Saturday, October 17, 2015
What does it take to stop Arctic drilling?
The one thing that decent people everywhere are unable to marshal in their efforts to stop the drilling, dwindling industry interest. If the oil companies still wanted to drill, they would be showered with leases but since they aren't interested, President Obama has canceled plans to auction drilling leases.
The Obama administration is abandoning plans to open the Arctic Ocean to more drilling in the face of dwindling industry interest and massive environmental opposition.True the article did mention "massive environmental opposition" but this didn't stop anything before. Nothing comes between Big Oil and their crude except their own lack of interest.
The Interior Department said Friday it is canceling a pair of scheduled Arctic Ocean lease sales. One was planned for next year to auction rights to drill for oil and gas in the Chukchi Sea off the northern coast of Alaska, and the other was for 2017 in the neighboring Beaufort Sea.
At the same time, Interior Secretary Sally Jewell rejected the requests of Shell and Statoil for more time to consider drilling under their current leases. Those leases start expiring in 2017.
The moves come just weeks after Shell announced its pioneering $7 billion Arctic Ocean oil exploration program was a failure. The company said it didn’t find enough oil to justify the cost and was abandoning the offshore Arctic drilling effort “for the foreseeable future.”
“In light of Shell’s announcement, the amount of acreage already under lease and current market conditions, it does not make sense to prepare for lease sales in the Arctic in the next year and a half,” said Jewell.
The Arctic Ocean is believed to hold huge oil and gas deposits. But low energy prices and high costs have dampened the enthusiasm of oil companies for exploring the Arctic Ocean and the lease sales were expected to draw little interest – especially after Shell’s costly failure.
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