5:51 PM

Richard Charter advises us that…..

- The Mineral Management Services, a federal agency that’s heading up oil and gas exploration on the Outer Continental Shelf, is hosting public environmental review meetings to solicit comments and alternatives on the potential environmental effects of oil drilling.
- Two meetings will take place in Jacksonville at 1 and 7 p.m. today at the Jacksonville Marriott at 4670 Salisbury Road.
- Those who can’t attend today’s meetings may e-mail comments to GGEIS@mms.gov or mail them in an envelope labeled “Comments on the PEIS Scope” to the Regional Supervisor, Leasing and Environment (MS 5410) Minerals Management Service, Gulf of Mexico OCS Region, 1201 Elmwood Park Blvd., New Orleans, LA 70123-2394.

OFFSHORE DRILLING:
Energy reps ask MMS to expedite Atlantic Coast study (04/21/2010)

Energy industry representatives pushed the U.S. Minerals Management Service to speed up a study on the environmental impact of seismic surveying off the Atlantic Coast. The research will look at an area off limits to exploration and drilling for more than two decades.
The agency held the first of 13 public meetings to gather comments on the environmental impact statement yesterday in Houston. The meeting drew about 40 people who largely urged the agency to focus on scientific reports and documented instances of seismic effects rather than speculating on potential impacts.
Once the study is done, scientists will analyze geologic data on the effects of drilling, allowing the government to move forward with lease sales, siting wind turbines, excavating sand and gavel, and drilling. Seismic activity has not taken place in the mid- and south-Atlantic since the early 1980s, surpassed by new technology to find the most prospective areas. Companies say they need the geophysical data to begin planning production from offshore sites.
Jennifer Smith, an environmental activist, urged MMS to consider harm done to whales, sea turtles and other marine life from seismic surveying. The industry says marine mammals are not harmed by seismic surveying, which involves capturing acoustic images reflected off the seabed by loud blasts of compressed air (Monica Hatcher, Houston Chronicle, April 20). — JP

What follows are the comments I sent in.. Feel free to use them..DeeVon

Re:  Comments on the PEIS Scope

To: Minerals Management Service, Interior Department
Attn: Regional Manager
Re:  Offshore oil & gas exploration and Development in the Gulf of Mexico
 
Dear Sirs:
I wish to file my opposition to any plans to expand oil and gas exploration and development in the Eastern Gulf of Mexico or Atlantic Outer Continental Shelf that would affect Florida, especially the area adjacent to the Dry Tortugas National Park.   Oil and water don’t mix.
 
The impacts of such activities would contribute to the further decline of Florida’s endangered coral barrier reef ecosystem where the Tortugas National Park is located.   It will adversely impact tourism and commercial fishing upon which the state’s economy depends. Yet the result would be just a few day’s of oil for a nation that really needs to invest in alternatives such as solar. 
 
The toxic drilling muds, routine spills from the platforms, accidental vessel groundings, daily pollution from land-based support activities, and the potential of rig blow-outs and catastrophic spills would result in water quality degradation and could result in permanent damage to the fragile and endangered coral reef ecosystem of South Florida.  The emissions from such activities would contribute to global warming adding further negative cumulative impacts.
 
Corals need clear, clean, nutrient free waters to thrive.  One spill could ruin this ecosystem.  The ongoing impacts of the Valdez spill are testament that clean-up efforts do not begin to restore natural systems degraded by oil and gas development.  It is not worth the gamble.  For the past 23 years, as the retired founder of the environmental organization Reef Relief, we have opposed oil and gas exploration and development in the Eastern Gulf of Mexico because the short term benefits do not begin to outweigh the negative long term impacts.  Nothing has changed in that regard except that now areas are being opened for such activity without any new evidence or justification as to its merits. For what??? 
 
Your job is to look at the extensive record and make a decision that will insure a sustainable future for all Floridians and the millions of others who come to visit us because of our spectacular oceans, beaches and coral reefs. The Eastern Gulf of Mexico has been off limits for many years for good reasons.   I trust you will take the long view and agree that conservation of this most valuable area is important.
 
Thank you for the opportunity to present this viewpoint. 
 
Very truly yours,
 
DeeVon Quirolo

You must be the change you want to see in the world.
Mahatma Gandhi
Indian political and spiritual leader (1869 – 1948)

We can do no great things; only small things with great love.
Mother Theresa

http://news.oneindia.in/2010/04/15/exxonvaldez-spill-still-affecting-alaskan-wildlife.html

Thursday, April 15, 2010,11:41 [IST]
 
Washington, April 15 (ANI): Lingering oil from the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill is still being ingested by wildlife more than two decades after the disaster, scientists in Alaska have found.
The research uses biomarkers to reveal long-term exposure to oil in harlequin ducks and demonstrates how the consequences of oil spills are measured in decades rather than years.

The Exxon Valdez tanker ran aground on the Prince William Sound on March 24, 1989, spilling 10.8 million gallons of crude oil into the sea, covering 1,300 square miles. It is still regarded as one of the most devastating human-caused contamination events, and the effects on wildlife populations and communities have been debated by biologists, ecologists, and the oil industry ever since.

Now, using the biomarker CYP1A, which is induced upon exposure to crude oil, an international team led by Daniel Esler, from the Centre for Wildlife Ecology
, Simon Fraser University, British Columbia, has measured prolonged exposure to oil in local wildlife populations.

“One of the more remarkable and unanticipated findings of recent research is the length of time over which animals were exposed to residual oil. Our research has shown that oil remaining in the area, particularly in inter-tidal areas, was encountered and ingested by some near-shore animals,” said Esler.

The team focused their research on harlequin ducks as an example of such a species. Harlequins are marine birds that live in inter-tidal and shallow sub-tidal areas. Between 1990 and 2005 there were approximately 14,500 ducks in the Prince William Sound area.

“In addition to the higher likelihood of exposure due to their habitat, harlequin ducks have a number of characteristics that makes them particularly sensitive to oil pollution,” said Esler.

“Their diet consists of invertebrates that live in this area and have a limited ability to metabolize residual oil. Also, harlequin ducks have a life history strategy based on high survival rates, as well as a small body size when compared to other sea ducks.

“We found CYP1A levels were unequivocally higher in areas oiled by the Exxon Valdez spill than in nearby areas, a conclusion supported by multiple samples and two independent laboratories. We believe this shows harlequin ducks continued to be exposed to residual oil from the spill through at least 2009, twenty years after the event.

“We believe it is important to recognize that the duration of presence of residual oil and its associated effects are not limited to a few years after spills, but for some vulnerable species may occur over decades,” Esler added.

The study has been published in Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry. (ANI)

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/business/energy/6969813.html

Houston Chronicle

By LISE OLSEN and TERRI LANGFORD
April 21, 2010, 9:44PMApril 21, 2010, 9:44PMNine major oil rig fires have killed at least two people and seriously injured 12 since 2006 in the Gulf of Mexico, a lonely, high-risk drilling area where workers stay for weeks at a time, working 12-hour-a-day shifts.

Those fires are among 509 recorded on oil platforms in the Gulf since 2006, according to the U.S. Mineral Management Services, which monitors and collects platform data.

The Chronicle did not find any fatal accidents involving the drilling rig that caught fire Tuesday night, the Deepwater Horizon, or the company that owns it, Transocean Ltd.

However, fire struck other Transocean rigs in 2008 and 2009 and four of 19 accidents recorded on Transocean platforms for the past four years resulted in injuries to workers that required evacuation to shore and caused $1.9 million in damage, according to MMS accident reports.

The Houston Chronicle counted 35 fatal Gulf of Mexico platform accidents since 2006, based on local news reports and records.

The two deadliest Gulf of Mexico fires occurred in 2008 and in January on two oil rig platforms operated by the Apache Corp. In those two cases, one man died of his burns, and another died jumping into the Gulf to escape the fire.

$8.5 million in fines

Fires on Transocean’s other rigs did not involve injuries, according to government reports. One 2008 fire began after an O-ring was improperly installed on a fuel line, causing fuel to leak onto a hot engine surface. Another in 2009 started because of electrical equipment failure.

Most of the fatalities on these hulking metal behemoths involved drowning, diving accidents, helicopter crashes or drilling equipment mishaps.

Drilling companies have been assessed at least $8.5 million in fines since 2005 by the MMS, which also wears another hat: The agency collects royalties from the leases it sells to oil companies it monitors for safety.

In 2009, $11 billion in royalties was collected from off-shore leases. According to the MMS website, those royalties are one of the federal government’s greatest sources of non-tax revenue.

Attorneys who often represent off-shore workers in injury cases said that accidents aboard Gulf of Mexico oil platforms tend to be underreported.

“There is a big difference between their actual incident/injury rate and their self-reported (rate),” said attorney Michael Doyle of Doyle Raizner in Houston, a firm that specializes in offshore injury cases.

Injury rate higher?

Despite federal reporting requirements, Doyle said companies have failed to report off-shore injuries to the U.S. Coast Guard, which shares some enforcement authority with the MMS, in about a third of the employee cases he has handled.

“Often (company officials) deny an injury no matter what the doctors say,” he said. “So the injury rate looks low, but is not.”

Federal court records show dozens of recent cases filed nationwide against Transocean Inc and interrelated companies. But many of the injuries and death cases result in undisclosed settlements, two other attorneys who recently represented workers in cases against Transocean said.

Kurt Arnold, who has represented several clients in recent cases against Transocean Offshore and specializes in maritime injury cases said most of the workers live together in small towns from East Texas to all across Louisiana.

“Unfortunately, the rise of incidents offshore are increasing as the exploration for oil and gas increases,” Arnold said. “Many companies talk about their safety record, but the majority of accidents are not reported or misclassified. Unlike on land, there is little oversight.”

terri.langford@chron.com

lise.olsen@chron.com

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704133804575197613591134990.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_MIDDLENexttoWhatsNewsSecond

By GUY CHAZAN , RUSSELL GOLD And BEN CASSELMAN

Twelve people were missing and seven critically injured after an explosion and fire at an oil-drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico.

View Full Image

AFP/Getty ImagesA Coast Guard rescue helicopter and crew document the fire aboard the mobile offshore drilling unit Deepwater Horizon, while searching for survivors.

 

The rig, about 41 miles off the Louisiana coast, is owned and operated by Transocean Ltd. and contracted to British oil major BP PLC. A spokesman for Transocean said most of the 126 people on board were safe. A Coast Guard spokeswoman said 12 were still missing but said reports indicated that all 126 people got off the rig. The rig was still burning and listing.

Four Coast Guard helicopters and an airplane are being used in rescue operations and five Coast Guard cutters are also responding, the Coast Guard said. “We are still in a search and rescue operation,” Transocean spokesman Greg Panagos said.

Billy Nungesser, president of Plaquemines Parish, has said that the missing people were in a lifeboat that drifted away from the rig while rescue workers were helping others.

It was unclear what caused the blast, which happened at around 10 p.m. Tuesday. Mr. Panagos said Transocean wouldn’t focus on determining the cause until the search and rescue concludes.

Fifteen workers were airlifted to local hospitals, according to Petty Officer 3rd Class Elizabeth Bordelon of the Coast Guard.

Ninety-nine people from the rig are on a vessel expected to arrive at Port Fourchon, La., at 8 p.m. CDT, the Coast Guard said. Transocean is bringing family members of the rig’s crew to Louisiana and is providing counseling, Mr. Panagos said.

