http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jun2010/2010-06-16-091.html

NEW  ORLEANS, Louisiana, June 16, 2010 (ENS) – A coalition of environmental groups today took legal action on behalf of the U.S. government to oppose a lawsuit aimed at prematurely canceling the moratorium on deepwater oil drilling.

On June 7, Hornbeck Offshore Services, based in Covington, Louisiana, filed suit in federal court in the Eastern District of Louisiana against Ken Salazar in his capacity as secretary of the U.S. Department of the Interior.

The oil services company accuses Salazar and the Obama administration of violating the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act by issuing the six-month moratorium on certain deepwater oil drilling.
Hornbeck, which has some 1,300 employees, alleges that the shutdown of deep water drilling operations illegally interferes with its business contracts, is “arbitrary and capricious” and was not done in accordance with applicable federal regulations.
The company asks the court for a permanent injunction to stop the drilling moratorium.

The coalition of conservation groups wants the court to uphold the moratorium.

“The moratorium on drilling is crucial to ensure that safety and environmental measures are in place to prevent the next Deepwater Horizon oil spill,” said Miyoko Sakashita, oceans director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “The industry attempt to overturn the moratorium is an unacceptable gamble with the fate of the Gulf coasts human and natural environment.”

After the BP-leased oil rig Deepwater Horizon exploded and caught fire in the Gulf of Mexico April 20, President Obama ordered Secretary Salazar to begin a 30-day review of all exploration and production operations on the Outer Continental Shelf.

The review resulted in a report that concluded the drilling of new offshore deepwater wells “poses an unacceptable threat of serious and irreparable harm to wildlife and the marine, coastal, and human environment.”

On May 28, the Obama administration imposed a six-month moratorium on new deep water oil wells.
But in its lawsuit, Hornbeck argues that the moratorium is unjustified because, “The report contains no finding or evidence of a systemic failure by rig operators, drillers or other participants in offshore drilling operations to comply with current regulations or existing permits.”

“If anything, the moratorium does not do enough to end risky drilling, since there have yet to be true reforms to the lax safety and environmental oversight of offshore drilling,” said Sakashita. “The moratorium is already a compromise, which is narrowly tailored to allow most drilling to continue despite exemptions of environmental review.”

“We are still struggling to combat the largest environmental catastrophe ever faced by the Gulf of Mexico,” said Sakashita. “The industry challenge to the moratorium flies in the face of good common sense.”

The moratorium prohibits the Minerals Management Service from processing new applications for deepwater drilling operations, which affects 33 rigs.

The conalition of conservation groups includes the Center for Biological Diversity, Sierra Club, Florida Wildlife Federation, Defenders of Wildlife and the Natural Resources Defense Council, represented by staff attorneys, Earthjustice and the Southern Environmental Law Center.

The coalition points out that many of the suspended drilling applications have oil spill response plans that are similar to BP’s cookie-cutter plan that has been proven to be “tragically inadequate.”

The gulf region generates tens of billions of dollars annually for the commercial seafood industry and recreational fishing industry, the groups point out. As a result of the BP oil spill, one-third of the gulf is under a government-imposed fisheries closure.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

Clean Energy Congress
June 28-29, 2010
House Chamber, Florida State Capitol
Tallahassee, Florida

Florida has an opportunity to grow our economy and create jobs by establishing a market for the clean tech sector. For this reason and many more, there is an increasing urgency to put state and federal policies in place to attract investments to the state.

Don’t miss a unique opportunity to create a vision for a sustainable energy future for
Florida and the nation.
To submit ideas or participate as a delegate or observer,visit www.cleanenergycongress.org.

Space is limited so respond right away.

Monday, June 28
10:00 am Presentations
12:00 pm Lunch – 22nd Floor, Capitol
1:30 – 5:30 pm Discussion of delegate proposals
5:30 – 7:00 pm Reception – 22nd Floor, Capitol

Tuesday, June 29
8:30 am Adoption of Ideas and Policy Recommendations
12:00 pm Congress Adjourns
12:15 pm Press Conference and Signing Ceremony
“Declaration of Energy Independence”

For more information, visit www.cleanenergycongress.org
or e-mail cleanenergycongress@gmail.com.

The Clean Energy Congress is sponsored by The Florida Business Network for a Clean Energy Economy.

