WASHINGTON — Interior Secretary Ken Salazar on Tuesday defended his agency’s changes in the year after the Deepwater Horizon explosion, dismissing criticism of a lengthier and more extensive permitting process as mere “Washington noise.”
Appearing before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, Salazar stressed that the U.S. is committed to offshore oil-and-gas development when it’s done safely.
A plan to streamline the permitting process, championed by Sen. Mark Begich, D-Alaska, got the backing last week of President Barack Obama, who Saturday in his weekly radio address called for easing the way for more domestic oil and gas production, particularly in the offshore Arctic and National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska.
Begich and Sen. Lisa Mur kowski, R-Alaska, are pushing for increased offshore production in the Arctic as a source of oil that will keep the trans-Alaska pipeline running. Alaska’s senators have been meeting repeatedly with the president and White House officials in recent months to find ways to cut through red tape to move projects forward in the state.
“The past year has been evidence that (streamlining the permitting process) is needed now more than ever,” Begich told the committee Tuesday. “I was glad to hear the president talking about . . . the need to coordinate between the many different federal agencies.”
Murkowski told Salazar that she remains concerned that the U.S. is about one-third of the way toward the levels in new exploration and production that existed when the administration imposed an offshore-drilling moratorium after the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig April 20, 2010, and the subsequent oil spill into the Gulf of Mexico.
“It should be our goal to ensure our offshore industry is working safely,” she said. “But that requires that it be working.”
But Salazar pointed out that until a few months ago, he and the director of the new agency that oversees offshore drilling, Michael Bromwich, weren’t confident in the well-containment systems being developed by oil companies.
