http://thehill.com/blogs/e2-wire/e2-wire/204621-obamas-jobs-council-calls-for-expanded-drilling

By Andrew Restuccia – 01/17/12 03:43 PM ET

President Obama’s jobs council called Tuesday for an “all-in approach” to energy policy that includes expanded oil-and-gas drilling as well as expediting energy projects like pipelines.

“[W]e should allow more access to oil, natural gas and coal opportunities on federal lands,” states the year-end report released Tuesday by the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.

The report does not specifically mention the Keystone XL oil pipeline, but it endorses moving forward quickly with projects that “deliver electricity and fuel,” including pipelines.

“The Council recognizes the important safety and environmental concerns surrounding these types of projects, but now more than ever, the jobs and economic and energy security benefits of these energy projects require us to tackle the issues head-on and to expeditiously, though cautiously, move forward on projects that can support hundreds of thousands of jobs,” the report says.

The report retreats slightly from an interim report released in October that addressed the Keystone XL pipeline directly. The interim report appeared to offer cautious support for Keystone, calling on officials to “balance” environmental protections while realizing what it called the benefits of the pipeline.

But Keystone supporters will point out that the year-end report released Tuesday argues that energy projects like pipelines will result in economic and security benefits. It even echoes a common refrain from Republicans and the oil industry: that such energy projects “can support hundreds of thousands of jobs.”

White House press secretary Jay Carney insisted Tuesday that the jobs council report does not endorse the Keystone pipeline.

“Well, first of all, the Jobs Council wasn’t talking about Keystone specifically,” Carney said at his daily briefing. “The Jobs Council was talking about the importance of expanding domestic oil and gas production, a goal this president shares and has expounded upon at length, and has taken action as a policy matter to demonstrate his commitment to.”

The Keystone XL pipeline would carry oil sands crude from Alberta, Canada, to refineries on the Gulf Coast.

“The Council recognizes that providing access to more areas for drilling, mining and renewable energy development is controversial, but, given the current economic situation, we believe it’s necessary to tap America’s assets in a safe and responsible manner,” the report says.

“Additionally, policies that facilitate the safe, thoughtful and timely development of pipeline, transmission and distribution projects are necessary to facilitate the delivery of America’s fuel and electricity and maintain the reliability of our nation’s energy system.”

Stakeholders should work together to develop “best practices” aimed at ensuring safety, while also expediting energy projects, according to the report.

“[R]egulatory and permitting obstacles that could threaten the development of some energy projects negatively impact jobs and weaken our energy infrastructure need to be addressed,” the report says. “Speedy adoption of best practice standards would allow government officials to reduce regulatory and permitting obstacles to important energy projects.”

Under a payroll tax cut packaged signed into law in December, the president must make a decision on the pipeline by Feb. 21. White House and administration officials have said they will have little choice but to reject the pipeline under the deadline, arguing they will not have enough time to adequately review the project.

The looming deadline has set off an aggressive lobbying campaign. Republicans and industry officials argue that the project has been subject to sufficient review and is essential for boosting the ailing economy and creating jobs.

But environmental groups and other opponents of the pipeline have raised concerns about greenhouse gas emissions from oil sands production, as well as potential oil spills.
House Republicans quickly pounced on the jobs council report Tuesday, noting that the recommendations echo their “all-of-the-above” energy strategy.

“The President’s Jobs Council today confirmed what House Republicans have known all along, that American energy production will spur job creation and strengthen our national security,” House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Doc Hastings (R-Wash.) said in a statement. “Unfortunately, it appears President Obama is ignoring his Council’s recommendations, much as he has ignored the views of House Republicans on energy production, economic growth and job creation.”

More broadly, the jobs report calls for expanded oil-and-gas drilling, as well as “safe and responsible” natural-gas extraction from shale formations.

