The U.S. Interior Department has completed the first step, closing a public comment period on the proposal to lease 2.9 million acres of ocean to natural gas and oil companies. The pie-shaped area begins 50 miles off Virginia's coast, straight out from Virginia Beach on the south and across from Virginia's boundary on the Delmarva peninsula to the north.
"The East Coast really has not been looked at for 30 years," said Randall Luthi, who heads up the drilling plan as director of Interior's Minerals Management Service. Luthi spoke from his Washington office to CNN Radio.
"Our best guess is that area could contain about 130 million barrels of oil and 1.14 trillion cubic feet of natural gas," he said.
Besides the changing of the President there are some other factors that will come into play. Not a huge part of the article but something worth pointing out is the decreased price of gasoline, that will be a factor. Then the environmental/risks to nature that the article points out:
"The Navy has a lot of operations out there, in the area where this drilling takes place," he said, "And the North Atlantic right whale, there's only 300 or 400 of those individual whales left, and they migrate through that area as well."
The Navy has expressed concern about the prospect of drilling rigs in the area where much of its Norfolk fleet trains. NASA has objected as well because it launches satellites and low-altitude rockets from its facility on Wallops Island, Virginia.
Yes, there is some irony in the knowledge that the very same area where only 300 to 400 North Atlantic Right Whales are at is also the place NASA launches rockets from...evidently no whales have been hit, at least that we know about but it would be pretty horrid for NASA to take out an oil drilling platform.
2 comments:
So, we learn nothing from our past mis-Takes...? We sell out to totally ruin our one and only mother earth? Is this the thanks we give our loving mother for all her help, by raping her?--Joe
I am in favor of drilling where we can. We let other nations drill off our shores, but we play the environmental card when our nation's oil companies want to do the same thing? What is wrong here? Either people are misinformed about this issue or they don't care or ignore the facts so that their point can be flawlessly made. Gasp! You don't think people do that on other issues? Nah, not in this country the spin capital of the world.
As for Anonymous Joe, the planet is fine. Once the human race is gone, it will heal itself and move on. Get off your Goddamn high horse and relax. Stop thinking that the humans can undo everything. Even if every country blows up all it's nuclear weapons and destroys all life, in a relative short amount of time, the planet would heal itself and life would start again. I swear, humans are the most arrogant species in the world. In the words of the late great George Carlin, "The planet is fine. It's the people who are fucked."
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