“Anytime an incident like this happens, it’s a huge deal to us. We don’t want to see anybody hurt and we’ll do everything we can to take care of the crew,” Mr. Panagos said.

A spokesman for BP said the company had six personnel on board the rig at the time of the incident, and all were safe. The rig, the Deepwater Horizon, is located in an area known as the Mississippi Canyon.

Deepwater Horizon is a semisubmersible, effectively a floating platform that has small thrusters to hold it in place above a well. It was carrying out exploration drilling on BP’s Macondo prospect in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico. BP said Transocean was carrying out the work on BP’s behalf and was responsible for safety on the rig. Its staff on the facility work with Transocean’s drilling team to make sure the work is done to BP’s specifications.

BP, which owns the rights to produce oil and gas from the area, filed for a permit April 16 to temporarily abandon the well it was drilling at the site of the explosion, according to the Minerals Management Service, an arm of the Interior Department that oversees offshore drilling. It wasn’t clear from the service’s data if the government had approved the permit.

A BP spokesman says it had recently wrapped up exploration drilling. It is standard practice, the spokesman said, to file such a permit. The rig would then be moved to another location while BP spends time analyzing and interpreting data.

BP had begun to drill the well in June 2009, using a different Transocean rig. The Deepwater Horizon appears to have begun work in January, according to Minerals Management Service well data. The well had reached a depth of at least 11,500 feet.

Temporarily abandoning the well would typically require setting cement plugs in the wells to make sure that water, oil and natural gas don’t move around.

The deepwater Gulf of Mexico is a key focus of the western oil majors and a significant exploration hotspot. Last year, BP announced a “giant” discovery in the Gulf, saying its Tiber prospect, south of Louisiana, contained some three billion barrels of oil.

Associated PressThe ultra-deepwater semisubmersible rig Deepwater Horizon is shown operating in the Gulf of Mexico.

Finds like Tiber have resurrected a region that was dismissed as the “Dead Sea” in the early 1990s after the majors drilled a string of dry holes.

With a fleet of 146 rigs, Transocean is the world’s largest offshore drilling contractor. It has built up a big position in state-of-the-art rigs capable of operating in deep water and other technically challenging environments and has more than 21,000 employees world-wide. The company moved its domicile to Switzerland from the Cayman Islands in December 2008 for tax purposes and debuted on the Swiss stock exchange earlier this month.

Tuesday’s explosion isn’t the first major accident in the modern era of offshore drilling.

In 2001, a platform working off the coast of Brazil caught fire, killing 11 workers and sank five days later. The platform was a converting semisubmersible drilling rig.

According to an investigation by Petroleo Brasileiro SA, oil and natural gas was accidentally pumped into a storage tank, which led to excessive pressure in the tank and a rupture. Gas was dispersed inside the vessel and 17 minutes later, was ignited and exploded. The crew began to evacuate the facility about 1½ hours after the tank rupture.

About eight hours later, the facility was badly listing. Crews tried to inject nitrogen gas into its pontoons, but it sank five days later.

—Angel Gonzalez and James Herron contributed to this article.

Write to Guy Chazan at guy.chazan@wsj.com

http://www.nola.com/business/index.ssf/2010/04/eastern_gulf_of_mexico_is_cons.html
New Orleans Times-Picayune  By Kimberly Quillen, The Times-Picayune
April 18, 2010, 6:20AM 
Of the new territories that President Barack Obama proposes opening to offshore drilling, the eastern Gulf of Mexico is the best understood and promises to be the most fertile, the director of the Minerals Management Service said in New Orleans this week. It’s also a territory that, if opened up to energy exploration, could make an indelible mark on the south Louisiana economy.
“We know more about it than the other frontier (areas),” said Liz Birnbaum, who was in the area for a meeting of offshore inspectors hosted by the MMS, the federal agency charged with overseeing energy exploration. “The eastern Gulf is certainly the most reliable.”

Obama proposed late last month opening up territories along the Atlantic coastline, the eastern Gulf of Mexico and the north coast of Alaska to oil and natural gas drilling. The proposal, which drew criticism from environmental groups, aims to reduce dependence on foreign oil and curry political support for a climate change bill.

For years, offshore oil and gas development has taken place in the central and western areas of the Gulf of Mexico. But energy development in the eastern part of the Gulf has been off limits because of long-standing opposition from Florida, where politicians and environmentalists have worried about the impact of offshore development.

Obama’s proposal would limit drilling in the eastern Gulf to projects taking place at least 125 miles off the coast of Florida and would be allowed only if Congress agrees to drop a moratorium that now blocks drilling in that area until 2022.

Even with the 125-mile limit, the proposal would open up two-thirds of the oil and gas resources in the eastern Gulf, where an estimated 3 billion barrels of undiscovered oil and as much as 12 trillion cubic feet of undiscovered natural gas lay, according to the MMS.

But since the eastern Gulf has long been off limits to energy exploration, it remains unclear exactly how energy-rich the area is.

“Much of the information (we have) is based on work done before the moratorium that was closer to shore,” said Eric Smith, associate director of the Tulane Energy Institute. “We simply didn’t have the same tools (then) that we do now.”

Still, exploratory wells and seismic data on the eastern Gulf is more recent than data collected on the other new territories the Obama proposal would open up.

Because of the 125-mile limit, exploration in the eastern Gulf would take place primarily in deeper waters.

And south Louisiana is positioned to emerge as a base for serving eastern Gulf energy projects, a role it already serves for the central and western Gulf. Many of the supply vessels that support offshore platforms operate out of Port Fourchon, a sea port located on the southern tip of Lafourche Parish.

“It’s quite likely that (service for eastern Gulf projects) will come out of here,” said Birnbaum, noting that south Louisiana already has the infrastructure for bring oil and gas mined from the Gulf onshore.

“It would stand to reason that most of it would come out of Louisiana and Texas. That’s where the major service companies are located,” said Larry Wall, spokesman for the Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil & Gas Association, a group that represents the state’s energy industry. “It’s a crack in the door, but it’s definitely too soon to estimate any sort of financial impact.”
Smith said Mobile, Ala., also has offshore service capabilities that could serve the eastern Gulf.

Opening up of the eastern Gulf to energy exploration, assuming the moratorium is indeed lifted, could also renew interest in drilling in the Gulf as a whole, which has been perceived by some in recent years as an aging reservoir with its best days behind it.
“The idea that the Gulf of Mexico is tapped out is not consistent with our understanding,” Birnbaum said. “It’s a mature area. Some platforms have been abandoned. But as we move farther out, the companies are finding even more resources. The eastern Gulf is going to be another area for them to look at.”

 Kimberly Quillen can be reached at kquillen@timespicayune.com or 504.826.3416.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://www.sacbee.com/2010/04/18/2685021/the-conversation-is-it-time-to.html
Sacramento Bee
Opinion – California Forum – The Conversation
Sunday, April 18, 2010

A 1969 oil spill off Santa Barbara caused 200,000 gallons of crude oil to spread over 800 square miles of ocean and shore.  VERNON MERRITT III / Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

The Conversation: Is it time to get beyond the Santa Barbara oil spill? No
Shorelines need protection from the ‘Drill, baby, drill’ ethos
By Richard Charter
Special to The Bee
Published: Sunday, Apr. 18, 2010 – 12:00 am | Page 1E
When President Barack Obama announced plans to open broad swaths of America’s waters to oil and gas drilling late last month, the Pacific Coast from California to Washington was left protected – for now. This was not a foregone conclusion, considering that some areas off California were proposed for new drilling just in the past few years. But it was the right decision for the Pacific Ocean.

America’s systems of national parks, forests and wildlife refuges, such as the national seashores and parklands that now embrace many of California’s beloved beaches and estuaries, are based on the principle that some places are best safeguarded for future generations. That means protecting them from damaging industrial development such as offshore oil drilling.

Since 1981, most of California’s coastal elected officials have backed a bipartisan congressional moratorium that set aside fragile coastal waters, and protected important fisheries and coastal-dependent economies from the effects of offshore drilling. But on Oct. 1, 2008, President George W. Bush, bowing to well-funded lobbying pressure from the oil industry and then Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s orchestrated chants of “Drill Baby Drill,” abandoned the offshore drilling moratorium supported by three consecutive presidents, and pushed Congress to do the same.

When Obama took office, he inherited a fast-track Bush drilling plan proposing three separate offshore lease sales extending up and down the length of the California coast. Areas from Arena Basin off of Mendocino County to the beaches of La Jolla and San Diego were to be offered up for drilling. So when Obama announced his decision March 31 to open up coastal drilling elsewhere around the country, the entire California shoreline and its $43 billion coastal economy breathed a sigh of relief. It had won a long-sought – though perhaps temporary – political reprieve from new federal offshore drilling leases until at least 2017.

But other areas were not so lucky. On the Atlantic Coast, tens of millions of acres of seabed starting only three miles off the shoreline, from Delaware down to Georgia, could now be opened to drilling. And on the white sand beaches of Florida’s Gulf Coast and Panhandle, the administration proposes to undermine a carefully negotiated 2006 bipartisan compromise to set aside a portion of the eastern Gulf of Mexico until at least 2022, to protect fisheries, critical military assets and environmentally sensitive coastal areas.

And last but not least, the administration has allowed drilling to proceed in the remote and fragile waters of America’s Arctic Ocean, where global climate change is already wreaking obvious environmental havoc, and where no effective cleanup technology has been invented to handle an oil spill amid the broken sea ice. Yet Shell has just been given the green light to start drilling there this summer.

Offshore drilling accidents and related oil spills happen with alarming frequency throughout the world, despite modern, “safe” drilling technology. Last fall, an out-of-control blowout from a “modern” offshore platform oiled more than 8,000 square miles of Australia’s lush Timor Sea for 10 weeks. And this month, at least 18,000 gallons of crude oil spilled from a broken pipeline extending from an oil drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico through the Delta National Wildlife Refuge in Louisiana. So far, about 160 square miles have been oiled by the spill, including 40 square miles of protected marshes.

Here in California, we can enjoy Obama’s drilling reprieve until at least 2017, but we must be aware that the oil lobby still has its eye on our coast. In fact, the oil companies have already refocused their efforts on Sacramento and Santa Barbara. Three small local citizen groups in Santa Barbara County have recently admitted that they are working with the oil lobby to help facilitate the first new offshore leasing in 40 years within California’s near-shore state waters.
A drilling plan by Plains Exploration & Production Co. includes a proposal to “slant-drill” from an existing federal drilling rig back toward shore and underneath our protected state waters.
The dangerous precedent set by allowing at least 14 new wells to be punched into protected waters would gravely undermine four decades of bipartisan statewide protection provided by the California State Tidelands Oil and Gas Sanctuary. This state sanctuary, sheltering our waters between the Mexican and Oregon borders, is now the only legal protection our state retains from new drilling.

Fortunately, California’s State Lands Commission has already wisely rejected the proffered Plains Exploration deal. An attempt to circumvent the authority of the State Lands Commission also collapsed in the California Legislature. We cannot fall for an oil company’s flawed and flimsy assurances that drillers will eventually retreat from their profitable project and voluntarily remove portions of their spill-plagued infrastructure. To lose our coast in this way would be tragic after decades of hard work by elected officials and grass-roots activists from Santa Monica to Mendocino to Washington, D.C.

