With still no clear plans presented to the public on how to deal with accidental oil gushers such as the current BP oil disaster, the Department of the Interior's Minerals Management Service issued a new drilling permit to Bandon Oil and Gas, LP for a site about 50 miles off the coast of Louisiana and 115 feet below the ocean's surface. An Internet deep link search reveals Bandon Oil and Gas was recently known as Beryl Oil and Gas LP. Records also show that Bandon was recently acquired by Superior Energy Services, Inc.
The new drilling site is south of Rockefeller State Wildlife Refuge and Game Preserve, far to the west of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig that triggered the BP spill.
Last Sunday, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said "...an extended moratorium on deep water drilling was needed to provide time to implement new safety requirements".
"With the BP oil spill still growing in the Gulf, and investigations and reviews still under way, a six month pause in drilling is needed, appropriate, and prudent," Salazar said.
The approval is clearly duplicitous and misleading to the public as MMS says only offshore drilling deeper than 500 feet was suspended. I guess sorry we didn't ask.
2 comments:
We think a lot of people probably assumed Obama's statement meant that all oil operations in the Gulf of Mexico were put on a six-month hiatus. That's not the case. The moratorium relates to exploratory oil drilling, not to existing, oil-producing deepwater platforms, which will continue to produce. So Obama's words were technically accurate, though due to the common use of the phrase oil drilling to refer to all oil operations, we think it may have confused some people. And so we rule his statement Half True.
Fernando Valls
Thank you for your reply.
I understand what you are saying, and it is a game of semantics that is played so well that allows this to go on. The "SPIRIT" of what Obama had to say was we would do no further drilling until we understood what happened and what measures would be taken to preven this from happening in the future.
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