Bureau of Ocean Energy Management Archives - Page 41 of 47

Fish stakeholders to protest drilling plan

February 20, 2018 — Well, the boys of spring are heaving the ol’ horsehide around in the warmer climes of Florida and Arizona and that’s always a good thing, knowing that the calendar is about to flip over to baseball any minute.

Quick thought: What if baseball had been invented in, well, Norway or Iceland? Well, then the ball probably would be covered with fish skin rather than horsehide or the cowhide baseball switched to in 1974.

Be way better with fish skin. That way, any wild pitch truly would be the one that got away.

Meeting and greetin’

As we mentioned in last week’s column, things should be hopping in Boston on Feb. 27 when the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management hosts a public hearing on the Trump administration’s proposal to open the ocean floor off New England to potential drilling and exploration for gas, oil and whatever else is down there that can make a buck for somebody.

The meeting is expected to be packed with fishing stakeholders, conservationists and public officials — all of whom seem to be against any systematic mechanical intrusion into the marine ecosystem off the coast of New England.

One programming note: The venue for the event has been changed to the Omni Parker House hotel from the Hyatt Regency Boston. The time remains the same — 3 to 7 p.m.

We also were remiss last week in our discussion of the issue not to mention that the New England Fishery Management Council has submitted comments setting out its concerns about the possibility of gas and oil drilling off the Eastern Seaboard.

The council has recommended BOEM exclude the North and Mid-Atlantic areas because “oil and gas exploration and extraction activities in the Atlantic Outer Continental Shelf involve inappropriate risks that may harm living marine resources and communities that depend on them.”

Last summer, the council listed five general concerns: direct displacement of fishing activities due to survey or extraction activities; harm to sensitive deepwater habitats, such as corals; negative impacts on living marine resources from the high-decibel sounds produced during surveys and drilling; negative impacts to near-shore fish habitats from infrastructure necessary to support oil and gas industries; and risks associated with leaks and spills resulting from extraction and transport.

That’s a lot of concerns.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times

New Yorkers rally against offshore drilling plan

February 16, 2018 — ALBANY, N.Y. — Wearing fish-shaped caps and armed with a megaphone, New York state’s leading environmental advocates protested President Donald Trump’s plan to open offshore areas to oil and gas drilling on Thursday as federal energy officials held an open house on the proposal near the state Capitol.

The group, wearing caps shaped like sturgeon, salmon and other vulnerable ocean species, included Aaron Mair, past president of the Sierra Club, and Judith Enck, the regional Environmental Protection Agency administrator under former President Barack Obama. They said Trump’s plan could devastate the environment while leaving potential renewable energy sources untouched. They called on Congress to pass a law blocking the proposal.

“We all remember the BP Deepwater Horizon catastrophe,” Enck said into a megaphone, referring to the 2010 rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico that triggered the largest offshore oil spill in U.S. history. “We cannot afford that reckless activity in the Atlantic.”

Inside, federal energy officials handed out information packets and briefed members of the public on the president’s decision last month to open most of the nation’s coast to oil and gas drilling as a way of making the U.S. less dependent on foreign energy sources. Several dozen people had trickled through at the midpoint of the four-hour open house. Members of the public were encouraged to submit written comments.

William Brown, chief environmental officer at the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, said he welcomed comments from opponents to the plan.

Read the full story from Associated Press at the Seattle Times

Rhode Island: Ocean State Officials Pledge to Halt Offshore Drilling

February 13, 2018 — NARRAGANSETT, R.I. — Rhode Island’s governor and members of Congress are calling for an all-out effort to oppose President Trump’s plan for offshore drilling along the Eastern seaboard. They warned of the environmental and economic risks to the state’s fishing and tourism industries. They urged the public to submit comments on the proposal to the Bureau of Ocean Management (BOEM) and to show their opposition at a scheduled Feb. 28 public workshop in Providence.

Referencing the six commercial fishermen in the audience at at Feb. 12 press event, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., said he planned to advance a bill signed by all New England senators to ban offshore drilling off the New England coast. Whitehouse called the offshore drilling proposal a “dumb idea” and blamed the fossil-fuel industry for directing the Trump administration to enact it.

“This will not happen. Whatever it takes to prevent it, we will see takes place,” Whitehouse said.

