Drilling off Keys to begin by December

[ensho]

http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/09/19/2414621/drilling-off-keys-to-begin-by.html


A giant, semi-submersible oil rig en route from Singapore will probably be drilling in the Florida Straits between Key West and Cuba in mid-December. The rig could arrive earlier, but Repsol, the Spanish oil company, wants to wait until after hurricane season ends before it begins drilling.

This latest report on the progress of the Italian-made Scarabeo 9 oil rig comes from Lee Hunt, the chief executive of the International Association of Drilling Contractors, who just returned from a trip to Cuba last week as part of a joint delegation with the environmental group, the Environmental Defense Fund.

-snip-

Along with Hunt, the fact-finding delegation included William Reilly, a former Environmental Protection Agency administrator and co-chair of the White House task force investigating the 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Richard Sears, former vice president of deepwater drilling for Royal Dutch Shell, and Dan Whittle, a senior attorney for the Environmental Defense Fund.

Their goal was to learn how committed the Cuban government is to operating offshore oil and natural-gas rigs safely and responsibly, and to find out the best way for American companies with oil-spill expertise to work with Cuba, despite a 50-year-old economic embargo by the United States.

-snip-
--------------------------------

sigh

[sellitman]

1. Lets vote even more fascists into office.

The Oil companies will have lots of money to bribe even more politicians into doing their dirty work.

[FarCenter]

2. huh? we voted the Cuban government into office?

This is a Spanish oil company drilling in Cuba's exclusive economic zone.

[Yo_Mama]

3. The US does not control these waters

And we can't stop drilling there, unless we want to violate international law and start a war.

It does raise the question of how much good our own refusal to drill will do, but nothing's going to stop this. The Cubans desperately need the money.