The obvious take-home message: When you win big, as the California coast has now done, it is time to stop gambling and leave the casino.
Richard Charter is a senior policy adviser for marine programs for Defenders of Wildlife. He has been working on offshore drilling issues with local and state elected officials and the conservation community more than 30 years.

By KEVIN WADLOW   kwadlow@keynoter.com

Posted – Saturday, April 17, 2010 06:00 AM EDT

A new oil-drilling report commissioned for the Florida House of Representatives describes the risk for oil operations in state waters as “serious but manageable.” The 177-page report, written by consultants for Willis Structured Risk Solutions of London, was released April 9.

On Friday, a House energy-policy committee was expected to introduce a bill that would allow oil exploration and drilling in state waters.

“Risk of damage to natural and human habitats from hurricanes alone dwarfs the [oil-drilling] risks we have uncovered,” says the Willis report. It acknowledges the Florida Keys reef stands out as an area of particular environmental sensitivity.

“As one moves [south] along Florida’s Gulf Coast … the coastline and nearshore areas become increasingly sensitive to prospective oil and gas activities,” says the report.

Reef Relief policy advisor Paul Johnson praised technical aspects of the Willis report, but said it does not go far enough to highlight the risk to Keys and South Florida waters.

“Even if the risk is low, it’s inappropriate to go anywhere in South Florida,” Johnson said. “The environmental and social consequences of a spill are so enormous that South Florida [drilling] should be off the table until the risk is zero.”

Other drilling opponents in South Florida were unmoved by the report.

“One spill can end it all,” said Jonathan Ullman, an Everglades specialist for the Sierra Club in Miami.

Ullman pointed to a months-long major oil spill from a drilling platform in Australia’s Timor Sea that caused “devastating effects” to the marine environment there.

“If you put the submerged state lands on the market to the high bidder, an oil spill is not a matter of if but when,” Ullman said.

Johnson said from Tallahassee that even if the House bill is introduced, it appears unlikely that a companion bill will be passed by the Florida Senate.

A Senate bill on oil drilling has made little headway since being introduced March 11. The legislative session ends April 30.

“There’s not enough time and not enough interest on the Senate side for anything to go through this year,” Johnson said.

But in 2011, drilling advocates will take leadership positions in both the Senate and house, he said.

An April 6 spill from a crude-oil pipeline off Louisiana should serve as a warning, say Florida conservationists. The U.S. Coast Guard said the estimated 18,000 gallons of crude oil affected “an area of approximately 160 square miles,” including portions of the Delta National Wildlife Refuge.

“Introducing a bill to allow oil drilling in our nearshore waters in the midst of Louisiana’s ongoing oil spill cleanup is a twisted bit of irony,” said Mark Ferrulo, executive director of Progress Florida.

Several Monroe County groups — including the Key West City Commission, the Key West Chamber of Commerce and the Keys National Marine Sanctuary Advisory Council — have passed resolutions calling for continued bans on Gulf drilling.

“Despite advances in oil-drilling technology, there is no positive assurance that catastrophic damage to our coastline, beaches, plants and fish could be avoided during normal operating conditions or during storm situations,” says a Key West city resolution from November.

A federal plan unveiled March 31 proposes to open areas of the Gulf of Mexico that had been closed to oil exploration for decades.

Although President Obama and other officials said the areas lie at least 125 miles off Florida’s coast, they later acknowledged the draft zones come much closer to Dry Tortugas National Park and the Tortugas Ecological Reserves of the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary.

www.oceana.org

Thanks to everyone who signed on!   Matt Niemerski, Ocean Advocate

OCEANA | Protecting the World’s Oceans
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http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/state/house-will-wait-till-next-year-to-push-574191.html

Palm Beach Post:  House will wait till next year to push offshore drilling plan
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Updated: 6:17 p.m. Friday, April 16, 2010
Posted: 5:24 p.m. Friday, April 16, 2010
TALLAHASSEE – The House sponsor of legislation that would lift a ban on offshore drilling in Florida’s state waters said Friday he was dropping the effort for this year but would try again in 2011.

Rep. Dean Cannon made the announcement as a committee he chairs began reviewing a draft that had yet to be filed with just two weeks left in the 60-day legislative session.
It would have allowed drilling rigs as close as three miles from shore on a temporary basis. Permanent rigs or platforms would have had to stay at least six miles away.

“It is not the right time to vote on this issue,” said the Winter Park Republican. “I haven’t seen any evidence that would suggest that our counterparts in the Senate have an appetite for this issue this year.”

Instead, he plans to use the draft as a starting point next year when he’ll preside over the House as speaker if Republicans retain their majority as expected.

He’ll also have a powerful partner. Sen. Mike Haridopolos, an Indialantic Republican who has been leading the push for offshore oil and natural gas drilling in the other chamber, has been designated as Senate president for 2011-12.

Cannon’s draft bill would allow drilling in state waters that extend about 10 miles into the Gulf of Mexico and some three miles into the Atlantic Ocean.

It would not affect federal waters farther from shore. President Barack Obama recently announced plans to lift drilling barriers there. He wants to open up the Atlantic from Delaware to central Florida and plans to ask Congress to repeal a ban on drilling in the gulf within 125 miles of Florida’s beaches.

Cannon sponsored a similar bill that passed in the House late in last year’s session. Senate President Jeff Atwater, R-North Palm Beach, was cool to the idea and it was not taken up in the Senate.

Proponents said drilling can be done safely to help reduce dependence on foreign oil while providing the state with a new source of revenue.

Opponents said it still wasn’t worth the risk to Florida’s environment and tourism industry nor would it provide the state with a significant boost to either its economy or treasury.

Thanks to Richard Charter as ever!

http://cbs4.com/wireapnewsfl/House.sponsor.drops.2.1636485.html
CBS Channel 4  Florida AP News

Sponsor Drops Fla. Offshore Drilling Plan For Now
BILL KACZOR, Associated Press Writer
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) – The House sponsor of legislation that would lift a ban on offshore drilling in Florida’s state waters said Friday he was dropping the effort for this year but would try again in 2011.

Rep. Dean Cannon made the announcement as a committee he chairs began reviewing a draft that had yet to be filed with just two weeks left in the 60-day legislative session.

It would have allowed drilling rigs as close as three miles from shore on a temporary basis. Permanent rigs or platforms would have had to stay at least six miles away.

“It is not the right time to vote on this issue,” said the Winter Park Republican. “This is a bicameral process and I haven’t seen any evidence that would suggest that our counterparts in the Senate have an appetite for this issue this year.”

Instead, he plans to use the draft as a starting point next year when he’ll preside over the House as speaker if Republicans retain their majority as expected.

He’ll also have a powerful partner. Sen. Mike Haridopolos, an Indialantic Republican who has been leading the push for offshore oil and natural gas drilling in the other chamber, has been designated as Senate president for 2011-12.

Haridopolos would replace Senate President Jeff Atwater, a North Palm Beach Republican who is leaving the Legislature to run for chief financial officer.

Cannon’s draft bill would allow drilling in state waters that extend about 10 miles into the Gulf of Mexico and some three miles into the Atlantic Ocean.

It would not affect federal waters farther from shore. President Barack Obama recently announced plans to lift drilling barriers there. He wants to open up the Atlantic from Delaware to central Florida and plans to ask Congress to repeal a ban on drilling in the gulf within 125 miles of Florida’s beaches.

Cannon sponsored a similar bill that passed in the House late in last year’s session. Atwater was cool to the idea and it was not taken up in the Senate.

The Select Policy Council on Strategic & Economic Planning agreed to send a report on the issue to Speaker Larry Cretul, R-Ocala, that he can forward to his successor – Cannon.

The panel first took public testimony, again hearing the usual arguments.

Proponents said drilling can be done safely to help reduce dependence on foreign oil while providing the state with a new source of revenue.

Opponents said it still wasn’t worth the risk to Florida’s environment and tourism industry nor would it provide the state with a significant boost to either its economy or treasury.

Jay Liles, representing the Florida Wildlife Federation and Apalachicola Riverkeeper, said Florida instead should do more to promote renewable energy.

“This bill will rely on false promises of energy independence based on hope-for bonanzas,” Liles said. “If we can create more jobs, if we can grow a stronger economy by supporting renewable energy in a stronger fashion could we not forgo or at least stall the decision to go into our natural resources by drilling near shore?”

Florida Petroleum Council executive director Dave Mica spoke in favor of the bill. Mica acknowledged drilling in state waters was not the answer to energy independence or full employment but he argued it was part of the equation.

He credited the Legislature’s examination of the issue with persuading many Floridians to drop their long-standing opposition to drilling.

“We’ve won an awful lot of brains by this discussion,” Mica said. “We’ve still got some hearts to go.”

special thanks to Richard Charter

http://www.sungazette.com/page/content.detail/id/542033.html?nav=5011
Williamsport Sun Gazette
Williamsport, PA
Gas industry’s potential impact on the environment discussed at public hearing here
By DAVID THOMPSON dthompson@sungazette.com
POSTED: April 14, 2010
State Rep. Rick Mirabito, D-Williamsport, top photo, looks on as state Rep. Marc Gergely, D-White Oak, asks a question during the state House Democratic Policy Committee hearing on environmental issues of the Marcellus Shale and the Chesapeake Bay on Tuesday at Lycoming College.

MARK NANCE/Sun-Gazette
While few people are questioning the enormous economic impact of developing the natural gas resources in the Marcellus Shale, the gas industry’s potential impact on the environment is generating a lively debate.
That debate came to Lycoming College Tuesday during a public hearing by the state House Democratic Policy Committee.

The event, which mostly focused on environmental issues related to gas exploration, and to a lesser extent, the Chesapeake Bay, was co-chaired by state Reps. Rick Mirabito, D-Williamsport, and Mike Sturla, D-Lancaster.
Also sitting on the panel was state Rep. Mike Hanna, D-Lock Haven. Hanna said he supports a moratorium on leasing state land until the full impact of the gas industry is known.

A diverse group of speakers provided testimony regarding the Marcellus Shale during the near four-hour session.

Scott Perry, director of the state Department of Environmental Protection’s Bureau of Oil and Gas Management, discussed the agency’s role in regulating the industry and efforts it is taking to ensure gas development is done with minimal impact on the environment.

Perry said that while other departments within the agency have reduced staff because of the state’s budget problems, the oil and gas bureau has added personnel.

In spite of that, the agency – and the industry – face challenges on what to do with water-borne pollutants, such as Total Dissolved Solids or “TDS,” generated by the industry.

Perry said TDS in gas industry wastewater has concentrations of salt many times that of sea water.

Technologies exist to removed dissolved solids from gas wastewater, he said. However, the capacity to treat expected wastewater volumes does not yet exist in the state, he said.

Perry said he favors imposing a severance tax on gas removed from the shale to provide funding to cover the cost of mitigating the impact of gas exploration on local communities and the environment.

Terry Bossert, vice president of government affairs for Texas-based Chief Oil and Gas, discussed his company’s efforts to reduce the environmental impacts of shale development.

Those efforts include developing an inspection program for every well the company drills, Bossert said. The company also is using more stringent standards for its well casing – alternating layers of steel pipe and cement designed to prevent the migration of gas into ground water aquifers – proposed, but not yet adopted, by the DEP.

