http://www.ogj.com/index/article-display/2551923921/articles/oil-gas-journal/exploration-development-2/2010/12/salazar-puts_atlantic/QP129867/cmpid=EnlEDDecember22010.html

It’s about time….DV

Dec 1, 2010
Nick Snow
OGJ Washington Editor

WASHINGTON, DC, Dec. 1 — Emphasizing that the administration of US President Barack Obama remains committed to developing federal offshore oil and gas resources, Interior Sec. Ken Salazar said on Dec. 1 that Atlantic Ocean and eastern Gulf of Mexico areas will be excluded from the 2012-17 Outer Continental Shelf 5-year leasing program.

Lease sales in the central and western gulf will be held, but only when a supplemental environmental impact statement studying consequences of the spill from BP PLC’s Macondo well is completed, he added during a teleconference with reporters. “We will do everything we can to proceed with lease sales there at the end of 2011 and in early 2012,” he declared.

“As a result of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill we learned a number of lessons, most importantly that we need to proceed with caution and focus on creating a more stringent regulatory regime,” Salazar continued. “As that regime continues to be developed and implemented, we have revised our initial March leasing strategy to focus and expend our critical resources on areas with leases that are currently active.”

Oil and gas association leaders immediately criticized his move. “As our country looks for ways out of the hole of lackluster economic growth and job creation, today’s decision shows that this administration would rather keep digging than take the ladder to increased economic prosperity offered by developing our nation’s domestic energy resources,” American Petroleum Institute Pres. Jack N. Gerard said.

Bruce H. Vincent, chairman of the Independent Petroleum Association of America and president of Swift Energy Co. in Houston, maintained, “If there were any questions as to whether or not this administration is more interested in picking winners and losers in the energy market and waging an unbridled war on America’s oil and gas producers than creating jobs and putting our nation on a path toward energy security, they were put to rest with today’s misguided announcement that will keep even more taxpayer-owned energy resources further out of reach and under Washington’s lock-and-key.”

‘Relieved, disappointed’
National Ocean Industries Association Pres. Randall B. Luthi said he was relieved that Salazar apparently is moving forward on developing a 2012-17 OCS program, but disappointed that scheduled 2011 lease sales will be delayed and possibly canceled, particularly off Virginia, where bipartisan support remains, and the eastern gulf, where deepwater resources hold great promise.

“What would be more valuable to the nation’s economic and energy future would be the recognition that valuable energy resources lie in those areas that have been kept off-limits to even exploration for decades, and will now apparently continue to be locked away,” Luthi said.

Salazar said information will continue to be gathered about environmental impacts of conducting seismic studies of the South and Mid-Atlantic Outer Continental Shelf. Rigorous scientific analysis of the Arctic also will continue to determine if future oil and gas development can take place there, although no lease sales are currently planned, he indicated.

US Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation, and Enforcement Director Michael R. Bromwich, who also participated in the teleconference, announced that the DOI agency responsible for managing the nation’s offshore resources is completing an agreement with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration under which NOAA will collaborate with BOEMRE in the environmental analysis for OCS planning.

Environmental organizations endorsed Salazar’s action. “We need to make sure we never see another oil spill like the BP disaster. Keeping the eastern Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic coast out of the new 5-year drilling plan is a significant step in the right direction,” said Sierra Club Land Protection Director Athan Manuel. “But an oil spill like the BP disaster could happen anywhere-in Alaska, or in other parts of the central and western gulf where drilling is allowed.”

But Karen A. Harbert, president of the US Chamber of Commerce’s Institute for 21st Century Energy, said the move sends exactly the wrong signals. “By continuing to keep most of America’s abundant oil and gas resources under lock and key, the Obama administration is ensuring that we will continue to increase our dependence on foreign oil, which threatens our national security,” she maintained. “The administration is sending a message to America’s oil and gas industry: Take your capital, technology, and jobs somewhere else.”

Contact Nick Snow at nicks@pennwell.com.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1210/45865.html

Thank goodness someone (in an official capacity) is willing to speak out on this…..long overdue. DV

Politico: BP, Halliburton and Transocean – ‘were fully implicated in the catastrophe,’ Reilly said.

