Category Archives: energy policy

energy policy, Gulf restoration

E&E: GULF OF MEXICO: Bring Back the Gulf Coalition decries Interior ‘rigs to reef’ program, demands cleanup

Leave a comment
 

Jessica Estepa, E&E reporter
Published: Thursday, July 31, 2014
A group of environmentalists, scientists and fishermen is calling on the Interior Department for “strong and consistent implementation” of its idle iron policy in order to restore the Gulf of Mexico.
Under the policy, companies are required to dismantle and dispose of oil and gas infrastructure that is no longer being used.
But what has become the norm, the group contends in a letter to Interior Secretary Sally Jewell, is that oil and gas companies are using Interior’s “rigs to reefs” program to avoid the costs of decommissioning oil platforms in the Gulf under the guise of creating aquatic habitat.
“The permanent seabed placement of obsolete oil and gas extraction infrastructure invites more ecosystem damage rather than restoring it as originally envisioned,” they wrote in the letter sent last week. “The proposed additional discard of uncounted tons of deteriorating scrap metal into sensitive Gulf habitats will result in significant cumulative environmental degradation.”
To put it more simply, it will turn the Gulf into a “junkyard,” said Richard Charter, a senior fellow at the Ocean Foundation. He, along with marine consultant DeeVon Quirolo, yesterday released a report, “Bring Back the Gulf,” that dives further into the issue.
The pair calls on Interior to review the rigs to reefs program and to include a “broad” range of stakeholders as the discussion moves forward.
Charter said he believes that the Gulf is reaching a “critical mass” of artificial infrastructure. The future of the region will lie with the decisions that the federal government makes in the coming years.
“Americans have every right to expect companies to keep their promise,” he said.
An Interior spokeswoman said the department has received the letter and is reviewing the request.
The letter and report come as Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management reviews rules on decommissioning rigs. Earlier this year, Tommy Beaudreau, Jewell’s chief of staff and former head of the agency, said the branch would issue an advanced notice on a proposed rulemaking.
The review concerns financial assurances regarding decommissioning, a spokesman with the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement said today. It is meant to address concerns about how oil and gas companies pay for decommissioning rigs and could potentially provide some funds for the task.
Twitter: @jmestepa | Email: jestepa@eenews.net
Special thanks to Aileo Weinmann of Resource Media.
energy policy, gulf of mexico clean-up, Gulf restoration, offshore oil

Times-Picayune: Gulf of Mexico rigs-to-reefs program contested in letter to Interior Secretary and new e-book

