A Senate bipartisan coalition led by Louisiana lawmakers yesterday overwhelmingly defeated an amendment to postpone oil and natural gas leasing in the eastern Gulf of Mexico.

By 67 to 33, the Senate voted not to include the measure, which was co-sponsored by Sens. Bill Nelson and Bob Graham of Florida, in an $18.5 billion Interior appropriations bill for fiscal 2002. The proposal had sought to defer all leasing in the eastern planning area of the Gulf — including Lease Sale 181 — until April 1, 2002.

The Senate vote comes only weeks after the House adopted an identical measure. Because the two chambers disagree on the issue, the odds are that it may not be included in the final bill that emerges from conference. President Bush isn’t likely to sign legislation that would defer eastern Gulf leasing.

“I have a feeling that the Senate position will prevail [in conference], but it’s hard to tell at this point,” said a Capitol Hill observer. The Bush administration’s plans to limit the size of Lease Sale 181 “may take some of the wind out of the House vote.”

The administration’s decision on Lease Sale 181 made the Senate vote yesterday “all the more important,” said Tom Michaels, a spokesman for the National Ocean Industries Association. If the vote had gone the other way, it would have given the Florida delegation more time to “stall and ultimately halt Lease Sale 181,” he claimed.

Sen. Mary Landrieu and Bob Breaux of Louisiana led the drive to block the measure. “”We have a problem in this nation. Our demand for energy is too high and our supply is not great enough. We use 30 Tcf of natural gas [a year]. We only have 25 Tcf. We think that the Gulf of Mexico, places far from the shores of Florida, has ample supply of natural gas. Let us not move in the wrong direction,” Landrieu said on the Senate floor.

Nelson and Graham urged Senate lawmakers to repeat their action from Wednesday, when they adopted an amendment to bar drilling on federal lands designated as national monuments. “This [the Florida coastline] is a matter of national treasure to us. You all honored that yesterday in passing the…amendment” sponsored by Sen. Richard Durbin (D-IL).

In a related development, the Senate voted to adopt an amendment, sponsored by Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), clarifying that a section in the Interior spending bill, which renews the presidential offshore moratorium, would apply to pre-leasing activities (seismic and geophysical testing, for example) as well as leasing. The bill renews the moratorium on drilling off the West Coast, in the North Atlantic and eastern Gulf of Mexico south of 26 degrees north latitude and east of 86 degrees west longitude (near the bottom part of the Florida Panhandle).

“The simple, straightforward amendment I have proposed adds pre-leasing to the list of prohibited activities…It would clarify congressional intent and serve as a preventative step against any challenge to the meaning of the prohibition,” said Kerry in offering his amendment this week.

In other action, Landrieu made it quite clear during a Senate hearing Thursday that Louisiana disapproved of the Bush administration’s decision to cut back the amount of acreage that will be offered to producers in the upcoming Lease Sale 181 in the eastern Gulf.

The administration’s actions to cut back the eastern Gulf lease sale were “quite perplexing,” she said. On one hand, it talks about the “great demand for natural gas,” yet it has taken “not one but several positions to minimize…gas production,” Landrieu said before a Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing on comprehensive energy legislation.

“Is the administration taking a position that we are just not going to go forward with the compromise that was reached to drill hundreds of miles off of [Florida’s] shore?” she pressed Interior Secretary Gale Norton, who appeared before the committee. “Florida and Louisiana have very different views” on drilling in the eastern Gulf, said Norton, adding that the Bush administration tried to reach a “reasonable compromise” between the divergent sides.

Landrieu asked Norton what right Florida had to stifle drilling so far off of its coasts. “…First of all, these are not [Florida] state waters. They’re federal waters. They don’t belong to the state of Florida. [The offshore acreage is] actually closer to Louisiana,” she said.

The original agreement for Lease Sale 181, which was brokered between the Clinton administration and former Florida Gov. Lawton Chiles, stipulated that the Lease Sale 181 would involved offshore acreage located 100 miles from the Florida coastline, which “I thought was a quite reasonable arrangement.” But that wasn’t enough for Florida, she noted. In a major concession to the state, the administration earlier this month scaled back the amount of acreage that will be offered to producers in the lease sale — to 1.5 million acres from 5.9 million acres.

The downsized lease site is now located more than 100 miles off the coasts of Florida, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, and limits future drilling in the eastern Gulf primarily to the deep-water areas. As a result of the administration’s action, “we’ve now cut off a huge section of opportunities for drilling,” Landrieu said.

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