Senate blocks GOP bid to speed offshore drilling

MATTHEW DALY

Asso­ci­ated Press

WASHINGTON — A GOP bid to expand and has­ten off­shore oil drilling in the face of $4-a-gallon gaso­line prices suf­fered an over­whelm­ing defeat in the Sen­ate on Wednes­day, four days after Pres­i­dent Barack Obama directed his admin­is­tra­tion to ramp up U.S. oil production.

Five Repub­li­cans joined 52 Democ­rats or inde­pen­dents in reject­ing a bill writ­ten by Sen­ate GOP leader Mitch McConnell to speed up decision-making on drilling per­mits and force pre­vi­ously sched­uled lease sales in the Gulf of Mex­ico and off the Alaska and Vir­ginia coasts. The Obama admin­is­tra­tion sus­pended sev­eral lease sales after last year’s mas­sive BP oil spill.

The bill was sup­ported by 42 Repub­li­cans, well short of the 60 needed to advance it. Sev­eral GOP sen­a­tors com­plained that the bill gave too much ground to the Obama admin­is­tra­tion, includ­ing a pro­vi­sion that would require inde­pen­dent reviews of oil com­pa­nies’ plans for respond­ing to major oil spills before they could get drilling permits.

Sen. David Vit­ter, R-La., said McConnell’s bill did not go far enough to expand drilling in the east­ern Gulf of Mex­ico near Florida and off the Pacific coast. He said it also “increases the bur­dens and require­ments and hur­dles of even the new Obama reg­u­la­tions that have been put in place since the BP disaster.”

Vit­ter and fel­low Louisiana Sen. Mary Lan­drieu, a Demo­c­rat, also com­plained that the bill wouldn’t direct roy­al­ties from off­shore drilling to states where drilling occurs.

After the House passed sim­i­lar leg­is­la­tion last week, Obama on Sat­ur­day directed the Inte­rior Depart­ment to extend exist­ing leases in the Gulf and off Alaska’s coast and hold more fre­quent lease sales in a fed­eral petro­leum reserve in Alaska.

Both par­ties say that despite the BP spill, they want to allow respon­si­ble oil and gas drilling off the U.S. main­land and in Alaska. But they crit­i­cize each other’s approach.

Democ­rats assailed the GOP bill as unnec­es­sary and a give­away to big oil com­pa­nies, while Repub­li­cans said the mea­sure would spur pro­duc­tion that would reduce U.S. depen­dence on for­eign oil and cre­ate thou­sands of jobs.

“Today’s vote shows that ‘Drill Baby Drill’ may be a catchy slo­gan, but it is not an energy pol­icy,” said Sen. Robert Menen­dez, D-N.J., who is opposed to drilling off the Atlantic coast.

McConnell called the bill a “mod­est approach” that takes con­cerns of both par­ties into account to achieve a prac­ti­cal result. “By unlock­ing our own domes­tic resources, and speed­ing up the per­mit­ting process, our plan would actu­ally do some­thing to increase sup­ply, putting down­ward pres­sure on price” at the pump, the Ken­tucky Repub­li­can said.

White House spokesman Clark Stevens said the Sen­ate bill was unnec­es­sary, not­ing that the Obama admin­is­tra­tion has already taken many of the steps advo­cated in the bill, includ­ing a one-year exten­sion of leases in the Gulf of Mex­ico and cer­tain areas of Alaska.

What remained in the GOP bill “would have under­cut the impor­tant safety stan­dards put in place fol­low­ing the largest oil spill in U.S. his­tory,” Stevens said. “These are the very stan­dards that are allow­ing the admin­is­tra­tion to expand drilling safely, and indus­try has clearly demon­strated that they can meet them.”

The Inte­rior Depart­ment has issued 53 shallow-water per­mits since last June, when new safety stan­dards were imposed, Stevens said. Per­mits for 14 deep­wa­ter wells have been approved since late Feb­ru­ary, when indus­try demon­strated it could meet new stan­dards on con­tain­ing oil spills.

Inte­rior Sec­re­tary Ken Salazar said this week that Con­gress should change the law to allow leases onshore to be shorter than 10 years to pres­sure com­pa­nies to drill sooner. Cur­rently, 41 mil­lion acres of pub­lic lands are leased, but only 12 mil­lion acres are pro­duc­ing oil and nat­ural gas, Salazar said.

Off­shore, the Inte­rior Depart­ment already has the abil­ity to extend or shorten the length of a lease.

Posted by AP News on May 18 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.