The report notes that the Obama administration has called for new lease sales and said it will consider opening up new areas to drilling. But it says “further expanding and expediting the domestic production of fossil fuels both offshore and onshore (in conjunction with more electric and natural gas vehicles) will reduce America’s reliance on foreign oil and the huge outflow of U.S. dollars this reliance entails.”
Beyond oil and gas, the report calls for policies that improve energy efficiency, encourage private investment in energy research and development and expand renewable energy.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/obama-administration-to-reject-keystone-pipeline/2012/01/18/gIQAPuPF8P_story.html

By Juliet Eilperin and Steven Mufson,

The Obama administration will announce this afternoon that it is rejecting a Canadian firm’s application for a permit to build and operate the Keystone XL pipeline, a massive project that would have stretched from Canada’s oil sands to refineries in Texas, according to people who have been briefed on the matter.

However the administration will allow TransCanada to reapply after it develops an alternate route around the sensitive habitat of Nebraska’s Sandhills. Deputy Secretary of State William J. Burns will make the announcement, which comes in response to a congressionally mandated deadline of Feb. 21 for action.

Industry officials and analysts said they expect TransCanada to submit a new route proposal for the Nebraska leg of the pipeline within two weeks.

TransCanada declined to comment on the matter Wednesday; the White House declined to comment on its upcoming decision Tuesday night and Wednesday morning.

The effect of the administration’s move will probably be to delay the politically sensitive pipeline decision until after the presidential election – the second time it has postponed a final determination. Environmental groups have lobbied against the project, arguing that the difficult extraction of oil sands contributed to climate change and that the pipeline itself posed leak risks. Supporters of the pipeline say it will create jobs and enhance U.S. energy security by increasing oil supplies from a friendly neighbor.

“President Obama is about to destroy tens of thousands of American jobs and sell American energy security to the Chinese,” said Brendan Buck, a spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) . “The President won’t stand up to his political base even to create American jobs. This is not the end of this fight.”

The pipeline, which requires a federal permit from the State Department because it crosses an international border, has been under review for more than three years. The department is required to determine whether the project is in the U.S. national interest.

In early November, the administration delayed making that determination on the pipeline on the grounds that the pipeline needed to avoid crossing sensitive terrain in Nebraska’s Sand-hills region. At the time, officials predicted the process of rerouting the pipeline and the subsequent environmental review would extend the permitting process into early 2013.

But language inserted in last month’s payroll tax extension forces President Obama to make a decision by Feb. 21.

Administration officials have said for weeks that the truncated timeline makes it difficult to complete a review of whether the pipeline is in the national interest, given the fact TransCanada has yet to outline an alternate route.

Some political observers said that the effort by Congress to pressure the president into making a quick decision might have backfired. Last week, John Engler, former Michigan governor who is now head of the Business Roundtable, said “no chief executive likes to be painted into a corner by anybody, whether another nation or a legislative body. There are a couple of ways to react and one of them is a negative way.” Engler and the Business Roundtable support the pipeline project.

On Tuesday, White House spokesman Jay Carney called it “a fallacy to suggest that the president should sign into law something when there isn’t even an alternate route identified in Nebraska and when … there was an attempt to short-circuit the review process in a way that does not allow the kind of careful consideration of all the competing criteria here that needs to be done.”

“President Obama is doing the right thing standing up to oil lobbyists and sticking up for the families who are protecting their clean water from the Keystone export pipeline,” said Jeremy Symons, senior vice president of the National Wildlife Federation, in an e-mail.

On Wednesday, Daniel J. Weiss, who directs climate strategy for the liberal think tank Center for American Progress, said Obama’s decision to turn down the Keystone XL permit makes sense.

“The Republican provision to force a decision in sixty days for a route that hasn’t been chosen yet is asking the President to write a blank check to a big foreign oil company regardless of the harm to Americans,” Weiss wrote in an e-mail. “Denial of the Keystone XL permit would mean that President Obama will protect Americans by ensuring that the pipeline construction and operation will not pollute our air and water. This approach is like having medical tests before deciding on surgery.”

Even Stephen Brown, vice president for federal government affairs for the oil refiner Tesoro Cos., wrote in an e-mail that he was not surprised by the move.

“Today’s decision will be a fairly easy one for the White House to make,” Brown wrote. “No one who was planning on voting against the President would have been won over simply because of the approval of Keystone.”

Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://www.nola.com/news/gulf-oil-spill/index.ssf/2012/01/gulf_of_mexico_oil_spill_envir.html

Published: Thursday, January 12, 2012, 10:45 PM Updated: Friday, January 13, 2012, 8:42 AM
By Mark Schleifstein, The Times-Picayune

BP’s chief environmental scientist assigned to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill on Thursday said the company, working with state and federal trustees, remains on a fast pace aimed at restoring resources damaged during the 2010 spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Briefing reporters by phone in advance of a month-long series of hearings on proposed “early restoration projects” along the Gulf Coast, Robin Bullock said the formal Natural Resource Damage Assessment process required under federal law has developed “the largest set of environmental data at one point in time associated with an oil spill incident within the Gulf of Mexico.”

Hundreds of scientists — from universities, federal agencies and hired by BP — have gathered data on the status of Gulf resources before the spill, and the potential for resource damage from the estimated 5 million barrels of oil that gushed from BP’s Macondo well. That information was used to develop projects to restore natural resources and compensate the public for the use of those lost resources.

The hearings will focus on the first eight projects proposed in December by states’ trustees and BP, which total $57 million for the Gulf Coast and includes $28 million for Louisiana projects. BP has pledged to spend $1 billion on “early restoration” projects, but the company and other parties responsible for the spill may eventually have to spend as much as $20 billion on natural resource projects.

The first two Louisiana projects will build more than 100 acres of wetlands in Plaquemines Parish, place oyster cultch on six public seed beds in several parishes and upgrade an oyster hatchery on Grand Isle.

The projects were approved by a committee of trustees representing the five Gulf Coast states, the federal departments of Interior and Commerce and BP. Under the Oil Pollution Act of 1990, the trustees and the parties responsible for the spill are required to cooperatively complete the damage assessment process.

The early projects are driven by the early lessons learned by scientists, Bullock said.

“We knew a few things about the injuries very quickly,” she said, including the effects on recreational fishers by the closure of wide swaths of the Gulf to fishing, and to tourists by beach closures.

The $4.4 million proposed for building boat ramps and $600,000 for coastal dunes in Florida is aimed at compensating for such lost recreational opportunities.

“On the ecological side, we do know that oil reached the shorelines,” Bullock said. “We do know that we did have some mortality associated with birds, some mortality associated with turtles,” and projects aimed at restoring near-shore environments would compensate for their losses, she said.
Louisiana’s projects fall into the resource restoration category, as do the $11 million for oyster cultch and $2.6 million for an artificial reef in Mississippi and the $9.4 million for marsh creation and $1.1 million for coastal dune improvements in Alabama.

Louisiana’s first two projects are part of a $533 million list of 13 projects that it proposed in July for a share of BP’s early restoration money, said Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority chairman Garret Graves, who acts as Louisiana’s trustee in the damage assessment process.

Louisiana is supposed to get $200 million of the first $1 billion, but hopes some of the projects could be paid for with shares of the BP money provided that will go to the Commerce and Interior departments.

Bullock and Graves could not say when additional projects will be announced, but the agreement signed by trustees and BP set a goal of beginning construction of projects by the end of 2012, Graves said.

“The intent of Louisiana is to stick to that time frame,” Graves said.
Public comments are being accepted on the first list of projects through Feb. 14, including on the web at http://losco-dwh.com/EarlyRestorationPlanComment.aspx .

Recommendations for future projects also will be accepted.
In Louisiana, state officials will hold three public meetings to discuss the projects, each beginning at 5:30 p.m., with a public hearing at 6:30 p.m.:
* Jan. 31, Terrebonne Council Chambers, 8026 Main St., second floor, Houma.
* Feb. 1, St. Bernard Parish Council Chambers, 8201 West Judge Perez Drive, Chalmette.
* Feb.. 2, Belle Chasse Auditorium, 8398 Louisiana 23, Belle Chasse.

Mark Schleifstein can be reached at mschleifstein@timespicayune.com or 504.826.3327.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

Paul Voosen, E&E reporter
Published: Tuesday, January 10, 2012

It’s the most tangible intangible disaster of the past decade.