Special thanks to State Representative Michelle Rehwinkel Vasilinda who co-created the concept, is sponsoring our use of the House Chamber and the 22nd Floor, and has been spent many hours helping to plan the event.

http://www.naplesnews.com/news/2010/jun/17/oil-spill-threat-southwest-florida-low-coast-guard/

By Naples Daily News staff report

Originally published 01:29 p.m., June 17, 2010
Updated 01:40 p.m., June 17, 2010

The man leading the U.S. Coast Guard oil spill response on Florida’s west coast said Thursday that the threat to Southwest Florida is low but he’s prepared.

“We are being vigilant, we’re being very vigilant,” said Capt. Timothy Close, commander of the Coast Guard’s St. Petersburg sector, a branch of the Florida Peninsula Command Post set up for the oil spill.

Close spoke and answered questions for more than an hour at a meeting in Fort Myers of the Southwest Florida Regional Planning Council.

A research vessel west of Tampa Bay, two BP ships west of Key West and a C-130 aircraft flying from the St. Petersburg Naval Air Station are keeping daily track of the spill’s track toward Florida, Close said.

So far, only patches of light oil have been spotted in a clockwise eddy that has detached from the Loop Current west of the coast between Tampa and Naples, he said.

When 72-hour projections of the spill bring it within 94 miles of the coast – into a so-called trigger zone – Close sits down with spill responders to discuss what response is needed, if any.

That has happened two or three times, Close said, but the spill has always retreated back over the trigger line without any action being required.

He said the Coast Guard has confirmed one tar ball a man said he had collected from St. Petersburg Beach, but tests determined it was not associated with the Deepwater Horizon gusher.

Should the oil get close enough to threaten Southwest Florida, Close said, he is “confident” resources will be available to respond.

“We’ll have a pretty substantial period of time to start jumping on it,” Close said. “We’re watching every single day.”

Close said he has met with local emergency managers to fine-tune Coast Guard response plans, including locations for booms.

The response plans call for booms to be laid across passes and inlets to keep oil out of mangrove shorelines and marshes, where oil would be hardest to clean up.

“It’s not about protecting the beaches,” Close said.

Thanks to Richard Charter

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-06-17/bp-gulf-spill-fuels-australian-opponents-to-drilling-update1-.html
 (Update1)
June 17, 2010, 3:15 AM EDT
By James Paton
June 17 (Bloomberg) — BP Plc’s Gulf of Mexico disaster is generating opposition to deepwater drilling off Australia, where the government is opening new exploration areas less than a year after the country’s third-worst oil spill.

Resources Minister Martin Ferguson will receive the results tomorrow of an investigation into last August’s Timor Sea oil spill, he said in a phone interview. A month ago, he invited companies to bid for permits to explore new “frontiers” as Australia faces an import cost for oil and liquid fuels that may double in five years to A$30 billion ($26 billion). The country was self sufficient in oil as recently as 2000.

Ferguson, who today ruled out suspending exploration, is offering 31 drilling areas in waters as deep as 3,750 meters, more than twice the depth of BP’s leaking well. Australia’s expanded search for oil and gas comes as BP’s spill, the worst in U.S. history, focuses attention on petroleum industry safety.

“We should hold off on exploring in some of the deeper basins,” said Tina Hunter, an assistant law professor at Bond University in Queensland state who studies offshore oil regulation. “The last thing we need is to go into deeper waters and risk something like what happened in the U.S.”

Chevron Corp., Royal Dutch Shell Plc and ConocoPhillips are among companies planning more than $185 billion of oil and gas projects in the country, according to the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association.

‘Accidents Will Happen’

Increased drilling adds to the risk a disaster the size of the BP Gulf spill could occur off Australia, said Justin Marshall, a professor at the University of Queensland.

“The public needs much greater assurance accidents can be dealt with effectively, because they will happen,” Marshall, a former president of the Australian Coral Reef Society, said by phone yesterday. “Safety measures need to be enforced at a much higher level, the risks to the environment are huge.”

The U.S. probe into the BP spill and what caused the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig to explode on April 20, killing 11 workers, will focus on safety lapses and equipment failures.
Oil producers around the world are bracing for stricter regulation. Norway will ban any deepwater drilling in new areas until the cause of the BP spill is known, Oil Minister Terje Riis-Johansen said June 8. Russia may tighten its rules, Energy Minister Sergei Shmatko said May 24.

Obama Response

BP’s spill was initially overseen by the U.S. Minerals Management Service. The agency, faulted for lax regulation, was broken into three by President Barack Obama on May 19, creating bodies to oversee leases, drilling safety and fee collection.