Leave a comment
image001 6337.gif 2
 
Benjamin Alexander-Bloch, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune By Benjamin Alexander-Bloch, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune 
Email the author | Follow on Twitter 
on July 30, 2014 at 2:49 PM, updated July 30, 2014 at 2:52 PM
As the federal government this summer considers revised rules on the decommissioning of Gulf of Mexico oil rigs, many environmental groups are pushing for a reexamination of the rigs-to-reefs program.
The program, extremely popular among most Louisiana anglers because the artificial reefs attract fish, allows some oil and gas companies to convert their decommissioned rigs to reefs instead of requiring the companies to remove them.
But on Wednesday, Clint Guidry, president of the Louisiana Shrimp Association, joined calls for the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) to require the removal of rigs instead of converting them into such reefs.
There is debate about whether the artificial reefs promote aquatic life or simply attract fish, concentrating them for easy fishing access. And some environmental groups contend that their artificial habitats create more harm than good.
There are about 450 platforms in the Gulf that have been converted to permanent artificial reefs through the program that started in 1985. By far the majority of those reefs – more than 300 – are in Louisiana waters.
While the federal Idle Iron policy requires oil and gas companies “to dismantle and responsibly dispose of infrastructure after they plug non-producing wells,” the rigs-to-reefs programs allows some the decommissioned rigs to remain on the site as artificial marine habitats.
Guidry joined the authors of the recently released free e-book Bring Back the Gulf, which also advocates for requiring the removal of oil rigs.
Shrimpers often are against the artificial reefs, largely because the reefs can tangle their nets.
Guidry on Wednesday argued that the oil industry should “return Gulf bottoms to trawlable bottoms” and that that would “help everyone, not just shrimp fishermen, as it will help all users who have to navigate the Gulf.”
Last Wednesday (July 23), about 25 individuals, mainly representing environmental groups, signed a letter sent to Interior Secretary Sally Jewell urging “strong and consistent implementation of the Department of Interior’s Idle Iron policy requiring full decommissioning of spent oil and gas structures at the end of their useful economic life.”
“Industry has expanded their requests for Interior Department waivers to Idle Iron protocols – instead seeking permanent seabed disposal of disused oil and gas infrastructure throughout Gulf of Mexico waters under the misnomer of Rigs-to-Reefs projects,” the 7-page letter later continued. “The permanent seabed placement of obsolete oil and gas extraction infrastructure invites more ecosystem damage rather than restoring it as originally envisioned.”
The letter in part stated that the rigs’ deteriorating metal can harm “sensitive Gulf habitats.” It also states that, by attracting fish, the artificial reefs can cause overfishing of certain species and can expand habitat for invasive species.
Richard Charter, a senior fellow at The Ocean Foundation who co-authored the book Bring Back the Gulf that was released last week, said during a teleconference on Wednesday that oil and gas companies have an “obligation to return a reef bed to its natural state.”
Charter said “thousands of rigs due for decommissioning in the coming years” as some of the oldest deep-water wells reach the end of their lives. His his co-author, DeeVon Quirolo, added that the Gulf has reached “critical threshold of such artificial structures.”
In May, Jewell’s Chief of Staff Tommy Beaudreau said the agency this summer would be reviewing the regulations governing the decommissioning and related liability issues of old offshore oil infrastructure, according to Charter and Quirolo.
The Interior Department did not immediately return NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune questions on Wednesday about the status of that review, although Charter and Quirolo said that Interior is expected to hold public hearings on the matters as it move forward.
To see Charter and Quirolo free e-book, click here. There are iPad and Kindle versions available on their website, http://bringbackthegulf.org.
Below, view and download the letter sent last week to Interior Secretary Sally Jewell:
Click here to download this file (PDF)
© 2014 NOLA.com. All rights reserved.
energy policy, gulf of mexico clean-up, Gulf restoration, offshore oil

Bring Back the Gulf, the book by DeeVon Quirolo and Richard Charter

Leave a comment

July 30, 2014

Bring Back the Gulf

New Book Slams Policies that Allow Oil Industry to Dump Old Rigs at Taxpayer Expense

Now available as an E-book & PDF

 

Bring Back the Gulf is a timely analysis of the scientific, environmental, legal, social and political aspects of the U.S. Interior Department’s “Rigs-to-Reefs” program and is now available as an e-Book and PDF at www.bringbackthegulf.org, the story of how Big Oil decided to fool the American taxpayer, and why their complicated scheme is not in the public interest.

Current policy allows the oil industry to send its trash to the ocean bottom and call it a reef. Taxpayers are footing the bill for this giveaway that is compromising our Gulf of Mexico’s public natural resources. Rigs-to-Reefs is a clever name for a waiver that sidesteps a requirement that each offshore oil lease includes full decommissioning of spent oil and gas structures to restore the seabed to its previous natural state. Authors DeeVon Quirolo and Richard Charter assert that each oil lease should be enforced to, put simply, force oil companies to properly clean up after themselves when they’re done with a rig.

“When an oil company signs an offshore oil lease contract, that includes an obligation to return the seabed to its natural state once the rig has reached the end of its economic life,” said co-author Richard Charter, senior fellow with The Ocean Foundation. “Americans have every right to expect that the company will keep its promise. With thousands of rigs due for decommissioning in the next few years, we can either decide to help restore the Gulf of Mexico to its former vitality, or allow it to become a junkyard of epic proportions.”

“Dumping spent drilling rigs into the Gulf of Mexico has unanticipated long term negative consequences on marine resources and fails to support fishery management goals,” added co-author DeeVon Quirolo. “If anything, discarded rigs simply cause fish to aggregate so that they are over-harvested, and help invasive species to spread.”

“Shrimp fishermen need trawlable bottom in the Gulf to run their nets,” said Clint Guidry, president of the Louisiana Shrimp Association. “Further giveaways of ocean bottom are not in line with long-standing agreements we have made with the oil industry and State and Federal Government.”

