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Military spending bill opens Mississippi national park to oil and gas exploration
Petroleum News
Four paragraphs in a 96-page emergency military spending bill open a Mississippi national park designated as wilderness to oil and gas exploration, the Los Angeles Times reported May 31. The bill, signed by U.S. President George Bush in May, carries an amendment written by Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss., that codifies Mississippi’s claim to mineral rights under federal lands and allows drilling for natural gas under the Gulf Islands National Seashore, a thin necklace of barrier islands from Mississippi to Florida in the Gulf of Mexico.
Alabama’s Dauphin Island, which is surrounded by oil and gas development, isn’t included in the park.
As a preliminary step to drilling, the Times reported, the rider allows seismic testing, marking the first time the federal government has sanctioned seismic exploration on national park property designated as wilderness. Still unresolved conflicts State and federal officials have not agreed on the extent of exploration in the park. And there are still unresolved conflicts, the newspaper reported, including how shooting seismic on wilderness islands is compatible with the federal Wilderness Act, which prohibits ground disturbance and almost any type of development or construction.
Two of the five Mississippi islands and their surrounding environment are home to federally protected fish and birds, sea turtles and the Gulf’s largest concentration of bottlenose dolphins, the Times reported.
“Seismic testing inside a park, in wilderness, with endangered species, arguably inside a place where the mineral rights arguably belong to all of us, I think that’s particularly outrageous,” said Dennis Galvin, former deputy director of the National Park Service.
Jack Moody, a geologist with the Mississippi Development Authority, which is responsible for energy leasing, told the Times that the authorization shouldn’t be cause for alarm.
The law pertains only to Mississippi’s mineral claims. “We want the right to develop the minerals that the state owns,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean we will go through there with a bulldozer.” Mississippi governor laid groundwork for amendment Joe Sims, president of the Alabama and Mississippi division of the U.S. Oil and Gas Association, said the economic boon to the state could be significant – in the neighborhood of $200-$300 million over the life of production as an estimate of the state’s share of royalties and taxes.
Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, the former head of the Republican National Committee and a Washington lobbyist, signed a bill last year allowing oil and gas leases in state waters surrounding the islands, which laid the groundwork for the amendment, the Times reported.
Barbour also signed legislation transferring authority over drilling from the state’s environmental quality agency to the Mississippi Development Authority.
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