Obama continues to outsource jobs with drilling restrictions

Houston Chronicle:

The Obama administration on Thursday finalized a five-year plan for offshore drilling that focuses on allowing development in already-
explored areas of the Gulf of Mexico and the Arctic to the chagrin of oil and gas companies who were hoping for more territory. 

The first sale of leases under the Interior Department’s 2012-2017 plan is set to take place this fall, with areas of the western Gulf of Mexico up for grabs. Eleven more Gulf of Mexico sales are planned, as well as three auctions of leases in the Cook Inlet near Anchorage and the Chukchi and Beaufort seas north of Alaska. 

The plan rules out lease sales in Atlantic waters, despite pressure from Virginia officials eager for oil and gas development off the commonwealth’s shores.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar described the plan as “smart,” but “aggressive,” with planned auctions of waters around Alaska targeted to areas that have both big potential energy resources and small environmental and other conflicts.

But oil industry representatives and their allies in Congress said the administration’s plan would keep promising areas off the table. American Petroleum Institute Upstream Director Erik Milito said the program demonstrated “unnecessary restraint.” 

The plan “makes more areas off limits than it makes available,” Milito said, adding that the program’s focus on the Gulf of Mexico overlooks promising new areas for development in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. 

“While vitally important, the western and central Gulf of Mexico areas including in this proposed offshore program are not new areas,” Milito said. 

Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Wash., the head of the House Natural Resources Committee, said the plan offers “a bleak future for American energy production” because it keeps the East and West Coast “under lock and key.” 

And Randall Luthi, a former drilling regulator that heads the National Ocean Industries Association, called the administration’s plan “deeply disappointing.” 

“Taking the entire East and West coasts off the table and further delaying Alaska sales clearly shows this administration is not following its own advice to lessen our dependence on foreign sources of energy by bolstering production here at home,” Luthi said.

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This administration continues to outsource energy production by strangling  domestic production.  They are outsourcing to madmen like Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and making us more vulnerable to supply interruptions in the Middle East.  In short, there energy policy makes no sense and falls far short of their stated objective of an "all of the above" policy.  To get sensible energy policy it is going to take an election that defeats Democrats from top to bottom.