Virginia, Ground Zero in Drilling Debate, to Learn Its Fate Soon - Bloomberg Politics
▻http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-03-14/virginia-ground-zero-in-drilling-debate-to-learn-its-fate-soon
From the shores of Savannah, Georgia, to the Beaufort, North Carolina beachfront, coastal communities in conservative southern states have locked arms in opposition to oil and gas drilling in the Atlantic waters lapping their shores.
A different story is playing out in Virginia, where Democratic Governor Terry McAuliffe and both Democratic U.S. senators support nearby drilling which they say could deliver jobs, new business, and money to the state.
“Virginia is the battleground state,” said Athan Manuel, director of the lands protection program at the Sierra Club.
The Obama administration opened the door to a new generation of offshore drilling along the East Coast in 2015, when it released a draft plan for selling oil and gas leases in 104 million acres of the mid- and south-Atlantic. Now, as the administration prepares to release the next version of its 2017-2022 leasing proposal, the penultimate step before finalizing it later this year, a big question is whether Virginia’s coastline will remain up for grabs.
The answer could come as soon as this week.
The stakes are huge for Royal Dutch Shell Plc, BP Plc, Anadarko Petroleum Corp. and other companies whose U.S. offshore activity is largely confined to the Gulf of Mexico. The Interior Department has estimated that 3.3 billion barrels of oil and 31.3 trillion cubic feet of natural gas could be recovered from the Atlantic outer continental shelf, based on data from the 1970s and 1980s, when energy companies drilled 51 wells off the U.S. East Coast.
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For Obama, the issue is tied to his environmental legacy, following a historic climate accord struck in Paris in December, a rule slashing carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, and a halt in leasing coal on public land. “There is no way that opening these areas is going to be seen as anything other than a contradiction” of the president’s climate goals, said Franz Matzner, a senior adviser with the Natural Resources Defense Council Action Fund.
“If you open these offshore areas up for oil drilling, it’s telegraphing that you really don’t believe in our ability to achieve our climate goals,” Matzner said in an interview. “You’re saying in 20 or 30 years we will still be so stuck on fossil fuels that we can’t afford to take this oil off the table. If we can’t say no here, then we are in deep trouble.”