A judge on Friday threw out Obama administration rules that sought to
slow down expedited environmental review of oil and gas drilling on federal
land. Huffingtonpost
U.S. District Judge Nancy Freudenthal ruled in favor of a petroleum
industry group, the Western Energy Alliance, in its lawsuit against the federal
government, including Interior Secretary Ken Salazar. Huffingtonpost
The ruling reinstates Bush-era expedited oil and gas drilling under
provisions called categorical exclusions on federal lands nationwide,
Freudenthal said. Huffingtonpost Federal land agencies adopted new rules for interpreting the Energy
Policy Act last year in response to an environmentalist lawsuit. The Western
Energy Alliance says the rules would have delayed and added to the cost of
drilling. Trib The government argued that oil and gas companies had no case because
they didn't show how the new rules, implemented by the U.S. Bureau of Land
Management and U.S. Forest Service last year, had created delays and added to
the cost of drilling. Abcnews
The provisions spelled out in the Energy Policy Act of 2005 allow the
government to skip new environmental reviews for drilling permits under certain
circumstances. Billingsgazette The circumstances include instances where companies plan to disturb
relatively little ground and environmental review already has been done for that
area. A categorical exclusion also can be invoked when additional drilling is
planned at a well pad where drilling has occurred within the previous five
years. Abcnews.go There are in fact two drilling bans in the U.S. One is a presidential
ban, which George H. W. Bush Senior signed in 1989 and George W. Bush lifted in
July 2008. The other is a Congressional ban, adopted in 1981. Newscientist Former U.S. President George W. Bush lifted an almost 20 year-old
executive order that banned oil and natural gas drilling in most U.S. coastal
waters in July 2008. Newscientist in March 2010, the Obama administration proposed to open vast
expanses of water along the Atlantic coastline, the eastern Gulf of Mexico and
the north coast of Alaska to oil and natural gas drilling, much of it for the
first time. Nytimes The U.S. Minerals Management Service has estimated that there are
around 18 billion barrels of oil in the underwater areas off-limits to drilling.
Scientificamerican That's significantly less than in oil fields open for business in the
Gulf of Mexico, coastal Alaska and off the coast of southern California, where
there are 10.1 billion barrels of known oil reserves as well as an estimated
85.9 billion more. Scientificamerican The Energy Information Administration estimates that by 2030, U.S.
oil daily demand will climb to nearly 23 million barrels, with global per-day
consumption expected to top 118 million. Scientificamerican
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