By DARREN GOODE | 12/2/10 11:37 AM EST

The Republican co-chairman of a bipartisan presidential commission investigating the Gulf of Mexico oil spill said Thursday he has seen “indisputable evidence of a widespread lack of serious preparation, of planning, of management” in the oil and gas industry.

“That culture must change,” said William Reilly at the final public session of the Obama administration’s BP spill commission.

Three companies – BP, Halliburton and Transocean – “were fully implicated in the catastrophe,” Reilly said, while other companies “had no effective containment preparations and laughable response plans.”

Reilly, the Environmental Protection Agency chief under President George H.W. Bush, added: “We are not dealing here with a sick or failing or unsuccessful industry but with a complacent one.”

The Gulf spill began April 20 when BP’s Macondo well ruptured 5,000 feet below the Deepwater Horizon rig owned by Transocean. Halliburton was contracted by BP to handle cementing work on the well.

The National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling is holding its sixth and final two-day public session Thursday and Friday before submitting recommendations to President Barack Obama in January. The commission Thursday is hearing presentations from staff and deliberating on the safety culture in the offshore drilling industry, regulatory oversight, environmental review, drilling in the Arctic and oil spill response.

While the three companies have largely fired shots at one another, much of the commission’s probe has looked at the cementing work Halliburton did on the well and whether the company and BP adequately ensured that the cement used was adequately tested. BP’s well design has also come under scrutiny, as has why the well’s blowout preventer – the last defense against a blowout – failed.

Commission Co-chairman and former Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.) echoed in his opening remarks that the panel has learned “not to lay blame on just a few rogue companies,” while noting the probe has also uncovered “fundamental weaknesses” in the federal government’s ability to regulate and oversee oil and gas exploration and production.

Graham added that he remains “mystified as to why a few senators decided to deny this commission this power when subpoena power has been granted as almost an absolute for congressional commissions which have analogous responsibilities to ours.”

He added that the lack of subpoena power “has made our commission’s work more difficult.” The success of the panel so far, Graham said, “is a testament both to the determination and [to the] skill of our team and to the plain fact that the problems and deficiencies of the current safety regime are so egregious.”

Republican senators – upset over the makeup of the seven-member panel and the lack of a panel whose members are selected by Congress – have opposed granting subpoena power to the panel appointed by Obama. The House has twice approved granting the panel subpoena power.

____________________________________

Special thanks to Richard Charter

Wow. This is great news for the East and West coasts and the Gulf; at the expense of Alaska. DV

Dec. 1, 2010, 3:24 p.m. EST

Plans lease sales in already developed areas

By Steve Gelsi, MarketWatch

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — The federal government on Wednesday said it would keep the eastern Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic off limits for oil and gas exploration for now, while planning fresh lease sales in areas already under development.

In its first major oil-lease announcement since the Deepwater Horizon oil spill that began last April and ended in September, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said the oil and gas industry already holds about 29 million acres of offshore leases in undeveloped areas where it⤠s now allowed to explore for new sources of fossil fuel.

Post-Copenhagen, a Cancun compromise?

There are lowered expectations as the world tries to agree modest steps to rein in global warming at U.N. climate talks in Cancun, Mexico.

Salazar canceled plans first disclosed in March to allow some oil and gas leases in the eastern Gulf of Mexico, since many of those regions now fall under a congressional moratorium against offshore drilling, he said.

Areas in the mid and south Atlantic, “are no longer under consideration for potential development through 2017,” the administration said.

The U.S. delayed lease sales from March in the western and central Gulf of Mexico but will still hold an auction by the end of next year or early 2012, he said.

The Cook Inlet and the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas in the Arctic will continue to be considered for potential leasing before 2017. One proposal from Royal Dutch Shell /quotes/comstock/13*!rds.a/quotes/nls/rds.a (RDS.A 62.29, +1.62, +2.67%) Â for an exploratory well in the region remains under consideration, he said.

⤦As a result of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill we learned a number of lessons, most importantly that we need to proceed with caution and focus on creating a more stringent regulatory regime,”said Salazar. “As that regime continues to be developed and implemented, we have revised our initial March leasing strategy to focus and expend our critical resources on areas with leases that are currently active.”