“We always case our wells the way we’re going to under the new regulations,” he said.

The industry’s use of a single well pad to drill multiple wells reduces land disturbance, he said.

“It would be foolish to say we could develop the Marcellus Shale and not have any impact on the environment,” Bossert said, adding that all human activity comes with some degree of environmental impact.

Bossert said the gas industry is well-regulated in Pennsylvania. His company deals with many agencies, including the DEP, Susquehanna River Basin Commission, Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, Game Commission, Fish and Boat Commission and Army Corps of Engineers.

“We’ve even dealt with the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission,” Bossert said.

The latter agency came into the picture when Chief was building a pipeline and came across an old abandoned still, he said.

The one thing the industry needs from regulatory agencies is “consistency from region to region and project to project.”

Bossert said he does not oppose a severance tax, but believes it is the wrong time to do it while the industry is investing millions of dollars in the early stages of Marcellus Shale development.

Jon Bogle, co-founder of local industry watchdog group Responsible Drilling Alliance, said air pollution may be the industry’s biggest health risk.

Bogle discussed a study by Dr. Al Armendariz, an environmental engineering professor at Southern Methodist University who now is an administrator with the federal Environmental Protection Agency.

The study, which was contested by the gas industry, showed that gas industry operations caused more smog pollution than all motorized vehicles and airport operations in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, Bogle said.

Bogle also cited air and noise pollution issues that arose in Dish, Texas, a town in the Barnett Shale region.

His testimony included a recent story published in the Dallas Morning News showing most Barnett Shale facilities such as wells, condensate tanks and compressor stations emitted toxic chemicals into the air.

Bogle said that while air pollution may be the biggest health risk, it also may be the easiest pollution to control because of readily available equipment.
Also speaking were Eric Conrad, of the North Central Workforce Investment Board, and Thomas Beaudy, deputy director of the Susquehanna River Basin Commission.

Beaudy discussed the industry’s need for water for gas drilling operations. The commission must approve water use for any Marcellus Shale drilling operation in the river basin.

According to Beaudy, the industry currently is using less than 1 million gallons of water per day. At full production, about 28 million gallons of water will be used per day, he said.

Also discussed during the hearing was the possible development of an industry-generated fund that could be used to deal with long-term environmental impacts discovered after the industry has left the area.

According to Mirabito, the hearing was part of an effort to “explore issues so we can get the facts on the table and make informed decisions.”
“We all need air, water and soil to survive,” Mirabito said. “We also need energy. We all drove here and we all took showers with water (heated) by hot water heaters.”

http://www.sunshinestatenews.com/story/florida-democrats-divided-obama-drilling-plan-0
Sunshine State News
Florida Democrats Divided on Obama Drilling Plan
BY: KEVIN DERBY | POSTED: APRIL 13, 2010 12:15 AM
It’s rare to see a former Florida Democratic Party chairman taking President Barack Obama to task — but that’s exactly what Scott Maddox is doing on the issue of offshore oil drilling.
With Obama having come out for expanded offshore energy exploration, including up to 125 miles off the shore of the Sunshine State, Florida Democrats are somewhat divided in their backing of the president. While some leading Democrats, including state Chief Financial Officer Alex Sink and U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, are backing the president, Maddox and Democrats in the U.S. House continue to fight the proposal.

Maddox, now the frontrunner in a crowded Democratic primary for commissioner of agriculture and consumer services, had made opposition to offshore drilling one of the centerpieces of his campaign, even answering calls to “drill, baby, drill” with “no, baby, no.”

Maddox sent a letter to the White House on Monday, pleading with the president to pull the plug on any plans for drilling off the coast of Florida.

“When it comes to offshore oil drilling however, on behalf of the millions of Floridians who depend on clean beaches, clean water and a struggling tourism economy; please, not in our backyard,” wrote Maddox.

He played up the financial threat that offshore drilling could represent to Florida tourism.
“These beaches are not just environmental treasures; they are one of the most important drivers of our economy as well,” wrote Maddox. “In fact, we depend on their environmental vitality to ensure our financial security.”

Maddox is not alone among Florida’s Democrats in pushing back against the president’s call for expanded drilling. U.S. Rep. Corrine Brown, U.S. Rep. Alcee Hastings and U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz sent a letter to the president on March 31, blasting his proposal for offshore drilling 125 miles from Florida’s shores.

Like Maddox, the representatives focused on the environmental impact as well as the potential damage offshore drilling could have on tourism.

“In an already depressed economy, and with unemployment in the state of Florida nearing 13 percent, the last thing we need to do is endanger nearly one million jobs and the $65 billion tourism industry in our state,” said Brown. “Indeed, drilling for oil anywhere near Florida’s coasts, even if the drilling takes place more than 125 miles offshore, could prove devastating to Florida’s tourist industry.”

U.S. Rep. Kathy Castor sent a letter to the president April 5 in which she expressed her concerns with drilling off Florida’s shores.

“There are some places in our country that are too special to drill,” said Castor. “Florida’s coastline certainly fits that description.”

Still, the president’s plan has backers among Florida Democrats.

State CFO Alex Sink, the likely Democratic gubernatorial nominee, endorsed the president’s plan March 31.

“I support additional offshore exploration 125 miles from Florida’s coasts,” Sink said, though she added that she opposed drilling closer to the shore.

U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson offered conditional support for the president’s plans, but he is waiting to meet with officials from the defense department before fully endorsing them. Nelson is attempting to schedule meeting with Pentagon brass to see if drilling would get in the way of military operations off Florida’s coast.

The primary field for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated reflected the divisions among Florida Democrats.

U.S. Rep. Kendrick Meek, the frontrunner in the Democratic primary, had some concerns about the president’s proposal and said that the issue needed to be looked at in depth.

“Today’s announcement on energy security and independence requires serious consideration and study as questions remain unanswered, but caution must trump expediency,” Meek said after the president released his plan.

Former North Miami Mayor Kevin Burns, one of Meek’s opponents in the Democratic primary, blasted Obama’s plans.

“From day one of my campaign I have said, ‘Not one mile, not five miles, not 50 miles, not 100 miles off our shores’,” said Burns. “Our economy, our way of life and our children’s future are too important to play political games with – we need real solutions for energy independence, not more short term profiteering for the richest corporations.”

 Contact Kevin Derby at kderby@sunshinestatenews.com, or at (904) 521-3722.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/290333
Louisiana oil spill highlights need to protect Gulf from drilling
After being noticed early on Tuesday morning, the US Coast Guard, State of Louisiana and the Cypress Pipeline Company have been working for days to contain a pipeline leak that has seen 18,000 gallons of oil released.

 Stephanie Dearing

New Orleans, LA – Cypress Pipeline shut down the section of pipe, preventing even more oil from being pumped into the sensitive coastal area of Louisiana, home to the Delta National Wildlife Refuge. Wednesday saw over 16 vessels deployed to the scene, with up to 50 people working to set up a boom to contain the spill. It is estimated the spill covers 160 square miles.

The released oil came from a Chevron operation, although Cypress owns the pipe. Officials are downplaying the potential impact, saying the effects of the leak appears to be minimal. The cause of the leak is not known, and an investigation is ongoing.

The wildlife refuge is situated at the mouth of the Mississippi, and is home to migratory water fowl. There are 455 oil and gas wells in the refuge, all there with permission of the government. The refuge is also habitat for several endangered species, including the American Alligator and the Arctic Peregrine Falcon.

According to researchers, “The Mississippi Delta encompasses the largest area of coastal wetlands in the United States and supports one of the most extensive developments of petroleum extraction of any coastal area in the world. This area has experienced ecological impacts from energy development related human activities since the early 1900s.”

40% of America’s refining capacity is situated in the coastal zone of the Gulf of Mexico, wrote Ko and Day in their study, with Louisiana America’s number two source of crude oil source.

The incident has sparked a renewal of calls against further oil drilling in the Gulf, with environmental groups saying there is not enough oversight. Activists point to previous spills in the Gulf of Mexico; such as the January incident that saw over 450,000 gallons of oil released into the Gulf after an oil-laden ship collided with a tug boat. Last summer, an underwater pipeline leak saw over 58,000 gallons of oil spilled into the Gulf.

There are thousands of miles of pipeline in the United States that carry oil and natural gas. Pipelines are the number one mode for transporting oil in the United States.

There are a number of international interests drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico. China has been trying to get a toehold on accessing some of the riches hidden under the Gulf of Mexico waters, reportedly negotiating to take over oil leases from a Norwegian company.

Chevron is attempting to access oil reserves deep under the Gulf of Mexico, and the operation is not cheap. The company is currently spending $1 million per day to try to access the oil — which might not even exist. Companies are willing to spend extravagant sums of money in a bid to tap into the oil thought to be hidden beneath the Gulf.

Current extraction sees about 1.5 million barrels of oil a day coming out of the Gulf of Mexico. Tapping into new reserves could push that up to 1.88 million barrels a day.

Environmentalists are concerned with the quality of the water in the ocean, as well as protecting vulnerable plant and animal species. Organizations representing businesses found around the Gulf of Mexico are concerned that the push to drill for oil deep in the Gulf will negatively affect tourism.

There are thousands of oil drilling rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, although not all are in operation.

http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/290352

Digital Journal

La. resident fears dangers from gas exploration, drilling Special

Carol Forsloff
Trucks move down a side street in Saline, Louisiana with others as part of a parade in small town America.

Dolores Blalock has 50 acres of land in Sabine, Louisiana, estimated worth a lot of money for oil and natural gas, but Blalock is standing up and saying no to pollution of family land, a remarkable stance for anyone who could perhaps make millions.
As the oil spill from pipeline leakage enters the Gulf, the conversations about hydraulic fracturing and natural gas exploration have revved up around Natchitoches Parish. Most people say they favor it as they also advocate exploring offshore sites. But some don’t, like Blalock; and they are rare.

The oil and gas men have been surrounding Natchitoches Parish and the areas of North and Central Louisiana, with their big promises of big money.

Some of the humble folk have marched into banks flush with cash in bulging pockets. These are the new rich. So what’s the issue? Why wouldn’t someone like Blalock succumb?

The issue is hydraulic fracturing and worries about pollution that already plague Louisiana, especially when many believe the southern part of the State sold out to oil and gas interests long ago. The process of hydraulic fracturing is different than the oil drilling that goes on in coastal areas, but the concerns about the environment are still strong, among the few few protest locally. The issue is water pollution and potentially cancer-causing contaminants.

But Blalock won’t and says this, “This is my parents’ land. It has belonged to my family and is pristine. I intend to keep it. I don’t care if other people sell out. Until I know the drilling is really safe, I am not going to budge. I see other people offered money, but I’m not sure I want to go in that direction.”

Blalock has lived in Louisiana off and on for about two years since the death of her mother who left her a house and 50 acres of land. It is property that her parents purchased many years ago, and other family members own tracts of land nearby. But she has spent many years in California as well, returning to Louisiana where she spent her childhood and young adulthood to take care of family business and perhaps to permanently settle. She has the environmental concerns she brings from the Western states and looks at the issues in Louisiana with different eyes than people around the area.

“I worry about the long-term effects of this business,” Blalock declares, “And I don’t want to be one of those people who helps cause the problems for the state, even though I know other people just look at the money thing. I have to live with myself, frankly; and I just can’t see doing something that would put people at risk. If they show me real evidence, and I find it myself too, then maybe I will be interested in their money. But not until, and maybe never.”

