The Obama administration this week changed course on actions taken by the Bush White House on offshore drilling and power-plant emissions.
Saying he needed to restore order to a broken process, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar announced his strategy for developing an offshore energy plan that includes both conventional and renewable resources.
His strategy calls for extending the public comment period on a proposed 5-year plan for oil and gas development on the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf by 180 days, assembling a detailed report from Interior agencies on conventional and renewable offshore energy resources, holding four regional conferences to review these findings, and expediting renewable energy rulemaking for the Outer Continental Shelf.
“To establish an orderly process that allows us to make wise decisions based on sound information, we need to set aside the Bush Administration’s midnight timetable for its OCS drilling plan and create our own timeline,” Salazar said.
On Friday, January 16, its last business day in office, the Bush Administration proposed a new five year plan for offshore oil and gas leasing. The proposal was actually published in the Federal Register on January 21, the day after the new Administration took office.
“In the biggest area that the Bush Administration’s draft OCS plan proposes for oil and gas drilling – the Atlantic seaboard, from Maine to Florida – our data on available resources is very thin, and what little we have is twenty to thirty years old,” he said. “We shouldn’t make decisions to sell off taxpayer resources based on old information.”
Salazar directed the United States Geological Survey, the Minerals Management Service, and other departmental scientists to assemble all the information available about the offshore resources – conventional and renewable – along with information about potential impacts. The report is due in 45 days.
The Department of the Interior oversees more than 1.7 billion acres on the Outer Continental Shelf–an area roughly three fourths of the size of the entire United States.
The Secretary also will build a framework for offshore renewable energy development, so that the Department can incorporate the significant potential for wind, wave and ocean current energy into its offshore energy strategy.
“The Bush Administration was so intent on opening new areas for oil and gas offshore that it torpedoed offshore renewable energy efforts,” Salazar said. “I intend to issue a final rulemaking for offshore renewables in the coming months, so that potential developers know the rules of the road. This rulemaking will allow us to move from the ‘oil and gas only’ approach of the previous Administration to the comprehensive energy plan that we need.”
New Source Review Rule
The administration also announced a delay in changing the New Source Review program’s "aggregation" policy to allow time for a further review. The EPA said yesterday the planned rule change, announced days before Bush left office, will now be delayed until at least May 18.
New Source Review is a pre-construction permitting program to ensure
air quality is maintained when factories, industrial boilers and power
plants are built or modified. The rule change initiated by the Bush administration would have allowed for the measuring of emissions on hourly output instead of total annual output.
Bush’s EPA Administrator Stephen L. Johnson said the change would make the rule work better, but environmentalists and some EPA lawyers said it would undermine the agency’s ability to enforce compliance and require the installation of new anti-pollution technology.
The EPA will reconsider the rule over a 90 day period.
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