The decision drew a critical response from the American Petroleum Institute, a leading lobbying group for the oil and gas industry.

The group said the move, “shuts the door on new development off our nation’s coasts and effectively ensures that American jobs will not be realized.”
Steve Gelsi is a reporter for MarketWatch in New York.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://www.chipleypaper.com/news/settled-7766-most-spilled.html

I agree with Professor Chanton that it will be impossible for BP to restore the damage it has done to the benthic communities of the Gulf. DV

Holmes County Times Advertiser: Professor believes most spilled oil settled on ocean floor
November 26, 2010 8:42 AM
SARAH OWEN, Florida Freedom Newswire

PANAMA CITY – The oil is still there, sitting at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico and causing damage to the environment, a Florida State University professor who studies greenhouse gases, oceans and energy said Tuesday.

Professor Jeff Chanton compared natural oil seepage in the Gulf of Mexico to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. About 1,000 natural ocean-floor leaks combine to trickle about 400,000 barrels of oil into the Gulf each year, Chanton said, but scientists estimate as many as 60,000 barrels of oil poured into the Gulf each day of the spill.

“While natural seepage is a normal process, what happened this summer was totally overwhelming,” Chanton said.

The professor said he thinks most of that Deepwater Horizon oil – as much as 70 percent to 79 percent of it -sank to the ocean floor, where it remains, sucking up oxygen and inhibiting life.

He and his colleagues are working to determine how that layer of sludge might affect the Gulf and how long it might take for the ecosystem to recover.

“But this is going to be a really hard thing to measure,” he said. “It’s likely that there will be this small, incremental degradation, but it occurs on such a slow scale, and human lives are so short, that people won’t notice it. It’s going to be anecdotal – people will say, ‘Oh, the fishing’s not as good as it used to be.’ ”

Scientists will need money to conduct that research, he added. He’s hoping some money BP is expected to pay in fines will be tucked away in a trust fund for long-term studies.

“The law says BP has to restore things to the way they were, but we don’t even really know how things were,” Chanton added. “It’ll probably be 10 years before we really know the effects.”

Dave Lobell, a self-employed engineer, said he sat in on the lecture to pick up professional development hours and also because he was interested in the topic.

“It was very informative,” Lobell said, although he added that he thought Chanton’s political views were evident in the lecture and that he didn’t necessarily agree with the professor. Besides talking about the oil spill, Chanton also discussed global warming and his opposition to offshore drilling.

_______________________

http://www.pe.com/localnews/opinion/editorials/stories/PE_OpEd_Opinion_D_op_26_ed_bpspill.369705c.html

Press Enterprise
Southern California
Opinion/Editorial

Gulf-spill lessons

10:00 PM PST on Thursday, November 25, 2010
The Press-Enterprise

Oil companies and the federal government need a better approach to oil-drilling disasters than improvising after the fact. The Gulf of Mexico oil leak shows that both the industry and government need to do a better job of planning, and put more money and effort into devising better ways to clean up oil spills.

The lack of readiness is evident in the findings of two reports, released this week, from the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling. President Barack Obama established the panel in May to examine the Deepwater Horizon incident. That offshore well exploded in April, killing 11 people, and spewed oil into the Gulf of Mexico for five months. One report addressed the efforts to stop the leak, while the other assessed cleanup methods.

The reports portray a response to the disaster hindered by an absence of planning for such an event, and cleanup technology that had made only marginal advances since the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill off Alaska. The Deepwater Horizon leak spurred some quick advances in cleanup methods — but only because a catastrophe had already happened.

One of the reports notes that oil companies spend almost no money on researching and developing new ways to scour the ocean after a spill, despite earning billions in profits each year. Over the past two decades, the companies did put some funding behind nonprofit oil spill removal organizations, but those groups focus on cleanup, not research into new technology.

The federal government, likewise, devoted little money to oil spill research over the past two decades. A 1990 law, enacted after the Alaska spill, authorizes up to $28 million a year in such funding, but federal agencies, including the Coast Guard and the Minerals Management Service, have never spent even half that amount in any one year. Nor do federal deficits explain the reluctance to spend: The money comes from a tax on oil production earmarked specifically for cleanup activities.

