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Posted 08/24/2011 06:15 PM ET

Energy: A year ago, three oil rigs fled the Gulf of Mexico for better opportunities abroad. Now, it’s 10. Make no mistake, the toll is rising on a business environment marked by the Obama administration’s uncertainty.

It’s a sorry spectacle when rigs, the mighty instruments for extracting oil and gas from miles under the sea floor, are quietly pulling away from U.S. coasts for better business environments oceans away — namely the Republic of Congo, Nigeria, Egypt and Brazil.

“When you have companies that would be spending hundreds of millions of dollars, or in some cases billions of dollars, they need certainty,” Louisiana Oil & Gas Association President Don Briggs told BigGovernment.com. “We don’t have that now, and I don’t expect we will anytime soon.”

The massive planning, capital, project management and luck required to produce energy are uncertain enough.

The climate of government caprice makes it even worse.

The 2010 BP oil spill proved Obama’s anti-energy production talk was more than rhetoric — it was policy.

It started to create uncertainty when the president arbitrarily demanded $20 bil from BP to set up a cleanup fund for its spill in April last year. After it paid, however, what lingered was the image of a president who could extract what he wanted from any unpopular company.

Then the president issued an arbitrary moratorium on offshore drilling, idling rigs and throwing hundreds of thousands of Americans out of work. When a court ordered him to stop, he played three-card monte with the energy industry with an unannounced but real permit moratorium until another judge stopped him.

Meanwhile, lease sales hit their lowest level since 1958. Now at this late date, the president finally set an auction for Dec. 14. But the Interior Department nearly tripled the minimum bid price for deepwater leases in the Gulf of Mexico from $37.50 an acre to $100 an acre.

Why the big increase? More regulators, of course.

Meanwhile, even companies that got permits years ago can have them revoked for minor irregularities. This happened to Exxon Mobil, which spent $300 million to make a billion-barrel discovery of oil, only to have its permit pulled on a technicality. It’s now suing.

With such uncertainty, it’s no wonder that oil producers — which create thousands of high-paying jobs — are heading for places like the Congo. The only certainty now is uncertainty. Until that stops, more rigs will flee.

Original Article

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The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement (BOEMRE) announced today that it has awarded a $300,000 Coastal Impact Assistance Program (CIAP) grant to Plaquemines Parish in Louisiana. The parish will use the funding to review and update its Coastal Management Plan of 2000.

Created by the Energy Policy Act of 2005, CIAP provides funding to the six Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) oil and gas producing states to conserve and protect the coastal environment. CIAP is an ongoing program with grant funding that is allocated based on the offshore energy revenues collected by the United States.

“BOEMRE’s continued support for coastal management and restoration is vital to Louisiana and its coastal communities,” said BOEMRE Director Michael R. Bromwich. “The Coastal Management Plan is an important element of environmental conservation and protection, and these funds are critical for Plaquemines Parish to update its plan.”

In addition to the process of reviewing and evaluating the 2000 Coastal Management Plan, the CIAP grant will enable the parish to conduct public meetings and coordinate the new plan with within the parish. The updated plan will continue ongoing projects and identify activities for conservation, restoration and stabilization of wetlands and other coastal areas in Plaquemines Parish on the west bank of the Mississippi River, within the Greater New Orleans area.

CIAP received $250 million in appropriated funds for each of the Fiscal Years 2007-2010, to be disbursed to six eligible OCS oil and gas producing states: Louisiana, Alabama, Alaska, California, Mississippi and Texas.

Original Article