Following the undersea blowout of the Deepwater Horizon two years
ago, a majority of the oil and gas escaping from the rig’s out-of-
control well never surfaced. Instead, it flowed in a diffuse layer to
the southwest, thousands of feet below sea level. Largely invisible,
this snaking “plume” nevertheless entered the imaginations of
millions of people — at least until its demise to the Gulf’s vast
size and a host of hungry microbes.

A compelling image — but it never happened. At least, not the way
scientists imagined.

Rather than flowing in a tidy path to the southwest, pulled along by
a steady current, the Deepwater Horizon plume was a mess of swirl and
slosh. Virgin water exposed to the spill, rather than whisking away
permanently, would return after weeks, carrying with it microbes
already primed to chew hydrocarbons, according to a study published
yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The study presents a unified theory of the plume, its model results
matching many of the often contradictory observations made by
scientists during the first months of the spill. Understanding the
bathtub circulation of the Gulf of Mexico suddenly sorted these
findings into a comprehensible whole, said Dave Valentine, the
paper’s lead author and a microbial geochemist at the University of
California, Santa Barbara.
Click here to watch Dave Valentine’s model of the Deepwater Horizon
plume, matched against observations recorded during the accident.”

“There’s no perfect way of explaining something as amorphous and
ever-changing as this was,” he said. It is almost irreducibly
complex, he added. “It’s almost like an enclosed bay. It’s not a
simple current where things move from point A to point B.”

The Valentine study comes at a crucial time for Gulf research. A
government study published last month confirmed that nearly half of
the oil — and almost all of the gas — released from the BP well
likely remained trapped in deep waters. In all, some 33,000 barrels
of oil a day remained in the deep, the study found, an estimate in
line with a chemical study of the oil’s fate also released yesterday.

Folding these mature estimates of the released oil, along with
evidence of microbial degradation, into a plausible theoretical
framework is essential to the government’s ongoing investigation of
the spill’s environmental damage, according to NOAA Administrator
Jane Lubchenco, who found time from her high-profile job to edit
Valentine’s study.

“These results may help us better understand the variability in the
rapid rates of hydrocarbon consumption by bacteria in the plume, as
observed by several groups of researchers,” she said in a release to
Greenwire, “while our scientists continue to examine the impacts of
the Deepwater Horizon spill on the Gulf ecosystem.”

This is not Valentine’s first foray into the plume. Previously, his
work uncovered the large amount of gas that remained trapped
underwater during the spill (Greenwire, Sept. 17, 2010). Valentine
also found that, much to his amazement, the recalcitrant methane had
vanished, degraded by bacteria, during a follow-up cruise in the
early fall (Greenwire, Jan. 7, 2011).

Scientists who studied the plume found Valentine’s model convincing.
While it did not match every observation perfectly, and its
resolution was somewhat coarse, those are simply improvements that
can be made on what seems like a foundational step.

“Their approach is holistic and does an excellent job of explaining
large-scale patterns observed in the Gulf of Mexico following the
spill,” said John Kessler, a chemical oceanographer at Texas A&M
University and one of the plume’s chief researchers.

“This is probably a slam-dunk understanding of how the plume worked,”
added Chris Reddy, a chemist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic
Institution. “The plume activity is a lot more complicated than we
really thought.”

Shaping perceptions

Reddy was part of the Woods Hole team that, early on, helped shape
perception of the plume with a report published in Science the month
after BP’s well was capped (Greenwire, Aug. 20, 2010). They described
what seemed like a diffuse cloud of hydrocarbons — on average, the
plume had a concentration of 1 part hydrocarbon to every million
parts water — lurking underwater, stretching over an area the size
of Manhattan.

Their view then, and really until Valentine’s study, was that the oil
came out of the well “and took a right-hand turn,” Reddy said. It was
a simplistic idea, in retrospect, he said.

The model helps explain several confounding findings, added Rich
Camilli, the lead author of the Woods Hole study. Their cruise
arrived at the Deepwater Horizon site just before warnings of an
incipient hurricane. And while they saw signs of hydrocarbons to the
well’s northeast, the lead was not strong enough.

