The Obama administration is scheduled to unveil Wednesday its long-awaited five-year plan for oil and natural gas development of the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS).

Although the White House has not officially identified the subject of President Obama’s speech, an administration official confirmed for NGI that he will address the much-anticipated plan for leasing in the federal offshore area.

In a “status report” filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Monday, the federal government said it expected to announce “very soon” the results of a court-ordered analysis and review of the existing five-year (2007-2012) leasing plan.

A year ago the appeals court found that the existing five-year leasing plan was flawed due to Interior’s failure to properly assess the environmental impact of certain OCS areas included in the 2007-2012 plan, particularly offshore Alaska’s OCS. It sent the plan back to Interior to correct the flaws (see Daily GPI, April 20, 2009).

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar pledged that the administration would release the revised five-year OCS plan, which he said would cover existing and future lease sales (beyond 2012), by the end of the month, which is Wednesday (see Daily GPI, March 4). “We are attempting to pull together a plan for the Outer Continental Shelf that will cover both the existing current plan (2007-2012) as well as looking into the future,” he said earlier this month.

“It has been difficult to do in large part because of the failure…of the earlier plan,” Salazar, said, adding that the new plan “hopefully will not suffer from the inadequacies of the past plan.”

Of key interest to producers will be how much will remain of the five-year oil and gas leasing plan that was drafted in the final days of the Bush administration. The Bush-era plan for 2010-2015, which overlaps with the existing leasing plan, would open banned areas off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts and in the eastern Gulf of Mexico.

Calling the 2010-2015 leasing plan a “headlong rush of the worst kind,” Salazar in February 2009 extended the public comment period on it in an apparent effort to keep it from moving forward, critics said (see Daily GPI, Feb. 11).

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