No, the headline is not a jumble from two separate posts. Tuesday is the one-year anniversary of President Bush lifting the executive branch ban on oil and natural gas exploration and production from the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) off the U.S. coastline.
Remember the “Drill Here, Drill Now” campaign by House Republicans?
Not much has happened in the year since Bush acted, thanks to the Obama administration’s Interior Secretary, Ken Salazar, the President’s allies in the environmental movement, and congressional Democrats like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi who appear determined to stop all energy production in the U.S. that doesn’t involve windmills or solar panels.
Normally, companies submit “bonus bids” in a competition against each other for federal permits to conduct exploration on the OCS and on federal lands in the West where billions of barrels of oil and even more natural gas are waiting to be produced. The federal government received about $10 billion in revenue from such bonus bids last year. So far this year, however, the total is a mere $750 million. The end of the fiscal year is near, so the the total revenue this year is likely to be less than 10 percent of what it could have been.
Between the $10 billion from bonus bids and another $13 billion in royalties received from production in existing OCS and western lands areas, Washington cleared a pretty penny in 2008. But not this year. Salarzar is slow-walking the OCS process, a federal panel has put the existing OCS/western lands bidding on hold pending court challenges, and the Obama White House is pushing the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade anti-global warming bill that will further suffocate domestic energy exploration, production and innovation.
As an energy industry insider told The Examiner, “the administration has put the new OCS plan on hold, has lost in court on the existing one so that we actually have no OCS leasing program, and is presiding over a devastating set of threatening proposals which have led companies to decide not to invest here for fear that the government will change the rules of the game on them regarding taxes, regulations and other threats.”
Happy anniversary.
