http://www.sustainablebusiness.com/index.cfm/go/news.display/id/23555

Sustainable Business

03/29/2012 03:42 PM

Interior to Begin Seismic Exploration for Oil Drilling Off East Coast
SustainableBusiness.com News
The Department of Interior announced yesterday that it’s moving forward to open offshore oil and gas exploration off our Mid- and South Atlantic coastline.

To determine where it’s best to drill, oil companies first use dangerous high-pressure air guns and other seismic exploration methods up and down the Atlantic coast.

Imagine blasting dynamite in a neighborhood every 10-12 seconds for weeks or months on end. Now imagine that you can’t see, and depend on your hearing to feed, communicate and just about everything else you need for survival. That’s the situation whales, fish, and other marine wildlife are facing.

“Today’s announcement is great for petroleum companies, but horrible news for our coastlines and a potentially deadly blow to ocean fisheries and wildlife. It’s yet another reason why we need to break our dangerous addiction to oil-not find more ways to feed that addiction,” says Frances Beinecke, President of Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).

Michael Jasny, Senior Policy Analyst for NRDC says:
Airgun noise is loud enough to mask whale calls over literally thousands of miles, destroying their capacity to communicate and breed. It can drive whales to abandon their habitat and cease foraging, again over vast areas of ocean; closer in, it can cause hearing loss and death. The latest science from NOAA and Cornell shows that endangered North Atlantic right whales – which calve off the coast of Georgia and Florida – are especially vulnerable.

And the concern isn’t just about whales. For years, fishermen in other parts of the world have complained about loss of catch when seismic comes around – and for good reason. Norwegian researchers have shown that airguns dramatically depress catch rates in commercial fish by as much as 40-80%, depending on the fishing method. Again the impact area can be huge: roughly the size of Rhode Island for a single seismic survey.

Green technologies that would substantially cut the environmental footprint of airguns in many areas can be available for commercial use in 3-5 years or less. Yet the administration is opening the floodgates now, in areas it doesn’t even intend to consider for leasing until 2017. Industry has already applied to run hundreds of thousands of miles of trackline from Delaware south through Florida, blasting all the way.

We can’t boom-and-drill our way to lower gas prices. But we can destroy our oceans trying.
In coming months, the Department of Interior will hold public hearings on this issue.

Last November, President Obama announced his 5-year plan for offshore drilling. It’s hard to understand why this seismic exploration is necessary given that his plan says the Pacific and Atlantic coasts would be off-limits to drilling.
The plan satisfies neither the GOP – which wants much more widespread drilling – or the environmental community – which points to the Gulf spill as evidence that there is no safe offshore drilling in deep waters.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/drilling-off-the-atlantic-coast-moves-a-step-closer/2012/03/28/gIQApNvrhS_story.html

Washington Post

Drilling off the Atlantic Coast moves a step closer

March 28, 2012

By Darryl Fears,
The Obama administration on Wednesday took a significant step toward allowing oil and natural gas companies to drill off the coasts of Virginia and other Eastern Seaboard states.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced a plan to allow companies to conduct seismic mapping surveys on the outer continental shelf of the Atlantic Coast from Delaware to the middle of Florida.

“As part of our offshore energy strategy, we want to open the opportunity to conduct seismic exploration so we can know what resources exist in those areas,” Salazar said in Norfolk. “The fact is our information is 30 years old, and it’s out of date. The bottom line is it’s an important safe step to understand what resources are out there.”

In addition to assessing how much oil and natural gas is in the area, seismic testing would help determine the best places for wind turbines and other renewable energy projects, locate sand and gravel for restoring eroding coastal areas, and identify cultural artifacts such as historic sunken ships.

Virginia Gov. Robert F. McDonnell, in a statement, praised the announcement as “a small step forward in the development of our offshore energy resources.” But he also chided the administration for not allowing oil exploration off Virginia last year, a “breakthrough that would have led to the creation of thousands of new jobs in our state, generated significant revenues for state and local governments, and led to more domestic energy production.”

Environmental groups attacked the survey proposal, saying the sonic booms could injure hundreds of thousands of dolphins and whales and disrupt the feeding, mating and reproductive patterns of marine mammals millions of times each year.

