Four congressional Democrats, including the ranking minority members of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee and the House Natural Resources Committee, urged US Interior Sec. Ryan Zinke to delay a federal offshore oil and gas lease sale in the Beaufort Sea off Alaska.
Their Apr. 24 request was a response to the US Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s call for information and nominations several weeks earlier for a proposed lease sale there in 2019 (OGJ Online, Mar. 29, 2018).
Maria E. Cantwell (Wash.), the Senate committee’s top Democrat, and Raul M. Grijalva (Ariz.), who holds a comparable post on the House committee, were joined by Sen. Jeffrey A. Merkley (Ore.) and Rep. Jared Huffman (Calif.), lead sponsors of H.R. 1784, a 2017 bill that would keep the US Department of the Interior from leasing tracts in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas off Alaska.
“As BOEM itself previously recognized in excluding the region entirely from offshore oil leasing in the 2017-22 Outer Continental Shelf Oil and Gas Leasing Program, the harsh and fragile Arctic Ocean is incompatible with expanded offshore drilling,” the four Democrats said in their letter.
“A major oil spill in this unique ecosystem would occur more than a thousand miles from the nearest [US] Coast Guard station, with the threat of sea ice in all seasons, subzero temperatures, storms, fog, and complete darkness up to 20 hr/day,” they noted.
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