When Ferguson opened the new areas on May 17, he said the country must streamline rules to make a single agency responsible for safety, well operations and the environment.
“There is no intention by the government to scale back the development of the oil and gas industry in Australia,” Ferguson said today. “It is very important in terms of the nation’s energy security, jobs and the overall economy, but I am totally focused on the need to ensure we have the absolute best practices in place.”

The National Offshore Petroleum Safety Authority, the Australian Maritime Safety Authority and the Northern Territory Department of Resources are among bodies that had oversight of the Montara spill.

Moratorium Needed

Australia needs a yearlong moratorium on deepwater drilling to study the Montara report and the BP spill, Bond University’s Hunter told Bloomberg Television today.

Companies drilled 1,500 wells off Australia in the 25 years before the Montara accident without any blowouts, the petroleum group said. Explorers face stringent environmental conditions before drilling, Chief Executive Officer Belinda Robinson said in an e-mailed response to questions.

Last year’s spill, about 250 kilometers (155 miles) off the Kimberley coast, shows Australia needs a single agency to monitor well safety, protect the marine environment and oversee spill response, according to Hunter.

Calls to strengthen Australian regulations began before the Montara incident when a 2008 explosion at Apache Corp.’s Varanus Island gas plant caused fuel shortages in Western Australia, source of a third of the nation’s exports.

‘Consistent Approach’

“Some of the issues that have arisen as a result of the Varanus and Montara incidents mean we need to revisit our regulatory system and make sure we have the strongest possible national, consistent approach, rather than allowing potential differences to develop,” Ferguson said.

Montara may have spilled about 30,000 barrels of oil between Aug. 21 and Nov. 3, based on estimates by Bangkok-based PTT. That would make it the third-biggest spill in Australian history, according to figures from the Maritime Safety Authority.

The Timor Sea accident and a Chinese coal carrier that ran aground in April on the Great Barrier Reef have already damaged the marine environment, University of Queensland’s Marshall said.

“The ocean is full of life, and when that oil sinks to the bottom it’s going to be killing things,” he said.

Australian Greens party Senator Rachel Siewert urged the government to scrap the latest set of new drilling permits, concerned about the threat to whales, seals, turtles and other marine life in one area marked for exploration off the Western Australian coast. Parts of this block are “extremely deep,” as much as 3,750 meters, the Resources Department said.
“If a Montara-size spill occurred there, you’d see oil on the coast,” Siewert said in a telephone interview. “There are dangers inherent in deepwater production, and the government should put a hold on exploration that we have control over.”
______________________________________________

–With assistance from Rishaad Salamat in Hong Kong. Editors: John Viljoen, Peter Langan.
To contact the reporter on this story: James Paton in Sydney jpaton4@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Amit Prakash at aprakash1@bloomberg.net.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

Here on the open ocean, 12 miles from ground zero of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the gulf is hovering between life and death.

The large strands of sargassum seaweed atop the ocean are normally noisy with birds and thick with crustaceans, small fish and sea turtles. But now this is a silent panorama, heavy with the smell of oil.

There are no birds. The seaweed is soaked in rust-colored crude and chemical dispersant. It is devoid of life except for the occasional juvenile sea turtle, speckled with oil and clinging to the only habitat it knows. Thick ribbons of oil spread out through the sea like the strips in egg flower soup, gorgeous and deadly.

A few dead fish float in the water, though dolphin-fish, tuna, flying fish and the occasional shark can still be seen swimming near the surface, threading their way through the wavy, sometimes iridescent gobs of crude.

“This is devastating. I mean literally, it’s terrible. All this should be pretty much blue water, and — look at it. It just looks bad,” said Kevin Aderhold, a longtime charter fishing captain who has been taking a team of researchers deep into the gulf every day to rescue oil-soaked sea turtles.

“When this first happened, a lot of us were like, they’ll cap that thing and we’ll be out fishing again. Now reality’s set in. Look around you. This is long-term. This’ll be here for-ev-er.”

And then it gets worse. When the weather is calm and the sea is placid, ships trailing fireproof booms corral the black oil, the coated seaweed and whatever may be caught in it, and torch it into hundred-foot flames, sending plumes of smoke skyward in ebony mushrooms. This patch of unmarked ocean gets designated over the radio as “the burn box.”

Wildlife researchers operating here, in the regions closest to the spill, are witnesses to a disquieting choice: Protecting shorebirds, delicate marshes and prime tourist beaches along the coast by stopping the oil before it moves ashore has meant the largely unseen sacrifice of some wildlife out at sea, poisoned with chemical dispersants and sometimes boiled by the burning of spilled oil on the water’s surface.

