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The Interior Department has furthered its efforts to make oil and gas drilling on federal land easier by implementing a policy aimed at streamlining the leasing process. The streamlining effectively reduces the opportunities that drilling opponents have to put the brakes on oil and gas exploration.
The policy features provisions such as a 60-day deadline for processing proposed lease sales and cutting the protest periods to 10 days. Also, the Interior Department repealed a provision approved by the previous administration that gave other users of federal land such as hunters and anglers the power to object to a lease sale.
In addition, the public participation in some lease sale reviews was redirected to lower-level government officials and environmental reviews of lease sales were reduced to six months with BLM officials no longer required to visit the site of the lease while they conduct the review.
The move is clearly a part of President’ Trump’s top focus on energy independence, but it is making a lot of groups unhappy as it effectively removes a lease sale reform introduced by the Obama administration after scores of lease sales in Utah had to be canceled under a wave of lawsuits from environmentalists. The reform aimed to give other stakeholders besides the energy industry a bigger say in how federal lands are handled.
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There will certainly be a backlash now. “The clear direction is to issue as many leases as possible, as quickly as possible, without considering resource conflicts or the desires of local communities,” said one environmental activist, Wilderness Society senior counsel Nada Culver.
“Not only is the administration rolling back safeguards for fish and wildlife and other natural resources, it’s also making it harder for Americans to weigh in on decisions about their own public lands by decreasing opportunities for input,” commented another opponent, Tracy Stone-Manning, the associate vice president for federal lands at the National Wildlife Federation.
By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com
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Irina is a writer for Oilprice.com with over a decade of experience writing on the oil and gas industry.
Nope, "energy independence" was G. W. Bush's slogan.
D. Trump aims at the US energy DOMINANCE!