Posted by
Bryan Walsh Thursday, July 22, 2010 at 4:41 pm
While the White House, Congress and the oil industry fight over the controversial deepwater drilling moratorium, a federal judge quietly made a significant decision on the next frontier of offshore oil and gas exploration: the Arctic seas. Yesterday U.S. District judge Ralph Beistline blocked energy companies from developing oil and gas leases worth billions of dollars in the Chukchi Sea in northwest Alaska. Beistline ruled that the agency formerly known as the Minerals Management Service had failed to properly assess the environmental impact of natural gas development on the regioneven though there are trillions of cubic ft. of natural gas in Alaska’s offshore deposits and energy companies who bid on the leases like Shell have talked about their desire to develop gas. (The $2.7 billion, 2.76 million acre leases were sold in February 2008 under former President George W. Bush, despite fierce opposition from environmentalists and some Alaskan native groupsand were kept active under President Obama.) Though Beistline didn’t invalidate the original lease sales, as some environmental groups had hoped, the ruling stops all activity under the lease and requires the government to perform additional environmental reviews. “This ruling acknowledges the lack of information that [MMS] had about what drilling could do to the Chukchi Sea,” says Layla Hughes, the senior program officer for Arctic oil and gas policy at the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). “It’s pretty amazing the way this turned out.” read more
Like this:
Like Loading...
This website and sisters
royaldutchshellplc.com,
shellnazihistory.com,
royaldutchshell.website,
johndonovan.website, and
shellnews.net,
are owned by
John Donovan. There is also a
Wikipedia segment.