Tuesday, November 25, 2008

In Alaska, The Drill Is Gone Remember those 68 million acres House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the oil companies had to use or lose? According to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, they can't drill there either. When President Bush lifted the executive order banning oil and gas exploration in federally protected offshore areas, Speaker Pelosi called the action a giveaway of "more public resources to the very same oil companies that are sitting on 68 million acres of federal lands they've already leased." We thought it was nonsense to accuse the oil companies of sitting on profitable oil resources waiting for sky-high oil prices to rise even higher. We still do. With gas prices having fallen back to earth, her vast oil-rig conspiracy theory seems to have fallen flat. Proving it was so much hot air was Royal Dutch Shell's recent expenditure of $2.1 billion to acquire oil leases in the Chukchi Sea off Alaska and spending $84 million to buy leases in the Beaufort Sea. Clearly they weren't sitting on anything and wanted to drill and wanted to get these oil and gas reserves into the hungry American economy. Last Thursday, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals blocked a major drilling effort in the Beaufort Sea, ruling that federal officials failed to properly address environmental concerns when they granted permission to Shell Oil to drill there. The decision followed a temporary order issued last year that halted Shell's drilling at Sivulliq, 16 miles off the coast of northern Alaska....

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