Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 10, 1991 TAG: 9102100083
SECTION: NATL/INTL PAGE: A-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The New York Times
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
The plan takes into account the public protests that led President Bush, last June, to declare all but a tiny portion of the California coast and all of the southern Florida coast off limits for oil and gas exploration for 10 years.
Congress can also restrict offshore drilling, both by passing laws and by withholding money from the Interior Department.
Last year it enacted legislation to bar leasing and drilling for one year in Bristol Bay, Alaska, and off Florida and North Carolina.
The new plan, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times, does not call for any exploration in the areas set aside by Bush.
It also seeks to mute opposition in the others by defining more specifically than ever before the regions that the Interior Department wants to open for oil and gas production. It also calls for limiting the number of tracts to be put up for leases in these regions.
Top officials in the Minerals Management Service, the Interior Department unit that oversees the offshore oil and gas industry, say they hope the approach will quell public anxiety about offshore drilling.
But they acknowledge that putting the plan into effect will be difficult because of broad public support for banning offshore drilling in most parts of the country.
The public release of the plan, originally scheduled for December, has been postponed several times because of concern in the Bush administration about how it would be received at a time when the United States is at war in the oil fields of the Middle East and when the Persian Gulf has been fouled by what may be the largest oil spill ever.
"We're going to have less sales on less acres," said Barry Williamson, director of the minerals service. "We're going to focus on the places where oil will be found."
But leaders of national environmental groups, along with governors from both parties, have vowed to block any plan to drill off Florida and California.
In addition, Gov. James Martin of North Carolina, a Republican, supports the law temporarily barring Mobil Oil Corp. from drilling for gas on a tract it has leased 35 miles east of Cape Hatteras, N.C.
The new plan, which will become final later this year after public hearings, is to serve as the government's guide for managing oil exploration and production in offshore areas from 1992 through 1997.
Along with the administration's new national energy policy, details of which were made public on Friday, the offshore program is a primary component of Bush's program for encouraging the growth of the domestic oil industry.
If the offshore plan is put into effect, the Interior Department hopes it will raise tens of billions of dollars for the federal government.
Last year, more than 3,200 offshore platforms yielded an average of 836,000 barrels of oil and 11.5 billion cubic feet of natural gas daily, or 11 percent of the oil and 25 percent of the natural gas produced in the United States.
From 1954 until 1990, the government has received more than $90 billion in lease sales and royalties paid for oil and gas production.
The Minerals Management Service produces more revenue for the government than any other agency except the IRS.
Williamson said the Persian Gulf war could help the government to persuade more Americans to accept offshore oil and gas production.
"The war helps to focus attention on the seriousness of oil as a commodity," he said. "And it will help us focus attention on the facts and not on emotionalism."
But Sarah Chasis, a senior lawyer at the Natural Resources Defense Council, a national environmental group based in New York, said, "There are cheaper, faster, less damaging ways for this nation to meet its energy needs, including conservation, which the Administration's new energy policy ignores."
Along the East Coast, according to the plan, oil companies would be allowed to study the potential of finding gas and oil on 1,000 tracts covering roughly 9,000 square miles of the continental shelf.
Most of the tracts are in a band 15 to 250 miles offshore from central New Jersey to southern Georgia, but one is within 15 miles of the Virginia coast.
In separate sales in 1994 and 1997, the Interior Department would offer leases on 250 tracts covering 2,250 square miles.
Most companies do not consider the Atlantic continental shelf to hold rich reserves of oil, but it is a promising site for natural gas production.
The Interior Department has previously leased nearly 550 square miles of the continental shelf, and oil companies have drilled 51 exploratory wells, 38 of them off the coast of the Carolinas, Maryland, New Jersey and Virginia.
by CNB