Saboteurs in our midst

abandoned at sea

Biden administration quietly admits that “math error” is causing massive oil, gas permitting delays.

Their computer model “overestimated” damage to wildlife, causing permit renewal applications to be denied. And if you don’t have a permit, even for an existing well, you can’t drill. No oil, and the world is saved. It’s funny how errors like this happen, just like Facebook and Twitter censors so frequently “erroneously” ban conservatives’s postings.

Is it too far a stretch to suggest that many of the employees in the EPA and the Marine Fisheries Service are drawn to their respective agencies because they are passionate about the cause and want to regulate and control, and actively stop, projects and programs that run counter to their own beliefs? Ask that question over at the State Department, whose bureaucrats, high and low level, boast of stymieing Trump’s directives and policies. Or look to our public health agencies, which saw the COVID pandemic solely as a matter of preventing the spread of the disease (you’ll have noticed they failed), and deliberately blocked discussion of any other considerations, such as economic harm or mental health damage caused by their prescriptions.

Federal workers are protected from being fired, by law and by the enthusiastic support of the leftist politicians who are on the same page as them. I don’t know how we clean the stables, but someone had better come up with a way. Trump proved to be no Hercules; maybe DeSantis will, but he’ll need the backing of a Republican congress, and even then, the current crop of Republicans aren’t the people to help.

• The Biden administration privately blamed a math error for severe offshore oil and gas permitting delays, in a letter sent to industry leaders in late April.

• “[The National Marine Fisheries Service] understands the concerns of industry and is working with [the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM)] to expeditiously develop … revised regulations,” an administration official wrote in the letter to the National Ocean Industries Association (NOIA).

• “Gulf of Mexico seismic permitting delays — when coupled with the lack of progress on a new five-year offshore leasing program and the continuation of a multi-year gap in Gulf of Mexico oil and gas lease sales — undermine the predictability companies have relied on to make multi-billion-dollar investment decisions in the Gulf of Mexico,” NOIA President Erik Milito said.

Richard Spinrad, the head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), said a subagency “discovered a miscalculation” that has caused a massive backlog in permitting, in the April 29 letter obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation. Spinrad acknowledged the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) — the subagency tasked with analyzing the impact of offshore drilling projects on wildlife — has used faulty modeling on such impacts and, as a result, overestimated wildlife effects, delaying permitting on existing leases.

The NOAA administrator’s letter came in response to an April 5 letter from NOIA, the American Petroleum Institute and the EnerGeo Alliance, warning that energy producers had experienced significant permitting delays. In particular, oil and gas companies have reported delays in obtaining letters of authorization (LOA) from the NMFS to conduct pre-drilling activity, including seismic surveying and geological exploration, in the Gulf of Mexico. (RELATED: Biden Cancels More Oil And Gas Leases As Fuel Prices Skyrocket)

The Biden administration implemented the faulty modeling through an April 2021 regulation, according to the industry groups. A spokesperson for the Department of Commerce, which oversees NOAA and NMFS, said Thursday that the administration was “working to consider all possible solutions to expedite the rulemaking process to the greatest extent possible.”

“NMFS is also engaged with affected members of industry and with industry trade associations as it considers both short-term and long-term solutions,” the spokesperson told TheDCNF in an email. “The Commerce Department understands the concerns of industry and is working expeditiously to address the incorrect data it received for the initial rule and to proceed in earnest with the revised rule.”

“Gulf of Mexico seismic permitting delays — when coupled with the lack of progress on a new five-year offshore leasing program and the continuation of a multi-year gap in Gulf of Mexico oil and gas lease sales — undermine the predictability companies have relied on to make multi-billion-dollar investment decisions in the Gulf of Mexico,” NOIA President Erik Milito told TheDCNF in a statement.

“At a time when energy issues are at the forefront, NMFS should address the problems as quickly as possible,” Milito continued. “Companies must be able to continue to explore for and develop hydrocarbon resources in the Gulf of Mexico.”

Milito and other industry leaders have warned the delays have “commercial, operational, and safety implications.”

….. Meanwhile, the Department of the Interior (DOI) canceled all remaining offshore lease sales on May 11, including a sale spanning 1.09 million acres in the Cook Inlet in Alaska. The DOI has also dragged its feet on replacing the current offshore leasing plan that expires in late June and suggested in its latest budget proposal that the next offshore sale wouldn’t take place until fall 2023 at the earliest.