Republicans Eye Expanding U.S. Offshore Drilling

http://www.enn.com/today.html?id=8747

WASHINGTON — Barely a month after President Bush signed a $14.5 billion energy bill into law, Hurricane Katrina's destructive dance through the U.S. oilpatch is being seized on by Republicans as a reason to open more federal offshore waters to drilling.

The House and Senate energy committees are also looking at measures to help the energy industry, such as incentives to build the first U.S. refinery since 1976 and cutting the array of fuel blends required by anti-pollution rules.

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Now they have widened their scope to include drilling in banned Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) waters off Florida and other states. Currently, federal offshore drilling is allowed only in Alaska, Alabama, Louisiana and Texas.

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Environmental activists see crass opportunism.

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...and it flies in the face of rationality after the recent hurricanes.

Michael T. Klare discusses the issue at The Nation...

"This is so because the Gulf was the only area of the United States that showed any promise of compensating for the decline of older onshore fields and thus of dampening, to some degree, the nation's thirst for imported oil. There has been much discussion about the potential for drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) in Alaska, but energy professionals scoff at the prospects of obtaining significant amounts of crude there; instead, all of their attention has been on the deep waters of the Gulf. Spurred by the Bush Administration's energy plan, which calls for massive investment in deep-water fields, the big oil firms have poured billions of dollars into new offshore drilling facilities in the Gulf. Before Katrina, these facilities were expected to supply more than 12 percent of America's Lower 48 petroleum output by the end of 2005, and a much larger share in the years thereafter.

It is this promise of future oil that is most in question: Even if older, close-to-shore rigs can be brought back on line, there is considerable doubt about the viability of the billion-dollar deep-water rigs, most of which lie right along the path of recent hurricanes, including Ivan and Katrina. If these cannot be salvaged, there is no hope of slowing the rise in US dependence on imports, ANWR or no ANWR. This can mean one thing only: growing US reliance on oil from Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Angola, Nigeria, Colombia, Venezuela and other conflict-torn producers in the developing world."


http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050919/klare

some they closed in the 90's, preferably at locations removed from the current concentrations to provide some measure of redundancy.

As to offshore production, considering that the shutdown of the Atlantic conveyor will result in further heating of the mid-Atlantic, maybe the first step should be adding Cat. 6 and Cat. 7 categories to hurricane ranking.

To my knowledge, we have no way to estimate hurricane frequency/intensity that occurred during the last shutdown. But considering that heat is hurricane food, the future for GOM offshore production does not look pleasant.

For the same reasons that emergency "surge capacity" in any arena (e.g. hospitals), is unlikely. It's not profitable.

That is why any free-market purist approach to government will inevitably result in total unpreparedness for disaster. Maintaining preparedness for disasters cuts into profits, and so no privatized system will ever do it. Only a government can do it, but it has to be a government staffed by people who believe that privatization is not the inherently best answer to every problem.

Unless and until we throw the current batch of neocons out of power, we will remain unprepared for any significant disaster. Avian flu, earthquake, future hurricanes, terrorist attack, it doesn't matter.