Posted on 08/18/2011 8:53:12 AM PDT by thackney
Oil companies are once again squaring off with government regulators in the Gulf of Mexico. This time, its Exxon Mobil. The giant oil company is fighting to retain leases for the Julia field, what could be the biggest oil discovery in the Gulf ever, or at least since BP’s Thunder Horse field in 1999. The problem: the government claims Exxon’s leases for the field have expired.
The Obama administration has been cracking down on unused offshore leases, which cost the Treasury royalties, the Wall Street Journal reported. Exxon seems to believe getting an extension on the lease was just a formality. “You state your case and you got it. [This] was unexpected,” a spokesman told the Journal.
For the past year, the industry and government regulators have been squabbling over how drilling should proceed in the Gulf. One thing is clear: This isn’t it. Obviously, Exxon should be following the rules on permit extensions, especially in a case where the stakes were so high. As the Journal describes it:
The Texas behemoth faces the sobering prospect that it may have made the largest discovery ever in the Gulf of Mexico only to lose it. Tens of billions of dollars of oil could slip through its hands because it failed to follow federal rules for getting a lease extension while it moved forward with plans to get the oil out of the ground.
The oil company claims drilling a well in deep water takes time to do safely, and that the government’s response creates a regulatory environment that encourages haste over thoroughness. Exxon also claims the government has changed its tactics and that its arguments for not extending the lease have never been applied before. The government says Exxon didn’t submit a specific production plan, which violated the legal requirements for granting a lease extension.
This battle, playing out in federal court in Lake Charles, La., dates to 2008, two years before the Deepwater Horizon disaster, but it illustrates the fundamental disconnect between the industry and the government that’s emerged in the Gulf. The industry acknowledges that last year’s accident changes everything, yet still seems surprised when it does. Recognizing that regulations must change, oil companies still argue, essentially, “We’ve never done it that way before.”
The government, meanwhile, seems so eager to show its a tougher regulator that it looses sight of the big picture. If it takes the leases away from Exxon, it will have to find another company to develop them. That will take even more time and cost even more lost royalty revenue. At the same time, it will only add to the confusion over the new regulatory scheme in the Gulf, potentially creating further delays for other projects as well.
Oil Ping
You pinged me to the thread I posted?
NO,
I set a bookmark (Ping) so that your article is logged to my Free republic list of commented articles.....for later reference (so one doesn’t lose sight of it)
Try it as I described.
It goes into your ping list even if you leave the To: field blank.
What leaving it blank does not do, is add it to my ping list. I created the thread, I don’t need to be pinged back to it.
It wouldn’t surprise me at all to see them give those leases to Brazil.
Oil Rising from Macondo Well: BP Hires Fleet of 40 Shrimp Boats to Lay Boom Around Deepwater Horizon Site
Fresh oil is surfacing all over the northern quadrant of the Gulf of Mexico. Reports of slicks that meander for miles and huge expanses of oil sheen that look like phantom islands are becoming common, again. Fresh oil, only slightly weathered, is washing ashore in areas hit hardest by last year’s massive spill, like Breton Island, Ship Island, the Chandeleurs and northern Barataria Bay. BP has reactivated its Vessels of Opportunity (VoO) program to handle cleanup.
That report looks like a lawyer trying to drum up some business.
Other sources report it quite differently.
http://fuelfix.com/blog/2011/08/18/bp-investigates-new-sheen-in-gulf/
Cheri Ben-Iesau, commander of Coast Guard District 8 in New Orleans, said a Coast Guard plane was doing flyovers Thursday afternoon of the Green Canyon site as well as the Macondo well and was awaiting an update.
But she said the agency had so far found no evidence at the Green Canyon site that the sheen was linked to a leaking well head or subsea pipeline, nor that oil was still spilling into the water.
She said the Coast Guard gets roughly 10,000 reports a year of surface sheens in the Gulf, some of which are caused by natural oil seeps on the sea floor. Given the hot weather, the sheens tend to dissipate quickly, she said.
A statement from BP PLC placed the site of the sheen near two abandoned exploration well sites in the Green Canyon Block in the Gulf of Mexico, although its size and exact location wasn’t disclosed.
According to an online map published by the U.S. Department of Energy, the Green Canyon Block — a huge square-shaped area of water south of Louisiana — is south and west of the Mississippi Canyon Block where the Macondo well blew up.
A U.S. government official also said the area around Macondo was clear.
“They are not investing any sheens in the vicinity of the BP well,” Paul Barnard, Operations Controller for the New Orleans sector of the Coast Guard, told the AP on Thursday.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/08/18/national/main20093934.shtml
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