Offshore drilling Archives - Page 12 of 19

Massachusetts Senate declares opposition to New England offshore oil and gas drilling

February 23, 2018 — BOSTON — The Massachusetts Senate has registered its opposition to reopening any oil and gas exploration or drilling off the coast of New England.

A resolution passed by the Senate Thursday states that federal initiatives to reopen offshore drilling “threaten to jeopardize the environmental well-being of the Commonwealth, and more particularly, its coastal communities and waters.”

The measure asks the U.S. Department of the Interior to “take all possible action to protect the waters off the coast of the Commonwealth and New England, in particular Georges Bank, Stellwagen Bank, and Jeffreys Ledge, and to exempt these areas from oil exploration initiatives.”

The statement, co-authored by Sen. Mike Barrett, D-Lexington, and Sen. Bruce Tarr, R-Gloucester, comes days before the Bureau of Ocean Management plans a Feb. 27 public open house in Boston regarding its proposed National Outer Continental Shelf Oil and Gas Leasing Program.

The Bureau of Ocean Management will soon seek environmental permits for its Jan. 9 draft plan to reopen fossil fuel exploration in nearly all ocean areas along the continental United States and Alaska. March 9 is the deadline for submitting public comments on the draft leasing document.

Read the full story at MassLive

Trump’s plans to expand offshore drilling face headwind on Atlantic coast

February 22, 2018 — WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s bid to open Atlantic waters to offshore drilling has sparked bipartisan opposition in the states with the largest oil and gas reserves off their coasts, presenting unexpected obstacles to the long-held designs of the energy industry.

In recent years, political leaders in Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina had supported oil and gas drilling off their coasts, envisioning high-paying jobs and increased tax revenues. But new governors in the three states – two Democrats and a Republican – have all reversed the positions of their predecessors, fearing the potential impact on beaches, fisheries and tourism industries.

“This last election we’ve seen a significant shift at the leadership level,” said David Holt, president of the Consumer Energy Alliance, a trade group representing large energy users and producers. “If you look at the last 10 years, the majority of the governors and the public had been supportive.”

For oil executives in Houston, an international center of the offshore oil and gas sector, the Atlantic coast is a new frontier that could potentially mean significant profits in the decades ahead. Most of the world’s biggest oil companies, including Exxon Mobil, Chevron and Royal Dutch Shell, have a major presence here, employing thousands of people, as do firms specializing in offshore drilling and services, including TechnipFMC, National Oilwell Varco, McDermott International and Transocean.

But the recent shift in political and public sentiment represents a very real threat to their plans.

The oil and gas industry has sought access to U.S. Atlantic waters for years, hoping to find rich oil and gas fields similar to those off the coasts of Nigeria and Ghana. In Trump – who proclaims “energy dominance” almost as frequently as “Make America great again” – the industry believed it had found the key to achieving its goal.

Energy companies came close two years ago when former President Barack Obama considered allowing oil and gas development in Atlantic waters. They had the support of Republicans and Democrats, including Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine, the Democratic nominee for vice president in 2016, and former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a longtime friend and fund raiser for Hillary and Bill Clinton, but Obama ultimately decided against an expansion of offshore drilling.

Read the full story at the Houston Chronicle

Fish stakeholders to protest drilling plan

February 20, 2018 — Well, the boys of spring are heaving the ol’ horsehide around in the warmer climes of Florida and Arizona and that’s always a good thing, knowing that the calendar is about to flip over to baseball any minute.

Quick thought: What if baseball had been invented in, well, Norway or Iceland? Well, then the ball probably would be covered with fish skin rather than horsehide or the cowhide baseball switched to in 1974.

Be way better with fish skin. That way, any wild pitch truly would be the one that got away.

Meeting and greetin’

As we mentioned in last week’s column, things should be hopping in Boston on Feb. 27 when the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management hosts a public hearing on the Trump administration’s proposal to open the ocean floor off New England to potential drilling and exploration for gas, oil and whatever else is down there that can make a buck for somebody.

The meeting is expected to be packed with fishing stakeholders, conservationists and public officials — all of whom seem to be against any systematic mechanical intrusion into the marine ecosystem off the coast of New England.

One programming note: The venue for the event has been changed to the Omni Parker House hotel from the Hyatt Regency Boston. The time remains the same — 3 to 7 p.m.

We also were remiss last week in our discussion of the issue not to mention that the New England Fishery Management Council has submitted comments setting out its concerns about the possibility of gas and oil drilling off the Eastern Seaboard.

The council has recommended BOEM exclude the North and Mid-Atlantic areas because “oil and gas exploration and extraction activities in the Atlantic Outer Continental Shelf involve inappropriate risks that may harm living marine resources and communities that depend on them.”

