The Senate Appropriations Committee Thursday approved a Republican amendment that authorizes up to $10 million for the Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service to conduct a seismic inventory of oil and natural gas resources in the eastern Gulf of Mexico. Florida senators have vowed to do everything in their power to block the proposal on the Senate floor.

The Energy Policy Act of 2005 (EPAct) approved the inventory. The amendment, offered by Sen. Larry Craig (R-ID), authorizes the funding to carry it out, said Craig spokesman Dan Whiting.

The proposal was offered as part of the $32.3 billion Energy-Water appropriations bill, which was voted out of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development Tuesday and was expected to clear the full appropriations panel Thursday. The fiscal year 2008 bill, which funds the Army Corps of Engineers, Bureau of Reclamation and the Department of Energy, exceeds President Bush’s budget request by more than $1.8 billion and is nearly $2 billion more than the fiscal year 2007 spending measure.

In a letter to subcommittee leaders Wednesday, Florida Sens. Bill Nelson and Mel Martinez warned that they will try to cut off efforts to include funding for a seismic inventory of Outer Continental Shelf oil and gas resources in the spending bill. Neither senator is a member of the appropriations panel, so any move to block funding for the inventory would come on the Senate floor.

“We believe such attempts [inventories] undermine the protections for states like Florida that do not wish to have oil and gas development off their shores,” the Florida lawmakers said in their letter to Subcommittee Chairman Byron Dorgan (D-ND) and Sen. Pete Domenici of New Mexico, the ranking Republican on the Energy-Water subcommittee.

“If any such language directing seismic surveys is included in the Energy and Water Appropriations bill, or any other legislation, we will use our senatorial rights to prevent this erosion of our coastal protections,” Nelson and Martinez wrote.

The Florida senators, as well as other critics, fear that a seismic survey would eventually lead to the overturning of the 25-year-old congressional moratorium on drilling off the East and West Coasts.

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