Tag Archives: Drilling Moratorium

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Obama imposes 5-year oil drilling moratorium on Atlantic coast

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From Breitbart.

Excerpt:

Yesterday the Obama administration announced a delaying tactic which will put off the possibility of new offshore oil drilling on the Atlantic coast for at least five years:

The announcement by the Interior Department sets into motion what will be at least a five year environmental survey to determine whether and where oil production might occur.

Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell notes that a planned lease sale, which the administration cancelled last year, will now be put off until at least 2018. As you might expect, Republicans were not impressed with the decision:

“The president’s actions have closed an entire new area to drilling on his watch and cheats Virginians out of thousands of jobs,” said Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Wash., who chairs the House Natural Resources Committee. The announcement “continues the president’s election-year political ploy of giving speeches and talking about drilling after having spent the first three years in office blocking, delaying and driving up the cost of producing energy in America,” he said.

This is in addition to the moratorium on drilling in the Gulf that Obama imposed before.

Excerpt:

A moratorium on drilling in the Gulf of Mexico after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill plus a longer offshore oil and natural gas permitting processes will cost the U.S. more than $24 billion in lost oil and natural gas investment over the next several years, according to a report commissioned by the American Petroleum Institute.

The study by the energy industry trade group also found that, because of the moratorium and longer permitting process, capital and operating expenditures fell over the last two years by $18.3 billion.

The region saw $8.9 billion and $146 billion in investments in crude oil and natural gas, respectively — about 6 percent of global investment dollars. But that figure would have been closer to 12 percent for 2011 had the drilling moratorium not been put in place, the report said.

“As a result of decreases in investment due to the moratorium, total U.S. employment is estimated to have been reduced by 72,000 jobs in 2010 and approximately 90,000 jobs in 2011,” the report said.

In addition to closing an entire new area to drilling, Obama is also using environmental regulations to destroy jobs and raise energy prices.

Excerpt:

Despite rhetoric to the contrary, the Obama administration is poised to deal a major blow to U.S. oil and natural gas, a leading industry group charged Thursday.

Domestic production of both fuels could plummet if proposed Environmental Protection Agency regulations, designed to limit emissions from well sites, go into effect later this year, according to an extensive new study commissioned by the American Petroleum Institute.

The natural gas extraction technique known as “fracking” would be hardest hit, and fuel extracted via the popular process would drop by about 52 percent, according to a new study commissioned by API. Total gas production would decrease by about 11 percent, while domestic oil production could fall by as much as 37 percent, the report says.

Make no mistake – this Democrat administration is opposed to job creation in the energy sector and opposed to lowering gas prices.

Videos

Barack Obama is the worst President ever

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Bill Whittle explains. (7 minutes)

This is not to mention his record on abortion – the most pro-abortion President ever. Or the election of hardline Muslim extremists in Egypt.

The man is a catastrophic failure.

News

How the Obama administration deliberately ships jobs overseas

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From the Wall Street Journal.

Excerpt:

This month, one year since the Deepwater Horizon explosion in the Gulf of Mexico, the Noble Clyde Boudreaux—an ultra-deepwater semi-submersible drilling rig—will start operations off the coast of Brazil. Until a few weeks ago it was stationed in the Gulf.

The two events are not unrelated. Moving the Noble out of U.S. waters is one of the adverse consequences of the Obama administration’s overreaction to last year’s Gulf spill.

Despite the president’s repeated claims that he’s been “encouraging” domestic oil production, administration policies have been driving drilling rigs out of the Gulf (six deepwater rigs in addition to the Noble have left the Gulf, with two more possibly on the way out). The overall result has been lower domestic oil production, slower economic growth, job losses and higher energy prices.

In the immediate aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon explosion and spill, President Obama announced a six-month moratorium on new deepwater drilling. According to the administration’s estimates, this cost nearly 19,000 jobs in the Gulf states alone—even though federal researchers then cut the figure by an ad hoc factor of 40%-60% to make the results more palatable.

In the months after lifting the ban, the administration slowed drilling permits to a crawl, effectively creating what some have called a “permatorium.” Dismayed by the delays, in February U.S. District Court Judge Martin Feldman tried to force the administration to act on seven pending permits, calling the inaction on permits “increasingly inexcusable.” Permitting has picked up recently, thanks in part to increasing political pressure, but remains far below pre-spill levels.

In December, the White House reversed course on its own five-year plan to open portions of the Eastern Gulf of Mexico, the Mid-Atlantic and the South Atlantic to offshore exploration. This effectively locks up an estimated 7.6 billion barrels of oil and 36.6 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

Do you know what happens when the supply of a commodity goes down? Prices go up! And when gas prices go up, the price of every consumer good that is shipped using trucks and planes and boats also goes up.

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