_

By MIKE NIXON

Six months ago today the BP-managed Deepwater Horizon oilrig exploded 41 miles off the coast of Louisiana. Eleven workers were killed, 17 crew members were seriously injured, dozens of families were directly impacted, and the Gulf coast economy was set adrift on a sea of uncertainty surrounded by the worst oil spill in U.S. history.

Last week, the Obama administration lifted a 139-day deepwater oil-drilling moratorium, which had been in place since May 27, and was resistant to public opposition and a ruling by U.S District Judge Martin Feldman.

Petroleum industry officials insist the drilling ban also led to a reduction in the number of shallow water permits being issued, and added to hardship experienced in the maritime oil and gas industry as well as other offshore and onshore businesses.

In Louisiana alone, experts along with working class residents, now claim it will take at least another six months before any sign of economic recovery from the loss of thousands of jobs and millions of dollars in local and state tax revenue – since the oil spill incident and moratorium enactment – might be seen.

It could be even longer before what some consider normal activity, ranging from the fishing industry to retail sales, resumes.

“[The lifting of the moratorium] is a great first step, but I would not start popping the champagne yet,” said Greg Briggs, vice president of the Louisiana Oil and Gas Association. “It will be a minimum of two years before we start seeing production in the Gulf at pre-spill levels.”

Although the moratorium was lifted six weeks ahead of what had originally been scheduled, oil and gas industry experts said this week that bureaucratic red tape could hold off any drilling activity for at least two months.

“The deepwater drilling moratorium that was called ‘arbitrarily capricious’ by the federal courts resulted in significant uncertainty to the industry and forced many to impose reduced hours and wages, relocations and, in some instances, layoffs,” said Lori LeBlanc, executive director for the Gulf Economic Survival Team, a sub-organization of the South Louisiana Economic Council.

“Even with this week’s lifting of the moratorium, we fully expect the uncertainty to continue in the form of ambiguous regulations and delays in the permitting approval process,” LeBlanc said.

Oil industry leaders noted that in addition to the deepwater moratorium, companies have found it increasingly difficult to have shallow water drilling permits secured – although that was not designated as part of the ban.

Briggs and LeBlanc are among those who suggest that a 90 percent reduction in the number of shallow water permits issued since May could have been the federal government’s way of causing a shallow water moratorium without admitting it.

“Only 12 [shallow water] permits have been approved in the past four and a half months for new wells; where historically 10-to-14 permits were approved each month,” LeBlanc said.

When the deepwater moratorium was lifted, it was done with a list of new regulations, which could continue to slow oil and gas production, and further impact the overall state economy.

The Louisiana Department of Economic Development has not yet released final statistics on how the moratorium and its aftermath have impacted conditions among coastal parishes or the state as a whole.

However, the state did release, on emergency.Louisiana.gov, a rundown of data and a list of factors that would be hit by the originally planned six-month moratorium.

According to state figures, oil and gas production supported both directly and indirectly $12.7 billion in household earnings in Louisiana in 2005. Those earnings reflected the presence of 320,000 jobs and are part of $70.2 billion in business sales.

In 2006, the oil and gas industry alone paid more than 14 percent of total state taxes, licenses and fees.

U.S. Sen. David Vitter on Thursday charged that the lifted moratorium was more exhibit than essence.

“Numerous reports have appeared describing what I and many others have been fearing for months,” Vitter said in a printed statement, “that the Obama administration would make a big show of lifting the moratorium without actually making it possible for drilling to resume.”

Vitter said that a list of new rules attached to the ban-lifting order would only mean the loss of more jobs and increased uncertainty for the coastal areas.

One of the challenges faced by both deepwater and shallow water drillers is an increase in insurance coverage. By law, companies must pay from $35 million for up to 35,000 barrels of oil spilled each day and up to $150 million for anything more than 105,000 barrels a day.

With the new regulations, according to Vitter, all companies must carry at least $105 million spill insurance, which carries a price tag of $625,000 in annual premiums; an expense that smaller drillers might not be able to handle.

The senator suggested that added expenses placed on the oil and gas industry will continue to not only impact those businesses, but will have a carry-over to other areas of commerce and consumers.

“If you think that just because the moratorium is lifted all these rigs will go to work, think again,” Vitter said.

Government officials and oil industry experts claim that unless a significant amount of both shallow and deepwater drilling permits are issued quickly, as many as 30,000 more jobs in Louisiana will be at risk.

