Administration Delays Study of Offshore Oil, Gas Reserves, Lawmaker Says

CQ Roll Call
By Randy Leonard
January 10, 2014

The Obama administration is slow-walking a seismic survey of potential oil and gas reserves off the Atlantic coast to keep the region out of the next five-year series of lease sales, a House subcommittee chairman said Friday.

Colorado Republican Doug Lamborn, chairman of the Natural Resources Energy and Mineral Resources Subcommittee, questioned the five years it has taken the Interior Department to conduct a comprehensive environmental report that will set up a framework for additional assessments required before surveys can proceed.

“The development is being stifled by the administration,” Lamborn said, adding that it was urgent to get the surveys done in time to include parcels off the East Coast in the next series of lease sales. The current five-year program runs through 2017.

“Five years and counting — when will the U.S. Atlantic finally see this activity?” Lamborn said.

Appropriators directed the administration in a 2010 conference report to conduct a study of the environmental impact of oil and gas exploration on the Atlantic’s Outer Continental Shelf.

The study has been complicated by the volume of comments and new scientific information but the delay would not preclude the region from being considered in the next lease sale program, Cruickshank said. If approved, drilling in the region could begin in four or five years, he said, adding that he expects the report next month.

“We can consider whether or not to include the South Atlantic in the next five-year program without those seismic surveys having been completed,” he said.

Seismic surveys of the Atlantic in the 1980s used technology that is now outdated, panelists said. New imaging technology has more than doubled the drilling success rate to 70 percent, said James H. Knapp, an earth and ocean professor at the University of South Carolina.

In the Gulf of Mexico, surveys with modern equipment increased the estimates of oil reserves by a factor of five, said Richie Miller, president of survey company Spectrum Geo.

“We would expect the same thing, just with this new technology off the East Coast,” he told lawmakers.

Drilling supporters hope that estimates of rich oil and gas reserves will build support for developing the offshore resources. Critics say expanding drilling to the Atlantic coast should not proceed at least until Congress enacts legislation embracing the recommendations of a blue ribbon commission that studied the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

“I believe that would be a huge mistake — we should not be risking our fishing and tourism industries,” said New Jersey Democrat Rush D. Holt, who introduced an offshore drilling safety bill (HR 3780) last month. “It’s foolish to rush to open new areas to offshore drilling before we have heeded the lessons of the last disaster.”

Enacting the recommendations by the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill should come ahead of any steps to open more offshore areas to oil and gas drilling, said Donald F. Boesch, president of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science who served on the oil spill commission.

“They’re really a predicate, before we make these other decisions to move into other areas,” he said.

Fishing industry and environmental groups object to the seismic surveys, which deploy underwater air bursts that can harm or kill wildlife and may disrupt fish populations.

Several panelists told the subcommittee that mitigation measures would be used to monitor and avoid wildlife, but a draft environmental report stated that mitigation would probably not be 100 percent effective.

The debate over wildlife injury or avoidance from seismic surveys is a “legitimate scientific controversy,” Boesch said, “The science isn’t all lined up in the same direction.”

In a letter Thursday, Holt, fellow New Jersey Democrat Frank Pallone Jr. and two other Democratic members urged Interior Secretary Sally Jewell to involve the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in considering the potential impacts of seismic surveys on wildlife, a change recommended after the BP oil spill.

“We seek your assurances that NOAA is now a full partner in decisions related to this development,” they wrote.