“They’re acoustic animals. They’ve evolved over millions of years,” said Michael Jasny, a senior analyst for the Natural Resources Defence Council. “To take away their ability to hear, to damage their ears could be like a death sentence.”

“Why explore when we don’t want drilling in the first place?” asked Eileen Levandoski, a Virginia Beach resident who works for the Sierra Club’s Virginia chapter. “While the [Gulf of Mexico] and its people are today still reeling from the BP gulf oil spill disaster, there are huge incidents right now occurring off the coast of Scotland in the North Sea and off the Brazilian coast. The risk continues to be real and formidable.”

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management has received about 10 requests for permits from companies that conduct seismic surveys and sell the data to oil companies. Seismic surveys map hundreds of miles of ocean with acoustic waves that reveal contours of the ocean floor.

Surveys could begin early next year. Before that happens, BOEM will hold public hearings in Annapolis, Norfolk, Savannah and five other cities along the coast. Public comment is scheduled to end May 30, and the process of incorporating the testimony and finalizing the plan will take the rest of the year.

McDonnell’s government said 80 percent of Virginians support offshore oil and gas exploration. The governor said not allowing exploration last year pushed back any possibility of lease sales to 2018, at the earliest, and he said $4-a-gallon gasoline prices are evidence that exploration is needed.

Salazar, echoing Obama and economic experts, said that “there is no silver bullet for high gas prices” and that current domestic gas production is higher than any time in the past eight years.

“I’m proud of the progress that we’ve made over the last three years. Domestic gas and oil production is up, foreign imports of oil are down,” Salazar said. “In fact, imports of oil decreased by a million barrels a day in the last year alone.”

Tommy Beaudreau, director of BOEM, said planning surveys takes time. “Seismic surveys are important … but you need to be careful to manage the potential environmental effects, including effects on marine mammals.”

Jasny said those effects will be significant. He said that the technique has been used in many waters and that “seismic air guns have an enormous environmental footprint.
“Humpback whales and fin whales, both endangered, have been shown to fall silent and abandon habitat over areas of hundreds of thousands of square miles. Fish have been displaced over vast areas.

“Fishermen have complained for years about losses in catch,” he said.
Staff writer Anita Kumar contributed to this report.

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http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/schasis/drilling_our_atlantic_coast.html

Sarah Chasis’s Blog
Drilling our Atlantic Coast

Posted March 28, 2012 in Reviving the World’s Oceans

Some of the most mysterious and enthralling places on Earth may be next in line for oil and gas drilling.

Today the Obama Administration released its draft Environmental Impact Statement on its proposed plan to allow areas offshore the Mid- and South Atlantic to be surveyed for their energy development potential. This would allow seismic surveying, which uses air guns (i.e. high decibel acoustic energy pulses blasted from ships) to map the ocean floor.

Seismic surveys can be catastrophic to ocean life, including endangered whales and commercial fishing stocks.

In the ocean, animals communicate by sound. The sound impact from seismic surveys can displace marine mammals, including the endangered North Atlantic right whale, away from nurseries and foraging, mating, spawning, and migratory corridors. Seismic airgun surveys also have been shown to damage or kill fish and fish larvae and have been implicated in whale beaching and stranding incidents.

And these surveys will be occurring at and around some of the Atlantic’s most amazing submarine canyons. (“Ocean Oases” is a short NRDC film about the urgent need to protect the Atlantic Coast’s underwater canyons and seamounts.)

Cut into the Atlantic’s continental shelf is a series of vast undersea canyons, starting just north of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina and running up past Cape Cod. The canyons dive down thousands of feet over clay and stone cliffs before reaching the deep ocean bottom. The canyons host an amazing variety and abundance of marine life. Their hard foundations have allowed deep sea corals, rare sponges, and vivid anemones to grow and a bevy of fish and shellfish find food and shelter in these complex and dynamic environments. Endangered sperm whales, beaked whales, dolphins, and other marine mammals feed on congregating schools of squid and small fish. Commercial and recreational fishermen enjoy fishing the waters around the canyons. The types of coral and sponge communities in the seamounts and canyons have even yielded scientific and technological advances, including compounds for cancer treatments, models for artificial synthesis of human bone, and elements for constructing more durable optic cables.The canyons that would be impacted by seismic surveys in the Mid and South-Atlantic include Baltimore, Accomac, Washington, and Norfolk.

