Obama Must Approve a Five-Year Oil Drilling Plan in the Atlantic before July 1

EIN News says, "U.S. Scrambling to Meet Offshore Drilling Date. The Obama administration has less than 10 months to finish assembling its plan for selling offshore drilling leases over the next five years, and some oil industry leaders are worried the government is barely on track to meet a July 1 deadline for issuing the document. (chron.com)".

This issue has been made unnecessarily complicated. There is so much written about it that it takes a tremendous amount of time to sort out the relevant facts.

However, the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act was created by Congress in 1953. Congress designated the Secretary of the Interior as the administrator of the act. The Minerals Management Service (MMS) was the bureau within the Department of the Interior that is

responsible for implementing the requirements of the Act. A 1996 study by the US Minerals Management Service (MMS) estimated undiscovered conventionally recoverable resources in Atlantic federal waters to be 7,200,000,000 barrels (1.14×109 m3) of oil and 27.5 trillion cubic feet (TCF) gas. This means we are really talking about a large potential increase in US oil production. Previous drilling under the old five-year plan was not productive, but there has been significant improvement in drilling technology.

Section 18 of the Act calls for the preparation of an oil and gas leasing program indicating a 5-year schedule of lease sales

designed to best meet the nation’s energy needs.

The MMS is in the process of preparing a possible new 5-year program for 2010-2015, to replace the current program for 2007-2012. The last five-year plan will end on June 30, 2012. It must be either reinstated or replaced by a new plan. In either case, Congress and the President must approve the plan before it can become effective, which means leases can be offered. Required by law, the document lays out every planned government auction of drilling leases in federal waters for a five-year period. If a sale doesn't make it into the plan, it can't happen. "In the offshore, nothing happens without the five-year program," noted Dan Naatz, executive vice president of the Independent Petroleum Association of America. "It is the bible" of how offshore development moves forward.

My concern is the integrity of the approval system.

Elizabeth Birnbaum was head of the Minerals Management Service at the time of the BP oil spill in the Gulf. She was forced to resign. Her replacement is Michael R. Bromwich and the MMS name has been changed to Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement (BOEMRE). The key point is that Bromwich works for Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, who in turn works for Pres. Obama. The Obama/Salazar program has been to strongly support sustainable energy sources, such as solar and wind and to inhibit further petroleum production.

I caution Congress to not let the five-year lease plan default or be replaced by something which is contrary to further development of US oil production through its leasing program. More succinctly, Congress should pay close attention to what Obama and Salazar are doing in this area.