As US President George W. Bush signed the 2005 energy bill requiring the first significant evaluation of potential Outer Continental Shelf resources in years, coastal US states and Canadian provinces already were working on their own study. The main difference is that members of the North American Coastal Alliance emphasize cooperation over confrontation. They will discuss their work during the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission’s annual meeting in Jackson Hole, Wyo., Sept. 17-20.
Sandy McMullin, a director of the Nova Scotia Department of Energy, and Dan Seamount, a member of Alaska’s Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, cochair NACA. In separate telephone interviews, they emphasized the group’s neutrality.
“We discuss common issues,” McMullin said. “What we extract from it, as a province, is knowing and developing relationships with our counterparts in other coastal states. That’s a key aspect.”
Using existing data
Another is NACA’s interest in helping policy-makers in Canada and the US make decisions, he continued. That’s what’s behind the current effort, which doesn’t develop new data but tries to pull existing information together. “There is work you can do based on analogs to existing basins along the continental basin,” McMullin said. “We have a geologic feature we refer to as the Jurassic Carbonate bank, about 3,000 m below the surface, that is believed to go all the way to the Bahamas.” A small part of that, the Deep Panuke bank, has been explored, and EnCana Corp. made a significant gas discovery there in 2003. “So it may be possible to look at data from offshore Nova Scotia and apply it, to a very limited extent, to regions farther down,” McMullin explained.
Not just OCS
NACA’s evaluation, which it hopes to complete by the end of 2005, also will incorporate information beyond federal areas. Seamount noted that 1975 legislation put Katchimak Bay off limits to oil and gas activity. Its relatively small resource potential means opening it would not contribute much to energy supplies.
Bristol Bay is another story. “There, the OCS is still off limits, but the state has opened its 3-mile-wide band with limited drilling from onshore locations. With the technology we have today, those resources are accessible up to 3 miles out,” Seamount said. NACA works, however, because it includes states reluctant to allow more oil and gas activity off their coasts. “The committee has been effective, and will continue to be effective, because it’s an opportunity for coastal state regulators to share information, both from a production and environmental standpoint,” observed Hal Bopp, the California Department of Conservation’s oil and gas supervisor. “We meet with federal officials, particularly from the Department of Energy and Minerals Management Service,” he said from his Sacramento office. “The states have different perspectives, and a wide range of knowledge. It’s been valuable to me for gaining information about regulating offshore activities and the issues that are involved.”✦
