New York Times Editorial: Drill, but Not Everywhere/Washington Post Editorial: An offshore necessity

New York Times Editorial: Drill, but Not Everywhere
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: March 31, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/01/opinion/01thu1.html?th&emc=th


For years, the debate over offshore drilling for gas and oil has been a war of sound bites between the “drill now, drill everywhere” crowd that dominated the Bush administration and the Republican campaign in 2008, and members of the environmental community who would leave the country’s outer continental shelf untouched.

Neither provided a satisfying answer to the twin demands of reducing this country’s dependence on foreign oil and protecting precious coastal areas. On Wednesday, President Obama struck a sensible middle ground.

He announced a decision to expand oil and gas exploration in selected areas of America’s coastal waters that will satisfy neither extreme but is, on the whole, a careful and useful addition to the steps he has already taken to reduce the nation’s energy dependence.

Mr. Obama noted pointedly and correctly that increased oil and gas drilling cannot possibly address the country’s long-term energy needs. It should be seen as just one element of his broader energy strategy — including fuel efficiency standards to be announced on Thursday, big investments in alternative fuels in the stimulus package and new loan guarantees for nuclear power.

The new strategy — the result of more than a year of work by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar — also confronts an essential political reality: the Senate will insist on offshore drilling as part of a broader bill, expected after Easter, addressing climate change and other energy-related problems. Mr. Obama is trying to anticipate and shape that discussion by identifying areas that he thinks can responsibly be opened for exploration while quarantining others.

Nearly all of America’s coastal waters have been up for grabs since 2008 when President George W. Bush lifted a longstanding presidential moratorium on drilling in the outer continental shelf. A few months later, Congress allowed a parallel Congressional moratorium to expire. Mr. Bush also lifted a separate moratorium on drilling in Alaska’s Bristol Bay that was imposed by his father in 1990 after the Exxon Valdez spill. Bristol Bay is home to America’s richest fishing grounds and is the main driver of a $2.2 billion regional fishing industry.

Under the Obama administration’s plan, Bristol Bay will once again be completely protected, which is wonderful news. Further north in Arctic waters, the plan would allow drilling on existing leases in relatively small areas of the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas to proceed — which seemed inevitable, given legal and economic obstacles to reversing them. It would, however, postpone any further development pending the outcome of detailed scientific and environmental studies. Alaska’s environmentalists were encouraged, and they should be.

The rest of the plan is as significant for the areas it protects as for those it opens. Exploration will not be allowed on the Pacific Coast or along the Atlantic Coast north of Delaware. Seismic exploration — which in effect means exploratory drilling — will be allowed along the central and southern Atlantic Coast from Delaware to Florida, but, again, no new leases will be granted until the scoping process and the environmental reviews are finished.

The Interior Department’s seismic information is decades old, and one important point of the new plan is to discover what’s out there. The department’s most optimistic present estimate of the resources in the areas covered by the plan, including the Gulf of Mexico, is 63 billion barrels of economically recoverable oil.

That sounds like a lot, but it isn’t, since the United States consumes more than 7 billion barrels each year. As Mr. Obama noted, the basic energy math remains unchanged: a country that consumes one-quarter of the world’s oil, but owns about 2 percent of the world’s known reserves, cannot drill its way to self-sufficiency.


Washington Post Editorial: An offshore necessity
Copyright by the Washington Post
Thursday, April 1, 2010
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/31/AR2010033103708.html


ON WEDNESDAY President Obama proposed lifting a federal moratorium on offshore oil and gas drilling in large areas off the Atlantic seaboard, in the Gulf of Mexico and off the Alaskan coast, fulfilling a commitment he made in his State of the Union address. Environmental groups attacked the administration's decision, claiming that it is ecologically destructive, counterproductive to the goal of greening the economy and bad for coastal economies.

Yet any reasonable projection indicates that America will consume vast amounts of fossil fuel in the coming decades regardless of the carbon-curbing policies in place. Given that, there is no reason to avoid tapping its reserves, if they can be reached affordably and with appropriate care for the environment.

The way to determine the size and viability of these fields is to explore them, following federal geological studies where appropriate; companies bidding for federal leases can assess the risk that they aren't as rich as expected. In the process, government environmental analysis, which will proceed before new exploration leases are sold, must robustly ensure that ecological disruption is minimized. The administration is proposing to keep Alaska's ecologically fragile Bristol Bay off-limits, as well as the entire Pacific Coast from Canada to Mexico and waters in the eastern Gulf less than 125 miles from the Florida coast. Predictably, this reasonable compromise has elicited criticism from some on the right as well as the left.

Offshore drilling will proceed regardless of whether the government allows it here; the alternative, after all, is to import more foreign oil from, among other places, offshore rigs in Nigeria and Azerbaijan, where oversight of environmental effects might not be as stringent.