Three Republicans in the 115th Congress—Louisiana’s two senators and a member of the House of Representatives from Virginia—introduced legislation to keep a US president from using the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act and Antiquities Act to block offshore energy development and production.
The Outer Continental Shelf Energy Access Now (OCEAN) Act and the Unleashing American Energy Act of 2017 came in advance of an executive order that President Donald J. Trump was expected to issue before the end of this week, Sens. Bill Cassidy and John N. Kennedy and Rep. David J. Brat said separately on Apr. 26. The measures would direct Sec. of the Interior Ryan Zinke to review moratoriums and future leasing schedules, they said.
“Moratoriums and restrictions on energy production hurts American workers and energy security,” said Cassidy, who is a member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. “President Trump pledged to create jobs and this legislation will bring those well-paying jobs with good benefits to Louisiana and all American families.”
Kennedy said, “America must become energy independent, and this goal is well within our country’s reach. However, under President [Barack] Obama, we saw our energy creators become stifled by his ban on offshore oil and gas exploration off US coasts.”
The Obama administration initially retained federal oil and gas lease sales that were planned off the Mid-Atlantic and Alaskan coasts when it assumed power in January 2009. It suspended them following the April 2010 Macondo deepwater oil well blowout that took 11 lives and subsequently spilled an estimate 3.2 million bbl of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico.
A Mid-Atlantic lease sale and three in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas off Alaska were included when DOI issued a draft proposed 2017-22 OCS management program in early 2015 (OGJ Online, Jan. 27, 2015). Witnesses called for a second Mid-Atlantic sale during a House Natural Resource Committee hearing a few months later (OGJ Online, April 16, 2015).
Sale off Virginia canceled
Interior deleted a sale off Virginia’s coast that had been scheduled for 2021 when it released its proposed 2017-22 OCS plan in March 2016. Officials said this was largely in response to US military and public concerns that were much stronger than 5 years earlier (OGJ Online, Mar. 15, 2016).
Toward the end of his presidency, Obama withdrew 40,300 sq miles of the OCS off Alaska’s northern coast from oil and gas leasing (OGJ Online, Dec. 9, 2016). An executive order creating the “Northern Bering Sea Climate Resilience Area” excluded the Norton basin and St. Matthew-Hall planning areas from future OCS lease sales.
“The current limitations on oil exploration needlessly make our country more reliant on energy sources from unstable regions of the world,” Brat said. His bill has 21 GOP cosponsors.
Cassidy and Kennedy said that their bill would:
• Permit the Interior secretary to add additional OCS oil and gas lease sales to an existing 5-year program.
• Allow for new acreage to be made available years earlier than the current process allows.
• Let the Interior secretary reverse the Obama administration’s decisions to remove Artic and Atlantic lease sales from the 2017-22 plan that goes into effect on July 1.
• Stimulate thousands of well-paying jobs along with billions of dollars in investments.
• Add billions of revenue for federal, state, and local governments.
• Ensure continued considerations for state preferences, environmental sensitivity, industry interest, fisheries, marine navigation, and national energy markets.
Contact Nick Snow at [email protected].