The Permitorium Continues -- Alaska -- BLM Doesn't Want To Lease Where Best Oil Prospects Are -- June 16, 2011

Updates

June 21, 2011: Someone asked what the definition of "permitorium" is. A moratorium is an explicit acknowledgment that something is at a standstill. A "permitorium" is the same thing as "slow-rolling" the gullible. The authority lifts the "moratorium" in theory, but continues to keep the moratorium in place by obfuscation, bureaucratic delay, double talk, impossible demands,  imposing financial fees and/or penalties, and/or threats of crushing lawsuits if "i's" are not dotted or "t's" are not crossed.

Original Post

People smarter than I am can perhaps figure out all the nuances of this article, but the headline (Obama administration objects to the US House bill to expedite oil development in Alaska) doesn't surprise me.

The Obama administration today said a proposal from House Natural Resources Chairman Doc Hastings (R-Wash.) to expedite oil and gas leasing and energy infrastructure permitting in an Alaska reserve could force federal regulators to flout environmental laws and includes a costly, redundant resource assessment.

The proposal includes a "costly, redundant resource assessment"? Since when has anyone in Washington, DC, objected to a costly, redundant resource assessment?

But it's obvious the permitorium continues.

Mike Pool, deputy director of the Bureau of Land Management [who oversees drilling activities there] said the bill's requirement to hold lease sales in the areas most likely to produce commercial oil and gas and set permitting deadlines could undermine the agency's public land management process, including the National Environmental Policy Act.

Yeah, that doesn't make sense to bureaucrats: to hold lease sales in the areas most likely to produce commercial oil and gas. I can't make this stuff up. The oil and gas industry is being "slow-rolled."

More evidence that the industry is being slow-rolled:

"We have a permitting problem, we don't have a leasing problem," Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R) said, pointing to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' decision to deny a bridge proposal by ConocoPhillips to access its lease in NPR-A.

The decision was remanded late last year by the agency's Pacific Division. [I can't make this stuff up.]

The Army Corp said it is waiting to receive more information from the company on the "logistical probability of directional drilling" for a project that would involve a pipeline underneath the Colville River and a "roadless" drill site. No timeline has been set to issue a decision on the remanded permit.

And for many the slow-rolling no longer matters. There are other places to go. There are at least four domestic basins/fields that will keep oil E&P busy for decades: the Williston Basin Bakken in North Dakota and Montana; the Alberta Basin Bakken in Montana, the Niobrara in Wyoming/Colorado; and, the Eagle Ford in south Texas.

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For newbies, when you hear legislators in Washington say that oil companies are not drilling on their current leases, making them (the legislators) unsympathetic to oil industry's requests for more opportunities to drill, the legislators are forgetting to tell you the rest of the story: the oil companies can get their leases (and start paying for them) but they can't get a) the permits to actually start drilling; or, b) permits to put in roads or bridges to access their leases. Senator Murkowski is correct: it's a permitting problem, not a leasing problem. What a racket.