Gov. Gina Raimondo promised to lobby governors of coastal states to pass resolutions opposing the offshore drilling plan.

“This is backwards. We ought to be moving forward for offshore wind farms, not backwards for offshore oil drilling,” she said.

Raimondo also restated her intent to have Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke follow through on his promise to meet her in Rhode Island and discuss the fossil-fuel project. Several East Coast governors called Zinke after he met with Florida Gov. Rick Scott. Scott apparently convinced Zinke to exempt his state from the offshore drilling plan. Although there is skepticism of the agreement after Zinke’s office backtracked somewhat on that promise and legal questions of such an exemption surfaced.

Whitehouse and Raimondo were asked whether a state or regional carbon tax would put economic pressure on Trump and the fossil-fuel industry. Both said they favor a national or multi-state fee on fossil fuels. However, Whitehouse said his carbon tax bill in the Senate won’t advance until the head of the Senate is a Democrat.

“The Republicans are keenly interested in trying to shovel this issue under the rug as much as they can to keep the fossil-fuel money flowing into their party. It’s a sad state of affairs,” Whitehouse said.

Raimondo said she favors advancing a carbon tax along with public pushback to offshore drilling.

Read the full story at ECORI

Massachusetts: Local fishing stakeholders marshal opposition to drilling proposal

February 12, 2018 — So the Winter Olympics are rolling on the Korean peninsula and everybody seems to be on their best behavior and we’re all still alive to tell the tale. So that’s a good thing.

Here’s another good thing. You might have noticed we have coverage in today’s Gloucester Daily Times and on gloucestertimes.com of the double-showing Saturday of the fishing documentary “Dead in the Water” at the Cape Ann Museum.

Both screenings were sold out. But what was really interesting was the composition of the crowds. These weren’t the usual faces when it comes to Gloucester fishing. These weren’t the folks you see at the New England Fishery Management Council meetings or at other public forums. These weren’t permit holders and guys who work on boats.

The audiences for both screenings featured a cross-sampling of the Cape Ann community concerned enough about one of the region’s iconic-if-imperiled industries to give up a chunk of their Saturday to watch the film and begin to understand the withering complexities of the fishing crisis.

So, good for them. And good for the Cape Ann Museum for stepping up to host the screenings and subsequent panel discussions.

As an aside, we must concede we’re really not much for the Winter Games here at FishOn.

We like the skiing and love the hockey when the best players in the world are playing. But ixnay on the curling and skating and luge (Look, either sit down like a normal person or at least lay down so you know where you’re going.)

And don’t get us started on the biathalon. Ski for a while and then stop and shoot. Why? It all seems rather arbitrary. Why not have them ski for a while and then change a tire or grout some tile?

Willin’ to be drilling?

Things should get nice and toasty at the Hyatt Regency in Boston on the afternoon of Feb. 27 when the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management hosts a public hearing on the Trump administration’s proposal to open the ocean floor off New England to potential drilling and exploration for gas, oil and, for all we know, wolfram.

It’s a sweeping proposal, potentially opening up more than 90 percent of the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf to drilling and other invasive exploration.

More to the point, the plan is extraordinary iffy for only two reasons:

Most people — you know, everybody not scurrying around to scoop up mineral rights and leases — hate it and it has the superhero power of uniting the commercial fishing industry, environmentalists, the management councils and the recreational fishing industry in the same fight. On the same side.

Local fishing stakeholders, including the omnipresent Angela Sanfilippo of the Fishing Partnership and Support Services (as well as the Gloucester Fishermen’s Wives Association) are calling out the hordes to attend the hearing and marshal opposition.

So go, make thy own self heard.

Ornery down below the border line

Heading to Myrtle Beach soon for a little break in the action? Nice. Believe it or not there’s one restaurant named Mrs. Fish and another named Mr. Fish. They’re unaffiliated and they’re both really good.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times

R.I.’s governor urges opposition to Atlantic offshore drilling plan

February 9, 2018 — Gov. Gina Raimondo is urging Rhode Islanders to speak up against a federal plan that would open waters off the state’s coast to drilling for oil and gas.

In an interview in her State House office, she said the Trump administration’s plan to overturn an Obama-era ban on offshore drilling along the nation’s East Coast poses a threat to Rhode Island’s commercial fishing industry and the beaches along the state’s 400 miles of coastline.

