Energy Today - February 22, 2011
Rayola Dougher
Posted February 22, 2011
Energy In Depth: Just The Facts: Northeast Professors Confirm Hydraulic Fracturing's Environmental Safety Record: "New production data shows shale's promise and growth," reports the Scranton Times-Tribune over the weekend. Reports the Beckley Register-Herald today: "Natural gas big, thriving and growing across W.Va." Investor's Business Daily, in a recent editorial, goes with this headline: "A Shale Of A Difference." Modern shale gas and oil production - enabled by the 60 year-old environmentally proven oil and natural gas stimulation process called hydraulic fracturing - continues to make waves across the nation and throughout the media, for sure. And as this tightly-regulated production continues to help create tens of thousands of good-paying jobs at a time when they're most needed, while protecting the environmental and stabilizing energy costs for struggling consumers, academic experts - in addition to a host of environmental regulators - are speaking out, specifically about fracturing's long and clear record of environmental safety. Investor's Business Daily: A Shale of a Difference: Energy: The brightest hope for America's energy independence has been shut down by an Interior Department that says it wants to review the rules for leases. It really wants to kill off oil altogether. The game is this: Say that you want to find domestic oil and gas in a "smart" way, so you have to study things for a while. Then let enviros tie you up in court to block what you really don't want to do anyway, increase America's supply of domestic energy, keeping jobs and money here. On Tuesday, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced that the Obama administration is going to take a "fresh look" at oil shale leasing rules put forward in 2008 by President George W. Bush to develop oil-rich land in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming.
Politico: Judge: Interior must decide on drilling: A federal judge in New Orleans has given the Obama administration 30 days to decide whether or not to grant five deepwater drilling projects in the Gulf of Mexico, calling delays in issuing permits since last year's Gulf of Mexico oil spill as "increasingly inexcusable." Judge Martin Feldman of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana -- who previously held the Interior Department in contempt for placing a five-month deepwater drilling ban in the Gulf after the spill -- gave perhaps an unsurprising but potentially critical twist to ongoing efforts by oil-state lawmakers in both parties and industry officials to push the hand of Interior officials to start issuing new permits. "The government urges that delays are inevitable in a more regulated environment; in the wake of the disastrous BP spill, some delays are of course understandable," according to Feldman's ruling. "But now, nearly a year after the spill occurred, delays, particularly those of the length at issue here, become increasingly unreasonable." The backlog of permits, Feldman said, "becomes increasingly inexcusable."
Additional Resources:
Bloomberg: U.S. Fuel Consumption Edged Higher in January, API Report Shows
Say Anything Blog: Oil Is Good for North Dakota