Last summer, the council listed five general concerns: direct displacement of fishing activities due to survey or extraction activities; harm to sensitive deepwater habitats, such as corals; negative impacts on living marine resources from the high-decibel sounds produced during surveys and drilling; negative impacts to near-shore fish habitats from infrastructure necessary to support oil and gas industries; and risks associated with leaks and spills resulting from extraction and transport.

That’s a lot of concerns.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times

New Yorkers rally against offshore drilling plan

February 16, 2018 — ALBANY, N.Y. — Wearing fish-shaped caps and armed with a megaphone, New York state’s leading environmental advocates protested President Donald Trump’s plan to open offshore areas to oil and gas drilling on Thursday as federal energy officials held an open house on the proposal near the state Capitol.

The group, wearing caps shaped like sturgeon, salmon and other vulnerable ocean species, included Aaron Mair, past president of the Sierra Club, and Judith Enck, the regional Environmental Protection Agency administrator under former President Barack Obama. They said Trump’s plan could devastate the environment while leaving potential renewable energy sources untouched. They called on Congress to pass a law blocking the proposal.

“We all remember the BP Deepwater Horizon catastrophe,” Enck said into a megaphone, referring to the 2010 rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico that triggered the largest offshore oil spill in U.S. history. “We cannot afford that reckless activity in the Atlantic.”

Inside, federal energy officials handed out information packets and briefed members of the public on the president’s decision last month to open most of the nation’s coast to oil and gas drilling as a way of making the U.S. less dependent on foreign energy sources. Several dozen people had trickled through at the midpoint of the four-hour open house. Members of the public were encouraged to submit written comments.

William Brown, chief environmental officer at the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, said he welcomed comments from opponents to the plan.

Read the full story from Associated Press at the Seattle Times

In New Jersey, opponents of offshore drilling gear up for a fight

February 15, 2018 — Jim Lovgren is a third-generation fisherman and captains the Shadowfax. At the Fisherman’s Coop in Point Pleasant New Jersey recently, he watched as about a half-dozen men sorted freshly caught scup — or porgies — into bins.

“These fish they’ll be put in a cooler by tonight,” he said. “There could be 30,000 to 40,000 pounds of fish on the docks today. They will all be on their way to New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. We ship anywhere from Canada down past North Carolina.”

Lovgren grew up trawling the waters off Sandy Hook. He says the fishery is already stressed from rising ocean temperatures. While there used to be dozens of fishing boats here, Lovgren said today there’s only a handful. He worries that if oil and gas companies drill offshore, he’ll be put out of business.

“Blackback flounders are just about extinct in this area here,” he said. “That was a major fishery. yellowtail flounders, codfish, lobsters are disappearing off the Jersey coast and it’s all because the water’s getting too warm.”

Lovgren knows that burning fossil fuels is connected to climate change, warming oceans and his disappearing fish. Still, he said, he needs fossil fuel to trawl the ocean floor.

“Look, a fishing boat, it runs on diesel fuel. You have to have energy. We have to have energy.”

But President Trump’s offshore drilling proposal is an immediate threat to his livelihood, and he’s gearing up to fight it.

Lovgren, along with other fishermen, environmentalists, realtors, and local business owners, descended on a hotel near Trenton Thursday voicing their unified opposition to drilling for oil and natural gas off the coast of New Jersey.

The public meeting,hosted by federal officials from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, comes as the Trump Administration has proposed opening up the entire East Coast to offshore exploration.

But the proposal has little support along the Jersey coast.

“You start putting a bunch of oil rigs out there and it takes away places that we can tow, where we can fish,” Lovgren said. “The main concern is an oil spill.”

Talk to anyone who makes their living along the Jersey shore, whether it’s selling salt water taffy or renting shore houses, and they’ll tell you they don’t want another Deepwater Horizon along the East Coast. The Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosion off the coast of Louisiana in 2010 spilled an estimated 171 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, decimating the fisheries and driving away tourists.

“You know if we had a Deepwater Horizon spill down in Delaware,” Lovgren said, “it’s going to come right up off the Jersey shore. It’s going to wash right into Long Island onto the beach. It could be hitting Cape Cod and Nantucket. Now that could be devastating.”

Lovgren voted for President Trump, and still supports him. But not his proposal. He worries seismic testing, which is used to find the oil and gas reserves, would hurt whales and dolphins.

He’s also concerned about potential smaller leaks that don’t make headlines.

And he’s not alone.

Read the full story at NPR’s StateImpact Pennsylvania

A Nearly Invisible Oil Spill Threatens Some of Asia’s Richest Fisheries

February 13, 2018 — ZHOUSHAN, China — A fiery collision that sank an Iranian tanker in the East China Sea a month ago has resulted in an environmental threat that experts say is unlike any before: An almost invisible type of petroleum has begun to contaminate some of the most important fishing grounds in Asia, from China to Japan and beyond.