Raimondo said she requested the meeting with The Providence Journal to raise public awareness about the drilling plan. It was the first time in her tenure as governor that she has asked for such a meeting in regard to an environmental issue.

“I find the whole thing to be really quite alarming,” she said. “This might happen if we don’t oppose it loudly enough.”

In January 1996, the barge North Cape spilled 828,000 gallons of home heating oil off Moonstone Beach in South Kingstown, killing thousands of shore birds and millions of lobsters.

It is considered one of the worst environmental disasters in Rhode Island history, but the size of the spill was relatively small. The Exxon Valdez spill in 1989 in Alaska totaled 11 million gallons of crude while the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill may have released up to 20 times that amount into the Gulf of Mexico.

“The greatest concern would be an oil spill,” Raimondo said. “I was in high school when Exxon Valdez happened so I still remember that very vividly. The BP oil spill seems like it was yesterday. That could happen here. I think Rhode Islanders need to know that.”

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management estimates 90 billion barrels of undiscovered, technically-recoverable oil on the nation’s Outer Continental Shelf and 327 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. Less than a tenth of the total potential resources are on the Atlantic coast.

The proposal released by the Department of the Interior in January would take effect from 2019 to 2024. Lease sales for the North Atlantic region would take place in 2021.

Read the full story at the Providence Journal

California says will block crude oil from Trump offshore drilling plan

February 9, 2018 — SACRAMENTO, Calif. — California will block the transportation through its state of petroleum from new offshore oil rigs, officials told Reuters on Wednesday, a move meant to hobble the Trump administration’s effort to vastly expand drilling in U.S. federal waters.

California’s plan to deny pipeline permits for transporting oil from new leases off the Pacific Coast is the most forceful step yet by coastal states trying to halt the biggest proposed expansion in decades of federal oil and gas leasing.

Officials in Florida, North and South Carolina, Delaware and Washington, have also warned drilling could despoil beaches, harm wildlife and hurt lucrative tourism industries.

“I am resolved that not a single drop from Trump’s new oil plan ever makes landfall in California,” Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom, chair of the State Lands Commission and a Democratic candidate for governor, said in an emailed statement.

The commission sent a letter on Wednesday to the U.S. Interior Department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) urging the bureau’s program manager Kelly Hammerle to withdraw the draft proposal, saying the public did not have an adequate opportunity to provide input on the plan.

”It is certain that the state would not approve new pipelines or allow use of existing pipelines to transport oil from new leases onshore,” the commission wrote in the letter seen by Reuters.

California has clashed repeatedly with President Donald Trump’s administration over a range of other issues since last year, from climate change to automobile efficiency standards to immigration.

The Interior Department last month announced its proposal to open nearly all U.S. offshore waters to oil and gas drilling, sparking protests from coastal states, environmentalists and the tourism industry.

Read the full story at Reuters

Fisheries and Offshore Wind Working Group To Meet Monday in New Bedford, Mass.

February 9, 2018 (Saving Seafood) – WASHINGTON – A fisheries and offshore wind working group is scheduled to meet with offshore wind developers next Monday, February 12 in New Bedford, Massachusetts. The meeting will be held from 10:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. ET at UMass Dartmouth’s new School for Marine Science and Technology East building, 836 S. Rodney French Boulevard Room 102. Members of the public are encouraged to attend.

The Fisheries Working Group on Offshore Wind Energy is comprised of commercial fishermen, representatives from various fishing ports and sectors, recreational fishermen, scientists, and state and federal agencies. It is one of two working groups organized by the Massachusetts Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs and the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, along with a working group focused on marine habitat. The group was created to give stakeholders a chance to provide feedback and raise issues with offshore wind developers and the government.

Monday’s meeting will include three offshore wind energy developers – Deepwater Wind, Vineyard Wind, and Orsted – as well as the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. One focus of the meeting will be discussing a plan for an independent offshore wind and fisheries science advisory panel to help identify and fill key science and data gaps. Members of the public are encouraged to attend the meeting.

East Coast of U.S. Emerging Into a Hotbed for Offshore Wind

February 7, 2018 — Atlantic coast states might be protesting President Trump’s plan to expand offshore oil drilling, but they’re increasingly embracing a different kind of seaborne energy: wind.

