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Wednesday, August 2, 2006
Drill, drill, drill.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
It’s not energy independence, but it’s a start. The U.S. Senate voted Tuesday to open 8.3 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico to oil and gas exploration, an area projected to yield 1.2 billion barrels of oil and 6 trillion cubic feet of natural gas — or enough to heat 6 million homes for 15 years.
For Texas, Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana, it would be a windfall. Under the Senate bill, they’d collect 37.5 percent of royalties. Now they get about 2. The bulk of the royalties, which are expected to amount to $1.2 billion per year within a decade, would go to Louisiana. Voters there will consider a constitutional amendment that would dedicate all new offshore revenues to rebuilding wetlands and to hurricane protection. Florida beaches would be protected with a no-drill zone extending 125 to 300 miles from shore.
The U.S. House had earlier passed a version that allows drilling that is no closer than 50 miles from the shore of all coastal states. State legislatures could extend that to 100 miles. Some in the Senate oppose the House bill as a threat to New England, California and the Pacific Northwest. It’s not certain a bill will pass this year.
Meanwhile, another bill introduced last week in the House, co-authored by a California Democrat and a Republican, and co-sponsored by U.S. Rep. Jack Kingston, (R-Georgia), would open 2,000 acres of the nearly 20-million acre Artic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) to exploration. The royalties and lease payments, estimated at $39 billion over 30 years, would be put into a trust fund, which could only be used to fund clean-energy alternatives, like biomass, solar, hydrogen fuel cells, coal-to-liquid and other alternatives. ANWR, incidentally, is believed to have 10.4 billion barrels of recoverable oil.
Even without the trust fund, I’d open the 2,000 acres of ANWR in a flash. And yes, promising areas offshore, too. Clean energy, other than nuclear, is modestly promising — though I’d be strongly disinclined to create a trust fund that turns alternative energy into a 30-year spending boondoggle.
Clearly, though, some measure of energy independence is a necessity in mounting the war on terrorism.
