A bipartisan bill would keep protesters from disrupting offshore oil and gas leasing sales by moving them online within a year, lawmakers said Wednesday.
The Innovation in Offshore Leasing Act would amend the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act to allow the secretary of the Interior to conduct offshore oil and gas lease sales on the Internet. The bill would require the Department of Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Management to hold at least one online lease sale within a year of the bill’s passing.
While the current system, where oil companies send representatives to New Orleans with written bids for leases in envelopes that are then opened in person, was described as “workable” by an Interior official, lawmakers expressed concern that protesters are disrupting the process.
At a subcommittee hearing of the House Committee on Natural Resources Wednesday, Rep. Doug Lamborn, R-Colo., said several small groups of protesters disrupted a lease sale in March in an attempt to keep tracks of ocean from being subject to energy production. Updating the leasing process is a simple way to stop that, he said.
“While the private sector has quickly adapted to making many of our daily tasks Internet-friendly, federal agencies have been slow to follow suit,” he said.
Walter Cruickshank, deputy director of the Bureau of Ocean Management, said the lease sale in New Orleans was interrupted by protesters climbing on to the stage, shouting over participants and causing minor property damage.
The attempt to stop the lease sale shows that changes are necessary to the leasing process, but he questioned whether online leasing was the way to go.
“Adopting an electronic bidding system would represent a major modification to current practices,” he said.
The bill was authored by Rep. Garrett Graves, R-La., and co-sponsored by Rep. Alan Lowenthal, D-Calif.
Graves said the bill reflects how business works in modern times instead of holding onto the current decades-old system.
He said the Department of Interior may complain about having to institute a new process, but it expects the same thing from many companies that have to deal with its regulations on oil and gas production.
In the end, the bill would save the federal government money and help generate more revenue for states, he said.
“These funds … go back to improving the resiliency of our coastal areas and that’s something that’s very important for the state of Louisiana and the Gulf Coast states,” he said.
Graves worked on the bill with Lowenthal, who said it’s time for offshore lease sales to be updated after 35 years of the same process.
“It simply does not reflect how business is done in this country,” Lowenthal said.
