President Obama said something yesterday during his New Orleans stopover that caught the eye of Patrick Creighton of the Institute for Energy Research.
Here’s what Obama said: “What I think we need to do is increase our domestic energy production… I’m in favor of finding environmentally sound ways to tap our oil and our natural gas.”
That statement got Creighton’s attention because one of his jobs is to follow the progress of Washington’s processing of applications to explore and develop energy resources in places like federal lands in the western U.S. and in the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) areas off the U.S. coast.
Here’s what the Obama administration has done in those regards thus far in 2009, according to Creighton’s tracking:
· Feb 2 – Revokes 77 Utah oil and gas leases (later reinstates 17 of the 77 leases)
· Feb 10 – Delays new Five-Year-Plan for the OCS
· Feb 23 – Cancels commercial R&D on oil shale leases
· Sept. 17 – Obama’s Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar explains these facts by observing that he’s “in no hurry to make a decision on whether to allow offshore drilling in federal waters off Alaska and other states”
This is why, Creighton notes, “in 2008, the federal government generated over $10 billion in bonus bids from energy leasing. In comparison, since Obama/Salazar have taken office, the Interior Department has collected $875 million — or 8.6% of what was collected in 2008.”
How long before Obama’s appointees do what Obama says he wants them to do on energy?