“It reflects the conventional wisdom of oil spills: If they just keep the oil out at sea, the harm will be minimal. And I disagree with that completely,” said Blair Witherington, a research scientist with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission who has been part of the sea turtle rescue mission.

By unhappy coincidence, the same convergences of ocean currents that create long mats of sargassum — nurturing countless crabs, slugs and surface fish that are crucial food for turtles, birds and larger fish — also coalesce the oil, creating islands of death sometimes 30 miles long.

“Most of the Gulf of Mexico is a desert. Nothing out there to live on. It’s all concentrated in these oases,” Witherington said.

“Ordinarily, the sargassum is a nice, golden color. You shake it, and all kinds of life comes out: shrimp, crabs, worms, sea slugs. The place is really just bursting with life. It’s the base of the food chain. And these areas we’re seeing here by comparison are quite dead,” he said.

“It’s amazing. We’ll see flying fish, and they’ll land in this stuff and just get stuck.”

Hardest hit of all, it appears, are the sea jellies and snails that drift along the gulf’s surface, some of the most important food sources for sea turtles.

“These animals drift into the oil lines and it’s like flies on fly paper,” Witherington said. “As far as I can tell, that whole fauna is just completely wiped out.”

* * *

The turtle rescue team sets out at 6 a.m. in the muggy warm stillness of the harbor at Venice, La. The researchers move into the open gulf about an hour later, past a line of shrimp boats deputized to lay boom along the coastal marshes.

Closer to the Deepwater Horizon site, the water takes on a foreboding gray pallor tinged with a rainbow-like sheen. Soon, the oil begins swirling around the boat and the seascape smells like an auto mechanic’s garage.

Strewn among the oil and seaweed are human flotsam: an orange hardhat, a pie pan, a wire coat hanger, yellow margarine-tub lids, a black-and-green ashtray. The crew has found papers — long at sea on global currents — bearing inscriptions in Spanish, Arabic, Greek and Chinese.

The only sound that breaks the stillness is the deep thrum of the motors of the large charter boat and a small skiff carrying the turtle researchers. From dawn until nearly dusk, across sargassum islands that normally are alive with birds looking for crabs and snails — bridal terns, shearwaters, storm-petrels — only one bird is seen.

“What’s amazing is there’s so little bird life out here right now. Either they’ve moved on, or the oiling has had a tremendous impact,” said Kate Sampson, a researcher with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who is part of the turtle rescue team.

“We saw a few yesterday. We saw a few laughing gulls fly by. They were oiled, but they could still fly. And we saw a northern gannet, a diving bird. It was oiled too,” she said. “I can only imagine that the birds left because the dining hall is closed.”

Soon, the rising towers of the Discoverer Enterprise drill ship, which is collecting oil and gas from the damaged well, and the tall rigs boring two relief wells miles into the seabed appear through the haze. A flare of burning natural gas is silhouetted against the gray hull of the ship.

The Premier Explorer, which is helping coordinate cleanup operations at the broken well, announces the day’s burn box: A 500-square-mile field within which 16 controlled burns will be conducted.

In the days since the April 20 explosion on the Deepwater Horizon, more than 5 million gallons of oil have been consumed in more than 165 burns.

“The real issue is to stop this thing at the source, do maximum skimming, in-situ burning — deal with it as far off shore as possible, and do everything you can to keep it from getting to shore, because once it’s into the marshes, quite frankly, I think we would all agree there’s no good solution at that point,” Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen told reporters last week.

But the burn operations have proved particularly excruciating for the turtle researchers, who have been trolling the same lines of oil and seaweed as the boom boats, hoping to pull turtles out of the sargassum before they are burned alive.

Much of the wildlife here seems doomed in any case. “We’ve seen the oil covering the turtles so thick they could barely move, could hardly lift their heads,” Witherington said. “I won’t pretend to know which is the nastiest.”

Yet in one case, the crew had to fall back and watch as skimmers gathered up a long line of sargassum that hadn’t yet been searched — and which they believe was full of turtles that might have been saved.

“In a perfect world, they’d gather up the material and let us search it before they burned it,” Witherington said. “But that connection hasn’t been made. The lines of communication aren’t there.”

The smoke starts rising on the horizon at midday. The two boats carrying the researchers head in different directions, hoping to find and rescue a few more turtles before their mission wraps up. They find 11, all of them heavily speckled with oil.

Each day, the chances of rescues grow smaller. That there are still so many left stranded in the oil without food is a small miracle. Their long-term chances “are zero,” Witherington said.

“Turtles just take a long time to die.”

kim.murphy@latimes.com

Thanks to Mark Spaulding