From the beginning, agreements between oil companies and the public have been based on clear assurances that abandoned offshore drilling rigs would be removed and the seafloor restored. At the end of 2013, 2,608 Gulf rigs were due for decommissioning, and thousands more are due for decommissioning over the next few years.

In a letter to Secretary Sally Jewel, leading Gulf of Mexico stakeholders call on the Interior Department to halt issuing waivers that enable spent rigs to remain on the ocean bottom and instead require the seabed to be restored to its original condition as required under the Idle Iron policy. Additional recommendations include:

  • A broad representation of the full range of public interests needs to be more inclusively involved in the relevant federal and state decision-making processes regarding spent oil and gas structures
  • Monitoring of state “Rigs-to-Reefs” programs to ensure ecological integrity
  • Independent scientific research that is not unduly influenced by the oil and gas industry, especially for deep-sea processes that are vulnerable to impacts accompanying the growth of deepwater drilling
  • Enforcement of existing environmental laws that can help ensure a healthy Gulf of Mexico
  • Support effective management of all fisheries for long-term, ecosystem-based resilience and sustainability
  • Creation of deepwater preserves to protect biologic diversity and provide research opportunities through a Gulf-wide monitoring effort, especially in the northern Gulf, where oil production remains concentrated.

Today, some rigs are granted waivers to become permanent fixtures on the ocean floor, towed to state-established so-called “reefing sites.” Full responsibility for future maintenance and liability is then shifted to the state, in exchange for a one-time payoff from the rig owner equal to half of the savings over the cost of full decommissioning. This obviously saves the oil industry millions of dollars, but is counter to supporting larger Gulf of Mexico restoration or fisheries management goals.

Past seafloor discards have led to creation of the largest underwater artificial habitat in the world in Gulf waters at present. Ocean disposal in this manner is heavily promoted by the oil industry as an environmentally friendly option when in fact the reverse is actually true. Studies show that the rigs fail to equal or rival natural coral reefs in biologic diversity and instead attract fouling organisms, including bivalves, sponges, barnacles, hydroids and algae as well as non-native invasive species.

There is new urgency to prevent navigational hazards posed to vessel traffic when these massive structures become lost or damaged during major storms and hurricanes. The Interior Secretary Sally Jewell’s Chief of Staff Tommy Beaudreau recently announced that the agency will review policies regarding decommissioning and related liability issues beginning this summer.

#  #   #

energy policy, offshore oil

Platts: FEATURE: Fight over US offshore plan to focus on Gulf of Mexico, Atlantic, Alaska

Leave a comment
Washington (Platts)–28Jul2014/403 pm EDT/2003 GMT

The Obama administration later this week is expected to fully delve into the three-year process to develop the next five-year plan for offshore oil and gas leasing, an effort expected to center on whether to allow drilling in US Atlantic waters and offshore Alaska.

The US Interior Department’s Bureau of Energy Management has already received hundreds of comments on which offshore areas should be auctioned off for oil and gas drilling from 2017 to 2022 and is expected to receive thousands more by Thursday, the deadline for its formal “request for information.”

The plan, which administration officials want to have finalized before Obama is scheduled to leave office in January 2017, is expected to spark broad disagreements between industry, which wants unfettered access to the outer continental shelf, and environmentalists, who want offshore drilling limited, if not shut down completely.

The plan has already drawn considerable concern from California’s Democratic congressional delegation, which has urged Interior officials to keep California’s offshore waters out of the five-year plan.
But the three OCS planning areas offshore California are largely seen as politically untenable and will likely draw little focus from industry lobbyists, according to Erik Milito, upstream director for the American Petroleum Institute.   Milito said that industry is expected to push for expanded drilling throughout the US Gulf of Mexico, as well as in the Atlantic and offshore Alaska.
The majority of the eastern Gulf and a portion of the central Gulf are subject to a congressional moratorium and are not expected to be open for leasing until 2022, but Milito said this should not prevent the administration from including it in its leasing plan. The moratorium, he said, could always be reversed and, like any other offshore areas where oil and gas could be produced, the administration should not stand in the way.

“If you keep areas out of the program, then you’re taking those opportunities off the table and you’re pushing things way further out,” Milito said. “From our long-term energy planning standpoint, both from the government and the industry, it’s important to keep options on the table and not take them off the table.”

