Yes we can! DV
Phil Taylor, E&E reporter
Published: Monday, December 17, 2012
An environmental group today filed a lawsuit challenging the Interior Department’s five-year offshore oil and gas leasing plan, arguing the agency has failed to accurately analyze the costs and benefits of the plan.
The Center for Sustainable Economy, in a filing
The plan threatens catastrophic spills that could harm Gulf coastlines while failing to maximize revenue from lease sales, said the Santa Fe, N.M.-based group, which is represented in the case by Steven Sugarman and Michael Livermore of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law.
“Key factors were ignored by BOEM including the massive uncertainty associated with the potential for deepwater drilling disasters, the current glut in gas production, record U.S. fuel exports and the fact that millions of acres of existing leases are idle,” Sugarman said in a statement. “These omissions from BOEM’s economic analysis create an extreme and illegal bias in favor of new leasing.”
Recent lease sales have included 35 tracts in waters deeper than the BP PLC oil spill in April 2010, the group said.
An Interior spokesman today said the agency does not comment on pending litigation.
The agency in late June finalized a leasing plan that includes targeted new development off the North Slope of Alaska but forgoes sales in the Atlantic or Pacific oceans. Interior officials called it a “cautious but forward-looking” solution (E&ENews PM
It was followed by the release of the final version of a rule designed to prevent a repeat of the Deepwater Horizon disaster that killed 11 men and spilled nearly 5 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.
The agency’s drilling safety rule set in stone interim steps companies have largely followed since the Macondo well blowout to enhance well integrity, well control systems and blowout preventers
(Greenwire
Special thanks to Richard Charter