States bordering the outer continental shelf are looking for carbon-free electricity, even as the Trump administration rolls back rules requiring it.

Last week, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (D) announced that his state will aim for 3,500 megawatts of installed offshore wind by 2030, enough to power 1 million homes. Massachusetts has a goal to build 1,600 MW of offshore wind power by 2027, and New York has committed to 2,400 MW by 2030.

At the same time, wind technology is quickly advancing, thanks to its popularity in Europe. Ten countries across Europe had deployed 12,600 MW of offshore wind power by the end of 2016. In the United States, the Interior Department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) has issued 13 wind energy leases off the Atlantic coast. In late 2016, the first offshore wind farm in the United States came online about 4 miles off the coast of Block Island, R.I.

It’s unclear how the growth in offshore wind might be affected by Trump’s plan to open nearly all U.S. waters to oil and gas drilling.

But there are hints that the two types of development could come into contact on the open water.

According to BOEM’s draft proposed 2019-24 offshore oil and gas leasing plan, any drilling off the Atlantic Seaboard would have to be “coordinated” with current and future offshore wind development. The agency predicts that more wind projects are likely to be built between 2019 and 2024, when oil and gas lease sales are slated to be held.

Experts said it’s unlikely there would be direct competition for the same slice of ocean between the two industries. But that’s a hard question to answer.

Kevin Book, managing director of research for ClearView Energy Partners LLC, said it’s too early to know how offshore wind and oil and gas development might interact off the East Coast. Historically, offshore wind has been a nascent industry, and no one has drilled for oil in the Atlantic for decades. It’s been so long that developers have little idea what type of oil reserves lie under the sea, or if oil companies will want to tap them.

Read the full story from Scientific American/E&E news at IEEFA

Washington’s Cantwell on the coast to fight offshore oil plan

February 6, 2018 — WESTPORT, Wash. — U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) met with local fishermen, small business owners and other local leaders in Westport on Saturday to “discuss the negative impacts of the Trump Administration’s proposed offshore drilling plan on local jobs and the economy.”

Among those attending were Westport Mayor Rob Bearden, Al Carter of Ocean Gold Fish Processing, Hillary Bearden and Larry Thevik of the Washington Dungeness Crab Fishermen’s Association, Mark Ballo of Brady’s Oysters, Greg Mueller of the Washington Trollers Association, Mike Cornman of Wesport Seafoods, Jonathan Sawin, representing charter boat operations, as well as local business operators Sarah McWhelan, Adrienne Jones, and Port of Grays Harbor representative Molly Bold.

“Our coastal economy, and specifically our maritime fishing economy is so important to our state,” Cantwell said in opening remarks. “That’s why we’re here, because we want to do everything we can to help it grow and to protect it.”

In a letter earlier this week, Cantwell led a bipartisan group of 16 lawmakers from the Pacific Northwest to call on Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to remove the Washington/Oregon planning area from the National Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) Oil and Gas Leasing Program for 2019-2014. Zinke in January announced the National OCS Program for 2019-2024, which proposes to make over 90 percent of the total OCS acreage and more than 98 percent of undiscovered, technically recoverable oil and gas resources in federal offshore areas available to consider for future exploration and development.

By comparison, the current program puts 94 percent of the OCS off limits. In addition, the new program proposes the largest number of lease sales in U.S. history.

Cantwell has been a leading opponent of the new policy: “Oil drilling and exploration off the Pacific Northwest coastline, or an oil spill from drilling anywhere along the Pacific Coast, poses threats to the fishing, shellfish, and tourism industries at the heart of Washington’s economy,” Cantwell said “The maritime economy in Washington contributes $50 billion dollars to the state economy and supports 191,000 jobs in the state. Other states along the Pacific coast similarly rely on their maritime industries for significant economic output.”

Cantwell told the Westport group she couldn’t understand why the current proposal was made, since oil and gas exploration off the Washington coast has “been considered before and has been rejected.”

Late Sunday, a Bureau of Ocean Energy Management public meeting and citizens forum on the proposal that had been scheduled in Tacoma at the Landmark Catering and Convention Center was abruptly cancelled by what was said to be a “credible threat.”

