http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-deibert/florida-oil-drilling-_b_990183.html

by Michael Deibert

Posted: 10/4/11 12:44 PM ET

The news that the Spanish oil giant, Repsol, intends to begin exploratory drilling in the waters directly north of Cuba, has set off a chorus of criticism in Cuba’s neighbor to the north: the United States.

Repsol, which has a presence in more than 35 countries, has announced that an immense, semi-submersible oil rig constructed by the Italian company Saipem, is currently speeding its way from Singapore to the Florida Straits between Key West and Cuba, with a goal of beginning exploratory drilling sometime in December.

With analysts believing that Cuba’s coastal waters may contain up to 20 billion barrels of oil, Repsol — which also drilled offshore in Cuba in 2004 — is set to partner with Norway’s Statoil and India’s ONGC in the drilling of a pair of wells as per an agreement with the Cuban government.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, with memories throughout the region still fresh with images of the April 2010 explosion of BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf Of Mexico, there has been an outcry at Repsol’s plans.

The Deepwater Horizon incident killed 11 workers and loosed a gusher of oil that leaked an estimated 53,000 barrels a day into the Gulf for three months, fouling beaches in Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and killing fish and wildlife.

Following a 17-month investigation, a report last month on the disaster issued by the the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement leveled withering criticism at well owner and operator BP, rig owner Transocean Ltd. and cementing operator Halliburton Co.

“From the Deepwater Horizon incident, we have seen clearly that deepwater offshore drilling is inherently risky,” says Dr. Susan D. Shaw, director of the Maine-based Marine Environmental Research Institute. “Even in U.S. waters with the resources, infrastructure and equipment that we have, we watched a massive failure on many counts.”

In a rare moment of bipartisanship in the rancorous U.S. political landscape, a Sept. 28 letter to Repsol by 34 members of the U.S. Congress — including the Cuban-born Republican chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Florida Democrat Debbie Wasserman Schultz — wrote that the “oil drilling scheme endangers the environment, and enriches the Cuban tyranny” and urged the company to “walk away from the project.”

The U.S. maintains a trade embargo with Cuba, and Cuban-Americans make up a powerful voting bloc in the state of Florida, which counts for 27 electoral votes in the U.S.’s electoral college system.

Political considerations aside, however, it is the patch of sea where Repsol proposes to work that has caused the most concern.

The location of the proposed drilling is only 65 miles from the Marquesas Keys, an uninhabited group of islands near Key West, in an area of strong 4-6 mile per hour currents that come from the Gulf of Mexico, shoot through the Florida Straits and then churn northwards up the Atlantic Coast of the continental U.S.

A wide swath of protected areas could be threatened, including the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary — which spans some 2,800-square-nautical-miles and includes important repositories of coral reefs, seagrass and 1,600 miles of mangrove shoreline — and Biscayne National Park, an area that contains the beginning of the third-largest coral reef in the world and mangrove areas along its shore. The million-plus acre Everglades National Park — a subtropical wilderness that has famously been described as a “river of grass” — is also nearby.

“It’s such an ecologically rich area that any oil in the marine environment could seriously impact the entire ecosystem,” asserts Daniel O. Suman, professor of marine affairs and policy at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science.

Repsol’s safety record could best be described as mixed.

In February 2008, a spill by the company let free an estimated 100 barrels of crude near the 2.4 million-acre Yasuni National Park in Ecuador. The park, home to populations of jaguars, harpy eagles and other fauna, is also the ancestral home of the Huaorani people, the region’s native inhabitants. This was followed by another spill in Ecuador in February 2009. In December 2010, a Repsol petrol platform in Nigeria’s Ebro Delta region spilled 180,000 litres of crude into the ocean off that country’s coast.

On its website, Repsol — which did not respond to requests for comment — states that the drilling equipment to be used “complies with all the technical requirements and all the limitations established by the US administration for drilling operations in Cuba.”

Residents of the Florida Keys — one of the more beguiling corners of the United States with its vistas of blue-green ocean water and endless sky — remain apprehensive.

