The Obama administration is winning little new support for a compromise proposal to explore for oil and gas in federal waters without drilling.
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar floated the idea at a public meeting in Atlantic City last week, but was rebuffed by environmental groups, which oppose any new offshore exploration for fossil fuels. Salazar is holding forums in
four cities to help determine how, or whether, to allow oil and gas development in coastal waters kept off-limits to the industry by a federal moratorium until recently. He will travel to Anchorage on Tuesday and San Francisco on Thursday.
"We need to know what the facts are, we have to make (decisions) based on the best knowledge we have," Salazar said, responding to a statement by Jacqueline Savitz, a senior director with Oceana, a marine conservation group. "Our information on the Atlantic is 25 years old...we haven't done any scientific assessment of what's out there."
Salazar was referring to seismic imagery, which uses sound waves to map geological formations beneath the seabed. Seismic testing is typically one of the first steps taken to assess an area's potential for oil and gas reserves.
The moratorium, covering federal waters off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, as well as parts of the Gulf of Mexico and offshore Alaska, was allowed to expire last year. Oil prices were close to a record high at the time, increasing pressure to find new sources of energy. Although prices have since fallen sharply, President Barack Obama has not dismissed the Bush administration's push for increased offshore drilling, even as he rolls back some of his predecessor's other industry-friendly energy initiatives.
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$22 million, federally-backed program aims to help outsourcers in South Asia become more fluent in areas like Java programming—and the English language.
Despite President Obama's pledge to retain more hi-tech jobs in the U.S., a federal agency run by a hand-picked Obama appointee has launched a $22 million program to train workers, including 3,000 specialists in IT and related functions, in South Asia.
Following their training, the tech workers will be placed with outsourcing vendors in the region that provide offshore IT and business services to American companies looking to take advantage of the Asian subcontinent's low labor costs.
Under director Rajiv Shah, the United States Agency for International Development will partner with private outsourcers in Sri Lanka to teach workers there advanced IT skills like Enterprise Java (Java EE) programming, as well as skills in business process outsourcing and call center support. USAID will also help the trainees brush up on their English language proficiency.
http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/integration/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=226500202
Roy wrote:I think our flag should be changed to represent the current principles of this nation: green and white stripes, with an inset 50 white dollar signs on a gray background.
Roy wrote:No matter what we USED to stand for, this is what the government of the USA represents, and the majority of its citizens care about more than anything else: money and maximum gain.
2¢
pedalling_faster wrote:there are a lot of industries where we can live without their products.
it sounds like its time for American citizens to boycott American corporations that don't provide jobs for Americans.
3 Forties Oil Cargoes Cancelled On Buzzard Field Issues-Traders
By Sarah Kent, Of DOW JONES NEWSWIRES / NASDAQ / May 4, 2011
Ongoing production issues at the 200,000-barrel-a-day Buzzard field in the North Sea have caused severe delays to cargoes of Forties crude for delivery in May, traders told Dow Jones Newswires Wednesday.
Three cargoes of the North Sea grade, the largest component of the global Brent price benchmark, have been dropped, and over half are facing delays of two to three days, the traders said.
North Sea Buzzard oilfield at reduced rates after restart
Reuters / May 9, 2011
'We restarted the Buzzard platform at reduced rates Saturday morning (in the range of fifty percent),' Nexen spokesman Pierre Alvarez said in an email to Reuters.
Nexen's Yemen Operations Hit By Strike; Buzzard Operation Reduced
By Edward Welsch, Of DOW JONES NEWSWIRES / WSJ / May 9, 2011
Raymond James analyst Kristopher Zack said ... that Buzzard's problems are more meaningful. Buzzard production was 80,500 barrels a day net to Nexen last year, or about a third of its total production. Zack estimated production at about 35,000 barrels a day during the second quarter, which could cut into cash flow per share by about 8%.
Have the Tides Turned Against Offshore Drilling?
By Seth Cline | Staff Writer
Aug. 10, 2017, at 1:51 p.m.
Last month, in one of the North Carolina's most popular beach towns, North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper announced his opposition to offshore drilling.
"It's clear that opening North Carolina's coast to oil and gas exploration and drilling would bring unacceptable risks to our economy, our environment and our coastal communities – and for little potential gain," Cooper said from Atlantic Beach, North Carolina. "As governor, I'm here to speak out and take action against it. I can sum it up in four words: not off our coast."
When oil drilling off the southeast coast was proposed by President Barack Obama in 2015, Cooper's press conference may have stood apart from the bipartisan consensus that supported the idea?
But now, two years later, the Democratic governor's stance is less noteworthy. More than 125 municipalities along the coast have formally opposed drilling or seismic testing, and just one coastal governor in the Southeast still supports it.
What changed? Not local opinion, says Sierra Weaver, an attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center.
"The local communities have always been against offshore drilling, it's really a matter of them getting educated about what's at stake," Weaver says. "What has shifted is interest at the state level or the political level."
The issue of offshore drilling is one that often defies partisan loyalties. President George H. W. Bush instituted a moratorium on drilling off the southeastern coast, which President Bill Clinton extended, but President George W. Bush ended.
After the BP oil spill in 2010 derailed Obama's first attempt to open the East Coast to oil rigs, he tried again in 2015. Attention to the spill had subsided, the president's approval rating was on the rise, and every affected governor backed the plan, as did senators of both parties and many statehouses. The idea had momentum.
But coastal communities bucked. A grassroots movement born in Kure Beach, North Carolina pushed back against the town's mayor, then-Gov. Pat McCrory, and other political supporters. More than a million public comments were submitted about the proposal, many citing the environmental and economic harm that oil drilling and exploration would cause.