In some parts of the country there have already been lawsuits on the practice of oil and gas drilling. This is in addition to objections made by environmentalists about drilling along the Gulf Coast.

Scott Lumry, a Natchitoches resident, says about Natchitoches that in spite of the economic downturn the area will likely survive. He says, “People around here are getting money from oil and gas and more is coming in all the time. I see folks are likely going to make it in spite of University cutbacks, because this new business is getting people excited.”

Exciting some, but worrying others, the oil and gas business of drilling, and the concerns about pollution continue, even as the oil spill reported today by Stephanie Dearing continues to enter the Gulf.

But central and northern residents, for the most part, remain interested in money to be made from natural gas, as evidenced by the talk in the town, what Lumry has said and bank tellers at the local Bank of Montgomery who notice more folks coming in with money. Few are like Blalock and ask the hard questions.

New York is now the epicenter of protest against hydraulic fracturing even as North and Central Louisiana continue to give thumbs up to the process, so the economy can proceed to go forward without interruption.

http://www.beyondchron.org/articles/Louisiana_Oil_Spill_Highlights_Continued_Safety_Concerns_7999.html
Beyond Chron, San Francisco
(photos of spill online)
from Environment America

Louisiana Oil Spill Highlights Continued Safety Concerns
by Ryan Scholl, Environment America’ Apr. 09’ 2010
 
Early Tuesday morning, 18000 gallons of oil spilled from a Chevron-operated pipeline into a sensitive wildlife refuge on the coast of Louisiana. The oil has so far spread to an area of about 160 square miles, covering wetlands of the Delta National Wildlife Refuge, and the Gulf of Mexico. The refuge is the wintering home to hundreds of thousands of migratory birds as well as many other critters, including already threatened species such as the America alligator and the brown pelican.

The area of the spill is so remote that cleanup crews were not immediately able to get to it. Currently, local and state officials and crews from the oil company are on the scene driving the cleanup efforts. Updates on wildlife harmed by the oil are not yet in. Given the size and location of the spill, injured wildlife may not have been found or reported yet.

This spill is just one of many in recent memory. In January, an oil tanker headed for an Exxon Mobil refinery in Beaumont, TX spilled 462,000 gallons into the Gulf of Mexico after it collided with a tugboat. Last year off the Australian coast, millions of gallons gushed out of a deep water drilling rig after an explosion in an underwater pipe. That rig was state of the art, just two years old. The oil, which continued leaking for weeks, was said to have spread across more than 9000 square miles. And there are hundreds of other examples of recent spills.

Comparatively, this week’s spill off the Louisiana coast seems almost small. But with all that’s at stake, even a little bit of oil can do tremendous harm. That’s one reason why Environment America opposes President Obama’s recent announcement of plans to expand oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, off the Southeastern Atlantic, and in Northern Alaska. Despite claims by drilling supporters about the safety of modern drilling equipment and oil transportation techniques, there are no perfectly safe methods. Spills will continue to happen as long as we drill for oil.

And spills, of course, will continue to have disastrous impacts on wildlife, the tourism industry and our beaches. Though it’s difficult to estimate the true cost of an oil spill, a 2009 report by Environment America showed the economic value of sustainable ocean activities nationwide to be about $197 billion, compared to $164 billion for the value of nonrenewable oil and gas extraction. Even if your primary concern is the bottom line, the financial benefits alone of a clean offshore environment are worth supporting over the expansion of drilling.

We also oppose new drilling off our coasts because we just don’t need to do it. At best, new offshore drilling would meet only a tiny fraction of our current oil usage. In addition and more importantly, we have real options to reduce our dependence significantly, through using cleaner cars and increasing funding for public transportation. Recently announced increases in the national fuel economy standards will reduce gasoline consumption by as much as 11.6 billion gallons per year in 2016.

With irrefutable evidence of the dangers of oil drilling on the environment, plus the impact these threats have on coastal communities and the abundance and accessibility of cleaner and safer alternatives, it’s clear we should be moving away from using more oil and toward a cleaner, safer and more efficient future. Spills like the one this week in the Louisiana wildlife refuge are just the most recent reminder that we must do more to save our shores.

Special thanks to  Richard Charter

http://sentinelsource.com/articles/2010/04/09/opinion/sentinel_editorial/free/id_397024.txt
The Sentinel   SENTINEL EDITORIAL:
Obama’s reversal on offshore drilling

Published: Friday, April 09, 2010
When he was a candidate for president, Barack Obama firmly opposed offshore oil drilling, especially in Florida. “When I’m president, I intend to keep in place the moratorium here in Florida and around the country that prevents oil companies from drilling off Florida’s coasts,” he said during a 2008 campaign stop in Jacksonville.

By way of contrast, Republican John McCain backed President George W. Bush’s effort to end the moratorium that Obama mentioned – a congressional ban on offshore drilling, except in the central and western Gulf of Mexico, that had been in effect since 1982. Energy experts contended that benefits from expanded drilling would be long in coming, threaten the environment and provide at best a few years’ petroleum supply at great cost.

Obama said he wanted instead to develop alternative fuels, invest in clean energy options and encourage fuel-efficient vehicles – to ease and extend the transition to the day when either ruinous expenses or environmental hazards turn off the oil spigot.

As president, Obama has taken some steps in that direction, including a just-released plan to dramatically increase automobile mileage standards. But his administration has now announced a plan to allow oil and gas drilling along the Atlantic coastline from Delaware to mid-Florida, and to extend exploration to parts of the Florida Gulf Coast and to the Arctic Ocean north of Alaska.

This about-face on drilling mirrors the president’s recent change of position on nuclear power. During the presidential campaign, he said he was not opposed to expanding nuclear energy, but he said he would first see to it that safety concerns were addressed. In an interview at The Sentinel in late 2007, he said: “Given the importance of reducing carbon emissions, nuclear should be in the mix – if we can make it safe, we know how to store (the nuclear waste and) we can make sure that it’s not vulnerable to terrorist attack.” For emphasis, he added that the safety issues plaguing nuclear energy “may not be solvable. And if they are not solvable, then I don’t want to invest in it.”

Now, in another 2010 initiative, he has proposed making available $50 billion in federal loan guarantees for private industry to build new nuclear power plants. And with nary a word about waste storage or terrorist attacks.

These policy reversals seem to be part of an Obama effort to attract Republican advocates of oil drilling and nuclear power to his climate-change and energy-efficiency legislation. “The Republicans and the oil companies have been really beating the drums on drilling,” he said in a recent interview, “and so we don’t want gridlock. We want to get something done.”

But should that “something” include activities he and his supporters once deemed both reckless and insufficient? If oil drilling off the American coastline was a bad idea two years ago, has anything changed in the interim? If nuclear waste disposal and the potential for terrorist attacks on storage facilities were impediments to the expansion of nuclear power two years ago, has anything happened since then to make those risks acceptable?

During the summer of 2008, Obama charged that McCain’s advocacy of offshore drilling was no more than an empty political maneuver, “a strategy designed to get politicians through an election.” Now, as president, Obama is promoting policies on oil drilling and nuclear power designed to get other legislation through Congress. Given the stakes involved, is that strategy any more responsible?

http://www.offshore-mag.com/index/article-display/8832121184/articles/offshore/company-news/us-gulf-of-mexico-2/2010/04/mms-requests_comment.html
I strongly enourage anyone concerned about offshore oil to submit comments to the Minerals Management Service.  This is the only opportunity this year to state your position on the revised 2007–2012 plan for offshore oil and gas development along the US coast.   DeeVon

Offshore Magazine
MMS requests comment on revised OCS leasing program

Published: Apr 7, 2010
Offshore staff

WASHINGTON, DC — The MMS requests comment on the Preliminary Revised 2007-2012 Five-Year Outer Continental Shelf Oil and Gas Leasing Program. The comment period is open through May 3, 2010.

The preliminary revised program was required by order from the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in Center for Biological Diversity v. US Department of Interior, DC.

Per the court’s direction, the MMS re-analyzed all 26 OCS planning areas to better determine the relative environmental sensitivity of offshore oil and gas development. The expanded environmental sensitivity analysis is divided into three components of the marine environment that may be affected by oil and gas activities: marine habitats, marine productivity, and marine fauna (i.e., birds, fish, and sea turtles).

The expanded analysis considers the relative sensitivity of the marine environment of all 26 planning areas to oil spills and other potential factors, such as sound, physical disturbance, climate change, and ocean acidification. The analysis relied upon approximately 50 reports and studies, including many that were not considered when the original 2007-2012 program was prepared.

The court directed the Secretary to reconsider the leasing schedule, using the new sensitivity analysis in rebalancing the potential risks to the environment and coastal zone with the potential for discovery of oil and gas. The Preliminary Revised Program reaffirms the role of the Gulf of Mexico as the primary producing region, retaining the eight sales that have already occurred there and the four remaining on the schedule.

Mid-Atlantic Sale 220 offshore Virginia and the two special interest sales in the Cook Inlet offshore Alaska are also included. However, for lack of industry interest, Sale 211 in the Cook Inlet, scheduled for 2009, was cancelled. The Secretary also decided that Chukchi Sea Sale 193 held in 2008 is appropriate as part of this Preliminary Revised Program.

The remanded program schedules no sales in the North Aleutian basin and Beaufort Sea, Alaska; nor additional sales in the Chukchi Sea other than Sale 193.

The Secretary’s preliminary decision is to remove five sales from the schedule, sales 209 and 217 in the Beaufort Sea, 212 and 221 in the Chukchi Sea, and 214 in the North Aleutian basin, including Bristol Bay. The Secretary determined that the potential risks from a Bristol Bay sale, particularly to the commercial fishing industry, outweighed the potential for discovery of oil and gas. Results from exploration on existing leases in the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas, ongoing research on oil spill clean-up in icy waters, and more awareness of the effects of climate change will provide valuable information for making future decisions on offshore oil and gas development in the Arctic.

On April 17, 2009, the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit vacated and remanded DOI’s OCS 2007-2012 leasing program. The Court found that DOI’s determination of when and where to offer areas for leasing of oil and gas resources was based on a flawed analysis that failed to assess fully the relative environmental sensitivity and marine productivity of the OCS because it looked only at the effects of spills on the shoreline. The Court specified that on remand, the Secretary must first conduct a more complete comparative analysis of the environmental sensitivity of entire areas of the OCS and attempt to identify those areas most and least sensitive to OCS activity.

The MMS will accept comments in one of three formats:

* Online through the Federal eRulemaking Portal: http://www.regulations.gov. In the entry titled “Enter Keyword or ID,” enter docket ID MMS-2009-OMM-0016

* Via email: PRPcomments@mms.gov

* Or written comments may be hand-carried or mailed to the Department of the Interior; Attention:

Leasing Division (LD); 381 Elden Street, MS-4010; Herndon, Virginia 20170-4817.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

 By Bob Warren, The Times-Picayune

April 06, 2010, 9:10PM

Petty Officer 3rd Class James Peterson takes a sample Tuesday from an oil spill about 10 miles southeast of Venice in the Delta National Wildlife Refuge. 

Crews worked Tuesday to contain the oil from a spill in the Delta National Wildlife Refuge, the Coast Guard said.