“We’re very concerned,” says Key West mayor Craig Cates. “And because of the embargo (with Cuba) we can’t even send any equipment over if anything starts leaking. We just have to wait until it gets into our waters. ”

This article was first published in slightly different form in collaboration with Panos Caribbean.

http://www.nola.com/environment/index.ssf/2011/10/presidential_gulf_coast_task_f.html

I’m glad to see this process moving along. The reduction in nutrient run-off is an excellent strategy for improving Gulf water quality. DV

Published: Wednesday, October 05, 2011, 8:30 AM Updated: Wednesday, October 05, 2011, 12:17 PM
The Times-Picayune By Mark Schleifstein

The federal-state Gulf Coast Ecosystem Restoration Task Force today released a wide-ranging list of strategies for repairing damage done to Gulf of Mexico ecosystems by the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill and by other long-term threats. The main report contains mostly policy-level recommendations, leaving more specific prescriptions to an appendix of existing and proposed projects recommended by each of the five states bordering the Gulf.

However, Louisiana’s appendix page is not included. State officials expected it to be released on Friday.

The report endorses using the majority of Clean Water Act fine money resulting from the oil spill, which could be as much as $5 billion to $20 billion, for Gulf recovery efforts, in addition to current funding for such projects.

“This strategy is designed to prepare the region for transitioning from a response to the spill into a long-term recovery that supports the vital ecosystem and the people who depend on it,” said Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson, chairwoman of the task force.

“The health of the Gulf of Mexico ecosystem starts and ends with its people and its communities,” she said. “The individuals and families who visit the Gulf, who work in the region, who depend on its resources, and especially those who call it home, know its needs and challenges best. They will be integral to creating and executing this long-term strategy.

State officials are happy with the report’s key points, especially language calling for the Army Corps of Engineers to increase the amount of sediment dredged from the Mississippi River that is used to rebuild wetlands, speeding the process for approving and building restoration projects, and elevating restoration goals to the same importance as navigation and flood control in decisionmaking by the corps and other agencies, all of which they’ve requested from federal officials for several years.

“The Task Force’s draft strategy identifies fundamental obstacles that have plagued restoration and protection efforts in Louisiana and other states for decades. The report attempts to begin reversing 80 years of mismanagement,” said Garret Graves, senior coastal advisor to Gov. Bobby Jindal and co-chairman of the task force.

But Graves said he was disappointed that the report didn’t recommend more specific projects and goals, such as requiring the corps to use 50 percent of dredged material for restoration projects, and instead delays such recommendations for inclusion in a second task force report.

“We took a year to write a report that recommends another report,” he said. “I would rather be in a position where we are advancing as much as we can now.

“We’re going to continue working through this task force process through the public comment period (on the draft report) to try to add more specificity and more tangible actions to the report,” he said.

Jackson said elevating Gulf restoration efforts that address ecosystem impacts on coastal residents and the coastal economy to national prominence is the key accomplishment of the new report.

“Providing (restoration) an equal footing with navigation and flood damage risk reduction is a very important goal and it hasn’t been said before by all five states together,” she said. “Having the Gulf speak, as (New Orleans Women of the Storm leader) Ann Milling said, together with one voice is powerful.”

The task force adopted four broad goals for its strategy:

Restore and conserve habitat, including wetlands, coastal prairies and forests, estuaries, seagrass beds, natural beaches, dunes and barrier islands.
Restore water quality, in particular reducing the excess nutrients flowing down the Mississippi River system that create an annual low-oxygen “dead zone” covering an average 6,700 square miles along the coasts of Louisiana and Texas.
Replenish and protect living coastal and marine resources, including depleted populations of fish and wildlife species and their degraded habitats.
Enhance community resilience to a variety of threats, including storm risk, sea-level rise, land loss, natural-resource depletion and compromised water quality.

To accomplish those goals, the task force said it will rely largely on voluntary programs and increased cooperation among coastal states and their inland neighbors, and between the states and the federal agencies that enforce natural resource laws.

It also will work with several regional organizations, including the Gulf of Mexico Alliance, a regional partnership that includes the governors of Louisiana, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi and Texas; the federal-state Hypoxia Task Force, created to reduce nutrient flow into the Mississippi River; the federal-state Natural Resource Damage Assessment Trustee Council, formed under the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 to deal with environmental threats from the oil spill; and the National Ocean Council, established by President Obama to address broad, environmental ocean policies.

“The mission of the task force was not to develop another ‘new’ plan,” the report said. “Rather, the task force set out to build on existing work, learn from those who are actively involved in ecosystem restoration, and craft an agenda that would provide unified and strategic direction for restoration activities across the Gulf.”

The task force acknowledged that the national economic downturn presents challenges for restoration.

“In this time of severe fiscal constraint across all levels of government, task force member agencies are committed to finding common ground, establishing priorities, and working together to achieve them,” the report said. “This may involve reassessing budgets and agency activities to collaboratively align resources to the highest priority Gulf Coast restoration work.”

