Obama's War on Oil

As you pay $4 a gallon for gas you can look to this story as part of the reason oil costs are heading up without any relief in sight:

In early February, Shell Alaska announced it was dropping any plans to drill in the Arctic’s Beaufort Sea in 2011. According to Vice President Pete Slaiby, the decision was based on the recent remand of air permits by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Shell has been waiting five years to be given the go-ahead to drill.

Since 2005, the company has paid about $3 billion for leases to drill off the coast of Alaska. But after the BP oil spill last April, more than 4,000 miles away in the Gulf of Mexico, all drilling plans were put on hold per orders from the Department of Interior.

Shell isn’t the only company with ready-to-drill wells that is being prevented from drilling by the regulatory process that emerged from the BP oil spill. Hercules Offshore, a Houston-based oil company, has a developmental well in the Gulf of Mexico that has been ready since last April.

“We prepared the developmental applications,” Jim Noe, senior vice president of Hercules, told The Daily Caller. “Normally, we would have been developing and producing oil by June of 2010. But all the new rules and requirements and permit delays caused confusion and reluctance to submit the application.”

Hercules ultimately submitted the application in December 2010, but according to Noe, it took the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement (BOEMRE) 60 days to just “deem it submitted.”

According to the BOEMRE website, there are currently 13 pending permits for shallow and deep-water permits for new wells. The number sounds relatively low, a point noted by BOEMRE Director Michael Bromwich in a recent op-ed for the Houston Chronicle.

But Noe told a different story to TheDC, saying the reason the number of pending permits looks so low is because many are essentially in limbo, just waiting to be “deemed submitted” by the agency.

“There are applications made on a daily basis that aren’t being shown up on BOEMRE’s statistics for being submitted,” said Noe. “It’s disingenuous for Bromwich to point out relatively low number of pending permits for proof that there is low demand to drill.”

If we had a president who actually cared about what it costs Americans for energy, he'd order the EPA to back off and approve whatever requests are out there and get those companies drilling.

Unfortunately, we don't have a president like that.