May 29, 2018 — WASHINGTON — The Trump administration’s long-awaited decision on whether to allow seismic testing for oil and gas beneath the Atlantic Ocean is causing heartburn for the the energy industry, which eagerly awaits the fulfillment of President Donald Trump’s push to allow offshore drilling in U.S. coastal waters.
Five seismic survey companies want federal permission to shoot loud, pressurized air blasts into the ocean every 10 to 12 seconds around-the-clock for months at a time over 330,000 square miles of ocean from Florida to the Delaware bay, in search of fossil fuel deposits beneath the ocean floor.
If approved, the activity would reverse an Obama-era denial of testing permits in the Atlantic Ocean and represent a major advance of Trump’s “America-First Offshore Energy Strategy.”
After the public-comment period ended in July 2017, many stakeholders expected the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to quickly approve the “incidental harassment authorizations” needed to move the permit applications forward.
But more than 10 months later, NOAA, one of two federal agencies that will decide the matter, still hasn’t approved the authorizations. The IHA would allow the seismic testing to harass or injure small numbers of marine mammals, which would otherwise be prohibited under the Marine Mammal Protection Act.
Read the full story at the Mclatchy DC Bureau