At approximately 1 a.m., Tuesday, Berry Brothers General Contractors notified the Coast Guard that oil was discharging into a canal located approximately 10 miles southeast of Venice. Chevron Pipeline Co., which operates the pipeline, reported that approximately 18,000 gallons of crude oil were released.

The Coast Guard Sector New Orleans, the Louisiana Oil Spill Coordinator’s Office – Department of Public Safety and Corrections and Chevron responded to the spill to try and minimize damage to the refuge.

The Coast Guard evaluated the spill by air and the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality and the Coast Guard had pollution investigators in response boats on scene assessing the oil’s impact and monitoring clean-up efforts.

Coast Guard Lt. Stephen Nutting said the Mississippi River has not been impacted by the spill.
“Right now, we’re trying to contain it in the refuge,” he said.

Upon receiving the initial report of the spill, Chevron immediately closed the affected section of the pipeline and has initiated its emergency response procedures, the Coast Guard said.

The pipeline is owned by Cypress Pipe Line Company, which is a joint venture between British Petroleum and Chevron Pipeline Co.

The Coast Guard is investigating the cause of the spill.

© 2010 NOLA.com.

http://www.platts.com/RSSFeedDetailedNews.aspx?xmlpath=RSSFeed/HeadlineNews/Oil/6933006.xml
 
Crude line leaks into Louisiana wildlife refuge: USCG
 
Houston (Platts)–6Apr2010/607 pm EDT/2207 GMT
 
The US Coast Guard, Louisiana Oil Spill Coordinator’s Office and Chevron Pipe Line Company were working to contain an oil spill from a Chevron-operated crude pipeline in the Delta National Wildlife Refuge, according to a statement issued by the Coast Guard.
 
The leak involved about 429 barrels of crude oil and occurred around 1 am CDT Tuesday, according to the statement. The leak resulted in crude oil being discharged into a canal about 10 miles southeast of Venice, Louisiana.
 
This pipeline originates from an offshore oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico and terminates at the Empire Pipeline Terminal, said an official from the Louisiana Oil Spill Coordinator’s office. The Empire terminal is located in far southern Louisiana, on the east bank of the Mississippi River. The terminal has the capacity to store 1.3 million barrels of oil, according to information published on Chevron Pipeline Company’s web site.
 
CPL has shut the leaking segment of the crude pipeline. Cypress Pipe Line Company is a joint venture between CPL and BP.
 
  –Esa Ramasamy, esa_ramasamy@platts.com

Humans are the risk in drilling: Pensacola News Journal Editorial

http://www.pnj.com/article/20100404/OPINION/4040312/Editorial-Humans-are-the-risk-in-drilling

PNJ.com
Pensacola News Journal
Editorial: Humans are the risk in drilling

APRIL 4, 2010
The Orlando Sentinel recently took a close look at the Australian drilling rig that blew out last August in the Timor Sea, leaked oil for more than two months and dumped millions of gallons of crude.

It’s a cautionary tale for Florida.

Supporters claim drilling is much safer today because of new technology, redundant safety procedures and government oversight. All true. But the rig in the Timor Sea was one of the most modern in the world, and the Sentinel found that the main problem behind the accident likely was: human error and bad judgment.

They trumped all the technology and safety procedures.

Supporters also say the rules in the Gulf of Mexico are even tighter than those in Australia, and that appears to be true. But human error has never been eliminated from any human endeavor, and bad judgment is always one decision away.

The Timor rig spilled millions of gallons of oil. Fortunately, it was 150 miles off the coast and winds and tides kept the oil away from land. Unfortunately, the Sentinel reported, the slick still covered 22,000 square miles and polluted a rich marine area marked by coral and sponge reefs, whales, fish and birds. (Last October, Indonesian fishermen reported finding dead and oil-contaminated fish in their fishing grounds.)

The article indicated that the spill wasn’t caused by poor or failed technology, or a natural event like the hurricanes that regularly damage Gulf rigs. In the end, it looks like simple human error. “I just made mistakes,” the rig’s senior supervisor testified in a government inquiry.

Similar “mistakes” in the Gulf of Mexico could put oil on a lot of Florida beaches.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://www.collinscenter.org/resource/resmgr/OilDrilling/oilHome.html

Report punches holes in offshore drilling claims

Thursday, April 01, 2010  
BRADENTON HERALD EDITORIAL | Little impact at gas pump, low reserves refute goals

Despite a report prepared for the Florida Senate that should cripple efforts to allow oil and gas drilling in state waters, the push will continue.

The report, prepared by the Collins Center for Public Policy in conjunction with the Century Commission for a Sustainable Florida, estimates offshore reserves at a level so paltry there would be no noticeable impact on pump prices or on American reliance on foreign oil.

The amount would only quench America’s thirst for oil for less than one week, the report states.

Grand forecasts of billions in state revenue would thus not materialize, rendering the primary arguments in favor of drilling obsolete.

The “drill, baby, drill” proponents will have a tough time discrediting the report. The Collins Center, a reputable think tank that researches state issues, and the 15-member nonpartisan Century Commission, appointed by the legislators to investigate economic and environmental issues, conducted the study at the behest of Senate President Jeff Atwater.

The resulting 40-page report, chock full of information gleaned from private and government sources, should withstand attack.

While the report also states the odds of accidental oil spills are low because of drilling technology advances, the threat remains. With such negligible reserves believed to be beneath state waters, the risk is not worth the return.

Story continues…

Tampa Bay: Oil drilling plan hits a nerve nationwide, locally

http://www2.tbo.com/content/2010/apr/01/na-drilling-plan-hits-a-nerve/news-breaking/

Oil drilling plan hits a nerve nationwide, locally
Staff photo by JIM FARQUHAR

Pamula Hewett from Tampa put chocolate syrup on herself at a drilling protest at the Vinoy Renaissance Hotel in St. Petersburg on Wednesday.

ADVERTISEMENTBy WILLIAM MARCH
wmarch@tampatrib.com
Published: April 1, 2010
In a reversal of a long-standing ban on most offshore drilling, President Barack Obama is opening up areas of the East Coast – and possibly areas off the Gulf Coast of Florida – to oil and gas exploration and drilling.

Obama’s plan allows oil drilling on tracts 50 miles off the coast of Virginia and consideration of drilling for a large chunk of the Atlantic seaboard. At the same time, he is rejecting some drilling sites that had been planned in Alaska.

The plan drew objections Wednesday from environmentalists nationwide, and about 100 people protested outside a Newt Gingrich speech in St. Petersburg.

Its effect on Florida drew an immediate objection from Rep. Kathy Castor of Tampa, a Democrat and a strong Obama ally on most issues.

It drew guarded approval, however, from Democratic U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, a longtime opponent of oil or gas drilling near the Gulf Coast.

The plan’s proposals for Florida’s Gulf Coast apparently would require congressional action to alter the Gulf of Mexico Energy Security Act of 2006.

Nelson said the Obama proposal comes with assurance that no activity will be allowed within 125 miles of the coast, closer than that law now allows.

Nelson said he has told the administration “if they drilled too close to Florida’s beaches they’d be risking the state’s economy and the environment. I believe this plan shows they heeded that concern.”

He said he still wants assurances from the Defense Department that the plan won’t interfere with military training in the eastern Gulf.

Castor remains “very concerned because the oil companies are never satisfied.”

“Right now we have a guarantee written into law that a 200-plus-mile line is written into place until 2022. If you agree that 125 is enough, it would be the camel’s nose under the tent. They’re not going to be satisfied.”

Rep. Vern Buchanan, a Sarasota Republican, considers Obama’s plan flawed. “It fails to open the Alaskan and Pacific coasts to drilling but allows oil rigs off the eastern Gulf of Mexico, threatening our natural resources and tourism-based economy,” he said.

The full effect of Obama’s announcement on waters off the Florida Gulf Coast wasn’t clear Wednesday.

First, a map released by the Department of the Interior appeared to conflict in some ways with assurances Nelson’s office said he had been given about a 125-mile buffer off the west coast. The areas suggested to be opened come much closer than that to the Florida Keys.

“When they met with us they said 125 miles from all points, and that’s what we’re going to hold them to,” said Nelson spokesman Dan McLaughlin. The discrepancy “could be a distortion in their drawing.”

Obama spokesman Bill Burton didn’t give a direct answer when asked by reporters whether the administration will ask for a lifting of the moratorium that currently prevents oil and gas exploration some 230 miles off Florida.

Burton also denied the proposal is a change in the position Obama took on the issue during his campaign.

“Nothing has changed,” he said. “What you see here today is a fulfillment of what the president said he was going to do.”

In fact, it appears to differ sharply from a campaign speech Obama gave in Jacksonville in June 2008, saying, “Offshore drilling would not lower gas prices today. It would not lower gas prices tomorrow. It would not lower gas prices this year. It would not lower gas prices five years from now.”

He said more drilling “would only worsen our addiction to oil” and put off investments in clean, renewable energy.”

Obama shifted that position, however, endorsing a proposal that could have opened up areas 50 miles from the Florida coast.

Michael Brune, executive director of the national Sierra Club, singled out Gulf drilling in a statement Wednesday reacting to the Obama proposal.

He said drilling off Florida “would substantially increase the chance of oil spills damaging the Everglades, the Florida Keys, fragile coral reefs and Florida’s beaches” and jeopardize the coastal tourism industry.

Obama, speaking at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington on Wednesday, said, “This is not a decision that I’ve made lightly.” He addressed the expected outcry from disappointed environmentalists by saying he had studied the issue for more than a year and concluded it was the right call given the nation’s voracious thirst for energy and the need to produce jobs and keep American businesses competitive.
Obama made no secret of the fact that one factor in his decision is attracting GOP support for a climate change bill that has languished in Congress.

Information from The Associated Press was used in this report. Reporters Jackie Barron and Peter Bernard contributed to this report. Reporter William March can be reached at (813) 259-7761.

Opposing view: No need to drill offshore”: USA Today OpEd

USAToday, Op-Ed, “Opposing view: No need to drill offshore”

April 2, 2010

By Frances Beinecke
 

It’s risky, adds little supply, and the nation has several better options.

Everyone can agree we need a stronger, safer energy future for our country. The question is, how do we get there? I believe the answer is a comprehensive clean energy and climate strategy that takes advantage of solutions that hold the greatest potential to put us on a clean and domestic energy path.

And simply put, more offshore drilling moves us off this path.

There’s no need to jeopardize the 2 million jobs and the $128 billion annual economy that depend on ocean resources when drilling will do little to relieve America’s oil addiction. According to the Department of Energy, new drilling won’t significantly impact domestic crude oil and natural gas production before 2030. And the price of gasoline is set by the global marketplace, so it won’t impact prices at the pump either.

There are better ways to fuel our cars and trucks – available now – that will protect the ocean economy, create jobs and help America compete in the global clean energy market.

The new clean car standards President Obama announced this week are a real solution, saving Americans billions of dollars and 1.8 billion barrels of oil.

If we want to boost our domestic supply, we should focus on the untapped resource of enhanced oil recovery. Abandoned oil in existing wells can supply more than 10 times the oil as offshore drilling over the same period. Yet that’s left on the table.