“If there is one thing we have learned from [the Obama] Administration it is that the devil is always in the details,” said Gov. Bobby Jindal in a printed news release.

According to the Associated Press, several oil companies made known their intentions of going back to drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. However, as of last week, BP did not specify if it would seek new permits to drill in deepwater areas.

In addition, BP has not indicated if it will pay anything in terms of job loss compensation related to the moratorium.

“A … hurricane comes in and beats us up and then things get better,” Terrebonne Parish President Michel Claudet told Houma-area citizens during a town hall meeting Thursday. “[The moratorium] was a different saga.”

Oil and gas businesses are not the only ones impacted by the spill and moratorium. Viet Nguin took his boat out to try and catch shrimp Sunday for the first time since the April 20 Deepwater Horizon explosion.

Nguin said his annual income of about $39,000 is lost this year because of the oil spill and the moratorium. He worked four months for BP with the oil skimming efforts and earned $36,000 but, along with a large number of fishermen, he was cut from that job last week. “I think [BP] wanted to give other boats a chance to make money,” he said.

“I don’t know what’s going on,” Nguin said regarding BP activity or when the fishing industry will return to normal activity. “I really don’t know [when the shrimping business will return to normal].”

Briggs voiced a cautionary warning as he said: “We’ll see what happens in the next six months.”

Original Article

_

A central premise of Democratic Rep. Charlie Melancon’s Senate campaign is that he is far more likable, practical and effective lawmaker than the man he hopes to defeat, Republican Sen. David Vitter.

melancon-vitter.jpgThe Times-PicayuneRep. Charlie Melancon, left, and Sen, David Vitter

His case in point, on the campaign trail and in TV advertising, is his success in getting the Democratic House over the summer to approve his amendment to limit the moratorium on deepwater drilling, a legislative achievement that was hailed by Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., as the product of Melancon’s “persistence and smart maneuvering.”

0Share

3 Comments

But the Republicans in the Louisiana delegation, all of whom voted against Melancon’s amendment, characterize it much differently. In their view, Melancon was trading his support for legislation opposed by the oil and gas industry for a hollow amendment that would have not truly lifted the moratorium and would have vested more authority with the Secretary of Interior who imposed it.

Indeed, Don Briggs, president of the Louisiana Oil and Gas Association, recalls the jolt he got while sitting in the waiting room of a car wash when he saw a Melancon campaign ad taking credit for “the only bill passed ending President Obama’s job-killing moratorium.”

“There were people all around me and I said, ‘He’s lying,’” Briggs said. “Everybody in the waiting room looked at me.”

Effectiveness is often in the eye of the beholder. Like art, there is no objective measure of the art of compromise.

What is clear in the Louisiana Senate race is that voters are being offered two candidates with diametrically different personalities, styles and approaches to being an effective representative.

Melancon does not get handcuffed by ideology. He is best known as a leader among the Blue Dog Democrats, the group of fiscally conservative Democrats who often find themselves in the thick of most consequential debates in the House, looking to meet in the middle and strike a deal. The group is more likely than their fellow Democrats to sometimes cross party lines and vote with the Republicans — a bipartisan approach that voters say they want to see in Washington.

It’s a style that perfectly suits Melancon’s temperament.

“He’s a Gregarious guy; he gets along with everybody. People like him. He’s a nice guy,” said Rep. John Tanner, D-Tenn., a co-founder of the Blue Dog Coalition who is not seeking re-election. “What’s not to like?”

This is a man who at Washington Mardi Gras holds an uproarious Cajun joke contest.

Not so Vitter, who is cooler, more detached and among the least gregarious members of the Senate.

“Let’s be blunt. I don’t think David Vitter would win any popularity contest in either caucus in the Senate,” said political scientist Larry Sabato, head of the University of Virginia Center for Politics. “He’s not particularly well-liked.”

But that by itself doesn’t mean he cannot be effective. Sometimes, not caring about how well-liked you are can be liberating, especially in a Senate in which a single member can bollix the entire body, vexing one’s colleagues, but exacting a price.

For voters in a state so overwhelmingly opposed to President Barack Obama and the Democratic agenda on Capitol Hill, Vitter’s zeal to obstruct and delay may be considered the very essence of effectiveness.