It is the largest oil spill in decades, but the disaster has unfolded outside the glare of international attention that big spills have previously attracted. That is because of its remote location on the high seas and also the type of petroleum involved: condensate, a toxic, liquid byproduct of natural gas production.

Unlike the crude oil in better-known disasters like the Exxon Valdez and the Deepwater Horizon, condensate does not clump into black globules that can be easily spotted or produce heart-wrenching images of animals mired in muck. There’s no visible slick that can be pumped out. Experts said the only real solution is to let it evaporate or dissolve. Absorbed into the water, it will remain toxic for a time, though it will also disperse more quickly into the ocean than crude oil.

Experts say there has never been so large a spill of condensate; up to 111,000 metric tons has poured into the ocean. It has almost certainly already invaded an ecosystem that includes some of the world’s most bountiful fisheries off Zhoushan, the archipelago that rises where the Yangtze River flows into the East China Sea.

The area produced five million tons of seafood of up to four dozen species for China alone last year, according to Greenpeace, including crab, squid, yellow croaker, mackerel and a local favorite, hairtail. If projections are correct, the toxins could soon make their way into equally abundant Japanese fisheries.

Exposure to condensate is extremely unhealthy to humans and potentially fatal. The effects of eating fish contaminated with it remain essentially untested, but experts strongly advise against doing so.

“This is an oil spill of a type we haven’t seen before,” said Paul Johnston, a scientist at Greenpeace Research Laboratories at the University of Exeter in England. “Working out the impact is actually a huge task — probably next to impossible.”

For China, the disaster has become a test of its ambitions as a global and regional steward of the seas, especially at a time when it is reinforcing its territorial claims, including disputed territories with Japan in these waters. Given its proximity, China has taken the lead in investigating the disaster and monitoring the spill, but it has faced some criticism for what some see as a slow and inadequate response thus far.

Officials in Beijing announced on Feb. 1 that samples of fish taken within four to five nautical miles of the sunken ship contained traces of petroleum hydrocarbons, suggesting possible condensate contamination; they pledged to expand the range of testing to 90 miles, and closely monitor fish coming into markets.

Read the full story at the New York Times

Rhode Island: Ocean State Officials Pledge to Halt Offshore Drilling

February 13, 2018 — NARRAGANSETT, R.I. — Rhode Island’s governor and members of Congress are calling for an all-out effort to oppose President Trump’s plan for offshore drilling along the Eastern seaboard. They warned of the environmental and economic risks to the state’s fishing and tourism industries. They urged the public to submit comments on the proposal to the Bureau of Ocean Management (BOEM) and to show their opposition at a scheduled Feb. 28 public workshop in Providence.

Referencing the six commercial fishermen in the audience at at Feb. 12 press event, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., said he planned to advance a bill signed by all New England senators to ban offshore drilling off the New England coast. Whitehouse called the offshore drilling proposal a “dumb idea” and blamed the fossil-fuel industry for directing the Trump administration to enact it.

“This will not happen. Whatever it takes to prevent it, we will see takes place,” Whitehouse said.

Gov. Gina Raimondo promised to lobby governors of coastal states to pass resolutions opposing the offshore drilling plan.

“This is backwards. We ought to be moving forward for offshore wind farms, not backwards for offshore oil drilling,” she said.

Raimondo also restated her intent to have Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke follow through on his promise to meet her in Rhode Island and discuss the fossil-fuel project. Several East Coast governors called Zinke after he met with Florida Gov. Rick Scott. Scott apparently convinced Zinke to exempt his state from the offshore drilling plan. Although there is skepticism of the agreement after Zinke’s office backtracked somewhat on that promise and legal questions of such an exemption surfaced.

Whitehouse and Raimondo were asked whether a state or regional carbon tax would put economic pressure on Trump and the fossil-fuel industry. Both said they favor a national or multi-state fee on fossil fuels. However, Whitehouse said his carbon tax bill in the Senate won’t advance until the head of the Senate is a Democrat.

“The Republicans are keenly interested in trying to shovel this issue under the rug as much as they can to keep the fossil-fuel money flowing into their party. It’s a sad state of affairs,” Whitehouse said.

Raimondo said she favors advancing a carbon tax along with public pushback to offshore drilling.

Read the full story at ECORI

Massachusetts: Local fishing stakeholders marshal opposition to drilling proposal

February 12, 2018 — So the Winter Olympics are rolling on the Korean peninsula and everybody seems to be on their best behavior and we’re all still alive to tell the tale. So that’s a good thing.

Here’s another good thing. You might have noticed we have coverage in today’s Gloucester Daily Times and on gloucestertimes.com of the double-showing Saturday of the fishing documentary “Dead in the Water” at the Cape Ann Museum.