A news conference — that included Gov. Jay Inslee, Mayor Crystal Dingler of Ocean Shores, Gina James of the Quinault Indian Nation, state Attorney General Bob Ferguson, Commissioner of Public Lands Hillary Franz, and Thevik among the speakers — was moved to Olympia as a result.

Inslee and Dingler both cited the Nestucca oil barge collision of 1988, when 2.8 million gallons of Bunker C oil were spilled near the entrance of Grays Harbor. Inslee noted 4 million tourists visited the state’s beaches last year.

“Oil and gas drilling and the risk it poses — the inevitable risk — is unacceptable for some of the best beaches in the world,” Inslee said.

Dingler noted how the Ocean Shores Convention Center became a marine bird rescue center for oil-soaked birds after the Nestucca incident.

“Despite people’s efforts, we were able to save very few of them,” Dingler said, urging opposition to the drilling and exploration proposal “on behalf of a clean and healthy ocean, which powers our economy and is the bedrock of our way of life.”

The bureau is accepting public comments on the plan through March 9, and Cantwell has made the case for opposition in similar gatherings in Seattle and Vancouver.

“We have tried to prepare what is a response to this proposal in encouraging our various organizations in the state to communicate to the Secretary of Interior that this is a bad idea,” Cantwell said. “But unfortunately, they have continued to move forward.”

“W’re concerned about all sorts of issues,” Cantwell told the Westport group. “We’re concerned about the incidents of oil spills that we know have happened.” She also listed concerns about future earthquakes and tsunamis off the coast.

Mayor Bearden noted Westport late last month passed a resolution opposed to any coastal oil and gas drilling, similar to a resolution also adopted by the city of Ocean Shores.

“I think Westport would turn into a ghost town if we had some drilling and there was a spill,” Bearden predicted. He said mayors of several other Grays Harbor communities were considering similar resolutions.

So many local businesses depend on fishing and the marine environment, Bearden said, noting Westport is the top-producing fishing port on the West Coast and No. 10 nationally for production.

“People would not come, there would be no work” if there was an oil mishap on the coast, he said.

Carter of Ocean Gold, said his company provides about 600 jobs a year locally, with more than a dozen independent boats fishing for the enterprise.

Read the full story at the Daily World

Opponents, supporters react to Trump’s offshore drilling plan

February 6, 2018 — Environmentalists, fishermen, and state governments are signaling their opposition to the Trump administration’s proposed plan to reopen the ocean off Cape Cod and New England to oil and gas exploration.

“We are skeptical of anything the Trump Administration is doing in the marine environment or anything they are proposing to do,” said Conservation Law Foundation Vice President Priscilla Brooks.

A 2016 Bureau of Ocean Energy Management report estimated nearly 90 billion barrels of recoverable oil and 327 trillion tons of natural gas existed in mostly unexplored areas of the U.S. continental shelf. The new push for fossil fuel exploration and recovery was announced Jan. 4 with the unveiling of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s Draft Five Year Outer Continental Shelf Oil and Gas Leasing Program. It is part of President Donald Trump’s campaign pledge to make the U.S. more energy independent.

Currently, offshore fossil fuel exploration is controlled by a BOEM plan finalized near the end of the Obama presidency. Obama invoked a 1953 law, the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, to give what he said would be permanent protection from drilling to the continental shelf from Virginia to Maine.

But there were doubts that Obama’s use of the 1953 law would hold up in court, and the new plan is meant to replace the current one. International Association of Drilling Contractors President Jason McFarland hailed the inclusion of the Atlantic, Pacific, Arctic and an expansion of Gulf of Mexico drilling areas as an important step in achieving the goal of U.S. energy dominance in the world.

“IADC has long argued for access to areas that hold potential for oil and gas development,” McFarland wrote in comments last month, citing a U.S. Energy Information Administration estimate of a 48 percent growth in worldwide energy demand over the next 20 years. “The number and scale of the recoverable resources is large, and can lead to thousands of new jobs and billions of dollars in investment.”

But the Massachusetts Lobstermen’s Association and the various fishermen’s associations have panned the proposal. Last week, the New England Fishery Management Council approved a comment letter to BOEM that requested Mid-Atlantic and Northern Atlantic lease areas be excluded from the exploration and drilling.

Read the full story at the Cape Cod Times