Obama misleads on offshore drilling opportunities

Randall Luthi:

President Obama’s ambiguous call to “open” 75 percent of the country’s potential offshore oil and natural gas resources to exploration may sound generous, but the truth is, the areas containing those resources are technically already included in the upcoming 2012 to 2017 offshore leasing plan, and they are virtually the same areas where exploration and production have been allowed for decades.

Look beyond the president’s rhetoric to his record and it becomes clear that jobs and energy security are not high priorities for this administration. The shortsighted decision to deny the Keystone XL pipeline and the unnecessarily long moratorium on drilling in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico are but two examples.

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Around the same time as the Iranian announcement, the American Petroleum Institute unveiled a Quest Offshore Resources study showing that the deep-water drilling moratorium and subsequent permit slowdown forced 11 deep-water rigs to leave the Gulf of Mexico since 2010, taking their jobs and investments to the shores of Brazil, Africa and elsewhere. Those moves translated to a loss of $21.4 billion for our economy and an estimated 72,000 jobs in 2010 and 90,000 jobs in 2011, according to the study. We must do better.

An earlier Quest study rolled out by the National Ocean Industries Association showed that if permitting rates surpassed pre-2010 levels, 190,000 offshore industry-supported jobs could be created nationwide within the next two years without a single dime of government stimulus....

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Despite the vital revenue generated, jobs created, wages paid and increased energy security, less than 3 percent of the federal outer continental shelf is leased, leaving more than 97 percent of these resource-rich areas devoid of any permits....

Why not open up the other 97 percent of the outer continental shelf?  It would create hundreds of thousands of jobs and bring in billions in revenue to the US treasury in the form of royalties.  It would help lower the deficit and balance the budget while creating lower unemployment.  Only the anti energy left have a problem with that.