The administration is expected early next year to approve applications for companies to conduct seismic testing in the mid- and south Atlantic, but BOEM and industry officials said the administration could include the Atlantic in its next five-year plan even if these tests to update decades-old data are not complete.

Just because a lease sale is scheduled for a particular planning area, there’s no guarantee a lease sale will take place, Milito said.

“It just means you’re including opportunities for a potential lease sales,” he said. “If you don’t include the Atlantic then you have no possibility of doing it.”

BOEM’s current 2012-2017 schedule includes 15 lease sales — 12 in the Gulf of Mexico and three offshore Alaska, with the latter including sales planned for the Chukchi Sea and Cook Inlet in 2016 and the Beaufort Sea in 2017. Only six of the 26 OCS planning areas are included in the current leasing program.

Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski, the top Republican on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, wants to see additional drilling offshore Alaska, but is not pushing for a specific plan outside of simply expanding leasing offshore the state, according to Robert Dillon, a spokesman.  In other words, Murkowksi is not specifying which of the 15 federal planning areas offshore Alaska she wants to see included in the next leasing plan. Dillon said the specifics would be up to industry.

–Brian Scheid, brian.scheid@platts.com –Edited by Lisa Miller, lisa.miller@platts.com
Special thanks to Richard Charter
energy policy, offshore oil

Gainesville.com: Oil will spoil the best of Florida

Leave a comment

 

By Nathan Crabbe
Editorial Page editor
Published: Sunday, July 27, 2014 at 6:01 a.m.
Last Modified: Friday, July 25, 2014 at 2:03 p.m.
 
Growing up in Ohio, I liked visiting the beaches of Florida but didn’t realize that the state offered so much more as far as the water was concerned.

I thought that boating meant throwing out a line and catching fish. I didn’t know that you could jump in the water and actually catch things with your own hands.

I was lucky to meet Colleen shortly after moving here and eventually marry her, for a lot of reasons. One nice perk is that she introduced me to the possibilities that a mask, snorkel and flippers provide.

For Colleen and her family, all born and raised in Florida, the month of July is book-ended with the two best times of the year for living in the state. The start of the scallop season falls around the beginning of the month, while the two-day recreational lobster season falls near the end of it.

It was incredible enough to float around the Gulf of Mexico and catch bags full of scallops for the first time. It was absolutely mind-blowing to dive down in the waters around the Florida Keys and grab spiny lobsters with my (thankfully gloved) hands.

This is all a really long way of saying that I can’t believe that the Obama administration is going to allow more oil drilling off the Florida coast.

The administration announced this month that it is reopening the Eastern Seaboard to offshore oil and gas exploration. The U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management approved seismic surveys using sonic cannons to locate deposits beneath the ocean floor.
 
You think it’s loud when your neighbor turns on the leaf blower early in the morning? Seismic surveys require the use of sound waves far louder than a jet engine, reverberating through the water every 10 seconds for weeks on end.

This is especially harmful for whales and dolphins, which depend on being able to hear the echoes of their calls to feed and communicate. An expert on fish ecology told The Associated Press that aquatic creatures could suffer permanent hearing damage from just one encounter with a high-energy signal.

But that’s not even the most important reason that allowing more oil drilling off the coast is a terrible idea. Perhaps the Obama administration needs to be reminded of that reason, but I don’t think most Floridians do.
 
Just four years ago this month, the BP oil spill was finally being capped after polluting the Gulf for 87 days. It took months longer to fully seal the well. About 5 million gallons of oil spilled.

In addition to the devastating effect on marine life, the spill also hammered Florida’s economy. I visited some of the beaches near Pensacola around that time, and the only tourists were a handful of them who came to gawk at workers scooping shovels of oil from the sand.

Arrogance is the only possible explanation for reopening the Eastern Seaboard to offshore oil drilling. While it might bring jobs in the oil industry, it certainly won’t help anyone who owes their livelihoods to tourism and fishing.

So when I visit the Keys this week, I’ll try to soak in such pleasures as snorkeling around the coral reef of Looe Key. The reefs are already in decline due to pollution and climate change, and this oil announcement shows we won’t stop until we finish the job of destroying them.
 
It’s just a shame that we wait to learn from our mistakes until it’s too late.
Special thanks to Richard Charter.