US Designates Sites For Future Oil Drilling

[TransitJohn]

US Designates Sites For Future Oil Drilling
by Tennille Tracy|Dow Jones Newswires|Tuesday, November 08, 2011

The Obama administration proposed a moderate expansion of offshore oil drilling Tuesday, revealing a five-year plan that represents the first blueprint for offshore oil production since the Deepwater Horizon spill.

The plan, released by the U.S. Interior Department, proposes to open up regions in the Arctic and the oil-rich Gulf of Mexico for future leasing, but blocks access to the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. There are no active leases in the Atlantic and Pacific currently.

U.S. officials said they excluded those areas because they are concerned about oil-spill response capabilities. They also said they want to accommodate West Coast lawmakers who object to drilling activity off their coasts.

The federal government shouldn't "open up every single place and look under every single rock for oil and gas production," Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said to reporters Tuesday. "We need to drill in the right places with the right protections."

Salazar said the federal government wants to expand drilling in places where oil production already takes place, such as the Gulf of Mexico, and where the existence of oil and natural gas is already known. Tuesday's proposal involves a little more than 170 million acres.

Read the rest at: RigZone

[spin]

1. One way to prevent tragic accidents ...

is to send those who ignore the regulations to prison if their failure to be responsible leads to a disaster.

One major problem we have in our nation is that we have plenty of regulations but little actual punishment for those caught blatantly violating the rules.

Gulf oil rig disaster traced to companies' failure to follow federal safety regulations
Published: Wednesday, September 14, 2011, 1:08 PM Updated: Wednesday, September 14, 2011, 9:34 PM

WASHINGTON -- BP, Transocean and Halliburton all violated federal offshore safety regulations in a sloppy run-up to the blowout of the Macondo well last year that killed 11 workers and caused the worst offshore oil spill in the country's history. Costs appear to have been more carefully calculated than risks, according to federal investigators, who especially pointed a finger at a faulty cement job as "a central cause" of the disaster.
http://www.nola.com/news/gulf-oil-spill/index.ssf/2011/09/bp_and_its_contractors_violate.html

If some of the BP and Halliburton executives and supervisors end up in court and after conviction in prison, I predict the oil industry would clean up its act in a hurry.

The same goes for Wall Street and the Banks too Big to Fail. I might consider robbing banks if I didn't know that I would end up in prison. The bankers don't have to worry about a long jail sentence when they rob me. If they screw the 99% they get a golden parachute worth millions and often move on to another company to run it into the ground.

It's good to be rich and powerful in the United States.

[juajen]

2. Why yes, we've been raped so many times, we are no longer

considered pure; so how about a gang bang? Don't forget, what spills into the gulf winds its way into the Atlantic by way of the ____ ______ (fill that in for me, please, I'm having a Rick Perry moment. Ah, thank you brain, the "Gulf Stream", of course. I and many others are afraid to eat our once delightful array of delicious seafood. Though Jindal doesn't talk about it, many people here are still suffering monetarily and physically from the oil gushing into our waters from the BP oil spill. We are such a good republican state. It makes me sick.