http://www.nola.com/news/gulf-oil-spill/index.ssf/2011/04/interior_secretary_ken_salazar_5.html
While I don’t doubt that adequate time is needed to issue the permits, I think it is interesting that the oilies are trying to speed up government permitting, when enviros have waited and waited and waited for good environmental projects to be permitted by the federal permitting agencies. In Florida, where there is a time limit, if state permitting agencies don’t get your permit within the time allotted, you are “requested” to submit a letter each month requesting additional time to complete your part, even if you not the cause of the delay. DV
Times-Picayune
Published:Wednesday, April 13, 2011, 7:30 AM
By Jonathan Tilove, The Times-Picayune
Recalling the “nightmare and a nationalcrisis ” that began nearly a year ago with the blowout of theMacondo well, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar warned Tuesday that another oil spill of that magnitude “would probably mean death tooil-and-gas development in America’s oceans.”
Salazar offered the caution even as the House Natural Resources Committee will mark-up Republican legislation today intended to open new areas to drilling and speed the pace of permitting, legislation that Salazar said reveals a “sense of amnesia” about what happened last year.
“When you have gone through a horrific national crisis, which the Deepwater Horizon was, it’s important that you learn the lessons andthat we don’t repeat the mistakes of the past, and much of the legislation that I have seen bandied around — especially with the House Republicans — is almost as if the Deepwater Horizon-Macondowell incident never happened,” Salazar said. “We cannot afford to take that approach to the future of the nation’s energy security.”
Salazar, joined by Michael Bromwich, head of Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, met with reporters in a conference room at Interior Department headquarters Tuesday in advance of the April 20 anniversary of the spill, which took 87 days to contain.
The two men defended what Salazar characterized as the administration’s “sprint to reform” the regulatory regime in the wake of the accident, a process that Bromwich said “has been moving very smartly, particularly in recent months, which is why I think you’ve seen us in a position to approve a number of deep water drilling permits in the last few weeks.”
“There’s no doubt that the time we went through in 2010 was a nightmare and a national crisis for our country but I’m confident that now, a year after he event, that we are at place where we are standing up offshore drilling in a way that can be done in a safe and responsible way, in a way that protects people and protects the environment and at the same time that we have continued to move forward with the broader energy agenda for the United States,” he said.
Salazar and Bromwich said they would like to see Congress act on the recommendation Interior made last year to change the current 30-daydeadline for the regulatory agency to review and decide on applications for approval of exploratory plans, and extend it to 90 days.
BOEMRE announced last month that the bureau had approved the first deepwater exploration plan since the disaster, acting on an application from Shell.
“We got that first exploration plan done within the 30 days, but that was in part because Shell voluntarily resubmitted” its application, which restarted the 30-day clock, Bromwichsaid.
There are now three exploration plans pending, and Bromwich said that “as exploration plans continue to flow in we are going to have a hard time meeting the 30-day deadline.”
“The instructions I have been giving to my people is that I don’t want them sending applications back to the operators just to restart the clock — that is inappropriate — and if it is, in fact, taking us longer than 30 days to do the reviews, to do the site-specific environmental assessment, then it takes us longer than 30 days,” Bromwich said.
“We’re not telling our people to go slow; quite the contrary, we’re telling them to go as quickly as they reasonably can,” said Bromwich, indicating that the likely inability to complete the processin a month’s time ought to “demonstrate to the Congress that, in fact, we need the additional time.”
Bromwich also said he felt that his agency’s effectiveness was limited because, as of now, it can only directly regulate the operators who seek permits for drilling operations, and not, for example, contractors such as Transocean, which leased the drilling rig Deepwater Horizon to BP.
“That dramatically limits the scope of our oversight in ways that make me question whether there’s a different and better way to do business,” Bromwich said.
Special thanks to Richard Charter