Bromwich says no Alaska moratorium

Currently there is no Department of the Interior moratorium that specifically bans oil drilling in the shallow water on the Alaska outer continental shelf, Michael Bromwich, director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, told reporters at a media briefing during a BOEMRE offshore drilling forum in Anchorage on Aug. 26.

“There’s not a moratorium per se on Alaska,” Bromwich said.

When in May, in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, the Department of the Interior imposed a six-month moratorium on deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, Interior also placed a hold on Arctic outer continental shelf drilling, thus nixing Shell’s plans for exploratory drilling in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas in 2010. But Interior did not mention the Arctic in its notice to lessees for the deepwater moratorium. And water depths in the Arctic seas are substantially less than the 500-foot threshold for the drilling ban announced in May.

Then, following a court injunction against the moratorium, on July 12 Interior announced a new drilling moratorium that applied to all offshore drilling on the OCS requiring the use of a floating drilling rig and a subsea blowout preventer.

Again, there was no mention of the Arctic in the second moratorium, although the equipment specifications would appear to have applied to the drilling that Shell planned to carry out offshore.

And, at the Aug. 26 press conference, Bromwich stressed that equipment stipulations — rather than geographic location or water depth — determine which drilling operations are banned under the current moratorium. However, the equipment stipulations would typically only apply to deepwater drilling, he said.

“The new moratorium issued on July 12 is very clear on what it applies to,” Bromwich said. “Rather than using a depth analysis … it talks about certain types of equipment that are needed.”

—Alan Bailey