Both screenings were sold out. But what was really interesting was the composition of the crowds. These weren’t the usual faces when it comes to Gloucester fishing. These weren’t the folks you see at the New England Fishery Management Council meetings or at other public forums. These weren’t permit holders and guys who work on boats.

The audiences for both screenings featured a cross-sampling of the Cape Ann community concerned enough about one of the region’s iconic-if-imperiled industries to give up a chunk of their Saturday to watch the film and begin to understand the withering complexities of the fishing crisis.

So, good for them. And good for the Cape Ann Museum for stepping up to host the screenings and subsequent panel discussions.

As an aside, we must concede we’re really not much for the Winter Games here at FishOn.

We like the skiing and love the hockey when the best players in the world are playing. But ixnay on the curling and skating and luge (Look, either sit down like a normal person or at least lay down so you know where you’re going.)

And don’t get us started on the biathalon. Ski for a while and then stop and shoot. Why? It all seems rather arbitrary. Why not have them ski for a while and then change a tire or grout some tile?

Willin’ to be drilling?

Things should get nice and toasty at the Hyatt Regency in Boston on the afternoon of Feb. 27 when the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management hosts a public hearing on the Trump administration’s proposal to open the ocean floor off New England to potential drilling and exploration for gas, oil and, for all we know, wolfram.

It’s a sweeping proposal, potentially opening up more than 90 percent of the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf to drilling and other invasive exploration.

More to the point, the plan is extraordinary iffy for only two reasons:

Most people — you know, everybody not scurrying around to scoop up mineral rights and leases — hate it and it has the superhero power of uniting the commercial fishing industry, environmentalists, the management councils and the recreational fishing industry in the same fight. On the same side.

Local fishing stakeholders, including the omnipresent Angela Sanfilippo of the Fishing Partnership and Support Services (as well as the Gloucester Fishermen’s Wives Association) are calling out the hordes to attend the hearing and marshal opposition.

So go, make thy own self heard.

Ornery down below the border line

Heading to Myrtle Beach soon for a little break in the action? Nice. Believe it or not there’s one restaurant named Mrs. Fish and another named Mr. Fish. They’re unaffiliated and they’re both really good.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times

California says will block crude oil from Trump offshore drilling plan

February 9, 2018 — SACRAMENTO, Calif. — California will block the transportation through its state of petroleum from new offshore oil rigs, officials told Reuters on Wednesday, a move meant to hobble the Trump administration’s effort to vastly expand drilling in U.S. federal waters.

California’s plan to deny pipeline permits for transporting oil from new leases off the Pacific Coast is the most forceful step yet by coastal states trying to halt the biggest proposed expansion in decades of federal oil and gas leasing.

Officials in Florida, North and South Carolina, Delaware and Washington, have also warned drilling could despoil beaches, harm wildlife and hurt lucrative tourism industries.

“I am resolved that not a single drop from Trump’s new oil plan ever makes landfall in California,” Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom, chair of the State Lands Commission and a Democratic candidate for governor, said in an emailed statement.

The commission sent a letter on Wednesday to the U.S. Interior Department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) urging the bureau’s program manager Kelly Hammerle to withdraw the draft proposal, saying the public did not have an adequate opportunity to provide input on the plan.

”It is certain that the state would not approve new pipelines or allow use of existing pipelines to transport oil from new leases onshore,” the commission wrote in the letter seen by Reuters.

California has clashed repeatedly with President Donald Trump’s administration over a range of other issues since last year, from climate change to automobile efficiency standards to immigration.

The Interior Department last month announced its proposal to open nearly all U.S. offshore waters to oil and gas drilling, sparking protests from coastal states, environmentalists and the tourism industry.

Read the full story at Reuters

Washington Gov. Inslee formally objects to federal coastal oil/gas proposal

February 8, 2018 — Gov. Jay Inslee has formally asked the Trump Administration to remove the state from federal plans “to open waters off our coast to oil and gas drilling.”

And state Attorney General Bob Ferguson has said the state will sue the federal government if Department of Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke continues to support the proposal while removing Florida from waters that would be open for the same National Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) Oil and Gas Leasing Program for 2019-2024.

Inslee made his request in writing on Monday after an Olympia news conference with statements from a group that included Ocean Shores Mayor Crystal Dingler, Quinault Indian Nation representative Gina James, and Larry Thevik, president of the Washington Dungeness Crab Fishermen’s Association and an Ocean Shores resident.

In a letter to Zinke, Insleee said: “I have stated unequivocally that opening the Pacific Coast to new oil and gas drilling for the first time in decades poses grave danger to our state’s unique recreation, tourism, shipping, military and fishing industries, threatening thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in revenue each year.”

Read the full story at North Coast News