While the Interior Department is “fast-tracking” renewable energy projects, many of which are financed by the oil and natural gas industry, it has blinders on when it comes to promoting oil and gas production, the American Petroleum Institute (API) said Wednesday.

“Our concern…is that despite continued promise to promote increased domestic oil and natural gas production to meet the nation’s increasing demand for all forms of energy, government action that would accomplish that gets no fast-track treatment. In fact, when it comes to new oil and gas development, the administration’s policy appears to be one of extreme caution, often leading to delay,” API President Jack Gerard told Interior Secretary Ken Salazar in a letter.

“Perhaps the most recent glaring example involves the slowness of the department in developing a programmatic environmental impact statement (EIS) for Atlantic offshore development. Without that document — which Congress has now directed MMS [Minerals Management Service] to conduct — there can be no seismic testing, which is indispensable to the information-gathering that the department has deemed essential to successful planning and future leasing.

“Although we understand that an EIS may finally be authorized in the near future, we still must wonder why it has taken almost a year since MMS announced it would prepare this document,” Gerard said.

“Other examples include decisions to delay or defer lease sales in Utah, Colorado and Wyoming and a six-month delay in the next (2010-2015) OCS [Outer Continental Shelf] five-year lease plan. Despite overwhelmingly pro-development comments that we understand were submitted to MMS, we continue to see no movement on this [OCS] plan,” he noted (see Daily GPI, Feb. 11; Feb. 5).

“We also see a lack of action on the Virginia lease sale, which is estimated to have a potential benefit of $340 million under the current five-year [OCS] plan. We are continuously being told that MMS needs more information, but little or nothing is done to gather the needed information,” Gerard said (see Daily GPI, Nov. 13, 2008).

“We applaud your move to fast-track alternative energy projects, and we would ask that you apply this same approach to actions needed to develop our primary domestic energy source — oil and gas,” he said. He reminded Salazar that oil and gas companies are one of the world’s largest producers of renewable energy, including wind, geothermal and solar. More than one-fifth of all the U.S. investments in renewable energy between 2000 and 2008 came from oil and gas producers, according to API.

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