“We had limited time on site, limited resources and a hurricane
coming at us,” Camilli said with some regret. “We had to focus our
energies. And we focused on the southwest because it seemed to be a
bigger signal.”

The most important finding from Valentine’s model was its discovery
of microbial priming, several scientists said. For deep waters not
previously exposed to the spill, the carbon-hungry bugs followed a
predictable pattern, one species after another blooming to consume
its favored hydrocarbon, said Terry Hazen, the microbiologist who
gained fame by identifying an oil-eating bug feasting on the plume
(Greenwire, Aug. 24, 2010).

In unexposed water, the easiest-to-digest hydrocarbons would go
first, Hazen said. To put it in human terms: “The candy went away
first,” he said. “Then we got into the meat and potatoes. And then we
got into the gristle.”

This pattern changed once water previously exposed to the spill,
after sloshing in deep spirals that could stretch for 50 miles,
returned to the wellhead. Their bibs already on, the host of microbes
began eating the candy (propane), meat (alkanes) and gristle
(aromatic hydrocarbons) all at the same time. It was a smorgasbord.

Valentine suspects this priming dynamic happens all the time in
waters home to oil and gas seeps. But no one has been able to find
it, he said, “largely because we’ve never the controlled release
[necessary] — or in this case, an uncontrolled release.”

The layering of old and new water also explains observation
differences recorded by the Woods Hole group, Valentine and Samantha
Joye, a biochemical oceanographer at the University of Georgia. Both
the Woods Hole group and Joye had found similar ratios of propane to
methane in their samples, while Valentine had contradictory data.

“And Dave is not a hack,” Reddy said. “We were going, ‘How can we
have this discrepancy? Our data was solid.’ We used a lot of brain
power trying to figure out why Dave’s data was different.”

Reddy even began giving presentations about the differences between
Valentine and Joye’s data to study confusion about the plume. Then,
finally, Reddy and Valentine were sitting together on another ocean
research cruise, and Reddy remarked, “Dave, how do we figure out this
propane shit?” In 30 seconds, Valentine sketched out his new model,
where consumption rates would vary with old and new water.

“He really unified theories about the plume,” Reddy said.

Navy models play key role

That unification could not have happened without some elaborate
modeling, however, including heavy mathematical lifting by one of
Valentine’s co-authors, Igor Mezic, an engineer at Santa Barbara.

Mezic adapted the Gulf models used by the Navy to keep their gliders
from running into the seafloor, adding mixing diagnostics he had
previously applied to describing the oil’s movement on the surface.
Combined with the huge amount of data recorded during the spill — 10
times the normal amount — a model that is typically used for short-
term predictions becomes far more rigorous.

“It’s an approach that really showed where the action was,” Valentine
said.

The group then seeded the physical model with both the hydrocarbons
erupting from the well and 52 theoretical bacteria types, each tuned
to a different feedstock. Tracking the movement of these bugs, which
included exemplars of the microbes previously discovered in the plume
by Hazen and Valentine, revealed how important the microbial “memory”
of the plume became after the spill’s first few weeks.

“It seems like in the early stages, the first week and first month,
there were more dramatic swings and blooms of variability, then
things stabilize a bit,” Valentine said, thanks to the layered
presence of multiple primed bacteria.

While microbial degradation was an important part of the plume’s
demise, that does not mean all of the hydrocarbons were consumed,
Valentine added. Oil contains a host of complex chemicals like
polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, which many bacteria find difficult
to break down. It is quite possible those plume components vanished
due to the dilution over the Gulf of Mexico’s vast expanse, rather
than any bacterial work.

“We don’t really know what happened to a lot of that stuff,”
Valentine said.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/01/13/2587909/oil-rig-could-be-off-key-west.html

Posted on Friday, 01.13.12

The Scarabeo 9 semi-submersible oil rig photographed in China after it was built in 2011. The moveable platform is expected to begin drilling exploratory wells off Cuba, and near Key West, in the coming weeks.(Photo courtesy of Keppel FELS) KEYSNET.COM

BY DAVID GOODHUE
DGOODHUE@KEYSREPORTER.COM

The Scarabeo 9, a giant semi-submersible oil rig headed to Cuba, set sail from its temporary port in Trinidad and Tobago this week, observers said.