The oil and gas industry has not been allowed in these areas since drilling exploratory wells near several of the canyons in the early 1980s; Salazar’s announcement changes this.

We do need to plan ahead for our energy needs. Well-sited renewable energy shows much promise to help us keep the lights on at home. After the Deepwater Horizon disaster, we know the widespread ecological and economic devastation that can result from an offshore oil well blow-out. Even small oil spills can kill marine organisms and disrupt marine ecosystems. Properly sited offshore wind offers us a cleaner and safer way forward.

Our oceans support a host of jobs, food and recreation and we need to protect our ocean resources and allow these important services to continue into the future.

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http://www.nationalreview.com/campaign-spot/294755/after-long-delays-obama-takes-tiny-steps-toward-new-drilling

National Review

The Campaign Spot
Election-driven news and views . . . by Jim Geraghty.

After Long Delays, Obama Takes Tiny Steps Toward New Drilling
By Jim Geraghty
March 29, 2012 9:31 A.M.
1
Credit where it is due: President Obama’s Interior Department has taken a tiny step toward exploration for oil and natural gas off the coast of the Eastern seaboard from Delaware to Florida:
For the Atlantic, the administration released a draft environmental review outlining a 330,000-square-mile area from the Delaware Bay to Cape Canaveral, Fla., where seismic surveys could be conducted. The administration has no current plans to allow drilling in the Atlantic, though Mr. Salazar said that could change in light of the surveys.

Of course, this is after about a year’s delay. You can hear the “about time, guys” tone in the statement from Virginia governor Bob McDonnell:

It is encouraging that Secretary Salazar visited Virginia today to announce a small step forward in the development of our offshore energy resources. Unfortunately this small step forward follows many previous steps back. Virginia was poised to become the first state on the east coast to produce oil and natural gas offshore. This breakthrough would have led to the creation of thousands of new jobs in our state, generated significant new revenues for state and local governments, and led to more domestic energy production. Instead, this Administration cancelled Virginia’s scheduled lease sale for 2011, and pushed any possible lease sales to 2018, at the very earliest. With gas hitting $4 a gallon that seven-year self-ordered delay is more noticeable than ever. We should be looking for every opportunity to safely produce more domestic energy. Our citizens need the jobs; our nation needs the energy. Instead, the Obama Administration declared a seven-year timeout. That was the wrong decision. There is broad bipartisan support in Virginia for developing our offshore energy resources and Virginians support this common sense policy. We will continue to aggressively seek the lifting of these federal limitations on offshore oil and gas development. These decisions are leaving private capital that could be invested in expanding our domestic energy resources on the sidelines at a time when private investment in business expansion and job creation is so urgently needed to heal our ailing economy.
While we continue to be incredibly disappointed by last year’s decision, I do want to thank the Obama Administration for their announcement today.

Of course, seismic surveys are only the first step in developing any energy resources off the Eastern seaboard. Actually, I shouldn’t say any energy development; Virginia’s just given approval to another form that is supposed to be a source of bipartisan agreement.

Now it’s up to the federal government:
The Virginia Marine Resources Commission has voted unanimously to approve proposed construction of a 479-foot-tall, 5 MW offshore wind turbine generator prototype in the lower Chesapeake Bay, three miles off the coast of Cape Charles, Va. The construction of the prototype turbine is scheduled to be completed in late 2013, which could make this project one of the first offshore wind energy prototypes in the U.S.The wind power project now requires approval from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and review by the U.S. Coast Guard.

And one other bit of reasonably good news:
Separately, the Interior Department approved Royal Dutch Shell’s oil spill response plan for Alaska’s Beaufort Sea on Wednesday.Shell is working to begin drilling off Alaska’s coast this summer after repeated regulatory delays for the company’s Arctic exploration program. Shell will still need well-specific permits before it starts drilling. Interior approved Shell’s response plan for Alaska’s Chukchi Sea earlier this year.

So, after weeks of insisting that the U.S. can’t drill its way out of its gas-price problems, the administration takes a step to approve drilling in one previously verboten area and a tiny step towards drilling in another one. Why, it’s almost as if the line the president was touting on the trail proved to be erroneous, and suddenly reached its expiration date . . .

Special thanks to Richard Charter