And drilling off our coasts still poses grave risks. Despite technological advances, a blowout last year from a state-of-the art Australian facility took 10 weeks to bring under control and spread oil over 20,000 square miles. Recent hurricanes have destroyed oil platforms, tanks and pipelines throughout the Gulf of Mexico and released more than 1 million gallons of crude oil and other petroleum products. Hurricanes are an annual threat to our East Coast, making hurricane-related accidents inevitable.

I have worked more than 30 years to put sound oceans policies in place, and I know offshore drilling will not move America forward. We need to pay attention to real solutions: cleaner cars, better use of existing oil fields, and utilizing our coasts for clean renewable energy, such as offshore wind. That means comprehensive clean energy legislation with smart solutions for our energy and climate needs.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-helvarg1-2010apr01,0,734731.story
Los Angeles Times
OPINION
Oil drilling — a nasty national habit
It’s like advocating a healthy diet based on fast food, speed and low-tar cigarettes.

By David Helvarg
April 1, 2010
President Obama’s decision to have Interior Secretary Ken Salazar open vast new areas of federal ocean waters to offshore oil drilling is no surprise. In his State of the Union address, the president explained that his vision for a clean energy future included offshore drilling, nuclear power and clean coal. Unfortunately, that’s like advocating a healthy diet based on fast-food snacking, amphetamines and low-tar cigarettes.

If the arguments you hear in the coming days for expanded drilling sound familiar, it’s because they’ve been repeated for generations. We’ve been hearing promises about safer drilling technologies since before Union Oil began drilling in the Santa Barbara Channel. And if you don’t remember what happened that time, you should. Soon after the wells were bored, one of them blew out in January 1969, causing a massive oil slick that slimed beaches and killed birds, fish and marine mammals. The resulting catastrophe helped spark the modern environmental movement.

The president has promised no new drilling off the West Coast, and it’s no wonder. Opposition was unified and vociferous during Salazar’s public hearing on offshore energy development in San Francisco in April 2009. More than 500 people — including Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), Gov. Ted Kulongoski of Oregon, California’s lieutenant governor and four House members — testified and rallied for clean energy and against any new oil drilling.

Boxer noted that the coast was a treasure and a huge economic asset “just as is,” generating $24 billion a year and 390,000 jobs.

Still, in the new Department of Interior announcement, one can hear echoes of President Reagan’s Interior secretary, Don Hodel, who warned us in the 1980s that if we didn’t expand offshore drilling, we’d be “putting ourselves at the tender mercies of OPEC.”

We did expand offshore drilling then, not off the stunning redwood coastline of Mendocino, Calif., as Hodel wanted, but where the oil industry knew most of the oil and gas actually was and is: in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico. We even created a royalty moratorium for the oil companies that went after those huge deep-water fields.

But offshore drilling has done little to wean us from Middle Eastern oil. And with less than 5% of our domestic oil located offshore, more ocean drilling won’t help now either.

The only real way to quit relying on foreign oil is to wean ourselves from oil, and that’s something our leaders are unlikely to fully embrace until we’ve tapped that last reserve of sweet crude.

Nor is it likely that oil-friendly politicians in Louisiana, Alaska and Virginia, where new drilling will take place under the Obama plan, are going to embrace administration-backed climate legislation that recognizes drilling as a temporary bridge to a post-fossil-fuel world.

The only real difference in the drilling debate from 30 years ago is that back then the issue was energy versus marine pollution. Today we know it’s even more urgent. Oil, used as directed, overheats the planet.

Plus, any new platform drilled is a structural commitment to at least 30 more years of fossil fuel extraction — assuming it’s not taken out by a big storm like the jack-up rig I saw washed onto the beach at Alabama’s Dauphin Island after Hurricane Katrina.

I’ve visited offshore oil rigs in the Santa Barbara Channel and the Gulf of Mexico and was impressed by the oil patch workers I met there. The innovative technologies they use for extracting ever more inaccessible reserves of oil and gas are also impressive.

But now we need to direct that can-do spirit of innovation to large-scale carbon-free energy systems, including photovoltaics, wind turbines, biomass, hydrogen fuel cells and marine tidal, wave, current and thermal energy. The difficulties of producing energy with those technologies will make today’s drilling challenges seem simple.
I respect the roughnecks and roustabouts I’ve met who continue to practice a dangerous and challenging craft, and the contribution they’ve made to our nation’s maritime history. But I believe it’s time for them to exit the energy stage. Apparently the president does not. 

David Helvarg is president of the Blue Frontier Campaign ( www.bluefront.org), a marine conservation group. His new book, “Saved by the Sea — A Love Story with Fish,” will be published in May by St. Martin’s Press.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

What gets drilled, a map of tragic proportions….
 

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/31/science/earth/31energy.html
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-obama-drilling31-2010mar31,0,4617559.story

Special thanks to Richard Charter for his expertise, dedication and information on this issue for so many years….you are a hero!  DV

Here’s his report:
Neither the 2007-2012 five-year plan nor the 2012-2017 plan will include any oil and gas lease sales off the West Coast.
 
Current Five-Year Plan (2007-2012):
The Gulf of Mexico: Four proposed lease sales there will continue to go forward.  Details on one of these sales will be announced tomorrow.
Virginia:  A proposed lease sale there will continue to go forward if warranted by environmental review, which will take about a year to complete.
Chukchi and Beaufort Seas, Alaska: Leases for the drilling of five exploratory wells will continue to go forward.  Three production leases will not go forward at this time.  President Obama has asked the U.S. Geological Survey to undertake a special analysis of the sensitivity of drilling in the Arctic, which will inform future drilling decisions there.
Cook Inlet, Alaska: Proposed lease sales there will continue to go forward.
Bristol Bay, Alaska:  Proposed lease sales there will not go forward, and President Obama will sign a formal withdrawal of any leasing authority in this area.
 
Revised Five-Year Plan (2012-2017):
 

Mid and South Atlantic: The new five-year plan includes seismic testing and environmental review of areas south of Delaware to determine if drilling is appropriate.  If this information supports going forward with drilling, there will also be another lease sale-specific environmental review before any final decisions are made about whether or not to offer leases in this area.
Gulf Coast of Florida: The new five-year plan includes environmental review of an area in the eastern Gulf of Mexico close to 125 miles off the Gulf Coast of Florida.  About 2/3 of the oil and gas in the eastern Gulf of Mexico is believed to be located in this area.  Drilling in this area could not proceed without a Congressional amendment to GOMESA.  The Department of the Interior said that the Department of Defense was consulted in selecting this area, but didn’t say whether or not the DOD was now comfortable with the possibility of drilling occurring there.
Chukchi and Beaufort Seas, Alaska: Additional lease sales will be proposed in these areas.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/03/31/critics-claim-offshore-drilling-plan-half-step-energy-independence/

Special thanks to Richard Charter
Fox News

Updated March 31, 2010
Critics Claim Offshore Drilling Plan a Half-Step Toward Energy Independence

President Obama’s decision to open up the nation’s shores to new oil drilling drew complaints from both sides of the aisle Wednesday, as environmentalists and congressional Republicans alike claimed the move would do little for America’s energy independence.

President Obama’s decision to open up the nation’s shores to new oil drilling drew complaints from both sides of the aisle Wednesday, as environmentalists and congressional Republicans alike claimed the move would do little for America’s energy independence.

The president, in announcing the plan to allow drilling off the Eastern seaboard and potentially the western coast of Florida, said he anticipated the pushback. Yet, on the heels of a health care reform victory that cleared the way for work on other domestic challenges, the president defended his proposal, saying that “homegrown fuels” are needed to move away from foreign oil and help “transition” to more clean-energy sources.

The announcement appeared in part to be a bid for GOP support — but Republicans swiftly panned the policy change as a weak, half-hearted attempt at domestic oil exploration. Obama lifted a 20-year moratorium on exploration and drilling on the Atlantic seaboard from the northern tip of Delaware down to central Florida and approved it for a new section of the Gulf of Mexico and the Cook Inlet in Alaska. But exploration is expected to last years, and no lease sales will be held before 2012. It may take up to a decade to move oil and natural gas to marketplace.

In addition, no exploration or drilling would be permitted along the entire West Coast, even though Congress green-lighted it in 2008.

“The Obama administration continues to defy the will of the American people, who strongly supported the bipartisan decision of Congress in 2008 to lift the moratorium on offshore drilling not just off the East Coast and in the Gulf of Mexico, but off the Pacific Coast and Alaskan shores as well,” House Minority Leader John Boehner said in a written statement.

 ”Keeping the Pacific Coast and Alaska, as well as the most promising resources off the Gulf of Mexico, under lock and key makes no sense at a time when gasoline prices are rising and Americans are asking ‘Where are the jobs?’”

Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind., called the plan a “smokescreen” that would delay new exploration until at least 2012 and include a “fraction” of the resources in the Bush administration’s plan.

“Unfortunately, this is yet another feeble attempt to gain votes for the president’s national energy tax bill that is languishing in the Senate,” he said, in reference to the climate change legislation Democrats have been trying to pass.

The plan would open up drilling 50 miles off Virginia’s coast — and the state could see drilling leases sooner than 2012 for verified reserves. In addition, the Interior Department has prepared a plan to add drilling platforms in the eastern Gulf of Mexico, 125 miles off the coast of Florida, if Congress allows a moratorium to expire.

But the proposed leases in Alaska’s Bristol Bay will be canceled. And the Interior Department also planned to reverse last year’s decision to open up parts of the Chukchi and Beaufort seas. Instead, scientists will study the sites to see if they’re suitable for future leases.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell called the overall plan a step in the right direction, “but a small one that leaves enormous amounts of American energy off limits.”    But while Republicans said Obama wasn’t going far enough, Democrats and environmentalists claimed he was going too far — and wouldn’t shake the country’s dependence on foreign oil in the slightest.

“We cannot achieve meaningful energy independence through our own oil reserves,” Sen. Ted Kaufman, D-Del., said, noting the country’s oil reserves pale in comparison to how much Americans consume.

Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune also said “drilling our coasts will (do) nothing to lower gas prices or create energy independence.”

And Phil Radford, director of Greenpeace, called the announcement a “betrayal” of the people who voted for Obama.

Obama will offer environmentalists something they like, though, on Thursday when the administration cements sweeping emissions and fuel economy standards that will impact U.S. auto manufacturers.    The Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Transportation on Thursday are expected to sign the final rule establishing emissions and fuel economy standards for the U.S. auto fleet. Those standards call for new vehicles to average 35.5 miles per gallon by 2016. It will cover model years 2012 through 2016, and is estimated to cost up to $1,300 per vehicle.

Fox News’ Major Garrett and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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http://thebristolbaytimes.com/article/1013bristol_bay_drilling_gets_a_reprieve

BRISTOL BAY TIMES

Bristol Bay fishermen and members of local Native corporations reacted with gratitude and relief after today’s announcement that the Obama administration decided to halt plans for offshore drilling in Alaska’s Bristol Bay and southeast Bering Sea.

Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar announced that, as part of a comprehensive strategy for strengthening the nation’s energy security and reducing America’s dependence on foreign oil, the Obama administration will expand oil and gas development and exploration on the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf, while protecting fisheries, tourism, and places off U.S. coasts that are not appropriate for development, a press release said.

“In our quest to secure our energy future, we must not lose the places and values that set our nation apart,” said Salazar. “Bristol Bay is a national treasure that we must protect for future generations.”

