THE Department of the Interior’s Minerals Management Service (MMS) is planning to prepare an environmental impact statement (EIS) for geological and geophysical studies offshore the US Atlantic seaboard.
This is the second step towards opening up US Atlantic waters following the Bush administration’s decision to drop the long-running moratorium that kept Big Oil out. The MMS estimates the OCS contains about 86billion barrels of oil and 420trillion cu ft of natural gas in yet-to-be-discovered fields, so the potential prize is huge.
MMS director Randall Luthi said the studies, along with other proposals and programmes, had been prepared as options for the Barack Obama administration.
“The final decisions regarding the next steps are theirs,” he said, noting that $3.8million in fiscal year 2008 funding is pegged for environmental research related to offshore alternative energy development. The Draft Proposed 2010-2015 OCS Oil and Gas Leasing Program was published in the US Federal Register last month.
Luthi said: “We’re basically giving the next administration a two-year head start. This is a multi-step, multi-year process with a full environmental review and several opportunities for input from the states, other government agencies and interested parties, and the general public. In order to move forward with expanded exploration and development responsibly, we need current data. That is why we are also announcing our intent to prepare a programmatic EIS to evaluate potential environmental effects of multiple geological and geophysical studies in the Atlantic OCS planning areas.”