Oil companies argue that funding research into better ways of preventing leaks is more cost-effective. But while prevention is a crucial safeguard, accidents do happen, as the Deepwater Horizon incident demonstrated. And the aftermath of a spill is the wrong time to start considering more efficient methods to recover leaking oil.

The reports suggest that the federal government should encourage more spending on cleanup research. Steps such as increasing the cap on oil companies’ liability for cleanup costs or offering tax credits for research, for example, could spur development of new technology. The report recommends that the government beef up its research efforts into new cleanup methods, as well.

Federal agencies should also require oil drillers to produce a detailed plan for responding to well blowouts, to show the companies are prepared to deal with such disasters. That step should have been standard long before now, but federal regulators have a history of deferring to the oil industry on safety matters.

The Deepwater Horizon blowout caught the industry and the government off balance and unready. Both failed to learn from the Exxon Valdez disaster two decades earlier — and neither should repeat that mistake this time.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

ATHENS BANNER-HERALD (Georgia) –

http://www.onlineathens.com/stories/112410/opi_740633452.shtml

Published Wednesday, November 24, 2010

University of Georgia marine scientist Charles Hopkinson, director of the Georgia Sea Grant program, ate shrimp and oysters for six days in a row during a recent visit to New Orleans for a meeting, according to an Associated Press report from late last week.

He’s “still here,” he told attendees at an international conference in Charleston, S.C., that considered whether seafood from the Gulf of Mexico, where the Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster spewed millions of gallons of oil, is safe to eat. But, he told the conference, he didn’t base his dining decisions on assurances from the federal government that Gulf seafood doesn’t pose a health hazard.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported recently that less than 1 percent of the 1,700-plus seafood tissue samples tested by the government held any trace of chemicals from the dispersant used in the Gulf of Mexico to break up the oil in the wake of the April explosion.

The FDA and NOAA tests, however, have been criticized in some quarters for not comprising a large enough sample, and not testing for all of the possible toxic components of the dispersant, or for possible toxic components resulting from the dispersant mixing with seawater and oil.

Outside of those criticisms, though, is the simple fact that the government’s record in reporting on the oil spill has done little to inspire public confidence in federal competence or desire to investigate the spill and its aftermath fairly and accurately.

A recently released draft report from the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling, a group of seven people with expertise in the legal, environmental and engineering arenas, and in the oil and gas industry, noted that the administration of President Barack Obama – who, in fairness, established the commission – made erroneous early estimates of the spill’s size and mischaracterized a government analysis by saying it showed most of the oil was gone. More recently, NOAA was reporting that it had not found evidence of oil on the sea floor.

In the wake of those announcements, other scientists, including Hopkinson and fellow UGA marine scientist Samantha Joye, debunked government claims. Regarding the supposed disappearance of the oil, UGA marine scientists noted that the analysis actually indicated only that the oil was dispersed, which meant that most of it still was in the water. Regarding the NOAA report on a lack of oil on the sea floor, a research team led by Joye reported finding thickly embedded oil.

Unfortunately, with that kind of track record preceding its claim that Gulf seafood is safe to eat, it’s little wonder that Hopkinson, calling the government’s errant analyses of the disaster “really disheartening” at the Charleston conference, would further ask, “So why should I believe their claim that the seafood is safe?”

Why, indeed? And there’s a larger issue here, too.

The government’s previously erroneous statements on the extent of the spill can be seen as a political exercise in trying to put the best face on the federal response, at the expense of keeping the public fully and honestly informed. It may be, in fact, that Gulf seafood is safe. But a government assertion of that point necessarily will be met with skepticism. Only now, that skepticism will do more than prompt the public to shake its head at the latest example of government incompetence.

At a time when this country needs to have more people working, a lack of trust in the federal government could adversely affect the working lives of any number of Gulf Coast fishermen and the working lives of people in related businesses.

Originally published in the Athens Banner-Herald on Wednesday, November 24, 2010
Special thanks to Richard Charter