Drilling Permits Provide Little Comfort

摘要

Nine months after President Barack Obama declared a moratorium on deep-water drilling and four and half months after the Department of Interior ended it, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement has resumed issuing drilling permits. Nobody is throwing confetti yet. "I want to be positive," Donald Briggs, president of the Louisiana Oil & Gas Association, confided on March 22, "but I am sorry. We averaged five permits a month in deep water prior to all this, now we have four and one exploration plan that already had been out there forever. We averaged seven permits a month in shallow water, now we are getting about four. I have trouble thinking (the administration) is doing anything to indicate it cares about us."