Interior secretary won't halt offshore drilling plan

Environmentalists had hoped the new Obama administration would put the brakes on proposed oil and gas drilling off the Virginia coast. On Tuesday, they got their first answer: Probably not.

President Barack Obama's secretary of the interior, Ken Salazar, said he would not intervene in a planned sale of exploration and drilling rights in Atlantic waters at least 50 miles off Virginia.

However, Salazar also said he was ordering a new study of potential economic benefits and environmental risks of offshore drilling - research by federal scientists that "may alter" those Virginia plans.

"I'm not prejudging the Virginia possibility," Salazar, a former Colorado senator, said in his first detailed remarks about the prospects of opening the Outer Continental Shelf to domestic oil and gas production.

At the same news conference Tuesday, Salazar announced a 180-day delay to a last-minute proclamation from the outgoing Bush administration to expand offshore drilling along much of the Atlantic coast and in the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific Ocean from 2010 to 2015.

The Virginia proposal, though, was part of an earlier plan for offshore leasing activity between 2007 and 2012, which already has been approved. Salazar said he was inclined to leave that alone.

In his comments Tuesday, Salazar said offshore resources beneath the Outer Continental Shelf should be developed, but only as part of a comprehensive package to bring about energy independence. Wind, solar and renewable sources, as well as greater efficiencies and conservation, should be part of that solution, he added.

He described this approach as "a new pathway forward," saying it represented a dramatic change from the policies in the previous eight years under President George W. Bush, which he described as "drill, drill, drill."

Salazar said the Bush administration had practiced "essentially foot-dragging" in crafting rules for developing offshore wind energy, including potential resources off Virginia. He pledged to speed those rules and support enterprises to create electricity from offshore wind farms.

Virginia environmentalists were lukewarm to his comments about oil and gas drilling, slated to occur in a slice of the Atlantic Ocean at least 50 miles off Virginia Beach. The government estimates the target area could contain as much as 130 million barrels of oil and 1.1 trillion cubic feet of gas.

"We're encouraged," said Deborah Murray, an attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center in Charlottesville. "We would have preferred he say that we're not going to look at Virginia anymore, but it's a start."

Murray said she was especially pleased that Salazar wanted new scientific research on the coast, instead of relying on "old science, some 20 or 30 years old," when private energy companies last looked beneath the ocean floor off Virginia. They found very little promise back then, but conducted scant tests.

Jackie Savitz, an organizer with the environmental group Oceana, said she still hopes Congress and the Obama administration will restore bans on offshore drilling. Those moratoriums were lifted last year for the first time in three decades.

Scott Harper, (757) 446-2340, scott.harper@pilotonline.com