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Last week, gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell wrote the other candidates for Governor asking them to join him in signing a letter to Interior Secretary Salazar. It was a letter that asked the new Interior Secretary to reject Governor Kaine's recent request that Virginia Lease Sale 220 be removed from the 2007-2012 program and included instead with the 2010-2015 program for offshore oil and gas lease sales. In essence, McDonnell's letter asserts that it is somehow a bad idea to proceed with gathering adequate information and ensure that we have the scientific data needed to make a reasoned decision about the aggressive Bush offshore drilling plans now still aimed at our coastline here in Virginia.
The coast of Virginia is now at a point in the offshore drilling program where a recent "Call for Information" (deadline was Jan. 13, 2009) has asked for "particular environmental, biological, archaeological, socioeconomic, and geological conditions or potential conflicts, or other information that might bear upon the potential leasing, exploration, and development of the program area and vicinity." The requested information was solicited for the Virginia waters located strictly within the initial 2.9 million acres comprising the federal Lease Sale 220 area, but Interior did not ask what Virginians think about a second followup offshore drilling plan only three miles from shore, now scheduled for 2014.
It is this additional expanded drilling plan for which the Interior Secretary has just announced an entirely reasonable 180-day extension of the public comment period as it encompasses waters much closer to shore. "To establish an orderly process that allows us to make wise decisions based on sound information, we need to set aside 'the plan' and create our own timeline," Salazar announced. "Our available data is very old and incomplete," he told reporters. "We shouldn't make decisions on America's treasures based on old information."
Governor Kaine simply calls for the temporary postponement of Virginia Lease Sale 220. "This Lease Sale is the only one currently proposed anywhere along the Atlantic seaboard," he writes. "I believe that no lease sale should be conducted in the Atlantic until the process that you have outlined for the 5 Year Program [2010-2015] is complete."
Including Virginia in the same process used to study all other Atlantic offshore drilling, and to incorporate adequate information about other offshore areas of Virginia, makes sense. Certainly, if MMS doesn't have enough information and studies to safely conduct any other lease sales in our region, they certainly do not know enough to conduct the FIRST lease sale, Virginia's Lease Sale 220, which goes on the auction block as early as 2011.
Not only does it makes sense to study Virginia as a whole and to study the Atlantic coast as a whole, it also makes sense to consider planning for all offshore coastal resources to include wind and wave power, as suggested by Secretary Salazar. "It seems to me the appropriate place to address the OCS and issues like royalty reform would be in the context of an energy bill," he said.
Of all the states along the Eastern seaboard, opposition to offshore drilling remains strongest in New Jersey, with their vital coastal-dependent tourism industry. Yet at the December 2008 MMS workshop in Williamsburg discussing Lease Sale 220 off of Virginia, when addressing concern for the industrial development of Virginia's coast expected to be necessary to handle raw products that may come to shore from drilling platforms, a Shell Oil executive indicated that energy companies might "instead build underwater pipelines to refineries in New Jersey, bypassing the Virginia coast altogether." Such pipelines and New Jersey refineries lie outside the scope of concern evidenced by MMS for Virginia's early Lease Sale 220.
As relieved as we should be that Virginia's coastal areas may not be targeted for heavy industrial development and the hydrocarbon pollution that onshore petroleum processing installations inevitably bring, this revelation by Shell nonetheless punches huge holes into the job creation potential now being touted by Bob McDonnell in his proposed letter. While hypothetical onshore jobs from future possible Virginia Lease Sale 220 development will likely land in New Jersey instead, the more limited number of offshore jobs will likely be filled by workers from all over the U.S.
Most offshore oil rig jobs call for a 14/21 day rotation, meaning working for 14 days and having 21 off. This equates to having approximately 3/5 of the year off. For this reason, workers would not have to relocate their families and otherwise disrupt their lives to work on Virginia's offshore rigs, opting to simply fly in from the Gulf Coast for the handful of times in any given year when they are needed to work off Virginia's shores.
We can't allow unfounded promises of jobs and reliance on outdated information to blind us to the fact that Virginia has an enormous opportunity with development of its offshore wind resources. Investment in such clean energy would create nearly four times more jobs than spending the same amount of money on developing any offshore petroleum resources that might or might not be found.
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Last week, gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell wrote the other candidates for Governor asking them to join him in signing a letter to Interior Secretary Salazar. It was a letter that asked the new Interior Secretary to reject Governor Kaine's recent request that Virginia Lease Sale 220 be removed from the 2007-2012 program and included instead with the 2010-2015 program for offshore oil and gas lease sales. In essence, McDonnell's letter asserts that it is somehow a bad idea to proceed with gathering adequate information and ensure that we have the scientific data needed to make a reasoned decision about the aggressive Bush offshore drilling plans now still aimed at our coastline here in Virginia.
