A bipartisan group of Virginia lawmakers support drilling off the commonwealth’s coast for oil and gas. But not many in the state’s congressional delegation are happy with the White House announcement it’s opening up the state’s coast to offshore drilling.
The White House was prepared to allow drilling off Virginia’s coast in 2010 but then the Deepwater
Horizon accident dumped some two hundred million gallons of crude oil into the Gulf and the plan was scrapped. Now the Interior Department is taking steps to open up the Atlantic Ocean to oil and gas exploration. Virginia Republican Congressman Morgan Griffith lauds the move.
“Well, you know, I think it’s a step in the right direction.”
Still, Griffith is holding his breath.
“Now we’ve been on this step before. It’s a long process once you get to this step. This just puts us into the five year plan and says that they ought to start putting down the paperwork to do a lease at some point in the future. A good first step in my opinion. We should have been doing this a long time ago.”
There’s a problem for supporters of offshore drilling though: The maps being used to know where natural resources sit off the coast are more than three decades old. Virginia Republican Congressman Rob Wittman says companies don’t trust the administration enough to start investing heavily in coastal drilling.
“The administration, as you know, previously allowed for the exploration to begin. But it’s like anything else. You’re not to get people to significantly invest in exploration if they don’t believe that they can develop the resource there. So I’m hopeful that the administration is going in a serious way to allow the development of the resource there, which I think accelerates the exploration element, which is going to have to happen in order to determine what’s there, how much is there, where is it and what do you do to safely develop it.”
Virginia’s two Democratic senators are pushing a proposal to allow Virginia to share revenue from any drilling off its coast. Senator Mark Warner says their plan would use some of the revenue to clean up the environment.
“Well, because what we’ve got is money not only for the state but also for environmental measures in Virginia.”
Warner says revenue sharing is also a simple matter of fairness.
“But why should Virginia be treated differently than Gulf states that have a revenue sharing flow?”
Senator Tim Kaine goes so far as to say he can’t support drilling off Virginia unless the state gets to share revenue with the federal government.
“It’s important for the states to participate in this. And so it would be like we would be having a new policy that would just uniquely disadvantage Virginia compared to the other states that allow this. Why would we tolerate that? No, the deal has to include revenue sharing for it to be one that Mark and I could support.”
But Warner and Kaine are facing opposition from their own party. Maryland Democratic Senator Ben Cardin is teaming up with northeastern Democrats in opposing offshore drilling.
“The people of Maryland understand just what the Chesapeake Bay and what our coast means to our way of life. I’ve met with watermen who understand the challenges of the day. A clean bay is a critically important to their livelihood.”
Kaine says for some of his colleagues on the east coast the debate is more ideological.
“Some don’t like it because they don’t want any more fossil fuel, but the reality is we have to balance three, three priorities: cleaner, more native, more affordable. And the way we do that is through certainly expanding alternatives but also using more native energy that is increasingly climbing down the kind of carbon-density ladder. And we’ve seen natural gas. It’s carbon. But it has enabled us to switch off dirtier technologies and thereby improve our climate.”
The Interior Department says it’s only floating a draft proposal and is making it clear its plan is open to change, which is bringing hope and fear to both sides of this contentious energy debate.
