Posted on 12/20/2010 10:41:52 AM PST by Al B.
It's called a "controlled crash landing." The twin-engine Saab turboprop plane chartered by Shell Oil circled warily above the volcanic peaks of the Aleutian Islands Dutch Harbor last week. It dived through a tiny opening in the clouds and the wheels smacked down amid driving snow. Inside sat about two dozen Alaskan Eskimos and a handful of Shell oil executives. At stake on the trip may be America's next big oil find.
Shell wants to drill at least one exploratory oil well north of Alaska in the Beaufort Sea in 2011. The company insists it can do it safely. Members of the Inupiat and Yupik Eskimo people who live in remote villages scattered through Alaska's Arctic region -- filled with tundra, lakes and sea ice -- are divided on whether to support the plan. They fear that potentially a big oil spill could kill off or drive away the whales, seals and walrus that make up much of their subsistence diet. But they're also afraid that if oil companies leave northern Alaska -- oil flow in the Alaska pipeline is down by two-thirds -- their land use tax money that pays for roads, homes and schools will disappear, too.
"It keeps me up at night," said Mayor Martha Whiting, who heads the Northwest Arctic Borough, a 39,000-square-mile county bordering the Chukchi Sea.
[...]
Shell hoped that a tour of the equipment would alleviate fears and gain local support.
Here's some background. Most Americans think of the tropical Gulf of Mexico when they envision offshore oil, yet the U.S. Geological Survey estimates that up to 25 percent of the Earth's undiscovered hydrocarbons may lie beneath the frigid Arctic Ocean, much off northern Alaska.
Several oil companies have bought offshore leases from the federal government. Shell paid the most; more than $2 billion for rights in the Chukchi alone. But buying leases does not automatically mean Shell can drill. Only after a purchase is made do companies run a gamut of state and federal regulations to apply for permits. The maddeningly complex system keeps companies and Eskimos in angst-ridden limbo year after year as the companies struggle to obtain permits from agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of the Interior and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. If they do get permits, environmental groups, allied with some native groups, sue to stop them.
Shell's previous attempts were stopped by court action in 2007, 2008 and 2009. In response to opposition, the company reduced the original plan's scope. In 2010 the company had cleared all hurdles when the Deepwater Horizon blew up in the Gulf of Mexico and the White House halted Arctic drilling.
But now the recently renamed Department of Interior's Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement (BOEMRE) is again processing the application.
Meanwhile, Shell is more than $3.1 billion in the hole in the Chukchi alone. Oil companies don't generally feel like underdogs but all parties do in the Arctic. As the New Year approaches, the company is gambling tens of millions of fresh dollars on whether it can drill in 2011 just in the Beaufort Sea. And remember; exploratory wells are different from producing wells. They are a first step, a way of finding oil, not extracting it. If the company finds oil it must begin a different round of permissions to extract it.
[...]
Meanwhile, BOEMRE is taking public response before approving or rejecting Shell's plan.
Amid the grinding wait, Shell hopes local leaders will support the company and steer clear of courts. That's why the roughly two dozen community reps were escorted by Slaiby onto the 300-foot-long Nanuq last week.
Related article by Mr. Reiss:
Cold, Hard Facts: U.S. Trails in Race for the Top of the World
As tough as the technological barriers are to developing Artic undersea resources, politics is the number one hurdle. At stake is 25% of the undeveloped oil & gas reserves on the planet. As the Coast Guard Admiral stated in the related article:
"If this were a ball game,....the U.S. wouldn't be on the field or even in the stadium."Sarah Palin understands the urgency and complexities of the issue. Few others political leaders, even on the right, do.
I thought that OBoBo’s EPA regulators recently announced that there would be no more offshore drilling for the next seven years. Specifically in the Gulf and the Atlantic. But will these jerks allow drilling off of Alaska?
I doubt it, under current leadership.
Imagine spending three billion on acquisition and exploration and not knowing if you’ll even be allowed to drill. Or how many years the delays will be.
Me too. I think the Obama plan is to give the resources to the polar bears.
Tragic situation developing, as the other Arctic nations stake their claims. The resources at stake make Prudhoe Bay look like a puddle compared to a huge lake.
I see that, just be the names mentioned in the article from nine ago.
Just drive over to Zippys and get a plate lunch on the way to the beach.
.
So you lay out $3 billion, and you don’t know if you will be allowed to drill.
This assures that OPEC will never see much competition from American resources.
If you have to lay out $3 billion up front, and then they can string you out for twenty years before turning you down on your permit, you can see that only the really big boys with big pockets can survive this kind of thing, and even they have to consider if its worth it when there are other places they can drill where the host countries actually want the oil to flow.
A concentrated effort to achieve energy independence would require an overhaul of our regulations, it would require a determination to steam-roll the hurdles we have set up over the years to let our own energy companies develop our own resources. We can never achieve independence if some bureaucrat has the power to stymy it with impunity. Endlessly.
Actually, it would only require logic and reason...but both are in short supply in Washington, DC.
Shell: No Beaufort Sea drilling in Arctic for 2011
Heritage Foundation: Breaking an Ice-Bound U.S. Policy: A Proposal for Operating in the Arctic
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