Melancon has said he wants to be a senator in the tradition of Russell Long, J. Bennett Johnston and John Breaux — using persuasion and relationships to broker deals and gain advantages for his state. But, as Sabato notes, Long, Johnston and Breaux belonged to a far more collegial consensus-driven Senate. The Senate now is a more polarized, less pleasant place and, in the age of C-SPAN, cable networks and the blogosphere, Vitter can effectively use the Senate floor as a front line in the ideological warfare being played out nationally.

One can imagine scenarios in which either Melancon or Vitter could thrive in the 112th Congress.

In a more evenly divided Senate, the affable, non-ideological Melancon could join Landrieu as a deal-making centrist to get pragmatic legislation through the process.

Or Vitter, with his conservative credentials and tactical approach, could emerge as a mentor to a new class of Tea Party Republicans likely to ride the GOP wave into the new Senate to push for changes being championed at the grass roots.

Both Melancon and Vitter have displayed their different approaches in the current Congress.

Melancon and other Blue Dogs on the Energy and Commerce Committee spent endless hours in trying to make changes in the Cap and Trade and health-care bills, before Melancon and most of the others ultimately voted against the final products.

On the other side of the Capitol, Vitter was free to trash both bills from start to finish, and, as soon as the ink was dry on the health-care bill, write legislation to repeal it, a kind of baby-out-with-the-bath-water approach that violates Melancon’s sense of legislative reason.

Melancon’s Breaux-Johnston paradigm also recalls an era in which he said both Louisiana senators worked in cordial tandem for Louisiana.

Of course, before Vitter, Louisiana had never popularly elected a Republican to the Senate, so the bipartisan pairing is something new for the state.

“Lots of states enjoy having a member in both caucuses,” Sabato said. “That way, no matter who’s in charge, they have somebody in the room.”

Vitter also can argue that on issues of concern to Louisiana — from hurricane recovery to the BP disaster to earmarks for the Army Corps and defense projects — that he and Landrieu offer a pretty good one-two punch for the state, even if it sometimes appears that they want to punch one another. Their rivalry can sometimes reach near-comic, Spy vs. Spy dimensions.

Landrieu and Vitter share a toughness, evident in their capacity for raking witnesses over the coals to score rhetorical points, and a certain legislative ingenuity — or gall — as in Landrieu’s willingness to stick her finger in the eye of the Obama administration by putting a hold on the nomination of Jacob “Jack” Lew to head the Office of Management and Budget until the moratorium was lifted and drilling permits issued.

In that tactic, she was taking a page from the Vitter playbook, who used a hold on Craig Fugate as head of FEMA to get concessions that would allow some rebuilding in flood zone areas of Grand Isle and in Cameron Parish, and another hold on the promotion of Gen. Michael Walsh to exact a commitment from the Army Corps to move forward on some long-delayed flood control projects.

Melancon is not nearly as publicly confrontational. His most memorable moment in the aftermath of the spill was when he teared up at an Energy Committee hearing in late May, a powerful display of his empathy for his coastal constiuents whose lives and livelihoods were being damaged.

He also reacted emotionally when the Republicans in the Louisiana delegation disparaged his moratorium amendment, accusing them of “playing David Vitter Republican politics.”

Lost in the furor was the fact that within minutes of the nearly party-line moratorium vote, the House passed a second Melancon amendment to dedicate money from oil spill fines to coastal restoration on a bipartisan voice vote.

Original Article

_
As far as the Obama administration is concerned, a federal judge’s ruling this week striking down new safety measures for offshore oil and gas drilling has no impact because it finds fault with the implementation of a policy that no longer applies.

U.S. District Judge Martin Feldman in New Orleans ruled Tuesday that a batch of 10 new emergency safety rules for drilling operations that were imposed June 8 by the Interior Department, known as Notice to Lessees 2010-N05, or NTL-05, did not go through a proper public process.

“Notice and comment were required by law,” Feldman wrote. “The government did not comply and the NTL-05 is of no lawful force or effect.”
Advertisement

But nobody is disputing that NTL-05 is in effect. An Interior Department document says a Sept. 30 “interim final rule” superseded NTL-05.

NTL-05 had a clear impact on shallow-water drilling operations during most of the seven-month ban on deepwater drilling, and smaller operators said it was artificially holding up their permits.

But now the federal government appears ready to impose the same rules from NTL-05 on future drilling by using the interim final rule, regardless of what Feldman does.