The reprieve from drilling in Bristol Bay is part of a broader decision by Salazar on the current and proposed Five-Year Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) oil and gas leasing programs and includes drilling in other areas of the nation.

“When Secretary Salazar visited Bristol Bay this past April, community leaders and residents voiced overwhelming opposition to drilling in waters critical to our subsistence way of life and our fisheries-based economy. We are thankful and grateful he took to heart the message that this is truly a place that’s not appropriate for oil drilling,” said Verner Wilson, acting executive director of Nunamta Aulukestai, an association of eight Bristol Bay Native Village corporations.

The administration reinstated the presidential withdrawal for Bristol Bay from offshore drilling until 2017. It had been in place under former administrations and was removed under President George W. Bush in 2007. The decision will cancel a planned 2011 lease sale in the region (known as North Aleutian Basin Sale 214) that would have put 5.6 million acres of rich Alaskan waters – including vital habitat and fishing grounds for some of the world’s most sustainable and lucrative fisheries – at risk, said a press release from Alaska Marine Conservation Council.

Bobby Andrew, a Bristol Bay village elder also with Nunamta Aulukestai, had a view farther than 2017.

“The people of Bristol Bay are thankful for the decision by Secretary Salazar but our message to Congress and the President is that we need permanent, permanent, permanent protection so this threat to our way of life is curtailed not only for the current generation, but also for future generations.”

David Harsila, president of the Alaska Independent Fishermen’s Marketing Association also called for permanent protection.

“Bristol Bay’s salmon resource is like no other on Earth and provides thousands of jobs to fishermen across Alaska and the west coast. Our organization and hundreds of member fishermen are thrilled with this decision, but want to see something permanent so we don’t have to fight this battle again,” stated Harsila.

The administration’s strategy does support exploratory drilling in the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas in the Arctic Ocean, exploration in much of the Atlantic Ocean OCS, some of the Florida coast and expanded development and production in the Gulf of Mexico. For more information visit the Department of Interior Web site, www.doi.gov.

 BAYTIMES STAFF can be reached at editor@alaskanewspapers.com, or by phone at 907-348-2438
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http://www.dailyastorian.info/main.asp?SectionID=2&SubSectionID=398&ArticleID=69122

Daily Astorian
Oregon

Recharging debate, Obama expands offshore drilling – but not on West Coast

The Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) – Shaking up years of energy policy and his own environmental backers, President Barack Obama threw open a huge swath of East Coast waters and other protected areas in the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska to drilling Wednesday, widening the politically explosive hunt for more homegrown oil and gas.

Obama’s move allows drilling from Delaware to central Florida, plus the northern waters of Alaska, and exploration could begin 50 miles off the coast of Virginia by 2012. He also wants Congress to lift a drilling ban in the oil-rich eastern Gulf of Mexico, 125 miles from Florida beaches.

Still off limits: the entire Pacific seaboard, an action that drew praise from Oregon Gov. Ted Kulongoski. And in a nod to conservation, Obama canceled oil exploration in Alaska’s Bristol Bay, deeming the area a national treasure.

For this oil-dependent nation, the decision could start to reshape far-reaching economic and national security policies, affecting where the U.S. gets the fuel for its cars, heating and energy-gulping industry.

For a president on a roll following a big health care win, Wednesday’s drilling declaration was both aggressive and pragmatic. Even with a push for cleaner energy sources and efficient cars – and with promises of protection for ecosystems and coastal tourism – the nation still needs more oil, Obama said.

“The answer is not drilling everywhere all the time,” Obama said in an event at Andrews Air Force Base. “But the answer is not, also, for us to ignore the fact that we are going to need vital energy sources to maintain our economic growth and our security.”

Inside politically conscious Washington, Obama’s announcement was viewed, too, as a play to win Republican support for a comprehensive climate change bill. Obama needs GOP help to move legislation through the Senate that would limit carbon emissions, a key priority, and his decision on drilling drew at least a bit of Republican applause.

Republican George W. Bush pushed for years to expand offshore drilling. He and Congress lifted bans on some drilling in 2008, when gasoline prices hit record levels. But Obama’s plan is narrower than Bush’s, which also would have opened up oil and gas leasing areas off California and in the North Atlantic.

Obama got a predictable pummeling Wednesday from environmentalists, who sarcastically compared him to Sarah Palin, the former vice presidential candidate whose oil-promoting speech at the Republican National Convention in 2008 famously drew chants of “Drill, Baby, Drill!”

Any big changes to environmental policy – particularly oil drilling – tend to touch off the bitter debate that Obama says he wants the country to end.    His support for exploratory drilling in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas north of Alaska, for example, drew outrage from the Center for Biological Diversity as a threat to polar bears. “Short of sending Sarah Palin back to Alaska to personally club polar bears to death, the Obama administration could not have come up with a more efficient extinction plan for the polar bear,” said Brendan Cummings, the center’s senior counsel.

More broadly, the conservation group Oceana declared Obama was “unleashing a wholesale assault on the oceans.”   Obama has been a supporter of drilling as part of a broader energy agenda, and the White House played down any talk of wooing Republicans.

But it is clear the president wants to show the opposition party that he is willing to come toward them with hopes the GOP will do the same in return. He has already done so on nuclear energy. However, winning a broad climate and energy bill remains an enormous lift for Obama in this election year.

“He could certainly point to this: ‘Look, I’ve moved away from where we were even a year ago, so let’s work something out,”‘ said Guy Caruso, an energy expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a former Department of Energy administrator. “Whether it’s enough? I doubt it. But it’s a step.”

The Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, offered just that kind of response but also questioned whether Obama’s government will actually follow through and open areas for oil production. GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a key negotiator with the White House on the energy bill, said he listened to Obama with “great interest.”

As for the fallout from environmental activists, White House spokesman Bill Burton said, “None of this should have been a surprise to anybody. We’ve been talking about all these different elements for a very long time and the president is following through on promises.”

While the first lease sale for an area 50 miles off the Virginia coast could come as early as 2012, development in other areas of the South Atlantic would still be years away, according to the Interior Department’s leasing plans released Wednesday. The department said it plans seismic studies, environmental reviews and public meetings in the regions involved to determine if leases should be offered in those areas between 2012 and 2017.

Obama’s plan to open more of the eastern Gulf of Mexico would require Congress to lift a drilling moratorium it imposed several years ago. An energy bill before the Senate would open an even wider area of the eastern Gulf than Obama is proposing, allowing drilling within 45 miles of some of Florida’s coast.

Access to oil and gas in South Atlantic waters also would probably meet stiff resistance from the coastal states unless Congress first enacts a plan to share the billions of dollars in potential revenue from lease sales and oil and gas development. And that’s not easy.

Lawmakers from coastal states that would benefit have been pushing for that, but some other senators argue that proceeds from oil and gas resources in federal waters should go to the U.S. Treasury.

Obama is trying to push several levers at once.  As part of his oil announcement, Obama said his government would release new requirements Thursday requiring automakers to build more fuel-efficient cars and trucks. The standards include first-ever rules on vehicle greenhouse gas emissions, which have been blamed for global warming.   For a bit of imagery, Obama stood in front of a Navy F-18 fighter scheduled to fly on Earth Day with a half-biomass fuel mix.   He implored people to accept a middle ground between viewing drilling as a cure-all or claiming it has no place in an energy portfolio.    Said the president: “This issue is just too important to allow our progress to languish while we fight the same old battles.”

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 http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5h1sB0OGKHXVLuRKN0Hg2uLY6mGiQD9EPMGL04
Obama backs oil drilling along Atlantic seaboard
By PHILIP ELLIOTT (AP) – 6 hours ago
WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama says he’s expanding offshore oil drilling along the Atlantic coast, arguing that America must break its dependency on foreign oil and rely more on “homegrown fuels and clean energy.”

Obama chose Andrews air base on the outskirts of Washington for his announcement, telling a military audience “this is not a decision that I’ve made lightly.”

The move reverses longstanding government policy. Obama is allowing drilling along a large portion of Virginia’s shoreline and is considering it for a large chunk of the Atlantic seaboard. He said “there will be those who strongly disagree,” but pledged that it will be done “in ways that balance the need to harness domestic energy resources and the need to protect Americas’s natural resources.”

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP’s earlier story is below.

WASHINGTON (AP) – In a reversal of a long-standing ban on most offshore drilling, President Barack Obama is allowing oil drilling off Virginia’s shorelines and considering it for a large chunk of the Atlantic seaboard. At the same time, he’s rejecting some new drilling sites that had been planned in Alaska.

Obama’s plan offers few concessions to environmentalists, who have been strident in their opposition to more oil platforms off the nation’s shores. Hinted at for months, the plan modifies a ban that for more than 20 years has limited drilling along coastal areas other than the Gulf of Mexico.

Obama was set to announce the new drilling policy Wednesday at Andrews air base in Maryland. White House officials pitched the changes as ways to reduce U.S. reliance on foreign oil and create jobs – both politically popular ideas – but the president’s decisions also could help secure support for a climate change bill languishing in Congress.

The president, joined by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, also was set to announce that proposed leases in Alaska’s Bristol Bay would be canceled. The Interior Department also planned to reverse last year’s decision to open up parts of the Chukchi and Beaufort seas. Instead, scientists would study the sites to see if they’re suitable to future leases.

Obama’s blueprint would allow Interior to go ahead with oil and gas leases on tracts 50 miles off the coast of Virginia. Those leases had been approved for development but were held up by a court challenge and a departmental review.

In addition, an administration official said Obama would allow exploration along the south Atlantic and mid Atlantic Outer Continental Shelf “to support energy planning” – a step toward potential leasing. The official spoke on condition of anonymity ahead of Obama’s announcement.

Obama is allowing an expansion in Alaska’s Cook Inlet to go forward. The plan also would leave in place the moratorium on drilling off the West Coast.

In addition, the Interior Department has prepared a plan to add drilling platforms in the eastern Gulf of Mexico if Congress allows that moratorium to expire. Lawmakers in 2008 allowed a similar moratorium to expire; at the time President George W. Bush lifted the ban, which opened the door to Obama’s change in policy.

Under Obama’s plan, drilling could take place 125 miles from Florida’s Gulf coastline if lawmakers allow the moratorium to expire. Drilling already takes place in western and central areas in the Gulf of Mexico.

The president’s team has been busy on energy policy and Obama talked about it in his State of the Union address. During that speech, he said he wanted the United States to build a new generation of nuclear power plans and invest in biofuel and coal technologies.

“It means making tough decisions about opening new offshore areas for oil and gas development,” he warned.

Obama also urged Congress to complete work on a climate change and energy bill, which has remained elusive. The president met with lawmakers earlier this month at the White House about a bill cutting emissions of pollution-causing greenhouse gases by 17 percent by 2020. The legislation would also expand domestic oil and gas drilling offshore and provide federal assistance for constructing nuclear power plants and carbon sequestration and storage projects at coal-fired utilities.

White House officials hope Wednesday’s announcement will attract support from Republicans, who adopted a chant of “Drill, baby, drill” during 2008′s presidential campaign.

The president’s Wednesday remarks would be paired with other energy proposals that were more likely to find praise from environmental groups. The White House planned to announce it had ordered 5,000 hybrid vehicles for the government fleet. And on Thursday, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Transportation Department are to sign a final rule that requires increased fuel efficiency standards for new cars.