Jackson said significant cost savings will result from coordination of restoration projects, including permitting, regulation and administrative functions, among the five states and 11 federal agencies on the task force.

Equally important, however, will be reserving a significant portion of any oil spill fine money for those restoration efforts, she said.

Within six months of the approval of the draft strategy, the task force will move to develop more specific short-term, medium-term and long-term tasks aimed at implementing its goals. In creating the task force, Obama said it would remain in place until Congress approved a similar body, but there’s been no move by Congress to do so.

To meet its habitat restoration and conservation goal, the task force will put “river management” — the use of the sediment and water resources of the Mississippi and other Gulf Coast rivers — on par with navigation and flood damage risk reduction priorities in federal and state decision-making.

That would mean working to maximize the use of river sediment for coastal restoration.

It also would find ways to increase the use of “dedicated dredging,” such as that being used in Louisiana to build wetlands with material piped from the river, through the use of permanent pipelines dedicated to restoration work.

The task force also would assist in expediting construction of river diversions that already have been authorized, planned and designed. Several such projects are awaiting financing in Louisiana.

The strategy also endorses Mississippi River hydrodynamic and delta management studies just announced by the corps and Louisiana, which are designed to help define the future of the lower river’s wetlands and determine how best to use the river’s water and sediment.

The report said coastal communities have relied on flood protection levees and navigation structures that “created unintended consequences … by accelerating wetland and barrier island erosion and restricting the flow of vital sediments that had sustained the ecosystem over time.”

In Louisiana, the combination of river and hurricane levees with navigation channels and oil and gas canals has played a large part in the state’s loss of 1,883 square miles of coastal land from 1932 to 2010, the report said.

The task force recommends the expansion of conservation areas to ensure a landscape that supports both the Gulf ecosystem and the human economy.

Included in that strategy would be collaboration between federal, state, local and private organizations to form habitat corridors for key species. Targeted resources would include seagrasses, mangroves, coastal forests and marshes, and they could be protected by buffer zones.

To address the dead zone and other water-quality issues, the task force recommends a variety of measures aimed at reducing the use of nutrients by farmers upriver and capturing nutrient runoff. It also endorses the Hypoxia Task Force goal of reducing the average size of the dead zone to less than 1,931 square miles, or less than a third of the present average.

The report relies largely on voluntary measures to meet that goal. But it also suggests that states adopt regulations limiting the amount of phosphorus contained in lawn fertilizer used in urban areas, a strategy already adopted in states bordering the Chesapeake Bay.

While a recent National Research Council report found that new federal financial support for development of biofuels has resulted in the reuse of marginal farmland in the Midwest to grow corn and other crops, which has increased nutrients in the Mississippi, Jackson said she doesn’t expect to see a reduction in that support.

“I don’t think you’re going to see anyone asking the Midwest give up on a new economic growth engine,” she said. “That would be like asking the Gulf to give up on energy production.”

Instead, Jackson said the report’s emphasis on methods of reducing the use of fertilizers and projects to capture nutrients before they enter the Mississippi will eventually meet the dead zone reduction goal.

To restore depleted fisheries and wildlife populations, the report recommends revising fishery management plans and better enforcing them.

As part of that effort, it recommends creating data collection programs independent of the existing system of relying on commercial and recreational fishery landings.

“The lack of data is frequently cited as a major challenge in achieving sustainability and maximizing economic benefits to recreational and commercial fisheries,” the report said.

The report also recommended looking at ways to reintroduce species in areas with depleted populations, including the use of aquaculture to restock native species.

For offshore areas, the report recommends better protection of key habitat areas, including coral reefs, sea grass beds and Sargassum seaweed patches. In some areas, oyster and coral reefs would be recreated, restored or enhanced, and artificial reefs could also be incorporated.

So-called “sentinel” species and sites — such as Atlantic bluefin tuna and their spawning grounds, and important deepwater coral reefs — would be identified and studied, the report said.

The task force also recommended a greater emphasis on controlling a variety of invasive species that threaten native species, including nutria, lionfish, giant salvinia, Asian tiger shrimp and several species of tilapia.

Public comments on the report are being accepted until midnight eastern time on Oct. 26. Comments can be submitted on the web at http://www.epa.gov/gulfcoasttaskforce/, by e-mail at oei.docket@epa.gov, by fax at (202) 566-9744, or can be mailed to U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, EPA Docket Center; Office of Environmental Information Docket, Mail Code 28221T; 1200 Pennsylvania Ave. NW; Washington, DC 20460.