The Interior Department’s decision to not open up new offshore areas in its proposed 2012-2017 leasing plan, particularly offshore Virginia, is a “missed opportunity with little to no justifiable policy rationale,” the National Ocean Industries Association (NOIA) said in comments filed with the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM).

“It is difficult to see how the administration’s aim to achieve a one-third reduction in oil imports by 2025…can be achieved with the proposed plan that blocks access to new areas of the OCS [Outer Continental Shelf] until mid-2017 at the earliest,” said the NOIA, which represents all sectors of the offshore industry, including oil and natural gas production.

The proposed 2012-2017 leasing plan, which was released last November, calls for two leases sales in the eastern Gulf of Mexico (GOM), and sales in the western and central GOM and Alaska, but the East Coast is noticeably absent. While NOIA and offshore producers would like to see more offshore regions opened to leasing, their pleas are likely to fall on deaf ears.

“We’re not expecting changes” to the proposed leasing plan, said an industry spokeswoman (see NGI, Nov. 21, 2011). Interior seldom makes changes to its leasing plan once it’s issued. “History bears this out,” she said.

“At this point in the process for the proposed program, NOIA recognizes that the plan must now proceed with the scope of decision making as presently constituted. However NOIA would ask that as BOEM proceeds, the area available under the proposed [leasing] plan not be further reduced, nor the designated lease sales [altered]; and that the alternative [leasing plan recommended by Interior] with the highest level of potential for development be selected,” the NOIA said.

Upon completion of the proposed 2012-2017 leasing plan (possibly by later this summer), the offshore group called on the BOEM to immediately begin work on a revision to the leasing plan by scoping at least those areas, Eastern Coast and eastern GOM for example, that were considered in the 2010-2015 leasing plan, but then were put on hold following the Macondo well blowout in the Gulf in May 2010.

In April 2010, before the Macondo well explosion, President Obama proposed expanding development of the entire GOM, with a focus on the gas-rich eastern GOM; increasing exploratory activity in new frontier areas, such as the Mid-Atlantic (offshore Virginia) and South Atlantic regions and the Arctic Ocean (see NGI, April 5, 2010).

A month later, Obama halted or suspended drilling or planned drilling in the GOM and offshore Alaska and Virginia in response to the Macondo well blowout that lead to a fire on the Deepwater Horizon rig and mammoth oil spill (see NGI, May 31, 2010). This essentially placed the 2010-2015 leasing plan on the back-burner.

“NOIA is disappointed to see that there will be no lease sale proposed offshore Virginia [in the 2012-2017 plan]. While there has historically been a great degree of deference given to the views of elected officials from coastal states that stand in opposition to new exploration, it is unfortunate that there appears to be no similar deference when the views of a state are so strongly supportive of taking new concrete steps toward development,” NOIA said.

“There is strong bipartisan support in Virginia [for offshore leasing], including the governor, both U.S. senators, a majority of the House delegation and the state legislature,” the group noted.

The BOEM estimates that undiscovered technically recovered resources in the OCS are 88.59 billion bbl of oil and 398.37 Tcf of natural gas.

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