"It baffled me why the previous administration could be so adamantly against the Keystone pipeline and then wanted to go offshore and drill," says Jeff Oden, a commercial fisherman in Cape Hatteras, North Carolina.
For fishermen such as Oden, who face strict environmental regulations every time they go out, the drilling campaign is hypocritical.
"We’re regulated to the hilt and we’re just asking for a fair shake. We’re just looking to get the job done," Oden says. "You’re gonna have oil companies coming in that don’t need it and you’re gonna take a livelihood."
Critics of offshore drilling say the practice could decimate coastal fisheries, a $95 million business in North Carolina. Seismic surveys – in which ships blast underwater airguns to detect oil and gas deposits – are particularly disruptive, especially to marine mammals like whales and dolphins.
Oden, who also owns a motel in Cape Hatteras, says the potential threat to tourism is another reason for his opposition.
"It’s incredible what could happen, and to turn a blind eye and forget the Gulf oil spill is unbelievable," he says. "The bottom line is there's way more to lose than there is to gain in this venture."
In the end, scientists, fishermen and small business owners – three groups that don't always see eye-to-eye – were among those who opposed the drilling proposal. The campaign worked: The Obama administration removed southeast Atlantic coast drilling from its five-year plan last year.
But the fight is not over. In April, President Donald Trump signed an executive order aimed at reviewing Obama's five-year plan and making millions of ocean acres eligible for oil and gas leasing. This time around, the political tides may have shifted.
In South Carolina, like in North Carolina, the new governor opposes offshore drilling. And after a visible anti-drilling campaign in 2015 and the collapse of another high-profile energy project – two new nuclear plants – South Carolinians may be skeptical of a new drilling push.
"That ship has pretty much sailed and I think the only thing that would change anyone's mind on this issue would be higher gas prices," says Tyler Jones, a longtime political consultant in South Carolina. "There's not a whole lot of oil off our coast and so the juice isn't worth the squeeze, so to speak."
Low gas prices in South Carolina likely contribute to the ebb in offshore drilling support, Jones says. Indeed, gas prices across the country are among the lowest in the decade, and South Carolina has the nation's cheapest gas.
The state's dependence on tourism and Charleston's political pull also blur the partisan battle lines, says Matt Moore, a former South Carolina Republican Party chair.
"The Republican Party base extends a lot of grace on this issue – black and white lines have not been drawn," Moore says. "The closer a person lives to the coast, the less likely they are to support offshore drilling. It's a classic 'Not In My Backyard' issue which makes it an extremely narrow line to walk as a politician."
In Virginia, public opinion may be shifting as well. Though Gov. Terry McAuliffe supports offshore drilling, in the past year, Sen. Tim Kaine has reconsidered his support for it, and Lieutenant Gov. Ralph Northam, the Democratic nominee in this year's gubernatorial election, is a vocal opponent. The state's two largest cities, Norfolk and Virginia Beach, have voted to formally oppose offshore drilling and the Department of Defense, which operates the world's largest naval base in that region, has also voiced concerns about offshore drilling, citing potential disruptions to military exercises.
Proponents of offshore drilling say the practice is not as destructive as it's often portrayed.
“What you see along the coast is a lot of exaggeration of what this could mean in terms of impact on tourism fisheries and the coastline," says Erik Milito, a spokesman for the American Petroleum Institute. "We know from around the world this is certainly compatible with military exercises, with tourism, with fishing and with coastal economies in general."
Much of the recent anti-drilling sentiment is political, and often magnified by media coverage of activists and other drilling opponents, he says.
“Because we’re going through the process again we’re seeing an uptick in the amount of noise coming from the activist community," Milito says. "There are supporters in the coastal states that just aren’t as loud as a lot of the opposition when it comes to discussing this issue.”
Because of a "drumbeat of fear" that’s pushed into the debate, voters and politicians often lose sight of the long-term goals, he says.
“If we move 10 to 20 years down the road and we start seeing declines in the Gulf of Mexico what are we gonna replace that with?”
Trump officials have acknowledged that the plan to open the southern Atlantic to drilling will take years, and the Obama administration's five-year plan will remain in effect during that time. But the conflict will likely come to a head eventually.
"Trump's administration has said he intends to make the U.S. energy dominant. These communities have said they don't want drilling. So there's gonna be a fight," Weaver, the environmental lawyer, says.
Whether that fight will be enough to kill the proposal a second time remains to be seen.
"It doesn't seem like a death knell given the divided opinion among Republican officials," says Moore, the former GOP chairman. "When it comes to American energy independence the country is in a much different place than it was even 5 years ago, so there's not a pressing need, but external events have a way of changing things."
Energy dominance begins at home, and that includes any beachfront property you might have. The Interior Department unveiled on Thursday a draft proposal for leasing areas of the U.S. outer continental shelf for oil and gas drilling between 2019 and 2024. As five-year plans go, it's an ambitious one, envisaging leasing on fully 25 out of 26 planning areas -- from sea to shining sea, as it were: ClearView Energy Partners (which provided the data for that chart) points out in a report published on Friday morning that the proposal is probably padded for a purpose. Interior knows the list will get whittled down over time, so it's starting bigly. For an oil and gas industry seeking new prospects, that makes the proposal at least partly a mirage. It's not that there aren't potentially good prospects out there. Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico
Alfred Tennyson wrote:We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
vtsnowedin wrote:This will be a big issue this fall and again in 2020. The outcome of those elections will set the course or scrap this plan. Eventually we will need any oil that is out on the coastal shelves and we will drill it all. Just a matter of when.
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