Energy Today - February 8, 2011
Rayola Dougher
Posted February 8, 2011
Bloomberg: Interior Needs 30% Boost in Budget to Speed Gulf Drilling, Landrieu Says: The U.S. Interior Department, which oversees drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, should get a 30 percent boost in its 2012 budget to speed processing of oil-exploration permits, said Senator Mary Landrieu, a Democrat from Louisiana."The office needs to be scaled up in order to accomplish what we need to accomplish," she said yesterday in an interview in Washington. "It has been historically understaffed and underfunded." President Barack Obama will present his proposal for the 2012 fiscal year budget on Feb. 14. Landrieu said she doesn't have information on what will be in the president's proposal. Almost four months after the U.S. lifted a ban on deep- water exploration, drilling remains stalled because energy companies haven't proved to regulators they have ships and equipment ready to handle catastrophic blowouts. BP Plc's disaster in April killed 11 and led to the worst U.S. offshore oil spill. RigZone: Better than Delivering Pizzas: Marcellus Offers New Opportunities: This time last year, Eric Klinger, 19, made his living delivering pizzas. His friend, Matt Bartholomew, 20, worked in a factory that manufactured pharmaceutical products. Now, after a six-month course, they work for Halliburton, driving trucks, hauling supplies and doing some manual labor at natural gas drilling sites. They both started at salaries of between $45,000 and $55,00 a year -- higher than the wages of most Pennsylvanians, according to U.S. census data.
The American Spectator: Obama's Curious Energy Policies: Robert Samuelson in the Washington Post today (pushing a higher gasoline tax) writes that President Obama's objective driving various interventions is to have 1 million electric hybrid cars on the road in a few years. As Samuelson acknowledges this isn't realistic but, anyway, that would possibly save 0.2 percent of U.S. oil consumption. At enormous cost. And the lost domestic oil production from Obama's new restrictions on drilling just in the Gulf of Mexico is five times that. Which restrictions were imposed with politically inserted misrepresentations of scientific conclusions, and could be avoided at no cost. From the same administration. Classic.
Freedom Works: The Regulatory Review We Need: The White House's call to conduct a regulatory review which focuses only on obsolete and old regulations is hardly worth it; the immediate threat to American jobs are not just old and obsolete regulations which were implemented ten, twenty or thirty years ago, but the near-1000 new rules that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued during the past few months. The Wall Street Journal notes: The EPA's rules curb emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases cited as an impediment to growth by at least 30 organizations writing to [House oversight chairman Darrell] Issa, including representatives of agriculture, business, chemicals, energy, paper, manufacturing, and steel and iron sectors.
Additional Resources:
Platts: US crude stocks likely to build 2.4 million barrels: analysts
Politico: Gripes over EPA in responses to Darrell Issa
The American Spectator: Obama's Curious Energy Policies
PrairiePundit: Energy needed to grow the economy