It could be in the Florida Straits between Cuba and Key West in two weeks.

The moveable $750 million drilling platform was just given a passing grade by inspectors with the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, as well as members of the U.S. Coast Guard.

U.S. inspectors toured the rig while it was in Trinidad and Tobago on invitation from Spanish oil company Repsol, which will be the first of several international drilling companies to explore for oil in Cuba’s part of the Florida Straits. The agencies released a statement that their “personnel found the vessel to generally comply with existing international and U.S. standards by which Repsol has pledged to abide.”

“The review is consistent with U.S. efforts to minimize the possibility of a major oil spill, which would hurt U.S. economic and environmental interests,” the joint Coast Guard/DOI statement says. “The review compared the vessel with applicable international safety and security standards as well as U.S. standards for drilling units operating in the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf.”

Jorge Piñon, a former energy industry executive and current visiting research fellow at the Cuban Research Institute at Florida International University, said the Scarabeo 9 lifted anchor off Trinidad and Tobago Wednesday morning and the voyage to the northern coast of Cuba would likely take 14 days.

Piñon, a former executive with British Petroleum, has been involved in talks about the operation with the U.S. and Cuban governments, as well as the companies that will use the rig.

Daniel Whittle, Cuba program director with the Environmental Defense Fund, who has been a close observer of the country’s energy endeavors, also said he heard the Scarabeo 9 will arrive off Cuba in two weeks. Piñon said he expects exploratory drilling to get started very soon after the rig arrives because the contract between Repsol, Eni S.p.A – the Italian company that owns the Scarabeo 9 – and the Cuban government begins when the platform gets there.

He also said it behooves Repsol to get started as soon as possible since the company is paying $511,000 a day to use the rig. He expects an exploratory well to be drilled within 60 to 70 days of the Scarabeo 9’s arrival.

The Scarabeo 9 will operate as close as 50 miles from Key West. The prospect of an oil drilling operation taking place that close to the United States has raised concerns from offshore drilling opponents and state and federal lawmakers.

Some concern from the latter comes from those opposed to seeing the Communist Castro regime become a major energy player in this hemisphere. Since information about the building of the Scarabeo 9 became public about two years ago, several members of Congress have introduced legislation aimed at punishing companies taking part in the operation.

U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen’s district includes the Keys. She’s a fervent critic of the Castro government and issued a statement this week criticizing the Obama administration for allowing U.S. inspectors to conduct what she calls a “routine safety certification of the rig.”

“The issue at hand is a state sponsor of terrorism is poised to achieve a tremendous economic boon by entering the oil business and potentially endangering U.S. waters to boot. It is deeply disappointing that the Obama administration appears content to just watch that happen,” she said.

Environmentalists are concerned because of the depth of the project. The Scarabeo 9 will drill 6,000 feet underwater. The 2010 DeepWater Horizon/British Petroleum spill in the Gulf of Mexico, which took 85 days to staunch, happened at a depth of 5,500 feet.

But Whittle said he believes Cuba is committed to preventing such a disastrous spill from occurring off its coast, and the recent positive U.S. inspection should serve to calm some worries. But he also criticized the United States government for adhering too strongly with its 50-year-old trade embargo against Cuba. This would largely prevent U.S. companies with expertise in oil cleanup from helping in the event of a disastrous spill in Cuban waters.

“U.S. interests can only be protected with broad dialogue and cooperation between our two countries – something the Cubans have been open to, but the U.S. government is still proceeding cautiously on that front,” Whittle said in an e-mail to The Reporter.

The amount of oil located in the area of the Straits that Repsol will explore is not certain. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates about five billion barrels, but the Cuban government thinks the offshore lease holds up to 20 billion barrels.

For more Keys news, go to KeysNet.com

Special thanks to Richard Charter