The judge’s latest ruling was made in the course of a lawsuit by London-based Ensco Plc against Interior Secretary Ken Salazar. In July, Feldman said Salazar’s deepwater drilling moratorium was arbitrary and capricious, so the Interior secretary rewrote the ban. On Oct. 13, after Salazar ended the drilling suspension early, the Justice Department contended the whole Ensco lawsuit was moot.

Feldman is scheduled to consider that question next month.

http://www.nola.com/news/t-p/capital/index.ssf?/base/news-8/1287642794222560.xml&coll=1

_

Connie Lewis • clewis@theaddvertiser.com

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee compares the upcoming mid-term elections to a self-cleaning oven: Americans are going to turn the knob up to an “unbearably hot level” this November.

And when the process is over, they’ll open the door and wipe out the ashes, he told a crowd of 500 petroleum industry executives who attended the one-day Gulf Coast Prospect and Shale Expo on Tuesday at the Cajundome Convention Center.

He used the oven analogy to predict that the Republican Party would gain a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives in the fall election, and that they would also gain control of the Senate, albeit by a slim margin.

But prior to delivering a luncheon speech, Huckabee said he might make a second bid for the White House.

Commander In Chef?

“I haven’t ruled it out,” he said. “We’ll see how things go.

“I’ve been down that road before, so the easy part is I know what to expect. The hard part is I know what to expect.”

Huckabee, who now hosts a Fox News Channel talk show, was a presidential candidate on the Republican ticket before U.S. Sen. John McCain of Arizona gained the party’s nomination in 2008.

Not surprisingly, Huckabee heaped criticism on the Obama administration even when it really wasn’t the Obama administration he was criticizing. He said loans extended to “insurance companies and automobile manufacturers” to help them through the recession amounted to the federal government interfering in a free-market economy, even though those loans were part of the TARP program instituted under the Bush administration.

“It’s not the role of government to decide which companies win and which lose,” he said.

He also called the federally mandated offshore drilling moratorium “idiotic” and an “overreaction” to the April 20 explosion of BP’s Deepwater Horizon drilling rig.

The rig spewed an estimated 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico before it was capped in late July. It was declared dead in late September.

The moratorium recently was lifted, but the government’s failure to define the details of the new regulations leaves a great deal of uncertainty in the oil industry and impairs the overall economy. Furthermore, the cost of heightened insurance requirements to cover offshore accidents could cripple small, independent operators, he added.

In a three-point list of what it takes for a nation to be viable, Huckabee said it must first be able to produce its own food. Secondly, it needs to be able defend itself and manufacture its own arms, and third, it should be able to fill its own fuel needs without depending on foreign sources.

“It’s a matter of our own national security,” he stressed. Lafayette businessman and environmentalist Harold Schoeffler said he agrees with Huckabee that drilling regulations are too cumbersome. But it’s business as usual for government, he said.

“It’s natural that people in government don’t want to be caught making a bad decision because it would affect their careers forever after,” he said. “Joe Blow has a drilling rig and there’s a problem, the guy who put his name on a permit is in trouble.

“But you can’t regulate out all the risks of spills. The risk is there, and it will always be there.”

Original Article

Former Arkansas Gov. and presidential candidate Mike Huckabee will speak to a sell-out crowd of about 500 people today at a petroleum industry exposition at the Cajundome Convention Center.

The doors for the one-day Gulf Coast Prospect & Shale Expo open at 8 a.m. Huckabee, who now hosts a talk show airing on the Fox News Channel, will speak at a luncheon that begins at 11:30 a.m. Luncheon-only tickets that were going for $50 per person are gone, but admission to the full event is still available for $150.

Presented by the Louisiana Oil and Gas Association, which counts some of the nation’s largest companies among its membership, the exposition comes at a time of uncertainty in the Gulf of Mexico region.

While petroleum businesses view the end of the federally mandated offshore drilling moratorium a step in the right direction, as far as jobs are concerned, they’re wary that the new regulations they face may prove to be cumbersome.

Nonetheless, the event displays a sense of optimism since it gives companies manning booths a chance to interest firms in sharing a piece of their drilling prospects, and likewise to take a look at what others are offering, said Steve Maley, operations manager for Lafayette-based Badger Oil Corp.

“My guess, though, would be that the majority of prospects being shown are on land or within Louisiana coastal waters,” he added.

Maley said his company will man a booth, and it will have scouts out talking to other firms.

Huckabee was a presidential candidate on the Republican ticket in 2008 before Sen. John McCain of Arizona gained the nomination.

Original Article